I had finally gotten tired of cleaning Java-based viruses off my machines
I believe you mean JavaScript viruses (very common) not Java viruses (extremely rare). Javascript viruses tend to be mostly harmless (stuff like, a popup you can't close) and are generally overblown by virus software. That's why your autoprotect software wasn't catching it: It wasn't that important. And erasing the files from your browser's cache after the fact is not really helpful either. You're not really "infected" per se. (Though some of those JS files are vectors into bigger and badder viruses.)
So when I hear stuff like this article, it's another reason I love IE. Dumping Java was the best move MS ever made on the browser.
That has to be the worst reason in existence to use IE. If you don't want Java, don't install it. FireFox won't do it automatically, nor will Opera, nor will Safari. Sticking with IE because it doesn't install a JVM by default is nothing more than a false sense of security.
The UltraSPARC T2 has 8 cores, each of which runs 8 threads of execution in parallel, for a total of 64 threads of concurrent execution. If you want to make it comparable to the desktop chips from Intel or AMD, you'd need to generate a chip (from the now OSS tools) with fewer cores. I'd imagine that a quad core T2 would use a similar amount of power, but with vastly more parallel processing capability than your average Core Duo.
I'm more worried about the Cholesterol. Some people have naturally high cholesterol. It doesn't impact their health any, but there's no way they're ever going to come out with a "normal" reading. Are they going to get fined for having "poor health" even when they don't?
Lame idea.
I much prefer the idea my insurance company has. They give you this monopoly money for doing healthy stuff, getting checkups, and generally keeping in good condition. You can later redeem the fake money for real stuff like merchandise and vacations. If only their website didn't suck so badly, I'd have a huge pile of their funny money.:-/
Funny you should mention a shotgun, because that's exactly the comparison I had in mind. A sawed off shotgun is incredibly dangerous to humans because the blast still has enough force to do damage to soft tissue. However, when it's used against a harder target, a sawed off shotgun is far less effective than a rifle.
Same thing here. There will be less ejecta, wider area of heating, less change of a tsunami, etc. All in all, the total effects on the Earth would be greatly lessened due to the greater area over which the damage is spread.
I think the 'average' set up will be something like four remotes, two nunchucks, and two classic controllers.
I somewhat doubt it's common enough to be the average. I only know one person who has a full 4 remotes, and I don't know anyone outside of Slashdot who has 2 Nunchucks. My setup is 2 remotes (bundled + WiiPlay), 1 Nunchuck, a Classic Controller, and 2 GameCube Controllers. I'd like to get more controllers, but I'm taking my time. I don't need them immediately and they're rather expensive to stock up on. Both my GCN controllers are used, so I suppose that says something about my miserly ways.:-P
I explicitly excluded WiiPlay from the games comparison because it says a lot more about the peripheral attach rate than the sales of the game itself. With sales topping 4.49 million, it does give an interesting peek into how well Nintendo is selling their accessories. I wouldn't be at all surprised if sales of the Classic Controller are slightly over 1 for every console and Wii Remote sales at 1.5 to 2 per console.:-)
Total Wii games sold as of June 30, 2007: 44.82 million Total Virtual Console games sold as of July 11, 2007: over 5.6 million
Assuming that their figures match up by date to the sales figured on the Wikipedia Wii page (9.27m), that gives a sell-through ratio of ~4.83 packaged games per system sold and 0.6 VC games per console sold.
That's definitely not bad, regardless of how the 360 is doing.
Further evidence comes in the form of comparing the top selling games. 3.7m Gears of War to 3.61m for Legend of Zelda. 1.4m for Call of Duty 2 vs. 1.82m for Wario Ware. 1.37m for Lost Planet vs. 1.25m for Super Paper Mario.
Given that the Wii is the younger system, these numbers are quite impressive.
Mass of asteroid = mass of asteroid shrapnel Kinetic energy of asteroid = mass of asteroid shrapnel Total energy delivered to Earth is equal
While the above is correct, it doesn't change what I just said. Dissipating the energy over a larger area means that the the Earth as a whole could better absorb the brunt of the impact.
having the entire asteroid reduced to dust in the atmosphere would be like living beneath a broiler.
Someone else already pointed out that the Oceans accept even more heat than the atmosphere. Heat which will be held only temporarily by the Earth, as it will reject quite a bit of the excess as blackbody radiation from the dark side of the planet.
This is a far better situation than the full asteroid hitting and throwing up ejecta. Most of its energy will still get converted to heat, but all the ejecta would act as a greenhouse to hold it in.
This is kind of like the problem navy ships face when using a CWIS to knock down incoming cruise missiles. When you're talking about multiple tons of airframe and warhead flying at a frigate, knocking it into several pieces a second or two before impact might not do much to improve the odds.
This example is not comparable. Knocking it into only a few pieces would be the same as splitting an asteroid. That's not what we're talking about. If you pulverized the airframe into thousands of tiny pieces, these pieces would scatter from their original trajectory and hit the ship's hull with a rain of shrapnel. While the shrapnel would indeed be incredibly dangerous for any men on deck, the greater surface area of the impact would prevent any serious damage to the ship's hull.
Prepare to be assimilated. Microsoft will add your technological and biological distinctiveness to its own. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been... is over.
you just made a single asteroid into a hail of dangerous shrapnel.
Shrapnel == Greater Cross Section Greater Cross Section == Atmosphere has greater effect on projectile Atmosphere has greater effect on projectile == Energy dissapated over wider area Energy dissapated over wider area == No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
It's frankly how embarrasing how much more valuable a good programmer is than a good manager.
I was with you, right up until this point. A really great manager is part teacher, part mentor, part boss, part friend, and part Solomon. A great manager will make sure you have the exact tools and resources you need, know exactly who can take on a given task, know when to dish out tasks that will help improve the skills of those (s)he manages, somehow manage to get whatever is needed out of higher management, and be able to identify and combat issues with a project before they become a problem.
Good management is just as much of an art as programming is. Just like in programming, there aren't that many people who are true naturals at it. Those that are can make a company run about 1000x smoother than anyone else could. Thus I don't begrudge them any high wages they may earn.
Funny thing, though. These same managers are also the ones who are often stuck at the lower rungs of the totem pole making only slightly more than you or I. (Sometimes less.) Like programmers, they like the "hands-on" experience of direct management. This tends to make them uninterested in moving to the top. Combined with their willingness to step on toes in order to get the job done, they're unlikely to get promoted very far, very fast. Thus they also can be found pining for the small-company environment.:-)
The contract is entered into when you place the order. The contract is technically completed when payment is made and the food is delivered. However, if the restaurant failed to live up to their responsibilities under the contract (e.g. delivered food that was not up to the implicit or implied standards), then they are in breach. It is then required that the restaurant make restitution.
But hey, don't let the fact that you ignored the post you're responding to get in the way of a perfectly good rant.:-/
Um, no. When the Bible refers to "man", it means "mankind". Jesus was half-mankind, half-God. He still was tempted by the sinful nature of man (e.g. the devil tempting Jesus in the desert), but he was able to resist the temptation. So I'm afraid there's no theological dilemma looming here.
From the perspective of science, parthenogenesis has long been known to be a possible physical explanation for a real-life virgin birth. It's just that up until now, there has been no solid proof that it could happen in humans.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. You can find physical explanations for everything that happens in the universe. That's not the point. If you believe in God, then you must believe that it's his Universe that follows his Laws. Which means that everything that happens has an explanation inside the universe. The only question is, did it happen because an extra-universal God made it happen (some of these events have pretty freaky odds) or because it was simply a big coincidence? That's an answer that science can't provide (at least yet) and where theology comes into play.
The error in your logic is easy to spot: JIT != Interpreter
JIT == Just In Time Compiler. Being able to compile Java down to native code at runtime allows the JVM to produce code that is optimized for the local system. The performance gains from this help make up for losses incurred by doing runtime compilation.
Abstract: "This article surveys a number of benchmarks and finds that Java performance on numerical code is comparable to that of C++, with hints that Java's relative performance is continuing to improve. We then describe clear theoretical reasons why these benchmark results should be expected."
1. Mach *was* worse than a 20% performance hit under many types of loads.
2. His attempt to say that Java is a 20 fold hit in performance is an outright untruth. Java JIT benchmarks have met or exceeded C/C++ benchmarks on several occasions.
3. One of Java's original failings prior to the Hotspot VM was that it was considered "slow". Java did not get a free ride in that respect. The Java community is still fighting to have the performance of the platform recognized some 10 years after it was resolved.
4. Interpreted languages like Ruby and Python are not used for performance-critical code. An Operating System has a variety of performance critical situations that would make the slow execution of Ruby and Python unsuitable. For example, if you're playing a movie file you need that absolute minimum latencies possible between reading a frame from disk, decoding the frame, and transferring the decoded frame to the screen.
5. In theory it should be possible to give up some of our performance gains from the latest technology in exchange for useful designs like Microkernel architectures. The realities of the market, however, is that performance is a selling point for an operating system. Your competitors WILL latch onto your poor performance and exploit it in their advertisements for all they're worth. Yes, the market can be illogical. Such is life.
Or what? Say he decides to give you your money back, pulls a beer and drinks it himself. What are you going to do about it?
Sounds like a perfect small claims court case for receiving punitive damages from an idiot bartender. The bartender clearly breached the contract in that case, so he is liable for damages caused by the breach. Personally, I think the judge would slap rather hefty damages on the fellow just for being such an idiot.
Generally you're correct in that most people wouldn't take it to court, but it wasn't my example in the first place. I'm continuing a comparison that the top poster brought up.
nobody seriously thinks it's criminal or fraudulent.
There's a huge difference between criminal and civil law. When dealing with contracts, you are usually dealing with civil law. So it's quite right that no one should think it's criminal. However, they probably think it's *wrong*, and are perfectly within their rights to have a judge decide on whether the bar tender was actually wrong or not.
We found no substantiation for the "common knowledge" that early Mach 3.0-based Unix single-server implementations achieved a performance penalty of only 10% compared to bare Unix on the same hardware. For newer hardware, [9] reports penalties of about 50%.
L4 tried to remedy a lot of the problems inherent in the microkernel design, but the industry had already made commitments to more monolithic designs by that point in time.
You need to look up laws for auctions. In an auction, the seller agrees to accept the highest bid given when he puts the item up for sale. The only protection the seller has is that he can set a reserve price. As long as the bids are below the reserve, the seller reserves the right not to sell the item.
In the case of the item in the article, the reserve price was met. Therefore the bidder was going into the sale with the understanding that the seller already agreed to sell for the high bid. Reneging after the auction is complete is a breach of contract.
As soon as you receive what you ordered in a restaurant, and consumed.. then you have accepted.
No, the contract is formed prior to the consumption. The terms of the contract, however, are not completed until the food have been received. (From what I understand, consumption is more or less irrelevant from a legal standpoint. What if you took your food to go?)
You are not expected to pay for the restaurants incompetence/mistake.
Correct. This is a failure by the restaurant to carry through on its responsibilities under the contract. If the restaurant either states or implies a certain level of quality or service, you have every right to expect that level of quality or service. Of course, a restaurant may disagree with you, in which case it would take a judge to decide if the restaurant really did carry out it responsibilities under the contract, or if you were making unreasonable demands upon the restaurant that are not part of the implied contract.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but who the hell really is around here? We have so few lawyers, it's shocking.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you mean JavaScript viruses (very common) not Java viruses (extremely rare). Javascript viruses tend to be mostly harmless (stuff like, a popup you can't close) and are generally overblown by virus software. That's why your autoprotect software wasn't catching it: It wasn't that important. And erasing the files from your browser's cache after the fact is not really helpful either. You're not really "infected" per se. (Though some of those JS files are vectors into bigger and badder viruses.)
That has to be the worst reason in existence to use IE. If you don't want Java, don't install it. FireFox won't do it automatically, nor will Opera, nor will Safari. Sticking with IE because it doesn't install a JVM by default is nothing more than a false sense of security.
parent rating: -1 FUD
The UltraSPARC T2 has 8 cores, each of which runs 8 threads of execution in parallel, for a total of 64 threads of concurrent execution. If you want to make it comparable to the desktop chips from Intel or AMD, you'd need to generate a chip (from the now OSS tools) with fewer cores. I'd imagine that a quad core T2 would use a similar amount of power, but with vastly more parallel processing capability than your average Core Duo.
Because MAJC, picoJava, aJile, and Jazelle don't count, right?
I'm more worried about the Cholesterol. Some people have naturally high cholesterol. It doesn't impact their health any, but there's no way they're ever going to come out with a "normal" reading. Are they going to get fined for having "poor health" even when they don't?
:-/
Lame idea.
I much prefer the idea my insurance company has. They give you this monopoly money for doing healthy stuff, getting checkups, and generally keeping in good condition. You can later redeem the fake money for real stuff like merchandise and vacations. If only their website didn't suck so badly, I'd have a huge pile of their funny money.
Funny you should mention a shotgun, because that's exactly the comparison I had in mind. A sawed off shotgun is incredibly dangerous to humans because the blast still has enough force to do damage to soft tissue. However, when it's used against a harder target, a sawed off shotgun is far less effective than a rifle.
Same thing here. There will be less ejecta, wider area of heating, less change of a tsunami, etc. All in all, the total effects on the Earth would be greatly lessened due to the greater area over which the damage is spread.
I somewhat doubt it's common enough to be the average. I only know one person who has a full 4 remotes, and I don't know anyone outside of Slashdot who has 2 Nunchucks. My setup is 2 remotes (bundled + WiiPlay), 1 Nunchuck, a Classic Controller, and 2 GameCube Controllers. I'd like to get more controllers, but I'm taking my time. I don't need them immediately and they're rather expensive to stock up on. Both my GCN controllers are used, so I suppose that says something about my miserly ways.
I explicitly excluded WiiPlay from the games comparison because it says a lot more about the peripheral attach rate than the sales of the game itself. With sales topping 4.49 million, it does give an interesting peek into how well Nintendo is selling their accessories. I wouldn't be at all surprised if sales of the Classic Controller are slightly over 1 for every console and Wii Remote sales at 1.5 to 2 per console. :-)
It's a bit hard to do as Microsoft keeps its numbers under wraps, but I'll give it a go.
According to Wikipedia's Best Selling Games Page, the Wii has sold:
Assuming that their figures match up by date to the sales figured on the Wikipedia Wii page (9.27m), that gives a sell-through ratio of ~4.83 packaged games per system sold and 0.6 VC games per console sold.
That's definitely not bad, regardless of how the 360 is doing.
Further evidence comes in the form of comparing the top selling games. 3.7m Gears of War to 3.61m for Legend of Zelda. 1.4m for Call of Duty 2 vs. 1.82m for Wario Ware. 1.37m for Lost Planet vs. 1.25m for Super Paper Mario.
Given that the Wii is the younger system, these numbers are quite impressive.
While the above is correct, it doesn't change what I just said. Dissipating the energy over a larger area means that the the Earth as a whole could better absorb the brunt of the impact.
Someone else already pointed out that the Oceans accept even more heat than the atmosphere. Heat which will be held only temporarily by the Earth, as it will reject quite a bit of the excess as blackbody radiation from the dark side of the planet.
This is a far better situation than the full asteroid hitting and throwing up ejecta. Most of its energy will still get converted to heat, but all the ejecta would act as a greenhouse to hold it in.
This example is not comparable. Knocking it into only a few pieces would be the same as splitting an asteroid. That's not what we're talking about. If you pulverized the airframe into thousands of tiny pieces, these pieces would scatter from their original trajectory and hit the ship's hull with a rain of shrapnel. While the shrapnel would indeed be incredibly dangerous for any men on deck, the greater surface area of the impact would prevent any serious damage to the ship's hull.
The Collective is made up of many individuals.
Prepare to be assimilated. Microsoft will add your technological and biological distinctiveness to its own. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been... is over.
Shrapnel == Greater Cross Section
Greater Cross Section == Atmosphere has greater effect on projectile
Atmosphere has greater effect on projectile == Energy dissapated over wider area
Energy dissapated over wider area == No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
I was with you, right up until this point. A really great manager is part teacher, part mentor, part boss, part friend, and part Solomon. A great manager will make sure you have the exact tools and resources you need, know exactly who can take on a given task, know when to dish out tasks that will help improve the skills of those (s)he manages, somehow manage to get whatever is needed out of higher management, and be able to identify and combat issues with a project before they become a problem.
Good management is just as much of an art as programming is. Just like in programming, there aren't that many people who are true naturals at it. Those that are can make a company run about 1000x smoother than anyone else could. Thus I don't begrudge them any high wages they may earn.
Funny thing, though. These same managers are also the ones who are often stuck at the lower rungs of the totem pole making only slightly more than you or I. (Sometimes less.) Like programmers, they like the "hands-on" experience of direct management. This tends to make them uninterested in moving to the top. Combined with their willingness to step on toes in order to get the job done, they're unlikely to get promoted very far, very fast. Thus they also can be found pining for the small-company environment.
Youth. It's one of those funny things about being young. Sometimes you solve a problem because no one told you it was impossible.
Did you read a single thing I wrote?
:-/
The contract is entered into when you place the order. The contract is technically completed when payment is made and the food is delivered. However, if the restaurant failed to live up to their responsibilities under the contract (e.g. delivered food that was not up to the implicit or implied standards), then they are in breach. It is then required that the restaurant make restitution.
But hey, don't let the fact that you ignored the post you're responding to get in the way of a perfectly good rant.
Eh? When did Jesus sin? He was tempted by sin, but never gave into it. The Bible is very clear on the fact that he was "a man without blame".
Um, no. When the Bible refers to "man", it means "mankind". Jesus was half-mankind, half-God. He still was tempted by the sinful nature of man (e.g. the devil tempting Jesus in the desert), but he was able to resist the temptation. So I'm afraid there's no theological dilemma looming here.
From the perspective of science, parthenogenesis has long been known to be a possible physical explanation for a real-life virgin birth. It's just that up until now, there has been no solid proof that it could happen in humans.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. You can find physical explanations for everything that happens in the universe. That's not the point. If you believe in God, then you must believe that it's his Universe that follows his Laws. Which means that everything that happens has an explanation inside the universe. The only question is, did it happen because an extra-universal God made it happen (some of these events have pretty freaky odds) or because it was simply a big coincidence? That's an answer that science can't provide (at least yet) and where theology comes into play.
JIT == Just In Time Compiler. Being able to compile Java down to native code at runtime allows the JVM to produce code that is optimized for the local system. The performance gains from this help make up for losses incurred by doing runtime compilation.
As much as I hate to hurt your feelings, Mr. AC:
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchma
Abstract: "This article surveys a number of benchmarks and finds that Java performance on numerical code is comparable to that of C++, with hints that Java's relative performance is continuing to improve. We then describe clear theoretical reasons why these benchmark results should be expected."
Thanks for that excellent explanation. I think I got a +1 Legal Knowledge upgrade from that one. ;-)
1. Mach *was* worse than a 20% performance hit under many types of loads.
2. His attempt to say that Java is a 20 fold hit in performance is an outright untruth. Java JIT benchmarks have met or exceeded C/C++ benchmarks on several occasions.
3. One of Java's original failings prior to the Hotspot VM was that it was considered "slow". Java did not get a free ride in that respect. The Java community is still fighting to have the performance of the platform recognized some 10 years after it was resolved.
4. Interpreted languages like Ruby and Python are not used for performance-critical code. An Operating System has a variety of performance critical situations that would make the slow execution of Ruby and Python unsuitable. For example, if you're playing a movie file you need that absolute minimum latencies possible between reading a frame from disk, decoding the frame, and transferring the decoded frame to the screen.
5. In theory it should be possible to give up some of our performance gains from the latest technology in exchange for useful designs like Microkernel architectures. The realities of the market, however, is that performance is a selling point for an operating system. Your competitors WILL latch onto your poor performance and exploit it in their advertisements for all they're worth. Yes, the market can be illogical. Such is life.
Sounds like a perfect small claims court case for receiving punitive damages from an idiot bartender. The bartender clearly breached the contract in that case, so he is liable for damages caused by the breach. Personally, I think the judge would slap rather hefty damages on the fellow just for being such an idiot.
Generally you're correct in that most people wouldn't take it to court, but it wasn't my example in the first place. I'm continuing a comparison that the top poster brought up.
There's a huge difference between criminal and civil law. When dealing with contracts, you are usually dealing with civil law. So it's quite right that no one should think it's criminal. However, they probably think it's *wrong*, and are perfectly within their rights to have a judge decide on whether the bar tender was actually wrong or not.
From the ACM paper, The performance of -kernel-based systems:
[9] ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/doc/published/o
L4 tried to remedy a lot of the problems inherent in the microkernel design, but the industry had already made commitments to more monolithic designs by that point in time.
Dude, try reading the next paragraph. You know, "the difference between eBay and a bar"?
You need to look up laws for auctions. In an auction, the seller agrees to accept the highest bid given when he puts the item up for sale. The only protection the seller has is that he can set a reserve price. As long as the bids are below the reserve, the seller reserves the right not to sell the item.
In the case of the item in the article, the reserve price was met. Therefore the bidder was going into the sale with the understanding that the seller already agreed to sell for the high bid. Reneging after the auction is complete is a breach of contract.
See: Invitation to Treat
No, the contract is formed prior to the consumption. The terms of the contract, however, are not completed until the food have been received. (From what I understand, consumption is more or less irrelevant from a legal standpoint. What if you took your food to go?)
Correct. This is a failure by the restaurant to carry through on its responsibilities under the contract. If the restaurant either states or implies a certain level of quality or service, you have every right to expect that level of quality or service. Of course, a restaurant may disagree with you, in which case it would take a judge to decide if the restaurant really did carry out it responsibilities under the contract, or if you were making unreasonable demands upon the restaurant that are not part of the implied contract.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but who the hell really is around here? We have so few lawyers, it's shocking.