Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden
chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep.
...And seat 14C has established and maintained a single encrypted tunnel to a non-resolving IP, over which
he appears to have routed a high volume of bidirectional traffic.
Seriously, using airline-provided internet access doesn't magically take away the standard rules
for the use of any public-access short-term ISP, whether libraries or coffee shops or just
someone's open WAP - Encrypt everything!
Of course, in the current political climate, that would probably have the gestapo waiting to "ask"
me a few questions on landing, but I refuse to give up best-practices out of fear of boogey-men.
It's now official, new machines have more RAM than my first computers had hard drive.
Makes you feel old? Your comment makes me feel old.;-)
My first computer (first PC, I should say, since I won't count the Timex Sinclaire 1000 with
a whopping 4k of RAM) had 256k of RAM, dual 360k 5.25" floppy drives, and no HDD. So technically it had more
RAM than HDD.
My first HDD weighed in at a mere 10MB (poor choice of words - as a large external device, it
weighed almost 30lbs, but had a capacity of 10MB). That meant basically 10x the installed
RAM in that machine.
Two machines later, I finally got to 16MB, passing my first HDD (I think at that point I had
a ~300MB HDD). Since I had that one while still in highschool, I suppose that would put it
around 1991 or 1992.
I didn't pass that threshold until somewhere around 2002, when I built my first box
with a "whopping" 512MB of RAM. Now... My home file server (I don't count my desktop PC,
since I don't store anything but the OS and installed apps on it) has just under 2TB. It
might take a few more years to pass that in RAM.
So... Um... Git off mah lawn, you damned whippersnappers!:)
Well, this discussion appears to be about an 'x86 Chipset,' not an x86 processor.
Which means more than just the processor. So there is an 'x86 architecture.' If there
wasn't, this topic would be meaningless.
My earlier post may have sounded more caustic than I intended it, but I meant what I wrote literally.
A "x86 chipset" just describes the supporting chips (usually memory, bus, and I/O) that let the
CPU-which-happens-to-speak-x86 do its thing in a way familiar to programmers and users of non-embedded
PC hardware. Although the PC world has a somewhat standardized set of these, by no means do all
x86-speaking CPUs require similar enough supporting hardware as to justify the
overly broad generalization.
Simple example - The earliest x86 chips manually controlled DRAM refresh. Then that moved out into the
chip-set (a large collection of single-purpose chips each doing their own thing - including a memory
controller as one of them). Then a handful of those merged into a single-chip solution that handled
all the critical non-CPU functionality (but had basically nothing we would think of as actual features
by itself). Then as more and more I/O tasks also merged into that one chip, it eventually split into
the Northbridge (bus and memory) and Southbridge (I/O). And now, we have CPUs with integrated memory
controllers once again (though they have dedicated hardware for it rather than needing to tie up actual
processing cycles for the job). Which of those would you call "the" x86 chipset?
Perhaps you could more accurately say that this provides for a single-chip PC
architecture, since most of what the chipset does has little to no relevance to what language
the CPU speaks.
The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated
standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip
The "x86 architecture" doesn't exist. x86 merely describes an ISA exported by the microcode of whatever
underlying architecture a given chip really uses. An ARM chip could look like an x86 chip. A PPC chip
could look like an x86 chip. The Core2 or Athlon64 could just as well export a traditional Motorola
ISA as the chosen x86 - and with modern chips, they could do so with a microcode patch at boot
time, you wouldn't even need to buy a new chip!
Thus, any holy wars regarding its efficiencies or inefficiencies must remain firmly rooted in
the ease of actually using it for coding. I do so, and find it for the most part adequate. It
traditionally lacked enough GP registers, but even that doesn't hold true these days (at least for
AMD's version - Not 100% sure about the Core line). And for that matter, very few coders
even bother with ASM anymore... Even firmware development (which I also do) uses C almost
exclusively nowadays.
Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware
with no current connection to the ISA against it.
It was a GREEN laser, which puts out a lot more power than your
standard red keychain ornament.
No, no, and... No!
A IIIa (now called 3R for the type of devices under consideration here)
puts out less than 5mW. 5mW of green laser light doesn't magically contain
more energy than 5mw of red laser light.
Humans perceive green light as much, much brighter because we
have a higher sensitivity to it. But in terms of total power, 5mW
equals 5mW equals 5mW.
That said, IIIB/3R can cause temporary eye damage, though it
takes some effort to target it just in the right spot and for long enough (a
quick random sweep across the eyes won't do it). But "disorientation" and
"hours of discomfort", over 500ft away and through a window? No. Evil
piggies just want to cry victim.
Why not create a "modified division" for those who take performance enhancing substances?
Why bother? Pro sports, or the olympics, supposedly show us the peak of human performance. If it takes
steroids or other drugs (did you know the IOC bans caffeine, so virtually all of us count
as "users of banned substances" just to get through the workday?) to even rank, then let the trained
monkeys take steroids!
This whole mess reminds me of nothing more than the mock-furor over Janet's Boob, or Imus's nappy-headed
hos. I have yet to meet anyone who actually cares (and while I don't follow sports closely, I'd
have to work in Antarctica to avoid plenty of people who do) about steroid use in pro sports; Yet,
to hear the idiots on TV and the radio, you'd think we have people rioting in the streets over the issue.
the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds.
...And if they had recycled the copper and aluminum in just one of each rather than burying them, they could have bought an entire
lab of mid-range PCs with it.
But hey, that wouldn't get kitchy national media attention.
All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem. God knows why.
Because the less "real" bandwidth they have to pay for, the better (from their POV).
They already have the tubes in place to provide TV or POTS. For a broadband ISP, finding a new
way to charge customers (and often, more than for the original service itself) to use those same
tubes amounts to icing on their cake. BUT! If they need to pay someone else so you can get out
of their play area and onto the real internet, well, clearly that costs money and they must
discourage it whenever possible.
So far, this all makes perfect sense, IMO.
Except when they start writing their own Office app suite. That does not make
sense.
No, no. This is an employment issue. You could lose your job for
"pushing back."
My own personal solution works well enough - When I get home from work,
I have a beer.
Of course, I can't really use that excuse at 9am on Saturday
(without looking like a hardcore alkie), but any day, any time after
early afternoon...
"Gee, I'd love to help - Send a taxi, and I'll come right in! Say,
can you send a lime with the taxi? I've run out."
Some people don't have that option.
You always have that option, with the possible exception
of serving in the military. If your job sucks enough that you
can't negotiate the details of "pager duty", you already
need new employment, you just haven't made the leap yet.
Currently, we work with no business with an in-house IT guy
Sorry? Do you mean that in the sense of not the boss' nephew, or not
having any IT department period?
Since we've taken over some telephone system operations, we also
generate a report that shows the delay in responding to voice mails
Out of curiousity, how can you tell whether or not a voice mail requires
a response, or if perhaps the recipient ran into the sender in the hall
and resolved the issue in person?
Let's not forget for defense of those things (the US in
WWI and WWII, France in WWI and WWII) and also for ideological
reasons (terrorism, crusades, etc).
US in WWI: Keep them from coming to our land.
US in WWII: Heard of Pearl Harbor? (and even for the Zimmerman fans, see WWI above).
Terrorism: We want their oil, they have no viable means to fight back.
Crusades: The vatican already owns most of Europe, let's convince the sheep to push West.
Even ideological reasons usually amount to a cover-story for a "real" resource.
Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that
only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them?
Because in the US, only huge chain stores survive. We can largely blame ourselves for that,
but such it stands.
Small stores have two major problems... First, they can't get as good prices for small quantities
as WallyWorld can when they buy out a manufacturer's entire production run, so they need to survive
on a thinner margin. Second, they have less ability to absorb losses - When Walmart eats the cost of
a high-end TV, it shows up as a miniscule blip on the monthly report; when a Mom-n-Pop does the same,
it could well mean ending that month in the red.
The only thing impressive CompUSA ever did was make the idiots at Best Buy look like geniuses.
Whoever modded this "funny" clearly has never visited a CompUSA.
Two true tales of years gone by...
Back in the days before sites like Pricewatch, when before any hardware purchase you'd
pick up a Computer Shopper, CompUSA used to carry this esteemed book-o'-ads. My friends and I
used to visit CompUSA occasionally and have a contest - Who could find the most over-priced item
in the store, compared to the lowest (not free or bundled) price they could find in Computer Shopper.
This amounted to no small feat, mind you, because everything in the store would cost 2-3x as
much as you could get it mail-order and even finding something for 10x as much didn't take too much effort.
Finding the worst deal, though... that could waste a whole boring rainy Sunday afternoon!
Second story, shorter but far more telling...
After ordering a new HDD, I realized I forgot to get
a mounting kit for it. I knew I'd pay waaaaaaaay more than I should, but for a $2 item, I wanted
it ASAP and didn't care about price. So, I go to the parts counter at CompUSA and asked for one.
"I don't think they even make those anymore, I haven't seen one in years".
Keep in mind this took place probably over a decade ago now; Yet, a few months ago, while
building a new PC, I used two such 3.5-to-5.25 kits.
Overpriced and useless. If this announcement surprises me in any way, it does so only through
sheer amazement that they managed to stay in business this long.
and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like
this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.
...Because we all know that hams only use radios powered by hugs and rainbows?
I've never quite understood that aspect of the ham pride in serving as the last working form
of communication in a disaster... Without electricity, they may as well resort to
RFC1149, because the best antenna in
the world amounts to nothing but a passable clothes-line without electricity.
Designers often want "features" you couldn't implement as anything short of a flash
program, and even if you give them that, will completely change the layout if they
don't like the way a particular shade of lavender looks on a rainy day. For the poor
bastards tasked with implementing the designer's "vision", learning how to tell them
"no" in a way they will accept (or at least not throw a fit over) counts as the single
most important skill available.
As for customers - They don't know what your site should look like, so don't know
it looks wrong. As long as they can navigate it, they'll just consider it ugly or awkward,
not broken.
And as for customers going elsewhere - Puh-lease. Hollow threat and we all know it. People
don't go to a company's website because of the website itself (with the small exception of
sites that actually specialize in producint/distributing online content). They go because
they need a driver, or product information, or contact information, or already want to buy
something.
I do think the prosecutors have the right to know whether or not the defendant is posting these blogs
to cause a big ruckos and to support their cause.
Google can answer that with a simple "yes" or "no".
Hopefully someone can explain this to me, as the stuff in the article led me to believe the publishers are making a big mistake.
Simple - They want to have their cake and eat it too.
They already have the absolute power to block Google. Further than that, Google (and every
major search engine out there) honors the robots file, so they don't even need to go so far as
actually "blocking" Google, they can politely tell it to go away.
However, doing that amounts to committing web-suicide for any online content producer, and the
publishers know it. So they can't really do that. Thus, they bitch and whine about the unfairness
of all the traffic (and corresponding ad revenue) Google brings them, for the sake of the very
small number of "lost" hits resulting from people getting a sufficient answer directly from the search
results page.
Their bag of tricks they bring with them must ALSO be not used.
I don't mean this rudely, but... Good luck with that.
Granted, good programmers don't just depend on a personal library of preexisting solutions,
they excel at turning big problems into smaller easily-solveable problems. When it comes
time to actually implement those solutions in code, however, even the best of coders use
their own personal "bag of tricks". Whether explicitly, by actually importing source
snippets, or implicitly by virtue of simply "knowing" how to do something in code, you
physically can't avoid someone using what makes them good at their job to do
their job.
Put another way - I know (in the "understand the math behind" sense) perhaps half a
dozen ways to do an FFT. If you stuck me at a computer and asked me to implement one
of those for you cold, it would still look very similar to every previous time
I used that same algorithm - Which in turn would look vaguely similar to the manner in
which my original source presented the algorithm. You just can't get away from that,
and "corporate policies" have no say in the matter.
As about the only way you could achieve that stated goal, you would need to hire
non-programmers and make them do clean-room implementations of whatever algorithms you
need. Otherwise, you get their preexisting skills - All of them.
Yeah, because the artistic quality of Southpark is a definite selling point.
Smoothly animated stop-motion cardboard cutouts (which IIRC, SP hasn't actually used since
the second season) still beat low-framerate stop-motion cardboard cutouts with macroblocking,
stream errors, buffering, and loss of audio sync.
And what to do with the old one? Throw away and let some scavenger hunter find the data?
Sledge hammer applied repeatedly.
Industrial shredder.
Thermite.
Persistant application of a grinding wheel.
Personally tossing in a large crucible of molten steel.
Fuming sulfuric acid.
We may not all have the resources to do all of the above, but I'd
bet most of us can find a way to physically reduce a HDD to very
very small chunks, if not completely dissolving/melting it at a
molecular level.
Bloch had his computer's hard disk completely cleansed using a "seven-level" wipe: a thorough
scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards.
You have to wonder - For those who can't do such things themselves, wouldn't it cost
less to just buy a new HDD, and take a sledgehammer (or thermite, where
readily available) to the old one?
Sure, for most Slashdotters who can do their own "seven level wipe" (or whatever number the current
rumors claim works infallably), saving a few hundred bucks for "good enough" makes sense. But if you plan
to spend the money either on a drive or an "expert", why not just physically trash the drive?
Once you can sit at a desk with a CEO and help him
format his confidential IPO document but don't read one
word in the process, you have succeeded. [bolding mine]
...Because you only need to read one number to
make sure you buy in (or sell out) at the right time.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep.
...And seat 14C has established and maintained a single encrypted tunnel to a non-resolving IP, over which
he appears to have routed a high volume of bidirectional traffic.
Seriously, using airline-provided internet access doesn't magically take away the standard rules for the use of any public-access short-term ISP, whether libraries or coffee shops or just someone's open WAP - Encrypt everything!
Of course, in the current political climate, that would probably have the gestapo waiting to "ask" me a few questions on landing, but I refuse to give up best-practices out of fear of boogey-men.
It's now official, new machines have more RAM than my first computers had hard drive.
;-)
:)
Makes you feel old? Your comment makes me feel old.
My first computer (first PC, I should say, since I won't count the Timex Sinclaire 1000 with a whopping 4k of RAM) had 256k of RAM, dual 360k 5.25" floppy drives, and no HDD. So technically it had more RAM than HDD.
My first HDD weighed in at a mere 10MB (poor choice of words - as a large external device, it weighed almost 30lbs, but had a capacity of 10MB). That meant basically 10x the installed RAM in that machine.
Two machines later, I finally got to 16MB, passing my first HDD (I think at that point I had a ~300MB HDD). Since I had that one while still in highschool, I suppose that would put it around 1991 or 1992.
I didn't pass that threshold until somewhere around 2002, when I built my first box with a "whopping" 512MB of RAM. Now... My home file server (I don't count my desktop PC, since I don't store anything but the OS and installed apps on it) has just under 2TB. It might take a few more years to pass that in RAM.
So... Um... Git off mah lawn, you damned whippersnappers!
Well, this discussion appears to be about an 'x86 Chipset,' not an x86 processor. Which means more than just the processor. So there is an 'x86 architecture.' If there wasn't, this topic would be meaningless.
My earlier post may have sounded more caustic than I intended it, but I meant what I wrote literally.
A "x86 chipset" just describes the supporting chips (usually memory, bus, and I/O) that let the CPU-which-happens-to-speak-x86 do its thing in a way familiar to programmers and users of non-embedded PC hardware. Although the PC world has a somewhat standardized set of these, by no means do all x86-speaking CPUs require similar enough supporting hardware as to justify the overly broad generalization.
Simple example - The earliest x86 chips manually controlled DRAM refresh. Then that moved out into the chip-set (a large collection of single-purpose chips each doing their own thing - including a memory controller as one of them). Then a handful of those merged into a single-chip solution that handled all the critical non-CPU functionality (but had basically nothing we would think of as actual features by itself). Then as more and more I/O tasks also merged into that one chip, it eventually split into the Northbridge (bus and memory) and Southbridge (I/O). And now, we have CPUs with integrated memory controllers once again (though they have dedicated hardware for it rather than needing to tie up actual processing cycles for the job). Which of those would you call "the" x86 chipset?
Perhaps you could more accurately say that this provides for a single-chip PC architecture, since most of what the chipset does has little to no relevance to what language the CPU speaks.
The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip
The "x86 architecture" doesn't exist. x86 merely describes an ISA exported by the microcode of whatever underlying architecture a given chip really uses. An ARM chip could look like an x86 chip. A PPC chip could look like an x86 chip. The Core2 or Athlon64 could just as well export a traditional Motorola ISA as the chosen x86 - and with modern chips, they could do so with a microcode patch at boot time, you wouldn't even need to buy a new chip!
Thus, any holy wars regarding its efficiencies or inefficiencies must remain firmly rooted in the ease of actually using it for coding. I do so, and find it for the most part adequate. It traditionally lacked enough GP registers, but even that doesn't hold true these days (at least for AMD's version - Not 100% sure about the Core line). And for that matter, very few coders even bother with ASM anymore... Even firmware development (which I also do) uses C almost exclusively nowadays.
Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware with no current connection to the ISA against it.
Cool, now for $750 one-time fee I can power my gaming system in an eco-friendly way.
I think you meant that sarcastically, but if you leave that rig on all the time, the payback time comes out to under a year vs paying $0.15/kWh.
We're supposed to take you seriously after this sentence?
I respect those who earn my respect.
"Don't tase me, bro!"
It was a GREEN laser, which puts out a lot more power than your standard red keychain ornament.
No, no, and... No!
A IIIa (now called 3R for the type of devices under consideration here) puts out less than 5mW. 5mW of green laser light doesn't magically contain more energy than 5mw of red laser light.
Humans perceive green light as much, much brighter because we have a higher sensitivity to it. But in terms of total power, 5mW equals 5mW equals 5mW.
That said, IIIB/3R can cause temporary eye damage, though it takes some effort to target it just in the right spot and for long enough (a quick random sweep across the eyes won't do it). But "disorientation" and "hours of discomfort", over 500ft away and through a window? No. Evil piggies just want to cry victim.
Why not create a "modified division" for those who take performance enhancing substances?
Why bother? Pro sports, or the olympics, supposedly show us the peak of human performance. If it takes steroids or other drugs (did you know the IOC bans caffeine, so virtually all of us count as "users of banned substances" just to get through the workday?) to even rank, then let the trained monkeys take steroids!
This whole mess reminds me of nothing more than the mock-furor over Janet's Boob, or Imus's nappy-headed hos. I have yet to meet anyone who actually cares (and while I don't follow sports closely, I'd have to work in Antarctica to avoid plenty of people who do) about steroid use in pro sports; Yet, to hear the idiots on TV and the radio, you'd think we have people rioting in the streets over the issue.
the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds.
...And if they had recycled the copper and aluminum in just one of each rather than burying them, they could have bought an entire
lab of mid-range PCs with it.
But hey, that wouldn't get kitchy national media attention.
All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem. God knows why.
Because the less "real" bandwidth they have to pay for, the better (from their POV).
They already have the tubes in place to provide TV or POTS. For a broadband ISP, finding a new way to charge customers (and often, more than for the original service itself) to use those same tubes amounts to icing on their cake. BUT! If they need to pay someone else so you can get out of their play area and onto the real internet, well, clearly that costs money and they must discourage it whenever possible.
So far, this all makes perfect sense, IMO.
Except when they start writing their own Office app suite. That does not make sense.
No, no. This is an employment issue. You could lose your job for "pushing back."
My own personal solution works well enough - When I get home from work, I have a beer.
Of course, I can't really use that excuse at 9am on Saturday (without looking like a hardcore alkie), but any day, any time after early afternoon...
"Gee, I'd love to help - Send a taxi, and I'll come right in! Say, can you send a lime with the taxi? I've run out."
Some people don't have that option.
You always have that option, with the possible exception of serving in the military. If your job sucks enough that you can't negotiate the details of "pager duty", you already need new employment, you just haven't made the leap yet.
Currently, we work with no business with an in-house IT guy
Sorry? Do you mean that in the sense of not the boss' nephew, or not having any IT department period?
Since we've taken over some telephone system operations, we also generate a report that shows the delay in responding to voice mails
Out of curiousity, how can you tell whether or not a voice mail requires a response, or if perhaps the recipient ran into the sender in the hall and resolved the issue in person?
Let's not forget for defense of those things (the US in WWI and WWII, France in WWI and WWII) and also for ideological reasons (terrorism, crusades, etc).
US in WWI: Keep them from coming to our land.
US in WWII: Heard of Pearl Harbor? (and even for the Zimmerman fans, see WWI above).
Terrorism: We want their oil, they have no viable means to fight back.
Crusades: The vatican already owns most of Europe, let's convince the sheep to push West.
Even ideological reasons usually amount to a cover-story for a "real" resource.
Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them?
Because in the US, only huge chain stores survive. We can largely blame ourselves for that, but such it stands.
Small stores have two major problems... First, they can't get as good prices for small quantities as WallyWorld can when they buy out a manufacturer's entire production run, so they need to survive on a thinner margin. Second, they have less ability to absorb losses - When Walmart eats the cost of a high-end TV, it shows up as a miniscule blip on the monthly report; when a Mom-n-Pop does the same, it could well mean ending that month in the red.
The only thing impressive CompUSA ever did was make the idiots at Best Buy look like geniuses.
Whoever modded this "funny" clearly has never visited a CompUSA.
Two true tales of years gone by...
Back in the days before sites like Pricewatch, when before any hardware purchase you'd pick up a Computer Shopper, CompUSA used to carry this esteemed book-o'-ads. My friends and I used to visit CompUSA occasionally and have a contest - Who could find the most over-priced item in the store, compared to the lowest (not free or bundled) price they could find in Computer Shopper.
This amounted to no small feat, mind you, because everything in the store would cost 2-3x as much as you could get it mail-order and even finding something for 10x as much didn't take too much effort. Finding the worst deal, though... that could waste a whole boring rainy Sunday afternoon!
Second story, shorter but far more telling...
After ordering a new HDD, I realized I forgot to get a mounting kit for it. I knew I'd pay waaaaaaaay more than I should, but for a $2 item, I wanted it ASAP and didn't care about price. So, I go to the parts counter at CompUSA and asked for one.
"I don't think they even make those anymore, I haven't seen one in years".
Keep in mind this took place probably over a decade ago now; Yet, a few months ago, while building a new PC, I used two such 3.5-to-5.25 kits.
Overpriced and useless. If this announcement surprises me in any way, it does so only through sheer amazement that they managed to stay in business this long.
and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.
...Because we all know that hams only use radios powered by hugs and rainbows?
I've never quite understood that aspect of the ham pride in serving as the last working form of communication in a disaster... Without electricity, they may as well resort to RFC1149, because the best antenna in the world amounts to nothing but a passable clothes-line without electricity.
Try telling that to a designer or customer!
Designers often want "features" you couldn't implement as anything short of a flash program, and even if you give them that, will completely change the layout if they don't like the way a particular shade of lavender looks on a rainy day. For the poor bastards tasked with implementing the designer's "vision", learning how to tell them "no" in a way they will accept (or at least not throw a fit over) counts as the single most important skill available.
As for customers - They don't know what your site should look like, so don't know it looks wrong. As long as they can navigate it, they'll just consider it ugly or awkward, not broken.
And as for customers going elsewhere - Puh-lease. Hollow threat and we all know it. People don't go to a company's website because of the website itself (with the small exception of sites that actually specialize in producint/distributing online content). They go because they need a driver, or product information, or contact information, or already want to buy something.
I do think the prosecutors have the right to know whether or not the defendant is posting these blogs to cause a big ruckos and to support their cause.
Google can answer that with a simple "yes" or "no".
Hopefully someone can explain this to me, as the stuff in the article led me to believe the publishers are making a big mistake.
Simple - They want to have their cake and eat it too.
They already have the absolute power to block Google. Further than that, Google (and every major search engine out there) honors the robots file, so they don't even need to go so far as actually "blocking" Google, they can politely tell it to go away.
However, doing that amounts to committing web-suicide for any online content producer, and the publishers know it. So they can't really do that. Thus, they bitch and whine about the unfairness of all the traffic (and corresponding ad revenue) Google brings them, for the sake of the very small number of "lost" hits resulting from people getting a sufficient answer directly from the search results page.
Can you hear the violins?
Their bag of tricks they bring with them must ALSO be not used.
I don't mean this rudely, but... Good luck with that.
Granted, good programmers don't just depend on a personal library of preexisting solutions, they excel at turning big problems into smaller easily-solveable problems. When it comes time to actually implement those solutions in code, however, even the best of coders use their own personal "bag of tricks". Whether explicitly, by actually importing source snippets, or implicitly by virtue of simply "knowing" how to do something in code, you physically can't avoid someone using what makes them good at their job to do their job.
Put another way - I know (in the "understand the math behind" sense) perhaps half a dozen ways to do an FFT. If you stuck me at a computer and asked me to implement one of those for you cold, it would still look very similar to every previous time I used that same algorithm - Which in turn would look vaguely similar to the manner in which my original source presented the algorithm. You just can't get away from that, and "corporate policies" have no say in the matter.
As about the only way you could achieve that stated goal, you would need to hire non-programmers and make them do clean-room implementations of whatever algorithms you need. Otherwise, you get their preexisting skills - All of them.
Those aren't cardboard cutouts
"The show is based on construction paper, which was used for the pilot," says Eric Stough, animation director at South Park. "All the pieces had to be cut out of construction paper. When we wanted to scale a character, we had to cut new pieces."
Though in fairness, apparently they did "switch" for the first season, not the second as I had thought.
Yeah, because the artistic quality of Southpark is a definite selling point.
Smoothly animated stop-motion cardboard cutouts (which IIRC, SP hasn't actually used since the second season) still beat low-framerate stop-motion cardboard cutouts with macroblocking, stream errors, buffering, and loss of audio sync.
And what to do with the old one? Throw away and let some scavenger hunter find the data?
Sledge hammer applied repeatedly.
Industrial shredder.
Thermite.
Persistant application of a grinding wheel.
Personally tossing in a large crucible of molten steel.
Fuming sulfuric acid.
We may not all have the resources to do all of the above, but I'd bet most of us can find a way to physically reduce a HDD to very very small chunks, if not completely dissolving/melting it at a molecular level.
Bloch had his computer's hard disk completely cleansed using a "seven-level" wipe: a thorough scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards.
You have to wonder - For those who can't do such things themselves, wouldn't it cost less to just buy a new HDD, and take a sledgehammer (or thermite, where readily available) to the old one?
Sure, for most Slashdotters who can do their own "seven level wipe" (or whatever number the current rumors claim works infallably), saving a few hundred bucks for "good enough" makes sense. But if you plan to spend the money either on a drive or an "expert", why not just physically trash the drive?
Once you can sit at a desk with a CEO and help him format his confidential IPO document but don't read one word in the process, you have succeeded. [bolding mine]
...Because you only need to read one number to
make sure you buy in (or sell out) at the right time. ;-)