Opera's CFO said he expected the rise in the
number of phones with Opera's browser to outpace
the increase in models.
Umm... Huh?
So... More models of phones will use Opera than
the number of existant phone models?
Neat trick, this guy should talk to the CEO of a
former employer of mine that swore to maintain
perpetual X% "growth" per year by making cuts
to reach that target.
Perhaps Bernie didn't do anything wrong...
These guys just use a system of math totally
incompatible with physical reality. Worldcom
investors actually made trillions, it
just doesn't look so good on paper. Yeah.
i know there aren't a lot of microsoft
supporters/fans around these parts
(understatement of the year)... but isn't
$5M a day a bit, oh i dunno, steep?
Consider what Microsoft has actually done to
get that penalty... This has nothing to do with
failing to open up their protocols, and
everything to do with all but telling
the EU the go fornicate with itself.
Governments don't like that - If one company
gets away with it, the rest will join in
very quickly.
However, in this situation, Microsoft still has
one rather drastic course of action left...
Totally pull out of all EU countries, block
them from any updates, then push out a service
pack that addresses a few dozen critical
exploits, including "proof of concept" code
to "demonstrate" those exploits. Overnight,
Windows becomes impossible to run without an
instant rooting anywhere in Europe.
On the down side (from MS's perspective), this
would greatly boost Linux support. But
the cost to change over, and the damage
that would occur during the transition
could add up to enough to crash a few smaller
economies (imagine the IRS, the DMV, and
the FBI's records all vanishing at once to
get an idea of the potential cracker-induced
damage).
Kinda scary to think that a single company could
destroy whole governments with just a few carefully-planned
steps. And THAT justifies the $5M fine per day - Fear
that Microsoft might have realized just how much power they
have, not just in a monetary sense, but in a critical
infrastructure sense.
And if anyone needs a better argument for Open Source, I
can't think of one...
nice try, but the Milgram studies have
generally been thought to be unethical.
True, they do seem unethical in hindsight.
But they also revealed an absolutely amazing
area of human psychology that we couldn't have
discovered any other way - That our normal
concept of "conscience" completely vanishes
in the interaction between an authority
figure and a subordinate.
Kinda funny that a lot of the most
important findings in psychology (and medical
science as well) count as "unethical" by
today's standards.
Myself, I interpret that as the entire human
race having turned into a culture of whiners.
"Oh, boo-frickin' hoo, I feel bad about having
thought-I-did-but-not-actually zapped that
guy"... "Oh, I feel violated, I must now sue you
because you said you would give me caffeine but
you actually gave me a sugar pill".
At the risk of sounding like a Trekkie, sometimes
the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. I
say "sometimes" because you could use the same argument
to justify torturing prisoners. When dealing with a
minor inconvenience to the few, no problem. When
"breaking" someone into saying whatever they think you
want to hear, the criteria for "justifiable" become quite
a lot more strict, if even possible to satisfy.
Actually the 32 bits version of Windows XP is NT 5.1, the 64 bits version is NT 5.2.
I haven't used the 64 bit version yet, but I can
tell you with absolute certainty that Windows 2003
describes itself as NT 5.2 when it boots.
Hmm, that would interest me greatly if
Microsoft decided to base the 64 bit version
of XP on 2003 rather than 5.1! Particularly
since I plan to upgrade my main machine at home
to a dual-core Athlon 64 when they come out.:-)
but I was always under the impression that Server
2003 and XP were akin to Windows 2000 and 2000 Advanced
Server?
Yes and no...
From a high-level view, 2003 roughly corresponds to the
"server" version of XP, which itself equates to 2000 Pro.
For Win2k, however, every version used the same
underlying OS, with only the list of installed products
(and a few config details) changing with the server-ness
of the product you installed.
Windows 2003, however, Microsoft actually released as NT 5.2
(compared to XP as NT 5.1, and Win2k as NT 5.0). Now,
version numbers don't mean a whole lot, but with Win2k3,
Microsoft actually did optimize it both in terms of
memory footprint and CPU efficiency. As an example, you
can just barely fit a hand-trimmed XP installation
into a 96MB RAM footprint. Win2k3 you can do in half that,
under 48MB (without running server-specific services and
applications, of course), comparable to the footprint of a
baseline NT4 Workstation installation.
And don't think
you give up speed for that - Not even close. 2003 not only
"feels" quite a lot more responsive, it actually does
run arbitrary code faster... I don't know how (perhaps XP has
that much bloat?), and I had to write a dozen or so
small test apps to prove it to myself, but you'll easily see
a 10% gain even on mostly CPU-bound tasks, and I frequently
notice that multiple I/O bound tasks that on XP would take
time 2X, take around 1.1X on win2k3.
And for stability... Wow. I thought Win2k took a huge leap
forward, and XP a big-but-not-so-big leap back, until I
started playing with 2k3... You just can't crash those things!
On one of my servers at work, I have an uptime over a year,
and it hasn't even started getting flakey! Almost as good
as a BSD box!
And no, I don't work for Microsoft... I even prefer Linux,
myself. But, finding myself more-or-less forced to use
Windows, I REALLY wish MS would release a pro or WS
version of Win2k3 (my particular hack works for now, but I
kinda wonder how Win2k3 SP1 will react to my trying to install
it on a nonexistant product line... With luck it'll work just
fine, but I expect I'll need to slipstream it in and do a clean
install, sigh).
although XP came quite a way in making things look better
Hey, I have fond memories of Fisher Price products from
my youth as well. But when I sit down at a computer, I
don't want flashbacks to using a Speak n Spell (unless I
run it as an
emulator (Yeah, I know, TI made it, not Fisher Price,
but you get the idea).
It really, truly horrifies me that people actually
like XP's interface. As the first thing I (and every
single competant computer user I know, without exception,
N>40) do when setting up an XP box, I disable the themes service.
Poof, no more craptastic prettified round window edges
taking up valuable screen real-estate.
For ONCE, I want a newer version of Windows to be faster and
smaller than the previous version and more stable as well.
Windows 2003 actually satisfies that requirement, by a solid margin.
However, Microsoft never decided to release it in a non-server
version... And if you've never tried running a server version as
a home version, well, you have no idea how many otherwise
"free" (as in beer but not speech) programs will refuse to run.
As an aside, you can trick 2003 into identifying itself as XP with only
two tweaks to the install CD. I will not disclose them for fear of
invoking the Legal Wrath of the Gates, but with a Google search for
similar hacks to Win2k, you can probably figure out what to change.
And no, the well-known product version switchers out there that worked
on 2k will not work, and will actually render your system
unbootable if they manage to do anything at all. Really, trust me
on this, I tried both of them.
Yes, most BIOSs include some degree of support
for USB keyboards at boot-time. But, having
dealt with a good number of different PCs and
USB keyboards at work, I would consider such
"support" sketchy at best. Most commonly, they
don't work at all. Right after that, in
a bizzare, horrible twist of fate, everything
works except the function keys (actually
I'd image any extended key sequence would fail,
but the function keys fall into that category).
And falling into last place, they work just
fine-n'-dandy.
Now, once you have your system up and running,
have a ball with your USB keyboard. But keep
a PS2 keyboard around just in case, and I would
make damned sure, personally, that my particular
choice of USB keyboard worked perfectly with a
system lacking any PS2 ports before
buying it.
Basically, the thesis is that not all the
links in a network are equally valuable
That "fact" results from two major problems,
however, the solving of which would again make
the "value" scale with O(N^2)...
First, legality. I have quite a lot of useful
content on my computer, which I cannot legally
share. I would say that the vast
majority of us fall into that category. Thus,
we have an artificial limitation on our value
to a network.
Second, not everyone has broadband, and very
very few people have symmetrical connectivity.
Thus, although we can download very fast, even
if we could legally share, we cannot
even come close to giving as much back as we
take. I consider this a somewhat more natural
limitation, though still partially artificial
(we can, in theory, fork over the money for a
symmetrical multi-megabit link, but very few
of us can afford to).
So, do these limitations refute Metcalfe's law?
I would say "no", because the second point above
will eventually vanish, and we could get
rid of the first problem if our laws didn't
deny us access to the products of our own
culture.
One final point that someone will probably scold
me on - The existance of massively more valuable
single nodes (such as Google, a sort of
meta-contributer, or Sourceforge, a meta-meta
contributer, or plain ol' collection sites
such as Guttenberg, Internet Archive, the former
MP3.com, and the like). These will of course
contribute far more than the average member of a
network. I see those as more of a bonus to the
overall N^2 growth, rather than making everyone
else less important. They do make everyone
else appear like leeches by comparison, but all
that material has to come from somewhere originally...
Joe Brown of Sandusky, Ohio, may not have a fat
pipe that thousands can download from, but if he
can provide even a single unique or very rare file,
he has helped make those collection-type sites more
valuable. And, of course, for those collections
without fat pipes, Joe running BitTorrent
can help a resource he doesn't actually have share
a resource he does have (ie, a mostly idle
broadband connection) for the benefit of all.
In short: how are you planning to keep
Firefox ahead of the curve?
Simply by not supporting Active-(e)X(ploits)?
By leaving in the "dom.disable_window_open_feature.blah" options,
one of the single best reasons to use Moz/FF?
(hijack the context menu? I think not! Resize
or move my window to appear how you think
it should look on your sad little 800x600 (or
worse, your envy-inducing 1920x1200) display,
when most of us use a 1280x1024 or 1024x786
resolution? Nope!).
By continuing to offer and improve plugin
support... Like Adblock, Nuke Anything, and
FlashBlock as the three that make
browsing tolerable (and ad-free) again?
Or, just the obvious "Only real alternative
to MSIE" - And you Opera people, don't kid
yourselves. Use FF for a week and you'll
outright uninstall Opera.
I agree, Moz/FF have some bugs to resolve (simply
visiting certain web pages should NEVER crash a
browser... It might not render quite right, but a
crash? Ouch!), and need to add new features to
keep up with the web in general. But for now, they
have such a healthy lead on the competition that I
would go so far as to say the entire Mozilla foundation
could take vacation for a year or two and still have the
advantage.
Of course, what with the end of Mozilla Suite, and
disconcerting rumblings from the half-dozen (literally)
key FF developers, including the two "active" ones...
One does have to consider that a new major version will
never come out.
Hmm, perhaps I should take back that crack at Opera...;-)
It worries me how many people just say "it
means faster programs and doesn't take much more
work". That mindset leads to lazy programmers
who A - Can't optimize to save their jobs; and
B - Don't actually understand what multithreading
really does.
If you consider it easy, you've either just
thrown great big global locks on most of
your code, in which case your code doesn't
actually parallelize well; or you've written
what I refer to in my first sentence - Bugs that
take an immense effort just to reproduce,
nevermind track down and fix.
Yes, I do wonder why you automatically
assume everyone this government picks is
an evil man.
Because
Poisoning the well only counts as
a logical fallacy when you can't demonstrate
that every single person that drinks from the
well ends up dead five minutes later.
In this case, I provided the list of bodies.
Feel free to go ahead and take a drink anyway.
projecting your hatred of W onto every
single person he associates with
"Hatred" != "Pity", but in this case, since
he only associates with yes-men, I can
safely presume that anyone he likes, I
will probably not.
There is absolutely no real reason to believe
that Griffith is a bad person for the job
Except for his total lack of "real" work experience.
Don't forget that.
But on the other point, I will concede that I have
no basis for calling him a creationist - In fact,
given his high level of education, statistically
speaking he most likely does not believe in
such superstitious drivel.
So you criticize this guy for having too many
management jobs, and then use that as the argument
for why he's unfit for the top management job as
NASA?
Yes, I do.
A "good" manager can make a tough, boring job at least
tolerable if not outright self-deprecatingly fun. A
"bad" manager can make a dream job with great coworkers
into a living hell.
"Good" managers invariable do not start out life
saying "I want to manage". They start out as
"one of the boys" doing real work, and over time
they (usually accidentally) trickle up through
leading small teams to heading projects to leading
deparments.
"Bad" managers start out in management or finance.
They have impressive qualifications, then spout
utter crap like "TQA", and hold increasingly
frequent meetings to find out why your project
completion date keeps slipping further into the
future.
Griffin has an impressive-sounding education, but
has never done "real" work in the field. That,
IMO, puts him very solidly in category #2, "Bad"
managers.
But just what kind of manager are you looking
for at NASA anyway? Someone that doesn't like science?
No - I want someone that DOES science
rather than someone that watches others
do science. Or at the very least, has done so
in the past. But this guy? He's done nothing but
watch. Football fans don't necessarily make good
players, nor do they necessarily make good coaches.
Let me get this straight. Because he has
more advanced degrees than you or I will ever
have...
No. I made that comment because he basically
sounds like an overeducated bureaucrat, that our
science-hating president chose for the position.
We have:
Torturers in charge of the upholding
the law and homeland insecurity;
A homophobic creationist in charge of
educating the nation's youth, and author of
the bill that cannot have any effect but to
try to bankrupt our public school system
(considering the simple fact that if you
have a distribution with more than one
value, then by definition you have samples
below the mean);
An anti-environmental secretary of the
interior, who has singlehandedly done
more to gut our preexisting environmental
protection laws than the oil companies could
ever dream of;
A pro-wage-slavery and opponent of safe
workplaces in charge of Labor;
Daddy's General in charge of our Department
of Imperialism;
A Secretary of State that has publically
admitted she "do[es] not believe in the Community
of Nations", and who completely failed to foresee
the biggest event in history in her actual field
of expertise, the former Soviet Union - ie, its
collapse;
A guy who failed miserably at leading
the EPA, shuffled around to head of HHS;
And finally, a secretary of agriculture that
doesn't see a need to test our food supply for
its safety, and who, as governor of Nebraska,
personally tried to make "March for Jesus Day"
and later, "Back to the Bible Day" state holidays.
And let's not forget a few of the more memorable
non-cabinet appointments, Mr. Jerry "Gay Plague"
Thacker, to a presidential HIV advisory
committee; A war criminal in charge of the
National Security Council; And a new head of the
EPA that thinks we should put low-income housing
on "only a little bit" dangerously polluted
sites...
And you really wonder why I might just think
that, lacking actual work-related qualifications,
Griffin might prefer epicycles to relativity?
Real work? Like heading the Space Department,
a group with more than 600 people,
Management - Doesn't count.
he helped design the Delta 180 missile
components of the SDI program.
Yeah, but so did I, through my tax dollars.
You can get away with stretching reality
quite a bit on a resume by saying
you "helped" or "contributed to" or "had
involvement with" a project...
He was also SDI's deputy of technology,
associate administrator for exploration at
NASA, and COO of In-Q-Tel
Management, management, and... management.
He also had leadership positions at Orbital
Sciences Corporation
Do I need to say it again?
and tech jobs at NASA JPL and
Computer Science Corporation.
Okay, that could mean something. Or
it could mean he worked a help-desk. Too
vague...
I'd say you'd make a pretty lousy hiring
manager if you just judged their time in
school without putting their work experience
into context.
I agree completely. But as you have so kindly
put Griffin's work experience into context...
I'd say we have a real winner here, boys!
Seriously over-educated in the sciences, yet
he's never held an actual job? waaaaaaay
too suspicious. I could almost forgive the
education (I hope someday to have a list like
that myself) if he had some real work experience,
but NO ONE with an interest in the hard
and applied science proceeds to jump to the
dark side and work as a manager their entire
career... They might accidentally end up there,
but only after a fairly long career doing "real"
work.
Let me know when it comes out that he believes
in creationism, and only went into aerospace
to disprove that whole pesky heliocentric
"theory".
If the screw makes contact with the harddrive and makes
direct contact with the case, having a piece of rubber around
the screw will not prevent ANY transfer of energy into the case.
If you have a screw tightly fastened, that point of contact can't
dissipate any energy. If you have it a little loose, however,
simple inertia will transfer as little energy between the two points
as possible. Without a gromet, though, that means the screws themselves
will buzz like crazy, and possibly work their way out eventually (bad!).
With grommets, you get the benefit of the interface dissipating most
of the vibration, without the down side of screws buzzing and possibly
falling out.
But yes, true isolation via "soft" parts would work much better - It
also costs more and has a higher chance of mechanical failure (if a grommet
disintigrates, you go back to a buzzing screw, rather than nothing at all
holding the drive in place).
If not for heat, those little foam-rubber 3.5"-to-5.25" mounting kits would
work wonderfully. But, wrap a drive in foam-rubber and see how long it
takes to die...
For long-term cryptographic purposes where no other form
of authentication exists, yes.
As a general hashing algorithm, it works just fine.
As a short-lived authentication (probably still good
for a period of several days, but for a few minutes, such
as a secure website transaction, it still works perfectly
well) - No need to rush out and change a few thousand
storefronts just because, with luck, massive CPU power, and
a week or two of CPU time, a determined cracker can fake
a message. And note that I refer to signing the transaction
itself, not to certs guaranteeing a site as authentic.
As an adjunct to another semi-private means of authentication
(such as a password), no problem.
For checking the integrity of a file transfer - In-transit
changes such as a man-in-the-middle attack, no problem. Checking
an executable against the known-good hash when you have reason
to suspect someone might want to change it, probably not so safe.
Now, that said, if a coder sat down today to implement a secure
cryptographic hash in a new project, should they use something
better, like SHA-512? Sure! But should everyone scramble to
purge all references to MD5 from their existing codebases? For
99% of code out there, I'd say no.
You have two approaches to making a quiet PC - Totally passive cooling, or big fans.
Assuming you need the second choice, you only need to
know three things, in (usually) decreasing order of
the amount of noise they make, to have a nearly-silent
machine:
120mm fans. Use them for everything
except the CPU (and for that, still get the
biggest you can physically mount to the
heatsink... a 90mm running at 1500RPM buried
inside the case won't cause too much racket,
and will move more air than a 60mm
running at 4000 RPM.
Hard drives make noise. Pick a quiet one.
Invest in a baggie of small rubber grommets and
use them on every screw you use. In fact, you
might want to use them on as many screws as you
can, anywhere in your computer.
Computers vibrate. Put nice thick felt
stick-on pads (like the ones you use to
protect hardwood floors from furniture) on the
bottom of your case. You can even go one
further and stick your PC in a sandbox (may seem
like a wierd idea, but three inches of sand will
totally stop vibrations from turning your
desk into a great big resonant surface)... Just
make sure the sand can't get into the case.
And for those of you who, like myself, have a
machine or two loaded with cheap noisy IDE drives
to use as a poor-man's fileserver... Two words:
"Spare Room". You very rarely need to actually
sit at a fileserver, so why not just stuff it in
a room you never use? Or even a closet, but beware
of dust and heat.
Ummm... Did you take a look at how you input
data to that program?
It looks more complicated than just filling out
a 1040! And I say that as a programmer, not just
your average Joe who gets confused by "Subtract
Line 27 from Line Q, and use Form 40291B17 if
the result comes out less than zero".
This whole topic amuses me, somewhat. If
you can't figure out a 1040EZ, purge the gene
pool of yourself immediately. If you
need a form more complicated than the EZ, you
should really go to an accountant (or
at least a pseudo-accountant firm like H&R
Block).
Offhand, I can think of only one exception to
this, the $100k cutoff for the EZ. So if you
just graduated college, have basically no real
assets, investments, or exceptional expenses,
but make over $100k, then you would need to do
the full 1040 (not that that takes a
rocket scientist, either, but, certainly more
time-consuming).
Weed the baddies out early, not with a tough
101 class, but with a slick ethics test.
I cannot think of ANY comparable
situation where looking up YOUR OWN
personal information would count as an ethics
violation.
These kids used a loophole to check their own
admissions status. Not affect it, not check
the status of other people, but just look at
their own information.
I often complain about our overly-litigious
society, but these kids should sue.
And for the record, this didn't involve anything
even remotely resembling cracking... More like
"log in, change the URL to blah, and
voila, you can see your acceptance/rejection
letter".
Also for the record, to those who say that no one
could have used this to view other peoples'
letters - Did you ever use a "secure" college
computer system? I've had accounts (one for
admissions, two for class registration) at
three different universities, and of those, one
just asked for your last name, one for the year
of your birth (gee, for incoming freshmen, that
kinda narrows it down to 99.9% having one of
three years, no?), and one used the last four
digits of your social security number (harder
to find, but still nearly trivial).
Any source of revenue a city/state/federal tax
can draw on, it eventually will.
If the law doesn't very specifically
exempt anyone that sells under, say, $10k
per year on eBay, you can expect to hear
about this getting badly abused about six
months from now.
Or do you really consider your typical
neighborhood pot dealer; eight year olds who
throw a temper tantrum in school; or people who
write zombie fiction - All terrorists?
People worry about the "slippery slope" of bad
laws because they can and will get applied
as broadly as The Powers That Be can apply them.
Well, considering that Win2k could just as well
have counted as NT4 SP7, and you could similarly
think of XP as Win2k SP5 (and 2003 exactly the same,
compiled with "#define MAXIMIZE_BLOAT
FALSE")...
Yes. Microsoft has a LOOOOOONG history of
hyping their next OS as so far beyond its
predecessors as to make them incomparable, then
having a final release that amounts to nothing
more than an incremental service-pack-like upgrade
to the previous version. I see no reason to expect
anything different from Longhorn.
"Shoehorn" seems like a more apropos name - How to
fit another gig of bloat into an NT-sized box.
Unless you have looked at how it is consumed,
you don't understand where the points of
leverage are. I've spent some time analyzing
this; click on the blog link.
Fascinating blog - Consider me a new regular
reader!
However, I wonder about your comment here...
You say that the corn->ethanol route gives
a yield of 120% (1 BTU input gives 1.2
output)... Now, that may not seem like much,
but compared with using petroleum, it still
gives a net gain in a renewable manner, no?
You make a lot of good points about the
realistic normal use of car - That one with a
range of 30mi would do for most situations. But
people don't only drive to and from work.
Myself, I visit family and friends in another
state every month or two, a 300mi drive.
Stopping 5-10 times to refuel would make that
quite a lot more inconvenient than just
filling up once before leaving and once before
returning. And therein I see the use of
renewable biofuels, such as corn-derived
ethanol or vegetable oil based diesel (with
ethanol the clear winner in terms of
relative cleanness)... They have a large
enough energy density (compared to batteries
or even compressed hydrogen) to give a few
hundred miles per refueling, with out wasting
half their energy content to lug around their
own weight.
For more general use, though, such as actual
electricity production, I agree completely that
corn seems like a poor choice. Personally I like
windmills and solar (photoelectric), since both
count as basically "fire and forget" technologies.
A little yearly maintenance, and they just do their
thing for 20-30 years.
However, something you don't seem to have mentioned
in your blog... What do you think of photocatalytic
hydrogen production?
To me, that seems like an almost ideal solution to the
three biggest problems with photoelectric solar, in that
it has basically no equipment cost (just a small compressor
and a modified propane-fired generator, basically), we can buffer
hydrogen so it works at night as well as during the day,
and with a mix of catalysts and a deep enough tank we can
approach 100% efficient capturing of the entire available
spectrum of sunlight.
Using Win32 and ANSI C ? Yeah, if you don't
mind spending 1 year on the project instead of
a month or two.
Nice troll, but I have and still do
code for Windows in exactly that way (though,
as I mentioned, my current project at work has
forced me to use C#.NET, much to my annoyance).
The only real slow part of using pure Win32
involves the initial layout of your windows
(for which a number of external "wizards"
exist, but I have yet to find one that can
do it as well as I can manually). But, when
someone complains that a particular part of
my window layout doesn't, for example,
relocate itself correctly on a resize, I know
right where to go to change it. My current
work project involves dealing with backend code
written in C#.NET, and that exact issue
has stumped the core app group - Though in
fairness, the actual "problem" may involve a
bug in.NET rather than it not making the
relevant functions available.
You must be either kidding or you've never
worked with VB 6 in your life to even utter
that statement. There are hundreds of reasons
to move away from that dinosaur.
You'll notice I phrased that in the same way
that I would say, for example, "even Mickey
Mouse would make a better president than Bush".
Doesn't mean I want Mickey for pres, just
that it counts as the lesser evil IMO. Anyway,
check the context. VB6 (yes, I meant VB6, if
you really insist on stuffing a version number
on there) actually compiles - Granted, with a million
and one dangling runtime calls, but it compiles
none-the-less. It doesn't run under an interpreter,
nor a VM. THAT led to my saying that I would
rather use VB6 than any of the.NET languages.
As I said elsewhere in this thread - If you can't
code, don't. Just because you can't
deal with directly telling Windows what to do;
because you can't deal with memory allocation
or those "oooooooh scary dangerous pointer
thingees" so many people go on about; because you
can't write code safely enough to run on the "real" CPU
and need a virtual one to protect you from a crash...
Don't assume I
No pointers + no memory leaks (almost) + broad library = much
quicker + easier to deliver software. Thats why.
And if you add 2+2 and expect 5, you'll have a serious problem
as well. Your point?
Why do people insist on calling pointers a problem? Computers have
(usualy virtual) linearly addressable memory, you can use that to your
program's advantage, 'nuff said.
This sort of thinking only became popular after Java. I've always
considered Java "cute", but did it really damage people so
badly that what formerly counted as a great potential source of speed,
now counts as a bug?
Slashdot Mirror
Opera's CFO said he expected the rise in the number of phones with Opera's browser to outpace the increase in models.
Umm... Huh?
So... More models of phones will use Opera than the number of existant phone models?
Neat trick, this guy should talk to the CEO of a former employer of mine that swore to maintain perpetual X% "growth" per year by making cuts to reach that target.
Perhaps Bernie didn't do anything wrong... These guys just use a system of math totally incompatible with physical reality. Worldcom investors actually made trillions, it just doesn't look so good on paper. Yeah.
i know there aren't a lot of microsoft supporters/fans around these parts (understatement of the year) ... but isn't
$5M a day a bit, oh i dunno, steep?
Consider what Microsoft has actually done to get that penalty... This has nothing to do with failing to open up their protocols, and everything to do with all but telling the EU the go fornicate with itself.
Governments don't like that - If one company gets away with it, the rest will join in very quickly.
However, in this situation, Microsoft still has one rather drastic course of action left... Totally pull out of all EU countries, block them from any updates, then push out a service pack that addresses a few dozen critical exploits, including "proof of concept" code to "demonstrate" those exploits. Overnight, Windows becomes impossible to run without an instant rooting anywhere in Europe.
On the down side (from MS's perspective), this would greatly boost Linux support. But the cost to change over, and the damage that would occur during the transition could add up to enough to crash a few smaller economies (imagine the IRS, the DMV, and the FBI's records all vanishing at once to get an idea of the potential cracker-induced damage).
Kinda scary to think that a single company could destroy whole governments with just a few carefully-planned steps. And THAT justifies the $5M fine per day - Fear that Microsoft might have realized just how much power they have, not just in a monetary sense, but in a critical infrastructure sense.
And if anyone needs a better argument for Open Source, I can't think of one...
nice try, but the Milgram studies have generally been thought to be unethical.
True, they do seem unethical in hindsight.
But they also revealed an absolutely amazing area of human psychology that we couldn't have discovered any other way - That our normal concept of "conscience" completely vanishes in the interaction between an authority figure and a subordinate.
Kinda funny that a lot of the most important findings in psychology (and medical science as well) count as "unethical" by today's standards.
Myself, I interpret that as the entire human race having turned into a culture of whiners. "Oh, boo-frickin' hoo, I feel bad about having thought-I-did-but-not-actually zapped that guy"... "Oh, I feel violated, I must now sue you because you said you would give me caffeine but you actually gave me a sugar pill".
At the risk of sounding like a Trekkie, sometimes the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. I say "sometimes" because you could use the same argument to justify torturing prisoners. When dealing with a minor inconvenience to the few, no problem. When "breaking" someone into saying whatever they think you want to hear, the criteria for "justifiable" become quite a lot more strict, if even possible to satisfy.
Actually the 32 bits version of Windows XP is NT 5.1, the 64 bits version is NT 5.2.
:-)
I haven't used the 64 bit version yet, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that Windows 2003 describes itself as NT 5.2 when it boots.
Hmm, that would interest me greatly if Microsoft decided to base the 64 bit version of XP on 2003 rather than 5.1! Particularly since I plan to upgrade my main machine at home to a dual-core Athlon 64 when they come out.
but I was always under the impression that Server 2003 and XP were akin to Windows 2000 and 2000 Advanced Server?
Yes and no...
From a high-level view, 2003 roughly corresponds to the "server" version of XP, which itself equates to 2000 Pro.
For Win2k, however, every version used the same underlying OS, with only the list of installed products (and a few config details) changing with the server-ness of the product you installed.
Windows 2003, however, Microsoft actually released as NT 5.2 (compared to XP as NT 5.1, and Win2k as NT 5.0). Now, version numbers don't mean a whole lot, but with Win2k3, Microsoft actually did optimize it both in terms of memory footprint and CPU efficiency. As an example, you can just barely fit a hand-trimmed XP installation into a 96MB RAM footprint. Win2k3 you can do in half that, under 48MB (without running server-specific services and applications, of course), comparable to the footprint of a baseline NT4 Workstation installation.
And don't think you give up speed for that - Not even close. 2003 not only "feels" quite a lot more responsive, it actually does run arbitrary code faster... I don't know how (perhaps XP has that much bloat?), and I had to write a dozen or so small test apps to prove it to myself, but you'll easily see a 10% gain even on mostly CPU-bound tasks, and I frequently notice that multiple I/O bound tasks that on XP would take time 2X, take around 1.1X on win2k3.
And for stability... Wow. I thought Win2k took a huge leap forward, and XP a big-but-not-so-big leap back, until I started playing with 2k3... You just can't crash those things! On one of my servers at work, I have an uptime over a year, and it hasn't even started getting flakey! Almost as good as a BSD box!
And no, I don't work for Microsoft... I even prefer Linux, myself. But, finding myself more-or-less forced to use Windows, I REALLY wish MS would release a pro or WS version of Win2k3 (my particular hack works for now, but I kinda wonder how Win2k3 SP1 will react to my trying to install it on a nonexistant product line... With luck it'll work just fine, but I expect I'll need to slipstream it in and do a clean install, sigh).
although XP came quite a way in making things look better
Hey, I have fond memories of Fisher Price products from my youth as well. But when I sit down at a computer, I don't want flashbacks to using a Speak n Spell (unless I run it as an emulator (Yeah, I know, TI made it, not Fisher Price, but you get the idea).
It really, truly horrifies me that people actually like XP's interface. As the first thing I (and every single competant computer user I know, without exception, N>40) do when setting up an XP box, I disable the themes service. Poof, no more craptastic prettified round window edges taking up valuable screen real-estate.
For ONCE, I want a newer version of Windows to be faster and smaller than the previous version and more stable as well.
Windows 2003 actually satisfies that requirement, by a solid margin.
However, Microsoft never decided to release it in a non-server version... And if you've never tried running a server version as a home version, well, you have no idea how many otherwise "free" (as in beer but not speech) programs will refuse to run.
As an aside, you can trick 2003 into identifying itself as XP with only two tweaks to the install CD. I will not disclose them for fear of invoking the Legal Wrath of the Gates, but with a Google search for similar hacks to Win2k, you can probably figure out what to change. And no, the well-known product version switchers out there that worked on 2k will not work, and will actually render your system unbootable if they manage to do anything at all. Really, trust me on this, I tried both of them.
but I still don't see many USB keyboards.
Simple reason for that...
"Hit F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup"
Yes, most BIOSs include some degree of support for USB keyboards at boot-time. But, having dealt with a good number of different PCs and USB keyboards at work, I would consider such "support" sketchy at best. Most commonly, they don't work at all. Right after that, in a bizzare, horrible twist of fate, everything works except the function keys (actually I'd image any extended key sequence would fail, but the function keys fall into that category). And falling into last place, they work just fine-n'-dandy.
Now, once you have your system up and running, have a ball with your USB keyboard. But keep a PS2 keyboard around just in case, and I would make damned sure, personally, that my particular choice of USB keyboard worked perfectly with a system lacking any PS2 ports before buying it.
Basically, the thesis is that not all the links in a network are equally valuable
That "fact" results from two major problems, however, the solving of which would again make the "value" scale with O(N^2)...
First, legality. I have quite a lot of useful content on my computer, which I cannot legally share. I would say that the vast majority of us fall into that category. Thus, we have an artificial limitation on our value to a network.
Second, not everyone has broadband, and very very few people have symmetrical connectivity. Thus, although we can download very fast, even if we could legally share, we cannot even come close to giving as much back as we take. I consider this a somewhat more natural limitation, though still partially artificial (we can, in theory, fork over the money for a symmetrical multi-megabit link, but very few of us can afford to).
So, do these limitations refute Metcalfe's law? I would say "no", because the second point above will eventually vanish, and we could get rid of the first problem if our laws didn't deny us access to the products of our own culture.
One final point that someone will probably scold me on - The existance of massively more valuable single nodes (such as Google, a sort of meta-contributer, or Sourceforge, a meta-meta contributer, or plain ol' collection sites such as Guttenberg, Internet Archive, the former MP3.com, and the like). These will of course contribute far more than the average member of a network. I see those as more of a bonus to the overall N^2 growth, rather than making everyone else less important. They do make everyone else appear like leeches by comparison, but all that material has to come from somewhere originally... Joe Brown of Sandusky, Ohio, may not have a fat pipe that thousands can download from, but if he can provide even a single unique or very rare file, he has helped make those collection-type sites more valuable. And, of course, for those collections without fat pipes, Joe running BitTorrent can help a resource he doesn't actually have share a resource he does have (ie, a mostly idle broadband connection) for the benefit of all.
In short: how are you planning to keep Firefox ahead of the curve?
;-)
Simply by not supporting Active-(e)X(ploits)?
By leaving in the "dom.disable_window_open_feature.blah" options, one of the single best reasons to use Moz/FF? (hijack the context menu? I think not! Resize or move my window to appear how you think it should look on your sad little 800x600 (or worse, your envy-inducing 1920x1200) display, when most of us use a 1280x1024 or 1024x786 resolution? Nope!).
By continuing to offer and improve plugin support... Like Adblock, Nuke Anything, and FlashBlock as the three that make browsing tolerable (and ad-free) again?
Or, just the obvious "Only real alternative to MSIE" - And you Opera people, don't kid yourselves. Use FF for a week and you'll outright uninstall Opera.
I agree, Moz/FF have some bugs to resolve (simply visiting certain web pages should NEVER crash a browser... It might not render quite right, but a crash? Ouch!), and need to add new features to keep up with the web in general. But for now, they have such a healthy lead on the competition that I would go so far as to say the entire Mozilla foundation could take vacation for a year or two and still have the advantage.
Of course, what with the end of Mozilla Suite, and disconcerting rumblings from the half-dozen (literally) key FF developers, including the two "active" ones... One does have to consider that a new major version will never come out.
Hmm, perhaps I should take back that crack at Opera...
It means "Difficult to reproduce bugs".
It worries me how many people just say "it means faster programs and doesn't take much more work". That mindset leads to lazy programmers who A - Can't optimize to save their jobs; and B - Don't actually understand what multithreading really does.
If you consider it easy, you've either just thrown great big global locks on most of your code, in which case your code doesn't actually parallelize well; or you've written what I refer to in my first sentence - Bugs that take an immense effort just to reproduce, nevermind track down and fix.
Yes, I do wonder why you automatically assume everyone this government picks is an evil man.
Because Poisoning the well only counts as a logical fallacy when you can't demonstrate that every single person that drinks from the well ends up dead five minutes later.
In this case, I provided the list of bodies. Feel free to go ahead and take a drink anyway.
projecting your hatred of W onto every single person he associates with
"Hatred" != "Pity", but in this case, since he only associates with yes-men, I can safely presume that anyone he likes, I will probably not.
There is absolutely no real reason to believe that Griffith is a bad person for the job
Except for his total lack of "real" work experience. Don't forget that.
But on the other point, I will concede that I have no basis for calling him a creationist - In fact, given his high level of education, statistically speaking he most likely does not believe in such superstitious drivel.
So you criticize this guy for having too many management jobs, and then use that as the argument for why he's unfit for the top management job as NASA?
Yes, I do.
A "good" manager can make a tough, boring job at least tolerable if not outright self-deprecatingly fun. A "bad" manager can make a dream job with great coworkers into a living hell.
"Good" managers invariable do not start out life saying "I want to manage". They start out as "one of the boys" doing real work, and over time they (usually accidentally) trickle up through leading small teams to heading projects to leading deparments.
"Bad" managers start out in management or finance. They have impressive qualifications, then spout utter crap like "TQA", and hold increasingly frequent meetings to find out why your project completion date keeps slipping further into the future.
Griffin has an impressive-sounding education, but has never done "real" work in the field. That, IMO, puts him very solidly in category #2, "Bad" managers.
But just what kind of manager are you looking for at NASA anyway? Someone that doesn't like science?
No - I want someone that DOES science rather than someone that watches others do science. Or at the very least, has done so in the past. But this guy? He's done nothing but watch. Football fans don't necessarily make good players, nor do they necessarily make good coaches.
No. I made that comment because he basically sounds like an overeducated bureaucrat, that our science-hating president chose for the position. We have:
- Torturers in charge of the upholding
the law and homeland insecurity;
- A homophobic creationist in charge of
educating the nation's youth, and author of
the bill that cannot have any effect but to
try to bankrupt our public school system
(considering the simple fact that if you
have a distribution with more than one
value, then by definition you have samples
below the mean);
- An anti-environmental secretary of the
interior, who has singlehandedly done
more to gut our preexisting environmental
protection laws than the oil companies could
ever dream of;
- A pro-wage-slavery and opponent of safe
workplaces in charge of Labor;
- Daddy's General in charge of our Department
of Imperialism;
- A Secretary of State that has publically
admitted she "do[es] not believe in the Community
of Nations", and who completely failed to foresee
the biggest event in history in her actual field
of expertise, the former Soviet Union - ie, its
collapse;
- A guy who failed miserably at leading
the EPA, shuffled around to head of HHS;
- And finally, a secretary of agriculture that
doesn't see a need to test our food supply for
its safety, and who, as governor of Nebraska,
personally tried to make "March for Jesus Day"
and later, "Back to the Bible Day" state holidays.
And let's not forget a few of the more memorable non-cabinet appointments, Mr. Jerry "Gay Plague" Thacker, to a presidential HIV advisory committee; A war criminal in charge of the National Security Council; And a new head of the EPA that thinks we should put low-income housing on "only a little bit" dangerously polluted sites...And you really wonder why I might just think that, lacking actual work-related qualifications, Griffin might prefer epicycles to relativity?
Real work? Like heading the Space Department, a group with more than 600 people,
Management - Doesn't count.
he helped design the Delta 180 missile components of the SDI program.
Yeah, but so did I, through my tax dollars. You can get away with stretching reality quite a bit on a resume by saying you "helped" or "contributed to" or "had involvement with" a project...
He was also SDI's deputy of technology, associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and COO of In-Q-Tel
Management, management, and... management.
He also had leadership positions at Orbital Sciences Corporation
Do I need to say it again?
and tech jobs at NASA JPL and Computer Science Corporation.
Okay, that could mean something. Or it could mean he worked a help-desk. Too vague...
I'd say you'd make a pretty lousy hiring manager if you just judged their time in school without putting their work experience into context.
I agree completely. But as you have so kindly put Griffin's work experience into context... I'd say we have a real winner here, boys! Seriously over-educated in the sciences, yet he's never held an actual job? waaaaaaay too suspicious. I could almost forgive the education (I hope someday to have a list like that myself) if he had some real work experience, but NO ONE with an interest in the hard and applied science proceeds to jump to the dark side and work as a manager their entire career... They might accidentally end up there, but only after a fairly long career doing "real" work.
Let me know when it comes out that he believes in creationism, and only went into aerospace to disprove that whole pesky heliocentric "theory".
If the screw makes contact with the harddrive and makes direct contact with the case, having a piece of rubber around the screw will not prevent ANY transfer of energy into the case.
If you have a screw tightly fastened, that point of contact can't dissipate any energy. If you have it a little loose, however, simple inertia will transfer as little energy between the two points as possible. Without a gromet, though, that means the screws themselves will buzz like crazy, and possibly work their way out eventually (bad!). With grommets, you get the benefit of the interface dissipating most of the vibration, without the down side of screws buzzing and possibly falling out.
But yes, true isolation via "soft" parts would work much better - It also costs more and has a higher chance of mechanical failure (if a grommet disintigrates, you go back to a buzzing screw, rather than nothing at all holding the drive in place).
If not for heat, those little foam-rubber 3.5"-to-5.25" mounting kits would work wonderfully. But, wrap a drive in foam-rubber and see how long it takes to die...
MD5 was broken for any and all purposes before
For long-term cryptographic purposes where no other form of authentication exists, yes.
As a general hashing algorithm, it works just fine.
As a short-lived authentication (probably still good for a period of several days, but for a few minutes, such as a secure website transaction, it still works perfectly well) - No need to rush out and change a few thousand storefronts just because, with luck, massive CPU power, and a week or two of CPU time, a determined cracker can fake a message. And note that I refer to signing the transaction itself, not to certs guaranteeing a site as authentic.
As an adjunct to another semi-private means of authentication (such as a password), no problem.
For checking the integrity of a file transfer - In-transit changes such as a man-in-the-middle attack, no problem. Checking an executable against the known-good hash when you have reason to suspect someone might want to change it, probably not so safe.
Now, that said, if a coder sat down today to implement a secure cryptographic hash in a new project, should they use something better, like SHA-512? Sure! But should everyone scramble to purge all references to MD5 from their existing codebases? For 99% of code out there, I'd say no.
Assuming you need the second choice, you only need to know three things, in (usually) decreasing order of the amount of noise they make, to have a nearly-silent machine:
And for those of you who, like myself, have a machine or two loaded with cheap noisy IDE drives to use as a poor-man's fileserver... Two words: "Spare Room". You very rarely need to actually sit at a fileserver, so why not just stuff it in a room you never use? Or even a closet, but beware of dust and heat.
Try Open Tax Solver
Ummm... Did you take a look at how you input data to that program?
It looks more complicated than just filling out a 1040! And I say that as a programmer, not just your average Joe who gets confused by "Subtract Line 27 from Line Q, and use Form 40291B17 if the result comes out less than zero".
This whole topic amuses me, somewhat. If you can't figure out a 1040EZ, purge the gene pool of yourself immediately. If you need a form more complicated than the EZ, you should really go to an accountant (or at least a pseudo-accountant firm like H&R Block).
Offhand, I can think of only one exception to this, the $100k cutoff for the EZ. So if you just graduated college, have basically no real assets, investments, or exceptional expenses, but make over $100k, then you would need to do the full 1040 (not that that takes a rocket scientist, either, but, certainly more time-consuming).
Weed the baddies out early, not with a tough 101 class, but with a slick ethics test.
I cannot think of ANY comparable situation where looking up YOUR OWN personal information would count as an ethics violation.
These kids used a loophole to check their own admissions status. Not affect it, not check the status of other people, but just look at their own information.
I often complain about our overly-litigious society, but these kids should sue.
And for the record, this didn't involve anything even remotely resembling cracking... More like "log in, change the URL to blah, and voila, you can see your acceptance/rejection letter".
Also for the record, to those who say that no one could have used this to view other peoples' letters - Did you ever use a "secure" college computer system? I've had accounts (one for admissions, two for class registration) at three different universities, and of those, one just asked for your last name, one for the year of your birth (gee, for incoming freshmen, that kinda narrows it down to 99.9% having one of three years, no?), and one used the last four digits of your social security number (harder to find, but still nearly trivial).
Did you read the summary?
Have you lived in the US long?
Any source of revenue a city/state/federal tax can draw on, it eventually will.
If the law doesn't very specifically exempt anyone that sells under, say, $10k per year on eBay, you can expect to hear about this getting badly abused about six months from now.
Or do you really consider your typical neighborhood pot dealer; eight year olds who throw a temper tantrum in school; or people who write zombie fiction - All terrorists?
People worry about the "slippery slope" of bad laws because they can and will get applied as broadly as The Powers That Be can apply them.
Or is Longhorn really just XP SP3?
Well, considering that Win2k could just as well have counted as NT4 SP7, and you could similarly think of XP as Win2k SP5 (and 2003 exactly the same, compiled with "#define MAXIMIZE_BLOAT FALSE")...
Yes. Microsoft has a LOOOOOONG history of hyping their next OS as so far beyond its predecessors as to make them incomparable, then having a final release that amounts to nothing more than an incremental service-pack-like upgrade to the previous version. I see no reason to expect anything different from Longhorn.
"Shoehorn" seems like a more apropos name - How to fit another gig of bloat into an NT-sized box.
Unless you have looked at how it is consumed, you don't understand where the points of leverage are. I've spent some time analyzing this; click on the blog link.
Fascinating blog - Consider me a new regular reader!
However, I wonder about your comment here... You say that the corn->ethanol route gives a yield of 120% (1 BTU input gives 1.2 output)... Now, that may not seem like much, but compared with using petroleum, it still gives a net gain in a renewable manner, no?
You make a lot of good points about the realistic normal use of car - That one with a range of 30mi would do for most situations. But people don't only drive to and from work. Myself, I visit family and friends in another state every month or two, a 300mi drive. Stopping 5-10 times to refuel would make that quite a lot more inconvenient than just filling up once before leaving and once before returning. And therein I see the use of renewable biofuels, such as corn-derived ethanol or vegetable oil based diesel (with ethanol the clear winner in terms of relative cleanness)... They have a large enough energy density (compared to batteries or even compressed hydrogen) to give a few hundred miles per refueling, with out wasting half their energy content to lug around their own weight.
For more general use, though, such as actual electricity production, I agree completely that corn seems like a poor choice. Personally I like windmills and solar (photoelectric), since both count as basically "fire and forget" technologies. A little yearly maintenance, and they just do their thing for 20-30 years.
However, something you don't seem to have mentioned in your blog... What do you think of photocatalytic hydrogen production? To me, that seems like an almost ideal solution to the three biggest problems with photoelectric solar, in that it has basically no equipment cost (just a small compressor and a modified propane-fired generator, basically), we can buffer hydrogen so it works at night as well as during the day, and with a mix of catalysts and a deep enough tank we can approach 100% efficient capturing of the entire available spectrum of sunlight.
Using Win32 and ANSI C ? Yeah, if you don't mind spending 1 year on the project instead of a month or two.
.NET, much to my annoyance).
.NET, and that exact issue
has stumped the core app group - Though in
fairness, the actual "problem" may involve a
bug in .NET rather than it not making the
relevant functions available.
.NET languages.
Nice troll, but I have and still do code for Windows in exactly that way (though, as I mentioned, my current project at work has forced me to use C#
The only real slow part of using pure Win32 involves the initial layout of your windows (for which a number of external "wizards" exist, but I have yet to find one that can do it as well as I can manually). But, when someone complains that a particular part of my window layout doesn't, for example, relocate itself correctly on a resize, I know right where to go to change it. My current work project involves dealing with backend code written in C#
You must be either kidding or you've never worked with VB 6 in your life to even utter that statement. There are hundreds of reasons to move away from that dinosaur.
You'll notice I phrased that in the same way that I would say, for example, "even Mickey Mouse would make a better president than Bush". Doesn't mean I want Mickey for pres, just that it counts as the lesser evil IMO. Anyway, check the context. VB6 (yes, I meant VB6, if you really insist on stuffing a version number on there) actually compiles - Granted, with a million and one dangling runtime calls, but it compiles none-the-less. It doesn't run under an interpreter, nor a VM. THAT led to my saying that I would rather use VB6 than any of the
As I said elsewhere in this thread - If you can't code, don't. Just because you can't deal with directly telling Windows what to do; because you can't deal with memory allocation or those "oooooooh scary dangerous pointer thingees" so many people go on about; because you can't write code safely enough to run on the "real" CPU and need a virtual one to protect you from a crash... Don't assume I
No pointers + no memory leaks (almost) + broad library = much quicker + easier to deliver software. Thats why.
And if you add 2+2 and expect 5, you'll have a serious problem as well. Your point?
Why do people insist on calling pointers a problem? Computers have (usualy virtual) linearly addressable memory, you can use that to your program's advantage, 'nuff said.
This sort of thinking only became popular after Java. I've always considered Java "cute", but did it really damage people so badly that what formerly counted as a great potential source of speed, now counts as a bug?
Sad.
If you can't program... Don't.