Only on Slashdot would someone be complaining
about a processor (or processors) that only get
32 billions OPS.
Except, they only get that on a fairly narrow
range of problems (easily divided into four
independant chunks, and heavily CPU bound
rather than memory-intensive).
For some perspective, the newest P4s get 6.4
billion instruction per second, more if you
consider the total possible SSE2 throughput.
With standard number-inflation, it wouldn't
surprise me to find out that this thing does
nothing really impressive besides stick four
general purpose CPUs on one die, with SMP
slightly enhanced as a result of the physical
proximity of the cores.
Of course, perhaps in keeping with your point,
I certainly wouldn't turn up my nose if offered
one at an affordable price, but as far as how
"cutting edge" this seems, I wouldn't cut the
budget for "real" supercomputers just yet.
On a project the size of the space shuttle
thousands of safety concerns will be brought
up. Not everyone of them can be fully
investigated.
False. The shuttle launches involve a ground
crew of literally thousands of people.
That come out to less than one follow-up per
person, or assuming only about a tenth of
those people have some technical skill, perhaps
each would need to check up on a few safety
issues each.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty
But they KNEW that a chunk of
styrofoam had hit the wing at mach-4(?).
That doesn't make it a matter of hindsight,
it makes it a matter of physics - Fragile
ceramic tiles whacked REALLY REALLY hard.
And why didn't they follow up on it? The
same reason that bothers most engineers.
I can just hear a dozen managers all telling
various subordinates "Kinetic energy? Pah, a
chunk of styrofoam can't do any harm". "Buffer
overrun? Pah, no one will even notice".
Uh-huh.
Think again about your statements about what
they can and cannot do. In fact they can detain
while the police arrive.
I'll accept the "detain", though if they don't
have some really good evidence of a crime,
my pockets will smile.
However, beyond that? Hey, fair enough, you
work in the field, whereas I've only gone by
the best reasonable explanations I've found
so far. So what powers *do* they have, and
why?
Or more to the point, if I hire a pair of
goons to "detain" everyone that invades my
personal space, do they magically have a
power that I do not personally have? Can
they act as more than an extention/enforcer
of my personal rights? And if not, how does
this change for a store?
Wear the signal blocker and get stopped
EVERY TIME you walk out of a store.
Good tradeoff, eh?
DAMN good tradeoff - If they can't show the
footage, in court, of you stuffing something
in your pockets, they better have a hefty
budget set aside for harassment suits.
Incidentally, you know those sensors many
stores already have by the doors?
You can ignore them. Someone tries to
physically stop you? Add assault charges
on top of the civil suit. Of course, if
they actually *find* something on you, I'd
imagine it greatly weakens your case. But
then, I don't actually advocate shoplifting,
just standing up for your rights.
Finally, if someone in a LEO-like uniform
approaches you in such a situation, ask
them their jurisdiction. You can also
ignore rent-a-cops who work only for the
store... Although they can throw you out
(simple matter of trespassing), they don't
have any power beyond that unless you give it
to them by cooperating. And if you do
cooperate, they have quite a few powers
(or rather, lack of an obligation to observe
your legal rights) that normal police do
not. 'Course, keep in mind that the guy with
a gun always gets his way - You can
only settle the matter in court if you don't
get shot to death by some overzealous
rentacop.
Hardware/firmware mirroring is great the vast
majority of the time. But if you're a truly
paranoid sys admin, I'd recommend loosely
coupled hot spare replication.
For data integrity (and cost, since this option
involves a few fairly simple scripts that any
decent admin could write), I'd agree with you
100%. I'd even recomment throwing the mirror
drive on another machine and doing the backup
over the network, which should protect against
mutual failure from anything short of a direct
lightning strike.;-)
However, if mirroring for speed, loosely coupled
mirrors don't help, while a many-drive RAID0
will boost performance nearly linearly with the
number of drives in the array.
Raid 1 basically issues a read request to
both drives and uses the data returned from
whichever drive responds first.
Does RAID 1 specifically require that, or
would that count as an implementation-specific
detail?
Because, if implementation-specific, I see
no reason why RAID 1 couldn't use the same
striped request pattern, since the desired
data will exist on both drives
anyway (ie, a proper superset of the data
available to RAID 0). That wouldn't speed
up writing, but for reading, you could get
the same benefit as RAID 0.
Everyone knows Linux is quite a bit more
stable than Windows. I really don't have
any need to do this kind of redundant
replication.
Assuming you didn't mean that as a troll...
HDD mirroring generally provides protection from
*hardware* failure, not software glitches. If
Windows suddenly decides to overwrite your porn
collection, a RAID controller will faithfully
do it on both drives. If you accidentally do
an "rm -rf/" as root on your Linux box, again,
kiss your data goodbye regardless of
mirroring.
Bingo, the MP3s will get new random bits for
every user who downloads them, and they won't
lose quality over time because the noise is
removed each time it's downloaded.
While a technologically-viable solution, it
does have one major problem - If each user can
do it, so can the RIAA. They don't even need
to know the algorithm to accomplish this (ie,
even a highly-obfuscated binary-only distro
wouldn't help), since they would only need to
use a consistantly known seed to have something
they can effectively compare against another
known zero-seed file.
Assuming an effectively non-reverse-engineerable
binary (an impossiblity, but irrelevant), with
its own random number generator, this still
reduces to a trivial problem - Using something
like Bochs, always run the program from a known
machine state, and it will always generate the
same seed. It doesn't matter *what* seed (so
even if it uses the file itself to generate the
seed, that won't help), just that it always
comes out the same.
And only today I was in complete awe when
I was able to download stuff using a 1 Gbps
line...
Consider yourself blessed, then.
I have a "mere" 200Mb (100btx FD on my
home LAN, and although I can get 20-30%
utilization over 6 machines all blasting data
full-throttle, no single connection ever goes
above 10%.
Until we go to purely solid-state HDDs (or
someone figures out a cheap way to get a
sustained HDD transfer rate two or
three orders of magnitude greater than what
we have now), moving to terabit-and-beyond
network bandwidth will only benefit
corporations, and perhaps LAN parties (basically
any situation with dozens, or even hundreds,
of high-activity nodes on the same segment.
While HDD size has increase phenomenally in
the past decade, sustained throughput has
increase by less than a factor of 10 (I
could get greater than 900KB/s in 1993, I
can get 6MB/s right now... Only about 6.5x
faster, compared to a size 350 times
greater (340MB vs 120GB). Even under ideal
conditions, I couldn't saturate a 100Mb link
with a single point-to-point transfer.
So I'll stick with my nice 100btx, perhaps
I'll eventually upgrade to gigabit on my
fileserver. But going beyond that... Not
in the near future.
OTOH I haven't tried with earplugs yet, I
should really do that sometimes.
At least bring a pair, always. They
make a huge difference, normally bringing
the music down to an "enjoyable" volume.
In the situation I described, though, no amount
of filtering would make up for a volume so high
that it exceeds the dynamic range of the
equipment, resulting in really annoying artifacts
in the music. I've had people "in the biz" explain
to me that you can't possibly clip on the
scale of hardware they use at any real venue, but
that doesn't change the fact that it happens (and,
while not an AE, I do consider myself knowledgeable
enough (from personal research in soft-audio-DSP)
to recognize clipping when I hear it).
I don't care if people want to "fix" their errors
on an album, that doesn't bother me - I can accept
an album as a "finished" work of art and enjoy its
(presumeably enhanced) merits regardless of the
unenhanced talents of the musician (or composer,
where that differs from the performer).
However, I go to concerts to see the "raw"
work, with no enhancements. If an artist
lacks the talent to actually reproduce their
work (within reason) in that environment,
they should not tour. Simple as that. Selling
me the same thing I could have on CD (minus the
masses of sweating fans packed in like sardines,
$3.50 pints of Aquafina, and idiots who consider
a concert a good place for impromptu karaoke)
for about $80 less (per pair) does not make me
happy.
As an (almost) unrelated aside, another concert
peeve of mine - Volume. I went to a concert this
past weekend (Tori Amos in Boston) where the
performer did well, the set list appealed to me,
and the environment in general seemed just about
perfect. However, even with earplugs (a
must for anyone who actually goes to
concerts to enjoy the music), they had the
volume cranked so high that the bass completely
distorted everything else (as in, I could audibly
detect clipping of the vocals at every new bass
note or percussive event). This does NOT make for
satisfied (much less "happy") concert-goers.
You have to keep in mind that NASA depends
on public funding, and that "the public",
not to mention the current US president,
have absolutely no clue about what counts
as good science vs smoke and mirrors.
Hubble takes the most "pretty" pictures,
thus people can ooh and aah over all the
great "science" it does. Compton may have
discovered features of our universe that
blow away anything Hubble has done in terms
of importance (such as the isotropism in
GRBs), but how do you make that into a pretty
picture? So, it gets axed, and we'll replace
Hubble to create even more eye-candy for the
public. Perhaps, if we get lucky, NASA can
pad the budget on JW enough to launch a few
"real" missions over its lifetime.
Hmm, reading that, I sound overly critical of
Hubble - I don't mean to, I realize it serves
a number of very useful and scientifically-valid
purposes. I just see its popularity (and the
answer to your question) as relating more to
its flashyness than to its utility.
A 25% absolute performance penalty, at the
relative "gain" of 82% of a small
part of the filesystem. However, compared
to even an incredibly small (by today's
standards) 1GB partition, you talk about
saving only 2.5% of the total disk space.
On any reasonable drive, this would equal
far less than 1% savings.
Now, in an embedded environment, such a
savings might make a noticeable difference.
However, in an embedded environment, you
wouldn't have every app ever considered
useful in/bin and/sbin, only those critical
to basic system functioning (or better yet,
something like a FreeBSD equivalent to
BusyBox (which I've used to create embedded
Linux distros that needed to fit in 8MB of
flash and have basic X functionality),
for a whopping 300k).
As for "people with 2.x and 3.x era root
partitions"... C'mon, really... Throw in
the "older means better" towel and upgrade.
Seriously. I have single OGG files (of
full CDs) larger than 50MB. Hell, I
gave up on DOS 3.3 because of the 32MB
partition limit nearly a decade ago.
Upgrade. Upgrade. Upgrade! Sometimes
"obsolescence" doesn't need to have the
word "planned" in front of it, you just
need to accept that PC-level hardware
has vastly improved since limitations
like that seemed even remotely acceptible.
So... Can someone explain why this matters,
beyond the "because we can" factor?
Since the goverment has no control over
our country anymore, why should we be obliged
to pay taxes and adhere to its laws?
Since they have more guns, and much
bigger ones at that (ie, nukes).
By all means, feel free to call up you local
representative, the IRS, even the president's
number appeared in an old Phrack, I believe.
Tell them all "Sorry, but since our interests
have drifted so widely apart, I must declare
myself no longer a member of the body of the
US, and as a result I will no longer pay my
taxes".
First of all, anyone you contact will laugh at
you.
Second, unless you can find an employer willing
to go along with this, you automatically
pay your taxes, and since under normal conditions
your standard pay deductions exceed your
owed taxes, the government really doesn't care
if you don't file for the difference.
Finally, assuming you really do owe the government
tax money which you do not pay, and they notice,
How long do you think you can hold off Ashcroft's
goons? His predecessor showed us the government's
opinion of people who dare to think differently,
in Waco (and Ruby Ridge, and plenty of other
less publicized events than Waco). They simply
kill you, end of nuissance, and a good example
to all the other uppity sheep who resent their
tax money going to help the RIAA file more
subpoenas against people.
You are being nothing short of dishonest
even mentioning that you can modify it yourself
for your own use in this context. Clearly the
user didn't create his own modified.exe
And what would you say if I told you that he
did in fact do the crack himself? Any
decent programmer can trace through a program
and replace an appropriate jump with a nop,
doesn't exactly take god-like skills. At
worst, a little bit of trial-and-error as
you run into "fake" copy-protection checks,
but if you just keep defeating one after the
other, eventually you'll get to the real one.
Now, considering the above, would it make a
difference if he had used a freely-downloadable
patch to the program? Obviously downloading
the cracked executable itself goes to far,
but does a small program that reflects the
experience of someone who already went through
the tedious work of tracing through the program
differ in the least from doing it personally?
To compare this with someone else's analogy,
would you consider scribbling little frog
pictures in the margins of a book okay but
using pre-made stickers of the exact same
frogs illegal?
Or, for another similar situation - I've
personally cracked programs that I had a
right to use but, for various reasons,
no longer worked (as the most common example,
programs written in an old version of Turbo
Pascal for DOS would calibrate a timing loop
on startup, which would result in a division
by zero on machines above roughly a PII/300,
and you could (usually) fix this simply by
initializing the counter to 1 rather than 0).
Would you consider it immoral that I didn't
just throw up my hands, kiss $50 or so
goodbye, and go buy a new product when
the old one did exactly what I wanted
from it?
Sadly, you probably would consider
that immoral. Can't have those uppity
programmers going around exempting themselves
from the cycle of planned (or even unplanned)
obsolescence, now can we?
Seriously folks I think lately we've forgotten
that stealing is stealing, and if you're
stealing a piece of software you should be
punnished for stealing a piece of software.
And for those situations where stealing
doesn't mean stealing?
Two trivial examples that I suspect
most us us could get "caught" for:
First, a friend purchased (completely legal, nothing unkosher whatsoever, not even
grey-market) a copy of Age of Empires - AoK.
It has a rather annoying copy protection scheme,
however, which annoys legitimate users
(whereas pirates just run a cracked version
with no hassles at all). So the solution?
He uses a cracked copy of the game. A stupid
software test for known program cracks would
flag him as "stealing", yet he did no such
thing.
Second, and even more difficult to deal with - I
have all of my CD collection on my HDD, since
I only ever listen to them while at the computer.
Legal format-shifting as allowed even by the
DMCA. Yet, can I "prove" to some stupid spyware
bot that yes, in fact, I really do own the CD?
Nope. And even if I could, I shouldn't NEED
to; my computer serves me, I do not serve
my computer.
More important than false positives, though, we
should consider the issue of why we buy software
in general. If I buy a game, I buy it to play
that game. If nowhere in the documentation (or
preferably, on the outside of the packaging)
does it describe its "RIAA-friendly anti-piracy
technology", it damn well better not have any.
I don't buy software to spy on me, I buy it to
do the task it describes itself as performing.
Nothing more, and nothing less.
It's just a wild guess. It has absolutely
nothing to do with physics, which is the real
laws we all live by. It has much more to do
with human laws such as patents and copyrights
that limit progress.
Though more than a "wild guess", you do
have it right when you mention that it has no
basis in physical reality.
I don't think I'd blame IP so much as marketing,
though. The major player in the field, Intel,
holds most of the relevant IP.
So why has Moore's Law worked for so long?
Because Intel schedules their releases of
new products based on it.
If anyone remembers the days of the original
Pentium, Intel made a few quiet claims that
they already had two full chip generations
nearly ready, just biding their time to maximize
profit based on planned obsolescence ("Needs
more testing" makes a great mantra to put off
releasing products without earning too much
bad PR).
So, in the commercial marketplace, Moore's Law
has held true. In physical reality, during
the late 80's and early 90's reality could have
significantly outpaced Moore for a few years
(though I suspect, considering current problems
in making faster chips, that we would have had
a corresponding slowdown from the end of the
90's to the present).
What you are proposing is breaking the
1st freedom; it is not because they claim
the GPL is invalid that we believe so and
should break it.
I agree with you in one sense, yet agree with
the post to which you responded in another...
Clearly, you have the "right" idea WRT to the
meaning of the GPL. However, since SCO has
decided to attack it, consider what would happen
if every major GPL'd project out there sent
them official notice that SCO no longer had the
right to use their code - SCO would have a HUGE
disincentive to press on with their attack on
the GPL, since winning would cripple their own
product.
Basically a pre-emptive delayed-payload attack
on them. If they go away, no problem. If
they press on, they risk injuring themselves
more than anyone else.
RGB sensors and emitters are generally
calibrated to the center frequencies of our
cones.
Tetrachromat humans occur VERY rarely,
and only as females.
For the rest of us, RGB centered at our own
visual peaks makes the most sense of any
encoding scheme possible. Not only can we
not see another color, but it wastes space in
the image (ie, some optimal conversion function
can, by physical necessity, reduce those four
colors to an RGB triad indistinguishable from
the original quartet by a normal human.
Now, if you want to get into machine vision,
that counts as another category entirely.
But wasting pixels (remember, this uses a
mask, reducing the effective resolution by
25% for the sake of having an effectively
redundant pixel) for something indended for
human viewing just doesn't make sense.
More color information is always good
More information does seem better, agreed.
However, due to the physiological limitations
of human vision, this scheme does not
convey any more information, thus my biggest
complaint. It seems everyone else missed this
as nothing more than a meaningless marketing ploy.
So you all go out and buy this toy so you can brag
about having "better" color, and I'll continue
taking perceptually identical pics with my boring
'ol RGB cam that cost $800 less.:-)
VB is a nightmare. It is not simple in any
way at all, and leads most to produce the
worst and least usable guis possible.
Pehaps I've simply never used anything better
(entirely possible, as most of my work involves
embedded code or performance-over-appearance work,
thus not all that much time spent in evaluating
packages for prettyness), but I really didn't
find VB all that bad. You just lay out your
window in an almost MS-Paint-like interface,
and poof, it all automagically works at runtime.
VC and BCC have similar GUI builders, but take
quite a lot more work to interface with it in
the code itself, assuming you want more than a
trivial popup window.
Raw Win32 API is an interesting way to fuck
up your brain. I wouldn't recommend it, very
little requires it.
Actually, compared to MFC, Win32 saves
more sanity than it costs. Now, I'll admit,
I'd rather avoid it whenever possible, but in
terms of making Windows do what I want
rather than what it thinks I want,
Win32 fits the bill nicely. Of course, I've
written a few stubs I always import to just
pass NULLs to 90% of the parameters of some
of those hellaciously long function
calls (try setting a font - Oy), but that
makes more a matter of aesthetics than a real
programming-related problem.
But, lest you get the wrong idea - Overall, I
tend to consider GUIs a complete waste of time
in 99% of programs (really, I don't need to
have a button to press just for the sake of
having a button to press - If I bother to start
the program, I really do want it to run).
If you need some crude graphics capabilities,
just usurp the handle of your console window
and treat it like the whore of a frame-buffer you
really wish Windows made more easily available.
So take my opinions of tools for making GUIs
with a grain of salt.;-)
VB is alive and well, and used for
pretty much the same reason as original
BASIC - simplicity.
I would agree it still lives, but disagree
about your reasons...
VB strips away all the simplicity normally
present in BASIC, in that if you know basic,
you don't necessarily know VB (very similar
to C vs JAVA... They have very similar atomic
statements, but the different paradigm makes
proficiency in one not map 1-to-1 to the
other).
VB excels in making pretty GUIs under
Windows. I have yet to find a language
that makes creating a spiffy user interface
anywhere *near* so easy. People rave about
JAVA for GUIs, but I would say that,
line-for-line, it takes just as much work
as using pure Win32. Tk does fairly well,
as long as you like the system default of
everything, but if you want more control,
it makes you jump through all sorts of
unpleasant hoops. But VB... Just no way
to beat its level of GUI-oneness.
Unfortunately, it crawls when it
comes to execution speed. I remember
writing an app for a professor back in
college, did nothing but text processing
and a few simple stats to compile student
evaluation surveys. Running through a list
of only 30-50 students took almost two
minutes. Incidentally, I prototyped it
in C (but he wanted a spiffy GUI, and I
hadn't yet mastered raw Win32), and the
same thing would finish in well under a
second.
This reduces the "TCP" he uses to a
stop-and-wait protocol.
Unfortunately, I have no mod points, but
I really wish I did so I could throw
one your way.
Apparently, of all the supposed techies reading
the article, only you caught that problem (hey,
I'll admit it, even I glazed over on the details,
so kudos to you). And that one change of his
TCP simulation makes ALL the difference - If you
take out all the part of a protocol that make
it play well in a multiple-speed in-and-out
environment, then yes, in fact, it will
behave only slightly better than the worst
speed in any direction. Almost a trivial
statement, yet the parent post's entire premise
rests on this one idea.
You couldn't copy the original image. You'd
have to have to separate source images
Not difficult at all, due to the use of
"glossy"... In fact, that makes it somewhat
easier
Scan it normally, then scan it under artificially
bright illumination (probably need to modify a
scanner, but they cost what, $30?). The glossy
parts will saturate, which you can then use as
a mask to separate the gloss from the regular
print.
Congrats, Xerox, you've come up with yet another
insecure way of making us feel safer.
Slashdot Mirror
Beat and pitch.
Make the derivative "music" at least try to keep these consistant, or at least slowly varying. If you can do that, this might work well.
Only on Slashdot would someone be complaining about a processor (or processors) that only get 32 billions OPS.
Except, they only get that on a fairly narrow range of problems (easily divided into four independant chunks, and heavily CPU bound rather than memory-intensive).
For some perspective, the newest P4s get 6.4 billion instruction per second, more if you consider the total possible SSE2 throughput. With standard number-inflation, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that this thing does nothing really impressive besides stick four general purpose CPUs on one die, with SMP slightly enhanced as a result of the physical proximity of the cores.
Of course, perhaps in keeping with your point, I certainly wouldn't turn up my nose if offered one at an affordable price, but as far as how "cutting edge" this seems, I wouldn't cut the budget for "real" supercomputers just yet.
On a project the size of the space shuttle thousands of safety concerns will be brought up. Not everyone of them can be fully investigated.
False. The shuttle launches involve a ground crew of literally thousands of people. That come out to less than one follow-up per person, or assuming only about a tenth of those people have some technical skill, perhaps each would need to check up on a few safety issues each.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty
But they KNEW that a chunk of styrofoam had hit the wing at mach-4(?). That doesn't make it a matter of hindsight, it makes it a matter of physics - Fragile ceramic tiles whacked REALLY REALLY hard.
And why didn't they follow up on it? The same reason that bothers most engineers. I can just hear a dozen managers all telling various subordinates "Kinetic energy? Pah, a chunk of styrofoam can't do any harm". "Buffer overrun? Pah, no one will even notice". Uh-huh.
Think again about your statements about what they can and cannot do. In fact they can detain while the police arrive.
I'll accept the "detain", though if they don't have some really good evidence of a crime, my pockets will smile.
However, beyond that? Hey, fair enough, you work in the field, whereas I've only gone by the best reasonable explanations I've found so far. So what powers *do* they have, and why?
Or more to the point, if I hire a pair of goons to "detain" everyone that invades my personal space, do they magically have a power that I do not personally have? Can they act as more than an extention/enforcer of my personal rights? And if not, how does this change for a store?
Wear the signal blocker and get stopped EVERY TIME you walk out of a store.
Good tradeoff, eh?
DAMN good tradeoff - If they can't show the footage, in court, of you stuffing something in your pockets, they better have a hefty budget set aside for harassment suits.
Incidentally, you know those sensors many stores already have by the doors? You can ignore them. Someone tries to physically stop you? Add assault charges on top of the civil suit. Of course, if they actually *find* something on you, I'd imagine it greatly weakens your case. But then, I don't actually advocate shoplifting, just standing up for your rights.
Finally, if someone in a LEO-like uniform approaches you in such a situation, ask them their jurisdiction. You can also ignore rent-a-cops who work only for the store... Although they can throw you out (simple matter of trespassing), they don't have any power beyond that unless you give it to them by cooperating. And if you do cooperate, they have quite a few powers (or rather, lack of an obligation to observe your legal rights) that normal police do not. 'Course, keep in mind that the guy with a gun always gets his way - You can only settle the matter in court if you don't get shot to death by some overzealous rentacop.
(disclaimer - IANAL).
alias rm=rm -i
...Evaluates, under the user issuing
"rm -rf /" to "rm -i -rf /".
Since the latter of a pair of mutually exclusive options takes precedence, the "-i" has no effect.
Hardware/firmware mirroring is great the vast majority of the time. But if you're a truly paranoid sys admin, I'd recommend loosely coupled hot spare replication.
;-)
For data integrity (and cost, since this option involves a few fairly simple scripts that any decent admin could write), I'd agree with you 100%. I'd even recomment throwing the mirror drive on another machine and doing the backup over the network, which should protect against mutual failure from anything short of a direct lightning strike.
However, if mirroring for speed, loosely coupled mirrors don't help, while a many-drive RAID0 will boost performance nearly linearly with the number of drives in the array.
Raid 1 basically issues a read request to both drives and uses the data returned from whichever drive responds first.
Does RAID 1 specifically require that, or would that count as an implementation-specific detail?
Because, if implementation-specific, I see no reason why RAID 1 couldn't use the same striped request pattern, since the desired data will exist on both drives anyway (ie, a proper superset of the data available to RAID 0). That wouldn't speed up writing, but for reading, you could get the same benefit as RAID 0.
Everyone knows Linux is quite a bit more stable than Windows. I really don't have any need to do this kind of redundant replication.
/" as root on your Linux box, again,
kiss your data goodbye regardless of
mirroring.
Assuming you didn't mean that as a troll...
HDD mirroring generally provides protection from *hardware* failure, not software glitches. If Windows suddenly decides to overwrite your porn collection, a RAID controller will faithfully do it on both drives. If you accidentally do an "rm -rf
Bingo, the MP3s will get new random bits for every user who downloads them, and they won't lose quality over time because the noise is removed each time it's downloaded.
While a technologically-viable solution, it does have one major problem - If each user can do it, so can the RIAA. They don't even need to know the algorithm to accomplish this (ie, even a highly-obfuscated binary-only distro wouldn't help), since they would only need to use a consistantly known seed to have something they can effectively compare against another known zero-seed file.
Assuming an effectively non-reverse-engineerable binary (an impossiblity, but irrelevant), with its own random number generator, this still reduces to a trivial problem - Using something like Bochs, always run the program from a known machine state, and it will always generate the same seed. It doesn't matter *what* seed (so even if it uses the file itself to generate the seed, that won't help), just that it always comes out the same.
And only today I was in complete awe when I was able to download stuff using a 1 Gbps line...
Consider yourself blessed, then.
I have a "mere" 200Mb (100btx FD on my home LAN, and although I can get 20-30% utilization over 6 machines all blasting data full-throttle, no single connection ever goes above 10%.
Until we go to purely solid-state HDDs (or someone figures out a cheap way to get a sustained HDD transfer rate two or three orders of magnitude greater than what we have now), moving to terabit-and-beyond network bandwidth will only benefit corporations, and perhaps LAN parties (basically any situation with dozens, or even hundreds, of high-activity nodes on the same segment. While HDD size has increase phenomenally in the past decade, sustained throughput has increase by less than a factor of 10 (I could get greater than 900KB/s in 1993, I can get 6MB/s right now... Only about 6.5x faster, compared to a size 350 times greater (340MB vs 120GB). Even under ideal conditions, I couldn't saturate a 100Mb link with a single point-to-point transfer.
So I'll stick with my nice 100btx, perhaps I'll eventually upgrade to gigabit on my fileserver. But going beyond that... Not in the near future.
OTOH I haven't tried with earplugs yet, I should really do that sometimes.
At least bring a pair, always. They make a huge difference, normally bringing the music down to an "enjoyable" volume.
In the situation I described, though, no amount of filtering would make up for a volume so high that it exceeds the dynamic range of the equipment, resulting in really annoying artifacts in the music. I've had people "in the biz" explain to me that you can't possibly clip on the scale of hardware they use at any real venue, but that doesn't change the fact that it happens (and, while not an AE, I do consider myself knowledgeable enough (from personal research in soft-audio-DSP) to recognize clipping when I hear it).
...Don't fake it.
I don't care if people want to "fix" their errors on an album, that doesn't bother me - I can accept an album as a "finished" work of art and enjoy its (presumeably enhanced) merits regardless of the unenhanced talents of the musician (or composer, where that differs from the performer).
However, I go to concerts to see the "raw" work, with no enhancements. If an artist lacks the talent to actually reproduce their work (within reason) in that environment, they should not tour. Simple as that. Selling me the same thing I could have on CD (minus the masses of sweating fans packed in like sardines, $3.50 pints of Aquafina, and idiots who consider a concert a good place for impromptu karaoke) for about $80 less (per pair) does not make me happy.
As an (almost) unrelated aside, another concert peeve of mine - Volume. I went to a concert this past weekend (Tori Amos in Boston) where the performer did well, the set list appealed to me, and the environment in general seemed just about perfect. However, even with earplugs (a must for anyone who actually goes to concerts to enjoy the music), they had the volume cranked so high that the bass completely distorted everything else (as in, I could audibly detect clipping of the vocals at every new bass note or percussive event). This does NOT make for satisfied (much less "happy") concert-goers.
Is HST the only Great Observatory being replaced?
You have to keep in mind that NASA depends on public funding, and that "the public", not to mention the current US president, have absolutely no clue about what counts as good science vs smoke and mirrors.
Hubble takes the most "pretty" pictures, thus people can ooh and aah over all the great "science" it does. Compton may have discovered features of our universe that blow away anything Hubble has done in terms of importance (such as the isotropism in GRBs), but how do you make that into a pretty picture? So, it gets axed, and we'll replace Hubble to create even more eye-candy for the public. Perhaps, if we get lucky, NASA can pad the budget on JW enough to launch a few "real" missions over its lifetime.
Hmm, reading that, I sound overly critical of Hubble - I don't mean to, I realize it serves a number of very useful and scientifically-valid purposes. I just see its popularity (and the answer to your question) as relating more to its flashyness than to its utility.
I fail to see the benefit of this.
/bin and /sbin, only those critical
to basic system functioning (or better yet,
something like a FreeBSD equivalent to
BusyBox (which I've used to create embedded
Linux distros that needed to fit in 8MB of
flash and have basic X functionality),
for a whopping 300k).
A 25% absolute performance penalty, at the relative "gain" of 82% of a small part of the filesystem. However, compared to even an incredibly small (by today's standards) 1GB partition, you talk about saving only 2.5% of the total disk space. On any reasonable drive, this would equal far less than 1% savings.
Now, in an embedded environment, such a savings might make a noticeable difference. However, in an embedded environment, you wouldn't have every app ever considered useful in
As for "people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions"... C'mon, really... Throw in the "older means better" towel and upgrade. Seriously. I have single OGG files (of full CDs) larger than 50MB. Hell, I gave up on DOS 3.3 because of the 32MB partition limit nearly a decade ago. Upgrade. Upgrade. Upgrade! Sometimes "obsolescence" doesn't need to have the word "planned" in front of it, you just need to accept that PC-level hardware has vastly improved since limitations like that seemed even remotely acceptible.
So... Can someone explain why this matters, beyond the "because we can" factor?
Since the goverment has no control over our country anymore, why should we be obliged to pay taxes and adhere to its laws?
Since they have more guns, and much bigger ones at that (ie, nukes).
By all means, feel free to call up you local representative, the IRS, even the president's number appeared in an old Phrack, I believe. Tell them all "Sorry, but since our interests have drifted so widely apart, I must declare myself no longer a member of the body of the US, and as a result I will no longer pay my taxes".
First of all, anyone you contact will laugh at you.
Second, unless you can find an employer willing to go along with this, you automatically pay your taxes, and since under normal conditions your standard pay deductions exceed your owed taxes, the government really doesn't care if you don't file for the difference.
Finally, assuming you really do owe the government tax money which you do not pay, and they notice, How long do you think you can hold off Ashcroft's goons? His predecessor showed us the government's opinion of people who dare to think differently, in Waco (and Ruby Ridge, and plenty of other less publicized events than Waco). They simply kill you, end of nuissance, and a good example to all the other uppity sheep who resent their tax money going to help the RIAA file more subpoenas against people.
You are being nothing short of dishonest even mentioning that you can modify it yourself for your own use in this context. Clearly the user didn't create his own modified .exe
And what would you say if I told you that he did in fact do the crack himself? Any decent programmer can trace through a program and replace an appropriate jump with a nop, doesn't exactly take god-like skills. At worst, a little bit of trial-and-error as you run into "fake" copy-protection checks, but if you just keep defeating one after the other, eventually you'll get to the real one.
Now, considering the above, would it make a difference if he had used a freely-downloadable patch to the program? Obviously downloading the cracked executable itself goes to far, but does a small program that reflects the experience of someone who already went through the tedious work of tracing through the program differ in the least from doing it personally?
To compare this with someone else's analogy, would you consider scribbling little frog pictures in the margins of a book okay but using pre-made stickers of the exact same frogs illegal?
Or, for another similar situation - I've personally cracked programs that I had a right to use but, for various reasons, no longer worked (as the most common example, programs written in an old version of Turbo Pascal for DOS would calibrate a timing loop on startup, which would result in a division by zero on machines above roughly a PII/300, and you could (usually) fix this simply by initializing the counter to 1 rather than 0). Would you consider it immoral that I didn't just throw up my hands, kiss $50 or so goodbye, and go buy a new product when the old one did exactly what I wanted from it?
Sadly, you probably would consider that immoral. Can't have those uppity programmers going around exempting themselves from the cycle of planned (or even unplanned) obsolescence, now can we?
Seriously folks I think lately we've forgotten that stealing is stealing, and if you're stealing a piece of software you should be punnished for stealing a piece of software.
And for those situations where stealing doesn't mean stealing?
Two trivial examples that I suspect most us us could get "caught" for:
First, a friend purchased (completely legal, nothing unkosher whatsoever, not even grey-market) a copy of Age of Empires - AoK. It has a rather annoying copy protection scheme, however, which annoys legitimate users (whereas pirates just run a cracked version with no hassles at all). So the solution? He uses a cracked copy of the game. A stupid software test for known program cracks would flag him as "stealing", yet he did no such thing.
Second, and even more difficult to deal with - I have all of my CD collection on my HDD, since I only ever listen to them while at the computer. Legal format-shifting as allowed even by the DMCA. Yet, can I "prove" to some stupid spyware bot that yes, in fact, I really do own the CD? Nope. And even if I could, I shouldn't NEED to; my computer serves me, I do not serve my computer.
More important than false positives, though, we should consider the issue of why we buy software in general. If I buy a game, I buy it to play that game. If nowhere in the documentation (or preferably, on the outside of the packaging) does it describe its "RIAA-friendly anti-piracy technology", it damn well better not have any. I don't buy software to spy on me, I buy it to do the task it describes itself as performing. Nothing more, and nothing less.
It's just a wild guess. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics, which is the real laws we all live by. It has much more to do with human laws such as patents and copyrights that limit progress.
Though more than a "wild guess", you do have it right when you mention that it has no basis in physical reality.
I don't think I'd blame IP so much as marketing, though. The major player in the field, Intel, holds most of the relevant IP.
So why has Moore's Law worked for so long?
Because Intel schedules their releases of new products based on it.
If anyone remembers the days of the original Pentium, Intel made a few quiet claims that they already had two full chip generations nearly ready, just biding their time to maximize profit based on planned obsolescence ("Needs more testing" makes a great mantra to put off releasing products without earning too much bad PR).
So, in the commercial marketplace, Moore's Law has held true. In physical reality, during the late 80's and early 90's reality could have significantly outpaced Moore for a few years (though I suspect, considering current problems in making faster chips, that we would have had a corresponding slowdown from the end of the 90's to the present).
What you are proposing is breaking the 1st freedom; it is not because they claim the GPL is invalid that we believe so and should break it.
I agree with you in one sense, yet agree with the post to which you responded in another...
Clearly, you have the "right" idea WRT to the meaning of the GPL. However, since SCO has decided to attack it, consider what would happen if every major GPL'd project out there sent them official notice that SCO no longer had the right to use their code - SCO would have a HUGE disincentive to press on with their attack on the GPL, since winning would cripple their own product.
Basically a pre-emptive delayed-payload attack on them. If they go away, no problem. If they press on, they risk injuring themselves more than anyone else.
RGB sensors and emitters are generally calibrated to the center frequencies of our cones.
:-)
Tetrachromat humans occur VERY rarely, and only as females.
For the rest of us, RGB centered at our own visual peaks makes the most sense of any encoding scheme possible. Not only can we not see another color, but it wastes space in the image (ie, some optimal conversion function can, by physical necessity, reduce those four colors to an RGB triad indistinguishable from the original quartet by a normal human.
Now, if you want to get into machine vision, that counts as another category entirely. But wasting pixels (remember, this uses a mask, reducing the effective resolution by 25% for the sake of having an effectively redundant pixel) for something indended for human viewing just doesn't make sense.
More color information is always good
More information does seem better, agreed. However, due to the physiological limitations of human vision, this scheme does not convey any more information, thus my biggest complaint. It seems everyone else missed this as nothing more than a meaningless marketing ploy. So you all go out and buy this toy so you can brag about having "better" color, and I'll continue taking perceptually identical pics with my boring 'ol RGB cam that cost $800 less.
VB is a nightmare. It is not simple in any way at all, and leads most to produce the worst and least usable guis possible.
;-)
Pehaps I've simply never used anything better (entirely possible, as most of my work involves embedded code or performance-over-appearance work, thus not all that much time spent in evaluating packages for prettyness), but I really didn't find VB all that bad. You just lay out your window in an almost MS-Paint-like interface, and poof, it all automagically works at runtime. VC and BCC have similar GUI builders, but take quite a lot more work to interface with it in the code itself, assuming you want more than a trivial popup window.
Raw Win32 API is an interesting way to fuck up your brain. I wouldn't recommend it, very little requires it.
Actually, compared to MFC, Win32 saves more sanity than it costs. Now, I'll admit, I'd rather avoid it whenever possible, but in terms of making Windows do what I want rather than what it thinks I want, Win32 fits the bill nicely. Of course, I've written a few stubs I always import to just pass NULLs to 90% of the parameters of some of those hellaciously long function calls (try setting a font - Oy), but that makes more a matter of aesthetics than a real programming-related problem.
But, lest you get the wrong idea - Overall, I tend to consider GUIs a complete waste of time in 99% of programs (really, I don't need to have a button to press just for the sake of having a button to press - If I bother to start the program, I really do want it to run). If you need some crude graphics capabilities, just usurp the handle of your console window and treat it like the whore of a frame-buffer you really wish Windows made more easily available. So take my opinions of tools for making GUIs with a grain of salt.
VB is alive and well, and used for pretty much the same reason as original BASIC - simplicity.
I would agree it still lives, but disagree about your reasons...
VB strips away all the simplicity normally present in BASIC, in that if you know basic, you don't necessarily know VB (very similar to C vs JAVA... They have very similar atomic statements, but the different paradigm makes proficiency in one not map 1-to-1 to the other).
VB excels in making pretty GUIs under Windows. I have yet to find a language that makes creating a spiffy user interface anywhere *near* so easy. People rave about JAVA for GUIs, but I would say that, line-for-line, it takes just as much work as using pure Win32. Tk does fairly well, as long as you like the system default of everything, but if you want more control, it makes you jump through all sorts of unpleasant hoops. But VB... Just no way to beat its level of GUI-oneness.
Unfortunately, it crawls when it comes to execution speed. I remember writing an app for a professor back in college, did nothing but text processing and a few simple stats to compile student evaluation surveys. Running through a list of only 30-50 students took almost two minutes. Incidentally, I prototyped it in C (but he wanted a spiffy GUI, and I hadn't yet mastered raw Win32), and the same thing would finish in well under a second.
This reduces the "TCP" he uses to a stop-and-wait protocol.
Unfortunately, I have no mod points, but I really wish I did so I could throw one your way.
Apparently, of all the supposed techies reading the article, only you caught that problem (hey, I'll admit it, even I glazed over on the details, so kudos to you). And that one change of his TCP simulation makes ALL the difference - If you take out all the part of a protocol that make it play well in a multiple-speed in-and-out environment, then yes, in fact, it will behave only slightly better than the worst speed in any direction. Almost a trivial statement, yet the parent post's entire premise rests on this one idea.
Sad. And again, kudos, good catch.
You couldn't copy the original image. You'd have to have to separate source images
Not difficult at all, due to the use of "glossy"... In fact, that makes it somewhat easier
Scan it normally, then scan it under artificially bright illumination (probably need to modify a scanner, but they cost what, $30?). The glossy parts will saturate, which you can then use as a mask to separate the gloss from the regular print.
Congrats, Xerox, you've come up with yet another insecure way of making us feel safer.