I used to work in a lumber yard by day, code by night, and play guitar on weekends, and when I did that, my wrists were a mess. I had to wear wrist braces, take waaay too much OTC pain killers, etc. However, since I stopped with the lumber yard, I've had no problems whatsoever. From wikipedia:
Studies done by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), indicated that job tasks involving highly repetitive manual acts or necessitating wrist bending or other stressful wrist postures were connected with incidents of CTS or related problems. However, it appears that the 30+ studies reviewed were concerned with the occupations of assembly line workers, meat packers, food processors, and the like, not general office work.
So unless you type in some extremely stupid fashion (I have very poor typing posture myself), I'm not inclined to believe that's enough to get carpal tunnel. And now for the haha-only-serious portion of this post:
Of course typing isn't enough to give geeks carpal tunnel - the mechanism by which CTS happens is that *muscles* compress the nerve. Geeks don't have muscles.
What other repetitive, wrist intensive motions do geeks stereotypically do to much of that could be causing this stress?
mod parent up. what's up with the repeated tag malfunctions? the tagging system seems to have some serious flaws (remember itsatrap day when every single story was tagged that way?)
For the record, JPEG2000 != JPEG. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew that, because from some of the comments it seems clear that many people don't.
But yeah, good for microsoft. Yeah, I said it. On slashdot, no less, and I mean it.
The trouble is that jpeg2000 is a patent minefield, and no one has made any promise not to sue or charge fees on it. Which is why, despite being dramatically better technically, we are stuck with blocky JPEGs. Microsoft's proposal is better than jpeg2000, because the IP is all in one place, and they are interested in giving it away for free (or so it seems).
So, to sum up, technically HD Photo is about the same as JPEG2000, both of which beat JPEG. But licensing wise, JPEG > HD Photo > JPEG2000
So, this is a death knell for JPEG2000, which is a good thing. Of course, it'd be even better if there was a good patent-free solution for a next generation format, but I suspect just about everyone will continue using JPEG anyway.
Are you intentionally being dense here, or have I smoked too much crack today?
The original poster said "I have no particular passions about either license". So you change the license in the formerly gplv2 code, then compile it and ship your gplv3 binary with it. Problem solved.
Yup. This is highly unlikely to be censorship, it's infinitely more likely a bad configuration / oversight.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to make a ruckus until the problem is fixed, and if by some meteor strike it was intentional, I'll line up with the rest. But we have no indication this is any such incident - it will in all probability be fixed.
It must be a stressful job to write such filter code - make a mistake in one direction and you are exposing wee ones to pornography, make a mistake in the other direction and you've got blogs full of sheep on sites like slashdot complaining that you are "censoring" them.
As someone who used to work for Media Matters, I can tell you there is a whole lot wrong with this writeup in the WSJ.
For starters, there is nothing approaching blogging involved. Media Matters has hired a number of prominent bloggers to work with them, but an organization with offices on K Street in Washington DC, with a staff of about 50, is a far stretch from what folks think of when they think of a blogger. The researchers write their articles to a very precise formula, and then the editorial staff "correct" them and the process goes back and forth quite a number of times before anything is published. Not exactly what the image of the term blogger conjures up, but Media Matters sure likes when people make that mistake.
What's happening here is not Media Matters discovering this horrible outrage and then alerting the rest of the world to it - what's happening is Media Matters trying to take credit for Imus's firing because they monitored his show. They monitor dozens of shows per day, and pick up every off color comment like this and document it over and over again.
Now, if you buy the stereotyped liberal "whiner" point of view, this is indicative of the whole media being a bunch of foul-mouthed bigots. And said bigots having a whole lot of staying power for not getting shit-canned more often. But if you think about it for a second, it's really just Media Matters shooting a spray of bullets, pointing out every time anyone says anything off color, and then taking credit when people get outraged about it because they documented it "first".
The unfortunate thing is that lots of well meaning and powerful leftist funders give Media Matters money because they fail to see this subterfuge, or maybe because they are "whining liberals" themselves.
It's really more indicative of a more general problem in Washington DC - folks there think that everything that happens in our democracy can be traced back to some pressure group inside the beltway. They don't believe in this thing called "grassroots". I wish I could say they are fools, but reluctantly I must admit that they are frighteningly close to correct in many cases - but not this one.
I just listened to this, and I shit you not the introduction is: "blah blah and self-proclaimed sex-symbol"... "He's asked me to let you know he's not wearing any underwear..." WTF?
Wow, that stuff about scapegoating is a pretty jaded take on things. Can't say I haven't been there, but still...
If we're talking about an application that can truly benefit from clustering, and is built so that node failure can be detected and worked around relatively gracefully, this isn't much of a consideration. If you have 10 machines, and 1 goes down, you lose 10% thruput. If you look at it in terms of cores, 20 1 core machines is equivalent to 10 2 core machines, so your downtime per core essentially doubles, true. But! In any sufficiently large system you should account for the fact that n machines will be down at any given point in time. So, make sure you have 2n spare cores (n systems) instead of n spare cores, and you're fine. Even if you estimate n at something as high as 25%, the economics of things will still force you into dual-core servers, since all the new cpus have dual core, and it's getting hard to find single-core server grade hardware. In short, the economics clearly balance out in favor of dual core CPUs.
The article, and most of these comments, are missing the point. The point isn't that you can't get the data off the hard drive - the investigators aren't that stupid - it's that they can't get previoiusly deleted or overwritten files off the hard drive using their standard techniques, because there is no way to image both a drive and the magnetic clues that these folks use.
Honestly, I read this as a sort of concession to OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and to some extent linux), who have really taken the mantle in BSD land, more than anything else. You just don't hear much about NetBSD anymore - linux won in the embedded space because of its buzz, and all the other portability that was NetBSD's great strength probably just wasn't worth the effort, especially now that FreeBSD has taken to non-x86/alpha architectures and OpenBSD's number of platforms is growing again. Unless you want to install unix in a lightbulb, NetBSD is probably out...
Notice that every year except 2002, the stock price started accelerating after WWDC. Apple stock, therefore, is usually flat or slightly downward trending for the first half of the year. The stock market is heavily influenced by whatever Jobs' latest reality distortion is.
I would also argue that, in addition to the seasonal fluctuation's effect, Apple stock was highly overvalued at the end of last year on half-baked speculation that apple would somehow conquer the entire PC market because of its move to intel. What we're seeing right now is that unbridled enthusiasm getting reigned in. If the apple desktops sell as well as the macbooks have, I expect we'll see the price jumping up again after August, which of course will dissipate by the end of the year, rinse, lather, repeat.
Oi, Theo! I agree with you 100%, but please, tone down the virtiol just a smidge! From TFA:
Jason and I spent a lot of time writing that code in the
past, but because your policies are privacy invasive towards us, and
thus completely thankless for the sales that we have given you in the
past -- we will not spend any more time on your crummy products.
And if you continue baiting me, I will delete the driver from our
source tree.
Calling their products "crummy" and threatening them with driver deletion if they don't stop "baiting" you is not a way to get what you want. Now it means some egomaniacal manager has to eat crow for the driver to go public. I was in 100% agreement with your post until I got to this point.
Sometimes, I wish someone would just slip some sort of tranquilizer in the water supply near Alberta...
Samsung forecast that the first hybrid drives would... reduce power consumption by about 9 percent overall, increasing a notebook's battery life by about an hour.
Uh... Someone in Samsung's PR division does not realize that the typical laptop does not get 11 hours of battery life. There has got to be a way to hold PR folks accountable for the stupid and wrong things they say.
If this team is as hot as they think they are, why don't they start up a competing product to whatever it is Apple hired them to do -- and if they do prove worthy, Apple'll have to pay a premium to get them back. Oh. They weren't really that great. Then IMHO Apple did nothing wrong.
Let me guess... You're a libertarian? There are lots of situations your overly simplistic explanation doesn't account for... For starters a bunch of programmers in the developing world cannot compete with a company like Apple at anything, period, without being bought out by a competitor or a miracle. Apple just has too much advertising, branding, infrastructure, experience, size, ability to dump produts at a loss, etc. Not to mention the case of Apple having hired them to, say, build a new trackwheel for ipods, or one of a thousand other internal projects that require coordination with the rest of Apple, in which case your suggestion doesn't make sense.
In short, take your invisible hand and shove it up the orifice of your choice:-)
Your post is largely correct - starting a few torrents shows an end user that there is a problem, but those torrents are also the *reason* for the problem. Bittorrent accounts for about 1/3 of all network traffic. [http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html]
ISPs oversell for the same reasons airlines oversell - it is much more profitable to do it, and it would be silly not to. Why would they pay for 2Gbps of connectivity at an access point when, statistically, usage never gets above 1Gbps? Would you want them to be charging you the amount it would cost them for full utilization of your pipe at all times (if you're not running bittorrent or some other P2P software)? I thought not.
With bittorrent's explosion, usage has gone up by a factor of 50%, and the margins don't cut it anymore. ISPs aren't sure how to react - as you pointed out, they don't want to charge the average user more, and they don't want the outcry that would come from a metered rate - both would be business suicide.
So, for the moment, they do nothing (except push for tiered internet so they can charge you more for non-blessed internet traffic), and us geeks complain on geek forums, but the money still rolls in for them, because, let's face it, you aren't going to spring for a T3 to get your pr0n and torrents faster.
Seriously... So it takes twice as long when I save or open my document? Who cares? Saving is done seldom and/or in the background, and open time is dominated by the monstrous word processing app in question loading.
MS makes it sound like the whole app will be somehow bloated and slowed down because of this, which is a clear deception.
> Stopping the action of GABA would not cause someone's brain to shut down in the way the OP is thinking.
I didn't claim it would. Perhaps you missed the part at the end where I said they'd *die* ?
> Let us doctor types handle the heavy lifting while you guys do your geeky thing. Merely summarizing Wikipedia articles doesn't make you a doctor or pharmD.
I hope your healing abilities are better than your psychic abilities (or ability to detect sarcasm).
GABA is far from the "only thing in our brains". Other neurotransmitters include serotonin (important in depression and hallucinogens), acetylcholine (why people smoke), dopamine (why some drugs are addictive), (nor)?epinephrine, glutamate and aspertate, etc. etc. The descriptions of what these chemicals do, of course, is vastly oversimplified here.
As for what anti-anxiety meds do, they mimic the effect of the naturally occuring GABA neurotransmitter, and have an inhibitory affect on cells with GABA receptors.
You *could* induce a vegitative state in someone by stopping the action of GABA, but it wouldn't exactly be "persistent" - GABA helps control some rather important functions in the brain stem, like breathing and heartbeat - in short, they'd die;)
I realize this article is about the ports tree, but FreeBSD's main source *has* been moving at a blistering rate of development the past few years. Recently there was an article about linux 2.6 getting buggier - and unfortunately the same is true of FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x... Some things to consider:
* 6.x came out shockingly fast after 5.x * 4.x was orphaned correspondingly quickly (despite being arguably the only stable freebsd branch left) * vinum (software raid) support, among other things, was broken thanks to the introduction of geom around 5.1, and gvinum is finally beginning to approach stability as of 6.1 * The new scheduler, ULE, was introduced in one 5.x release and then abandoned when it proved to be completely unstable. * As a reaction, one of the lead developers forked dragonflybsd off of the last truly stable freebsd release, the 4.x branch. Others have just given up. * Bugfixes are getting left on the floor in favor of adding features ( just look at a relatively old release such as freebsd 5.3's TODO list: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html - note that most of these problems are *still* not fixed in 6.1 )
People choose the BSD's for stability - or at least, they used to. FreeBSD has been going down a features at all cost route in some kind of effort to play catchup with their perceived rival linux for some time. In doing so, it is losing what makes it unique, and it needs to stop, or else people will abandon FreeBSD for other BSDs, linux (which is now more stable IMO), and even mac os.
No. If you RTFL in TFA... You see that they hit 4 of yahoo's mx records "mx#.mail.yahoo.com" (divide by 4, that gives us 2 per minute per server), and each of these has multiple IP addresses (on average, 4, so divide by 4 again). So in reality, they were hitting a physical machine *once every two minutes*. Or, as they put it in TFL:
"Next, we took measurements every two minutes for half an hour. That's 15 separate readings of each of 16 IP addresses, for a total of 240 readings. The results were surprising."
It's not that simple... Much of the code involved is doing things in well defined ways - let's face it, operating systems do a lot of boring things like copying data from one buffer to another where there isn't much room for creativity. If you give a number of programmers the assignment of writing a function in C that adds two integers together, I'll be damned if you don't get a lot of entries that look like or exactly like this without any copying:
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work in a lumber yard by day, code by night, and play guitar on weekends, and when I did that, my wrists were a mess. I had to wear wrist braces, take waaay too much OTC pain killers, etc. However, since I stopped with the lumber yard, I've had no problems whatsoever. From wikipedia:
Studies done by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), indicated that job tasks involving highly repetitive manual acts or necessitating wrist bending or other stressful wrist postures were connected with incidents of CTS or related problems. However, it appears that the 30+ studies reviewed were concerned with the occupations of assembly line workers, meat packers, food processors, and the like, not general office work.So unless you type in some extremely stupid fashion (I have very poor typing posture myself), I'm not inclined to believe that's enough to get carpal tunnel. And now for the haha-only-serious portion of this post:
mod parent up. what's up with the repeated tag malfunctions? the tagging system seems to have some serious flaws (remember itsatrap day when every single story was tagged that way?)
For the record, JPEG2000 != JPEG. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew that, because from some of the comments it seems clear that many people don't.
But yeah, good for microsoft. Yeah, I said it. On slashdot, no less, and I mean it.
The trouble is that jpeg2000 is a patent minefield, and no one has made any promise not to sue or charge fees on it. Which is why, despite being dramatically better technically, we are stuck with blocky JPEGs. Microsoft's proposal is better than jpeg2000, because the IP is all in one place, and they are interested in giving it away for free (or so it seems).
So, to sum up, technically HD Photo is about the same as JPEG2000, both of which beat JPEG.
But licensing wise, JPEG > HD Photo > JPEG2000
So, this is a death knell for JPEG2000, which is a good thing. Of course, it'd be even better if there was a good patent-free solution for a next generation format, but I suspect just about everyone will continue using JPEG anyway.
Are you intentionally being dense here, or have I smoked too much crack today?
The original poster said "I have no particular passions about either license". So you change the license in the formerly gplv2 code, then compile it and ship your gplv3 binary with it. Problem solved.
Why do people continue to post Cringely's stuff, and how does it continue to get on Slashdot? He himself all but admitted that he is a troll!
Oh, wait... I guess I just answered my own question.
Yup. This is highly unlikely to be censorship, it's infinitely more likely a bad configuration / oversight.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to make a ruckus until the problem is fixed, and if by some meteor strike it was intentional, I'll line up with the rest. But we have no indication this is any such incident - it will in all probability be fixed.
It must be a stressful job to write such filter code - make a mistake in one direction and you are exposing wee ones to pornography, make a mistake in the other direction and you've got blogs full of sheep on sites like slashdot complaining that you are "censoring" them.
That, sir, is one AWESOME story. Oh how I love post-communist pravda.
As someone who used to work for Media Matters, I can tell you there is a whole lot wrong with this writeup in the WSJ.
For starters, there is nothing approaching blogging involved. Media Matters has hired a number of prominent bloggers to work with them, but an organization with offices on K Street in Washington DC, with a staff of about 50, is a far stretch from what folks think of when they think of a blogger. The researchers write their articles to a very precise formula, and then the editorial staff "correct" them and the process goes back and forth quite a number of times before anything is published. Not exactly what the image of the term blogger conjures up, but Media Matters sure likes when people make that mistake.
What's happening here is not Media Matters discovering this horrible outrage and then alerting the rest of the world to it - what's happening is Media Matters trying to take credit for Imus's firing because they monitored his show. They monitor dozens of shows per day, and pick up every off color comment like this and document it over and over again.
Now, if you buy the stereotyped liberal "whiner" point of view, this is indicative of the whole media being a bunch of foul-mouthed bigots. And said bigots having a whole lot of staying power for not getting shit-canned more often. But if you think about it for a second, it's really just Media Matters shooting a spray of bullets, pointing out every time anyone says anything off color, and then taking credit when people get outraged about it because they documented it "first".
The unfortunate thing is that lots of well meaning and powerful leftist funders give Media Matters money because they fail to see this subterfuge, or maybe because they are "whining liberals" themselves.
It's really more indicative of a more general problem in Washington DC - folks there think that everything that happens in our democracy can be traced back to some pressure group inside the beltway. They don't believe in this thing called "grassroots". I wish I could say they are fools, but reluctantly I must admit that they are frighteningly close to correct in many cases - but not this one.
Air America was competing for viewers?!? With Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, no less? I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did!
Someone has got to be gaming the tagging system, as all but 3 entries on the home page have "itsatrap" in their tags for me atm.
Whodunnit? Howdja do it? Tell the world about your leet exploit!
I just listened to this, and I shit you not the introduction is: "blah blah and self-proclaimed sex-symbol" ... "He's asked me to let you know he's not wearing any underwear..." WTF?
Wow, that stuff about scapegoating is a pretty jaded take on things. Can't say I haven't been there, but still...
If we're talking about an application that can truly benefit from clustering, and is built so that node failure can be detected and worked around relatively gracefully, this isn't much of a consideration. If you have 10 machines, and 1 goes down, you lose 10% thruput. If you look at it in terms of cores, 20 1 core machines is equivalent to 10 2 core machines, so your downtime per core essentially doubles, true. But! In any sufficiently large system you should account for the fact that n machines will be down at any given point in time. So, make sure you have 2n spare cores (n systems) instead of n spare cores, and you're fine. Even if you estimate n at something as high as 25%, the economics of things will still force you into dual-core servers, since all the new cpus have dual core, and it's getting hard to find single-core server grade hardware. In short, the economics clearly balance out in favor of dual core CPUs.
The article, and most of these comments, are missing the point. The point isn't that you can't get the data off the hard drive - the investigators aren't that stupid - it's that they can't get previoiusly deleted or overwritten files off the hard drive using their standard techniques, because there is no way to image both a drive and the magnetic clues that these folks use.
Honestly, I read this as a sort of concession to OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and to some extent linux), who have really taken the mantle in BSD land, more than anything else. You just don't hear much about NetBSD anymore - linux won in the embedded space because of its buzz, and all the other portability that was NetBSD's great strength probably just wasn't worth the effort, especially now that FreeBSD has taken to non-x86/alpha architectures and OpenBSD's number of platforms is growing again. Unless you want to install unix in a lightbulb, NetBSD is probably out...
Perhaps, but there are a few counter-points to be made. Take a look at how their stock has performed:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y
Notice that every year except 2002, the stock price started accelerating after WWDC. Apple stock, therefore, is usually flat or slightly downward trending for the first half of the year. The stock market is heavily influenced by whatever Jobs' latest reality distortion is.
I would also argue that, in addition to the seasonal fluctuation's effect, Apple stock was highly overvalued at the end of last year on half-baked speculation that apple would somehow conquer the entire PC market because of its move to intel. What we're seeing right now is that unbridled enthusiasm getting reigned in. If the apple desktops sell as well as the macbooks have, I expect we'll see the price jumping up again after August, which of course will dissipate by the end of the year, rinse, lather, repeat.
Oi, Theo! I agree with you 100%, but please, tone down the virtiol just a smidge! From TFA:
Calling their products "crummy" and threatening them with driver deletion if they don't stop "baiting" you is not a way to get what you want. Now it means some egomaniacal manager has to eat crow for the driver to go public. I was in 100% agreement with your post until I got to this point.
Sometimes, I wish someone would just slip some sort of tranquilizer in the water supply near Alberta...
Uh... Someone in Samsung's PR division does not realize that the typical laptop does not get 11 hours of battery life. There has got to be a way to hold PR folks accountable for the stupid and wrong things they say.
Let me guess... You're a libertarian? There are lots of situations your overly simplistic explanation doesn't account for... For starters a bunch of programmers in the developing world cannot compete with a company like Apple at anything, period, without being bought out by a competitor or a miracle. Apple just has too much advertising, branding, infrastructure, experience, size, ability to dump produts at a loss, etc. Not to mention the case of Apple having hired them to, say, build a new trackwheel for ipods, or one of a thousand other internal projects that require coordination with the rest of Apple, in which case your suggestion doesn't make sense.
In short, take your invisible hand and shove it up the orifice of your choice :-)
Your post is largely correct - starting a few torrents shows an end user that there is a problem, but those torrents are also the *reason* for the problem. Bittorrent accounts for about 1/3 of all network traffic. [http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html]
ISPs oversell for the same reasons airlines oversell - it is much more profitable to do it, and it would be silly not to. Why would they pay for 2Gbps of connectivity at an access point when, statistically, usage never gets above 1Gbps? Would you want them to be charging you the amount it would cost them for full utilization of your pipe at all times (if you're not running bittorrent or some other P2P software)? I thought not.
With bittorrent's explosion, usage has gone up by a factor of 50%, and the margins don't cut it anymore. ISPs aren't sure how to react - as you pointed out, they don't want to charge the average user more, and they don't want the outcry that would come from a metered rate - both would be business suicide.
So, for the moment, they do nothing (except push for tiered internet so they can charge you more for non-blessed internet traffic), and us geeks complain on geek forums, but the money still rolls in for them, because, let's face it, you aren't going to spring for a T3 to get your pr0n and torrents faster.
Seriously... So it takes twice as long when I save or open my document? Who cares? Saving is done seldom and/or in the background, and open time is dominated by the monstrous word processing app in question loading.
MS makes it sound like the whole app will be somehow bloated and slowed down because of this, which is a clear deception.
> Stopping the action of GABA would not cause someone's brain to shut down in the way the OP is thinking.
I didn't claim it would. Perhaps you missed the part at the end where I said they'd *die* ?
> Let us doctor types handle the heavy lifting while you guys do your geeky thing. Merely summarizing Wikipedia articles doesn't make you a doctor or pharmD.
I hope your healing abilities are better than your psychic abilities (or ability to detect sarcasm).
Neuropsychopharmacology is what you speak of.
;)
GABA is far from the "only thing in our brains". Other neurotransmitters include serotonin (important in depression and hallucinogens), acetylcholine (why people smoke), dopamine (why some drugs are addictive), (nor)?epinephrine, glutamate and aspertate, etc. etc. The descriptions of what these chemicals do, of course, is vastly oversimplified here.
As for what anti-anxiety meds do, they mimic the effect of the naturally occuring GABA neurotransmitter, and have an inhibitory affect on cells with GABA receptors.
You *could* induce a vegitative state in someone by stopping the action of GABA, but it wouldn't exactly be "persistent" - GABA helps control some rather important functions in the brain stem, like breathing and heartbeat - in short, they'd die
I realize this article is about the ports tree, but FreeBSD's main source *has* been moving at a blistering rate of development the past few years. Recently there was an article about linux 2.6 getting buggier - and unfortunately the same is true of FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x ... Some things to consider:
* 6.x came out shockingly fast after 5.x
* 4.x was orphaned correspondingly quickly (despite being arguably the only stable freebsd branch left)
* vinum (software raid) support, among other things, was broken thanks to the introduction of geom around 5.1, and gvinum is finally beginning to approach stability as of 6.1
* The new scheduler, ULE, was introduced in one 5.x release and then abandoned when it proved to be completely unstable.
* As a reaction, one of the lead developers forked dragonflybsd off of the last truly stable freebsd release, the 4.x branch. Others have just given up.
* Bugfixes are getting left on the floor in favor of adding features ( just look at a relatively old release such as freebsd 5.3's TODO list: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html - note that most of these problems are *still* not fixed in 6.1 )
People choose the BSD's for stability - or at least, they used to. FreeBSD has been going down a features at all cost route in some kind of effort to play catchup with their perceived rival linux for some time. In doing so, it is losing what makes it unique, and it needs to stop, or else people will abandon FreeBSD for other BSDs, linux (which is now more stable IMO), and even mac os.
-DH
No. If you RTFL in TFA ... You see that they hit 4 of yahoo's mx records "mx#.mail.yahoo.com" (divide by 4, that gives us 2 per minute per server), and each of these has multiple IP addresses (on average, 4, so divide by 4 again). So in reality, they were hitting a physical machine *once every two minutes*. Or, as they put it in TFL:
"Next, we took measurements every two minutes for half an hour. That's 15 separate readings of each of 16 IP addresses, for a total of 240 readings. The results were surprising."
It's not that simple... Much of the code involved is doing things in well defined ways - let's face it, operating systems do a lot of boring things like copying data from one buffer to another where there isn't much room for creativity. If you give a number of programmers the assignment of writing a function in C that adds two integers together, I'll be damned if you don't get a lot of entries that look like or exactly like this without any copying:
int add(int x, int y) {
return x + y;
}