It should be banned, but only because that's an inefficient way to do things. RDP traffic is encrypted. Run shoutcast (or some equivalent) on your home pc and if you need to control it then use remote desktop
But then if I'm streaming over unencrypted wireless (very common) my neighbor can steal my music.
The vmsplice() approach that Linus is talking about is exactly that -- a call that will block until the kernel is done with the previous buffer.
That's certainly not the impression I get from Dave Miller's commentary about splice/tee to sockets, which discusses using poll/select/more advanced methods to see when the splice has finished and comments:
We really can't block on this, but I guess we could consider allowing that for really dumb applications.
It does indeed require some smarts in the application to field the events, but by definition of using this splice stuff there is explicit knowledge in the application of what's going on.
This is why I'm very hesitant to say "yeah, blocking on the socket is OK", because to be honest it's not. As long as the socket buffer limits haven't been reached, we really shouldn't block so the user can go and do more work and create more transmit data in time to keep the network pipe full.
Or Linus commenting:
Some users may even be able to take _advantage_ of the fact that the buffer is "in flight" _and_ mapped into user space after it has been submitted. You could imagine code that actually goes on modifying the buffer even while it's being queued for sending. Under some strange circumstances that may actually be useful
In practice I think the FreeBSD approach probably does have speed advantages in most cases, and the fact that it's transparent to the userspace developer would seemingly be a big advantage.
Why would you say this? In practice, on every real OS that's tried it, real-world apps become much slower with the COW approach when zero-copy is enabled than if they use the old read/write semantics. And in practice, even the guy who proposed it on the Linux kernel mailing list said (in response to "That's a huge mistake, and anybody that does it that way (FreeBSD) is totally incompetent."): Yea, we're not using it either.
It's a pain in the ass and even if you get it right performance gains are minimal. Because in the real world, people don't allocate new memory for every read/write pair, they use a static buffer. Which means they get the COW fault on every read, unless they do a fairly arcane restructuring of their buffer use.
And without that, it is much slower than just doing a real read/write pair and forgetting zero-copy.
Linus was overly harsh in his commentary, but ultimately the response to What about marking the pages Read-Only while it's being used by the kernel and if the user tries to write into them letting the VM dup the page with the COW code?
should be something like Dave Miller's one-liner: That's historically how you kill performance.
It's been done a million times, not once with success, and so unless someone can actually produce a system that uses it and performs well in real (end-application) benchmarks and not contrived "here's how it looks if I never take a fault" benchmarks then all the evidence supports using an explicit (splice/tee) approach.
And, in reality, coding applications to use splice/tee explicitly is easier on the end programmer than coding them to use a COW zero-copy read/write efficiently (ie without incurring so many COW faults that it's actually slower than not using a zero-copy approach).
So you can either do a COW approach, put a lot more burden on the programmer to get passable efficiency, and even then have it only be a moderate gain.
Or you can do an explicit splice approach, have it be easier on the programmer, and have it perform much better.
And they know this how? Aside from people collecting unemployment, they have no way to collect this data.
They do weekly statistical surveys, the two largest being the Current Population Survey the Current Employment Statistics Survey. Without the surveys they would have no way of capturing people who are job hunting but not drawing unemployment.
I've read in many places that the nationwide unemployment rate issued by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts only people who are drawing unemployment insurance, which is not available to recent graduates and which expires after several months whether or not one's best job searching efforts result in a job offer.
This is not true.
In BLS definitions, people are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey week. This includes not only regular full-time year-round employment but also all part-time and temporary work. Also, people with a regular job who did no work for exceptional reasons (vacation, paternity/maternity leave, illness, strike, etc) are considered employed.
People are considered unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.
So the major problem is that people who are seeking full-time jobs but are working even a single hour a week are counted as employed. Less egregiously, if you stop looking for work--say you want a job, but spend months looking and finally get discouraged and stop job hunting for 4 weeks--you're not considered unemployed.
But if you're looking for work and do not have a job, you are counted as unemployed even if you're not drawing unemployment.
It also does not count situations of underemployment, such as an IT professional working at Kroger because local companies' IT departments are fully staffed.
And it probably shouldn't. You don't have a right to have a cushy job doing whatever your main interest is at a huge hourly wage.
I mean, if I'm working as an entry level programmer but would like to be a senior engineer, should I be considered unemployed? Or if I'm a senior engineer but want to be a non-tech manager? Or if I'm a manager but want to be a writer?
The names are standard in crypto texts, even rigorous academic ones.
e.g. Alice (first communicator), Bob (Second communicator), Eve (passive attacker--eavesdropper), Mallory (malicious active attacker), and Trent (trusted third party)
There is actually a substance that gets you almost the same effects without making people as violent as alc makes some.
It's been years since I blazed up, but I never enjoyed it when I did. Just made it really hard to think clearly, so I was basically stupid and very slow; and being conscious of being stupid and slow, it also made me really tense. Kind of like being hammered out of my mind on booze (also not fun) but with more coordination, less awareness of time, and more self-consciousness about the situation (and less headache and more dry mouth the next day).
It was certainly nothing like having a good buzz going after 2-3 beers, where you get relaxed but still feel mostly in control of yourself and able to think clearly.
You want to cure the headache and depression associated with your hangover? A little hair of the dog that bit you will do the trick quite nicely.
For 95% of the world, the absolute _last_ thing they want if they're hung over is a drink. Pretty much everyone I know who drinks to the point of getting a bad hangover spends the next day drinking water, popping advil, and swearing to god that they'll never drink again.
It's not until the hangover wears off at 5:00pm that they decide to pop off down to the bar for a couple beers.
Actually, what he's looking for is Ketamine. Horse tranquilizers. Dry the liquid, powder it, and snort it. The high lasts 20 minutes, there is no comedown, and it's completely harmless
He said short-term. Ketamine screws with your coordination and senses for a lot longer than alcohol, often up to 24 hours.
It's also pretty far from being a replacement for alcohol; alcohol is often a party drug making people socially outgoing and taken in crowds. Ketamine tends to make one maudlin, introspective, and antisocial (often to the point of being comatose). Totally different effect, especially compared to moderate alcohol consumption.
Also, it is _not_ completely harmless; it causes respiratory and circulatory depression and can be lethal. It is safer (not completely safe) when ingested or snorted than when injected intravenously; combining with alcohol, GHB, or other downers is particularly dangerous. Chronic use can cause long-term memory problems, neurosis, and depression. And it's highly addictive.
When used as an anaesthetic for children, it is generally accompanied with other drugs to counteract respiratory depression.
But good luck finding any now, the feds have cracked down and I haven't seen any in years.
Are you kidding? Special K is all over every rave these days. It and GHB are currently the two fastest spreading club drugs on the planet.
Oddly enough, that's why the woman you're shacking up with (if you were) is referred to as your common law wife -- because it was recognized under British Common Law.
Not true. Such a thing wasn't the British common law, isn't the US common law, and the common law marriage rules in the US are quite different from what the common law marriage rule was in British law.
1. Shacking up with someone (even for a long time) didn't cause them to become your wife in British common law and doesn't in the US. 2. There's no common law marriage in the US as a whole, although about 9 states recognize it. The common myth that "if you live together for 7 years, you're married by common law" is a (false) myth. 3. The rules for common law marriages in the US are different from what the British common law rules were.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice; my understanding of the issues is:
In the British common law, if the couple (above the age of consent) expressed unconditional consent to be married, they were married. No witnesses or vows were required. Common law marriage was (almost, see next paragraph) eliminated in Britain by the Marriage Act of 1753 (the "common law marriage" spoken of in modern England/Wales has no legal status, Scotland is a seperate case, and true common law marriage by cohabitation and repute exists there).
British law does have one case where common law marriage can happen--essentially, if you CANNOT get an official marriage, then common-law marriage can happen by the old "unconditional consent" rule; this happened most famously in Japanese internment camps in the 20th century.
In the US, requirements vary by state among the few that allow it, but normally it's something along the lines of if you 1) Intend to be married, and 2) Represent yourself as married to the community, and 3) Consummate the marriage
then you are married. 3) is sometimes phrased as cohabitation instead of consummation, and is sometimes dropped. All states that allow it have some variation on 1) or 2), and almost all have both 1) and 2).
But if you never intend to be married and you don't go around telling people that you are married, you aren't married by common law in any US state.
Also New Hampshire is a weird case, they only recognize common law marriage posthumously (for inheritance purposes).
Again, I'm not a lawyer and could be wrong about the above.
There are games where the virtual environment is the GUI. For example, what options does a player have to open a locked door? For example, what options does a player have to open a locked door? Well, find the key, use magic, pick the lock, bash it in, talk some character into opening it, or sneak in behind someone else using the door.
Spot on, good games don't have lots of obvious GUI options to do specific tasks, they let you apply existing items/monsters/etc generically and combine them or use them creatively to accomplish your goals.
Even in simple text-only games there can be tons of options, most of which won't show up as GUI options, e.g. in nethack you could
Unlock/open it with a key/lockpick/credit card/knock spell/wand of opening Destroy it (kick it down, take a pickaxe to it, cast force bolt at it, etc) Polymorph into a jelly/slime/etc and go under it, or into a Xorn/elemental/ghost etc and go through it Find a way to get a monster to open it/destroy it for you get something to explode near it, blasting it down Teleport past it Dig a route around it Find a route around it (secret door/alternate hall/etc) Dig down a level and climb up the stairs behind it Go up a level and then dig a hole to drop down behind it
And probably many more. Some of those depend on using items that don't seem obviously related to opening a door and certainly don't have any options specific to a door.
No kidding. In the Real World, you will constantly be told to work with somebody on this or that project. The boss knows damn well this is a terrible mismatch. Since you are a hard working, knowledgeable, productive employee and Bob is either lazy, stupid, incompetent or all three, the boss' idea is that, through some miracle of "setting a good example" or "crosstraining" or "peer-peer development", your good qualities will rub off on him, making him a better worker
In the real world, you'll pretty much never have (or get) to do hands-on pairs programming stuff with another worker, since there's generally too much work to be done even without pairing up. Pair programming is limited to hard debugging tasks or delicate core-system improvements or data transformations that really _need_ an extra set of eyeballs and can justify the costs, for most other stuff periodic consults as needed and code reviews try to take the place of pair programming.
Unlike in school, you won't be personally graded as a team either--even average non-techie bosses can tell who's working and who's slacking. And you'll never get in the situation of being tethered to an incompetent partner for a full semester--incompetents are generally let go fairly swiftly, especially because having incompetents under his command makes your boss look weak and ineffective.
Now, your group/division may be graded as a team, so the major thing to watch out for is terrible bosses. They are, thankfully, somewhat rare and usually easily replaced except in unusual situations (government or behemoth corporate jobs or extreme nepotism), and normally they can be recognized quickly enough that you can start plotting your exit strategy with plenty of time. Major warning signs are reluctance to fire bad workers, inability to cope with shifting specs and understand that timetables change when specs change, lack of some (formal or informal) employee review process, failure to reward good workers, and excessive or nonexistant meetings.
The exception is incompetent corporate leadership, in particular flawed business plans, which can be less easy to recognize (especially if you're gambling on startups or "idea" companies) and can crash down quickly.
According to Cringley years ago (who was talking about this back in '99) the patent was filed (and a demonstration given to Sun and Netscape separately, based on the opensource Mosaic codebase) *before* Java was actually released as part of Netscape 2.0.
Meaning they really do seem to be first because they predated the first embedded app of Java in Netscape
Some versions of Mosaic supported embedded components in 1994. There were all kinds of papers on how to best do it, but the "plugins" concept was widespread. See, e.g.:
If the printer inside jams, it stops accepting transactions.
Well, I've never seen one jam; but I've seen them run out of paper plenty of times and keep right on running transactions.
I doubt you've seen this with the internal printer. Remember the parent said: "When you use a Diebold ATM, it prints a paper trail inside the box, and gives you a printed receipt with a transaction number that can be matched to both the internal database and to the paper trail inside. If the printer inside jams, it stops accepting transactions."
ATMs will continue running if the external receipt printer jams/runs out of paper/etc. But they stop accepting transactions if the internal printer (that prints the internal paper audit trail) jams.
Most large scale systems that use SSD's to increase DB performance do so using DRAM (mainly) or SRAM based units with battery backup...The units are ridiculously expensive, but far faster than anything you'd manage to get with flash or harddisks
You can get versions in the $150 range that use standard SIMMs, then fill them up with whatever size you want. Definitely not the same as the high-end stuff, but pretty cool. Gigabyte's i-ram comes to mind--it's battery-backed, kind of (like 12 hours completely off power or something, draws from the PCI bus to maintain state/recharge).
I've been waiting a long time to get a nearly silent drive for my home machine. I'm willing to pay a bit extra for that feature.
This seems at about the crossover point from "flash devices are only for expensive specialty use by corporations/research projects/etc" to "early adopters may now be willing to shell out for it". Presumably once they get the ball rolling, production ramps up and prices fall.
This is why I play NetHack rather than World of Warcraft.
oh, and because it's free as in beer, too
Free beer? Pasawahan keeps charging _me_ 225 zorkmids for a potion of booze. Probably ought to ditch the Hawaiian shirt, they're always ripping off tourists...
Perhaps someone can inform me why exactly I would pick this browser over Firefox?
1. Speed. The UI is far more responsive. 2. Memory usage. Epiphany doesn't leak memory like mad if you leave it running for several days or go through many tabs. 3. Appearance. It looks like all your other desktop apps.
There are plenty on benchmarks of MySQL vs. Postgres. The Postgres people seem to dispute these but they show MySQL killing Postgres.
All the serious benchmarks I've seen show MySQL killing postgress for simple queries on small and large databases and bulk inserts, and Postgres killing MySQL for complex queries on large databases and random inserts.
If the government owns everything, you can only operate inside its sandbox, which is a pretty infantile version of freedom.
Would the same apply when a corporation owns everything?
Yes, but even worse. With private-sector money, you often wound up with nontransferrable cash usable only at the company store. Not only did that have a much more limited selection than the general market, but it also had no competition and could set monopolistic pricing.
I've always wanted to see how fesible it would be to plumb an entire house with cold water only, and do point-source heaters at various places instead of a central system. That way there's no need for insulated pipes
This is what they do in Ecuador in most places. Only they use electric shower heaters that mount on the showerhead, and if you touch it and anything else outside the tub, you get shocked. Not a life threatening shock, but a most unpleasant one when you're groggy in the morning needing a hot shower to wake up.
Seriously. You get used to jumping in/out of the shower.
They also do a half-assed job of heating the water.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be banned, but only because that's an inefficient way to do things. RDP traffic is encrypted. Run shoutcast (or some equivalent) on your home pc and if you need to control it then use remote desktop
But then if I'm streaming over unencrypted wireless (very common) my neighbor can steal my music.
Indeed, looking at the vmsplice patch you can clearly see that it supports nonblocking I/O (with the SPLICE_F_NBLOCK flag)4 .2/1399.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/060
That's certainly not the impression I get from Dave Miller's commentary about splice/tee to sockets, which discusses using poll/select/more advanced methods to see when the splice has finished and comments:
Or Linus commenting:
In practice I think the FreeBSD approach probably does have speed advantages in most cases, and the fact that it's transparent to the userspace developer would seemingly be a big advantage.
Why would you say this? In practice, on every real OS that's tried it, real-world apps become much slower with the COW approach when zero-copy is enabled than if they use the old read/write semantics. And in practice, even the guy who proposed it on the Linux kernel mailing list said (in response to "That's a huge mistake, and anybody that does it that way (FreeBSD) is totally incompetent."):
Yea, we're not using it either.
It's a pain in the ass and even if you get it right performance gains are minimal. Because in the real world, people don't allocate new memory for every read/write pair, they use a static buffer. Which means they get the COW fault on every read, unless they do a fairly arcane restructuring of their buffer use.
And without that, it is much slower than just doing a real read/write pair and forgetting zero-copy.
Linus was overly harsh in his commentary, but ultimately the response to What about marking the pages Read-Only while it's being used by the kernel and if the user tries to write into them letting the VM dup the page with the COW code?
should be something like Dave Miller's one-liner:
That's historically how you kill performance.
It's been done a million times, not once with success, and so unless someone can actually produce a system that uses it and performs well in real (end-application) benchmarks and not contrived "here's how it looks if I never take a fault" benchmarks then all the evidence supports using an explicit (splice/tee) approach.
And, in reality, coding applications to use splice/tee explicitly is easier on the end programmer than coding them to use a COW zero-copy read/write efficiently (ie without incurring so many COW faults that it's actually slower than not using a zero-copy approach).
So you can either do a COW approach, put a lot more burden on the programmer to get passable efficiency, and even then have it only be a moderate gain.
Or you can do an explicit splice approach, have it be easier on the programmer, and have it perform much better.
It's a no-brainer.
And they know this how? Aside from people collecting unemployment, they have no way to collect this data.
They do weekly statistical surveys, the two largest being the Current Population Survey the Current Employment Statistics Survey. Without the surveys they would have no way of capturing people who are job hunting but not drawing unemployment.
I've read in many places that the nationwide unemployment rate issued by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts only people who are drawing unemployment insurance, which is not available to recent graduates and which expires after several months whether or not one's best job searching efforts result in a job offer.
This is not true.
In BLS definitions, people are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey week. This includes not only regular full-time year-round employment but also all part-time and temporary work. Also, people with a regular job who did no work for exceptional reasons (vacation, paternity/maternity leave, illness, strike, etc) are considered employed.
People are considered unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.
So the major problem is that people who are seeking full-time jobs but are working even a single hour a week are counted as employed. Less egregiously, if you stop looking for work--say you want a job, but spend months looking and finally get discouraged and stop job hunting for 4 weeks--you're not considered unemployed.
But if you're looking for work and do not have a job, you are counted as unemployed even if you're not drawing unemployment.
It also does not count situations of underemployment, such as an IT professional working at Kroger because local companies' IT departments are fully staffed.
And it probably shouldn't. You don't have a right to have a cushy job doing whatever your main interest is at a huge hourly wage.
I mean, if I'm working as an entry level programmer but would like to be a senior engineer, should I be considered unemployed? Or if I'm a senior engineer but want to be a non-tech manager? Or if I'm a manager but want to be a writer?
The names are standard in crypto texts, even rigorous academic ones.
g raphy
e.g. Alice (first communicator), Bob (Second communicator), Eve (passive attacker--eavesdropper), Mallory (malicious active attacker), and Trent (trusted third party)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_in_crypto
There is actually a substance that gets you almost the same effects without making people as violent as alc makes some.
It's been years since I blazed up, but I never enjoyed it when I did. Just made it really hard to think clearly, so I was basically stupid and very slow; and being conscious of being stupid and slow, it also made me really tense. Kind of like being hammered out of my mind on booze (also not fun) but with more coordination, less awareness of time, and more self-consciousness about the situation (and less headache and more dry mouth the next day).
It was certainly nothing like having a good buzz going after 2-3 beers, where you get relaxed but still feel mostly in control of yourself and able to think clearly.
You want to cure the headache and depression associated with your hangover? A little hair of the dog that bit you will do the trick quite nicely.
For 95% of the world, the absolute _last_ thing they want if they're hung over is a drink. Pretty much everyone I know who drinks to the point of getting a bad hangover spends the next day drinking water, popping advil, and swearing to god that they'll never drink again.
It's not until the hangover wears off at 5:00pm that they decide to pop off down to the bar for a couple beers.
Actually, what he's looking for is Ketamine. Horse tranquilizers. Dry the liquid, powder it, and snort it. The high lasts 20 minutes, there is no comedown, and it's completely harmless
He said short-term. Ketamine screws with your coordination and senses for a lot longer than alcohol, often up to 24 hours.
It's also pretty far from being a replacement for alcohol; alcohol is often a party drug making people socially outgoing and taken in crowds. Ketamine tends to make one maudlin, introspective, and antisocial (often to the point of being comatose). Totally different effect, especially compared to moderate alcohol consumption.
Also, it is _not_ completely harmless; it causes respiratory and circulatory depression and can be lethal. It is safer (not completely safe) when ingested or snorted than when injected intravenously; combining with alcohol, GHB, or other downers is particularly dangerous. Chronic use can cause long-term memory problems, neurosis, and depression. And it's highly addictive.
When used as an anaesthetic for children, it is generally accompanied with other drugs to counteract respiratory depression.
But good luck finding any now, the feds have cracked down and I haven't seen any in years.
Are you kidding? Special K is all over every rave these days. It and GHB are currently the two fastest spreading club drugs on the planet.
Oddly enough, that's why the woman you're shacking up with (if you were) is referred to as your common law wife -- because it was recognized under British Common Law.
Not true. Such a thing wasn't the British common law, isn't the US common law, and the common law marriage rules in the US are quite different from what the common law marriage rule was in British law.
1. Shacking up with someone (even for a long time) didn't cause them to become your wife in British common law and doesn't in the US.
2. There's no common law marriage in the US as a whole, although about 9 states recognize it. The common myth that "if you live together for 7 years, you're married by common law" is a (false) myth.
3. The rules for common law marriages in the US are different from what the British common law rules were.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice; my understanding of the issues is:
In the British common law, if the couple (above the age of consent) expressed unconditional consent to be married, they were married. No witnesses or vows were required. Common law marriage was (almost, see next paragraph) eliminated in Britain by the Marriage Act of 1753 (the "common law marriage" spoken of in modern England/Wales has no legal status, Scotland is a seperate case, and true common law marriage by cohabitation and repute exists there).
British law does have one case where common law marriage can happen--essentially, if you CANNOT get an official marriage, then common-law marriage can happen by the old "unconditional consent" rule; this happened most famously in Japanese internment camps in the 20th century.
In the US, requirements vary by state among the few that allow it, but normally it's something along the lines of if you
1) Intend to be married, and
2) Represent yourself as married to the community, and
3) Consummate the marriage
then you are married. 3) is sometimes phrased as cohabitation instead of consummation, and is sometimes dropped. All states that allow it have some variation on 1) or 2), and almost all have both 1) and 2).
But if you never intend to be married and you don't go around telling people that you are married, you aren't married by common law in any US state.
Also New Hampshire is a weird case, they only recognize common law marriage posthumously (for inheritance purposes).
Again, I'm not a lawyer and could be wrong about the above.
There are games where the virtual environment is the GUI. For example, what options does a player have to open a locked door? For example, what options does a player have to open a locked door? Well, find the key, use magic, pick the lock, bash it in, talk some character into opening it, or sneak in behind someone else using the door.
Spot on, good games don't have lots of obvious GUI options to do specific tasks, they let you apply existing items/monsters/etc generically and combine them or use them creatively to accomplish your goals.
Even in simple text-only games there can be tons of options, most of which won't show up as GUI options, e.g. in nethack you could
Unlock/open it with a key/lockpick/credit card/knock spell/wand of opening
Destroy it (kick it down, take a pickaxe to it, cast force bolt at it, etc)
Polymorph into a jelly/slime/etc and go under it, or into a Xorn/elemental/ghost etc and go through it
Find a way to get a monster to open it/destroy it for you
get something to explode near it, blasting it down
Teleport past it
Dig a route around it
Find a route around it (secret door/alternate hall/etc)
Dig down a level and climb up the stairs behind it
Go up a level and then dig a hole to drop down behind it
And probably many more. Some of those depend on using items that don't seem obviously related to opening a door and certainly don't have any options specific to a door.
No kidding. In the Real World, you will constantly be told to work with somebody on this or that project. The boss knows damn well this is a terrible mismatch. Since you are a hard working, knowledgeable, productive employee and Bob is either lazy, stupid, incompetent or all three, the boss' idea is that, through some miracle of "setting a good example" or "crosstraining" or "peer-peer development", your good qualities will rub off on him, making him a better worker
In the real world, you'll pretty much never have (or get) to do hands-on pairs programming stuff with another worker, since there's generally too much work to be done even without pairing up. Pair programming is limited to hard debugging tasks or delicate core-system improvements or data transformations that really _need_ an extra set of eyeballs and can justify the costs, for most other stuff periodic consults as needed and code reviews try to take the place of pair programming.
Unlike in school, you won't be personally graded as a team either--even average non-techie bosses can tell who's working and who's slacking. And you'll never get in the situation of being tethered to an incompetent partner for a full semester--incompetents are generally let go fairly swiftly, especially because having incompetents under his command makes your boss look weak and ineffective.
Now, your group/division may be graded as a team, so the major thing to watch out for is terrible bosses. They are, thankfully, somewhat rare and usually easily replaced except in unusual situations (government or behemoth corporate jobs or extreme nepotism), and normally they can be recognized quickly enough that you can start plotting your exit strategy with plenty of time. Major warning signs are reluctance to fire bad workers, inability to cope with shifting specs and understand that timetables change when specs change, lack of some (formal or informal) employee review process, failure to reward good workers, and excessive or nonexistant meetings.
The exception is incompetent corporate leadership, in particular flawed business plans, which can be less easy to recognize (especially if you're gambling on startups or "idea" companies) and can crash down quickly.
According to Cringley years ago (who was talking about this back in '99) the patent was filed (and a demonstration given to Sun and Netscape separately, based on the opensource Mosaic codebase) *before* Java was actually released as part of Netscape 2.0.
9 5/
Meaning they really do seem to be first because they predated the first embedded app of Java in Netscape
Some versions of Mosaic supported embedded components in 1994. There were all kinds of papers on how to best do it, but the "plugins" concept was widespread. See, e.g.:
http://maury.bionetlab.org/webrouser/papers/spie-
I doubt you've seen this with the internal printer. Remember the parent said: "When you use a Diebold ATM, it prints a paper trail inside the box, and gives you a printed receipt with a transaction number that can be matched to both the internal database and to the paper trail inside. If the printer inside jams, it stops accepting transactions."
ATMs will continue running if the external receipt printer jams/runs out of paper/etc. But they stop accepting transactions if the internal printer (that prints the internal paper audit trail) jams.
Most large scale systems that use SSD's to increase DB performance do so using DRAM (mainly) or SRAM based units with battery backup...The units are ridiculously expensive, but far faster than anything you'd manage to get with flash or harddisks
m /index.x?pg=1
You can get versions in the $150 range that use standard SIMMs, then fill them up with whatever size you want. Definitely not the same as the high-end stuff, but pretty cool. Gigabyte's i-ram comes to mind--it's battery-backed, kind of (like 12 hours completely off power or something, draws from the PCI bus to maintain state/recharge).
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-ira
I've been waiting a long time to get a nearly silent drive for my home machine. I'm willing to pay a bit extra for that feature.
This seems at about the crossover point from "flash devices are only for expensive specialty use by corporations/research projects/etc" to "early adopters may now be willing to shell out for it". Presumably once they get the ball rolling, production ramps up and prices fall.
This is why I play NetHack rather than World of Warcraft.
oh, and because it's free as in beer, too
Free beer? Pasawahan keeps charging _me_ 225 zorkmids for a potion of booze. Probably ought to ditch the Hawaiian shirt, they're always ripping off tourists...
Perhaps someone can inform me why exactly I would pick this browser over Firefox?
1. Speed. The UI is far more responsive.
2. Memory usage. Epiphany doesn't leak memory like mad if you leave it running for several days or go through many tabs.
3. Appearance. It looks like all your other desktop apps.
This makes no sense. Perl (along with PHP and Python) is one of the major LAMP languages.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/01/25/lam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundl
There are plenty on benchmarks of MySQL vs. Postgres. The Postgres people seem to dispute these but they show MySQL killing Postgres.
All the serious benchmarks I've seen show MySQL killing postgress for simple queries on small and large databases and bulk inserts, and Postgres killing MySQL for complex queries on large databases and random inserts.
Yes, but even worse. With private-sector money, you often wound up with nontransferrable cash usable only at the company store. Not only did that have a much more limited selection than the general market, but it also had no competition and could set monopolistic pricing.
I've always wanted to see how fesible it would be to plumb an entire house with cold water only, and do point-source heaters at various places instead of a central system. That way there's no need for insulated pipes
This is what they do in Ecuador in most places. Only they use electric shower heaters that mount on the showerhead, and if you touch it and anything else outside the tub, you get shocked. Not a life threatening shock, but a most unpleasant one when you're groggy in the morning needing a hot shower to wake up.
Seriously. You get used to jumping in/out of the shower.
They also do a half-assed job of heating the water.
It's a bidet.
And for those who like the Bose look, Tannoy and Energy make small-speaker satellite systems that actually sound good.