They look at PowerPC running Darwin 8.1 and two Xeons and an Opteron running Linux 2.4/2.6. Why not show the PowerPC running Linux?! I want to see how Linux on PPC compares to Linux on x386 these days!
Hey, that sounds familiar. I did some benchmarking two years ago and it got posted on Slashdot. Of course, people were flaming me there that I should be comparing Linux/x86 to OS X as the "native" operating system, and it was unfair to handicap the Apple hardware with something "not optimized for it".
I'd go rerun some benchmarks, but the fastest Mac I currently own is a mini, and I don't think anybody would pay attention to benchmarks against Apple's cheapest computer. Even if price/performance was a goal.
And you're right, people have thought of this exact idea (I'm sure every other computer major and linguist has, in fact, since the birth of ENIAC--I know the idea's crossed my mind tons of times, not that I'd have the slightest clue how to do it), however actually attempting to do it with a reasonable chance of success? I'm going to say Google is the first.
Language Weaver has been selling statistical machine translation systems for a while.
Their quick glance page indicates >500 words per minute on a minimum-spec'd 2.4GHz box with 2G of memory, though...
The specs for Java have always been completely open. Anyone can reimplement it. The only restriction is that you can't call it Java unless it meets the spec
This is a reasonable thing to do under trademark law; the Java mark would guarantee that customers would be receiving a system that met a particular quality standard.
So therefore Sun has no problem releasing all of its current implementation under a DFSG-free license, as "naji" (Not A J*va Implementation)? I could give you a nice shell script to fix any "java"-related trademarks in that case.
While you're at it, it would be a good idea to renounce any legal action against anyone practicing patents involved in any naji-related implementation, like IBM did in its blanket patent releases.
Oh right. That would mean Sun might give up control. Of anything. And since this is 2005, Sun has forgotten their spirit of 1988: "anybody can do this, but we're going to be the best."
I just wish Sun would try to lead rather than rule.
You obviously have no grasp of economics. Free trade works BECAUSE countries are not equal. A country should specialize according to its comparitive advantage.
Is this a sideways argument for a relative economic advantage for the US in providing the service of violence?
On the short but oil-powered commute home, there was a report of 100 insurgents (nationalities undetermined) in Iraq killed vs 3 US Marine casualties. I play FPS games. Let's just say I don't get a 30:1 ratio.
I'm not really seeing the new dinar in the table of currencies in The Economist's Big Mac Index. Last I heard, the airport Burger King just took USD. (500 bonus points to the first person with convincing evidence they take EUR.)
I guess what I'm saying here is that there are lots of externalities that a naive libertarian may ignore, but that you can bet the exchange rates take into account. Recent US visitors to Europe may feel bad economically, but in the medium term, well...does it matter where the boat springs a leak?
The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world.
I'm not trying to get be overly difficult here (watching Cowboy Bebop on my Mac mini MythTV frontend; how could I, with such a blatant stereotype?) but I have just one thing to say to you:
What the fuck?
The transformations we have seen in the past 20 years have brought all of our fantastically cool toys out to everybody. And that's expanded the scope of digitally available information from "what random l33t k1d5 post on Apple II BBS textfiles" (btdt) to make the authoring of the new Library Of Everything vaguely possible. Even to weirdos who think that cataloging the differences between various railroad market games to the 72 eggheads listed on the Eiffel Tower to groups flailing to understand the etiology of autism. Oh, and lots of sites with pictures of celebrities and NASCAR drivers, but I'm not hip enouugh to know which ones to cite here.
Not to mention the absurdly cheap laptop (dynabook) I'm typing on, nor the self-supporting ideology of Open Source that props all of this up. You too, of course---what software did you type your response into? Even if it was IE, the open standards let you type your words into a program written in perl hundreds of miles away running a giant pile of stuff written by people like you and me as a collaborative effort that may eventually be mentioned in the same breath as the physical cathedrals of Europe.
I think the problem we have, in the here and now, is that the things that will prove truly transformative of the next era are not readily identifiable in the same way that PostScript, Smalltalk, network mail, etc are visible to us today.
Besides, the article summary says the Alto was doomed. Says who? One of the environments hosted on the Alto was Mesa (think Modula-2 or Lilith), which led to Cedar (think Modula-3 or the Oberon UI), which was vastly influential on Java. Which is a language you might have heard of; surely monster.com (heh heh heh) has heard of it.
Oh, and one more thing. There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist. The Wayback Machine is just a start. You trolls: your "only old Stephen Kings die in Korea" posts may be considered a part of the archeological record.
It uses modular exponentation to generate a cryptographically random sector distribution list,... then cuts power to the drive and degausses the entire disk.
50% Informative and 50% Interesting? For such a pile of random buzzwords shoved into sentences like five year old stacking their toys into a big heap, I was expecting 20% Funny, 40% Overrated, and 60% Troll.
Prints the date in same format as Unix date command (default) but unlike the buggy date command this script does take into account the fact that September 1993 never ended.
"our position is that we don't think we have any chance of changing how the 'open source community' behaves. Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples). [...]
Unlike the Marine CorpS, people who contribute to Linux have no special cadre bond. Nobody, by dint of writing kernel patches, implicitly decided to give up elements of personal freedom in other areas of their lives, professional or personal.
What was especially galling here, I think, was that Larry decided that reverse engineering, interoperability, and parallel development is what made a bad apple. Um, hello? You're marketing this to Linux hackers?
If Microsoft asked for this, hackers would rebel. If Sun asked for this, hackers would rebel. And even if Red Hat or Ximian asked for it, you'd see a bunch of ornery hackers getting out ethereal, ddd, and strace. It's just their nature.
Just think if Minix's license said "you can use this for free, as long as you aren't creating a competing operating system". Or if AT&T's educational Unix license said "we can revoke this if somebody on the other side of campus is releasing a free compiler that competes with ours."
My iMac 450MHz is named "style-over-substance" and my mini is named "appeal-to-pity".
Note also that due to network effects, users of a platform have an incentive to find more users for it. If articles like this can convince people that cool things will happen because more hackers will use the platform, this may become self-fulfilling.
And yes, my main Linux box is named "bandwagon", so I'm quite aware that a lot of the behavior of Linux fanboys can be explained this way as well.
PS: Apple's episodes of "we must control the platform" (exemplified by the original Torx-screwed-shut Mac, disappearance of the iMac mezzanine slot, slapping of OS X rethemers, etc) make them a strange long-term commitment for Real Hackers, as opposed to just the digerati.
I'll send offline---my google/bookmark mojo on a hoppin' Saturday night is low. Since you're willing to follow up to such a c.s.a.a-style flame, I'll keep the discrete discreet. (Or I'll post here; your call.)
no copy protection/DRM nonsense imposed on your media files,
From the author of everybody's favorite snow-on-the-workbench hack, I'd expect no less. (Is that too transparent an in-joke invitation to mod up? Guess we'll see.)
However, I do expect more. I want no copy protection/DRM nonsense imposed on applications I've built myself, dammit.
To use any of the Zodiac-specific functions in your app, you need to have it signed by Tapwave.
Let's put that another way. Tapwave can veto the cool parts of any application that they don't like, or any application they're afraid of. And because they have that control, they may have to assert it.
There was one recent case where Tapwave decided not to sign an emulator binary, no doubt due to the fear of a lawsuit from the original platform designer. As a result, that emulator can't run on a standard Zodiac. If Tapwave had, oh, a normal open platform like...Windows 95 then Tapwave could just shrug and say "our users are responsible for their own activities."
But because you guys decided to create a mechanism (yes I know why) to provide an external, third-party control on what software uses what features on MY HARD-EARNED HARDWARE...you now are stuck making sure that you do apply that control mechanism in any way that could keep your company from plausibly getting sued.
And you can get sued for anything in the US (thank god). But in today's climate it seems like you can get plausibly sued for more than you used to.
Before you reply with something like "get the DAA" or "we'll sign almost anything, look at our track record", I'd like to point out that I have absolutely no guarantee that this will continue.
If your company would like to make the above statements legally binding on you, your successor companies, and (god forbid) your liquidation proceedings, feel free. Until then, your company is only entitled to partial credit on the "our gaming platform is open" question.
The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.
The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.
That's not true. The 1541 has a 6502 at 1MHz, and that's from the service manual and the schematics therein.
This clock signal is the reference for the complete bus timing. Its frequency is 1022.7 kHz (NTSC models) or 985.248 kHz (PAL models).
However, 25 times per video frame (so 1500 times a second in NTSC) the video chip needs more cycles:
For this reason, the VIC uses the mechanism described in section 2.4.3. to "stun" the processor for 40-43 cycles during the first pixel line of each text line to read the character pointers. The raster lines in which this happens are usually called "Bad Lines" ("bad" because they stop the processor and thus slow down the computer and lead to problems if the precise timing of a program is essential, e.g. for the transmission of data to/from a floppy drive).
I highly recommend the paper above for anybody interested in just how far blackbox reverse engineering of LSI chips can go, and just how many amazing ways to stretch the C64 architecture have been discovered between 1982 and 1996, when the paper was written.
Most notable, web form generation from meta data (in a well designed way) that can generate forms for passage through XML middleware (like biztalk and some java stuff out there)
I don't know about you, but over the last ten years the term "middleware" has had one reasonable translation, brought to us by both The Holy Grail and the Teletubbies: Run away! Run awaaaay!
What a Teletubby says when they want to get away from something or some event in Teletubby-land. As an actual object, middleware has survived when nobody really thinks it's middleware. For instance, Apache looks an awful lot like an Object Request Broker, complete with the usual maze of activation policies, but it's low-brow enough that almost everybody has ignored this.
Taking that generation of iMacs apart is a pain. The only easily exposed parts are the RAM (already upgraded) and the Airport slot. To replace the hard drive, you have to crack the case open, and be prepared to deal with all the handling concerns involved with servicing exposed CRTs. Putting them back together is reported to be difficult for newbies, especially if they want to keep them from cracking.
I suppose I could go to a dealer, but I've been too lazy.
Another minus of the fanless CRT iMacs is that they use the heat generated by the CRT as a source of air movement by convection. Even when the screen is blank, the CRT is still powered up in order to keep pulling air up the chimney. Bad in the summer.
I'm going to declare moderation victory when my relatively reasonable post gets marked down as flamebait for one joking word, and there's an unmoderated child that says "This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the world would just use English."
For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu
Oops. They meant déjà, and just had to get the snotty accents right. Unfortunately, they fed their UTF-8 text into a web publishing tool that assumed it was ISO Latin 1 or no doubt Win1252. Oops.
The sequence "0xC3 0xA9" is "é" when interpreted as UTF-8, but you can't escape it like that in HTML. Either put those actual UTF-8 octets into your source and declare the charset when serving it, or put in an HTML character reference to the decoded Unicode codepoint.
I bought a Mac mini the day it came out because it was the lowest price for a OS X dongle I've seen, and I needed something quiet. The old fanless G3/450 iMac is the loudest machine in the house because it has one of those Maxtor drives that goes "weerrrerrrowwwwwwEEEERERROOWrrrrreeeoor".
I installed dual-boot Debian testing the day I got the mini, however. (debian-ppc lost my success report mail from weeks ago, so I can't cite precedence over this guy.)
Why install Linux on an OS X dongle?
Because it's probably the cheapest new non-x86 machine you can buy. I care about the portability of my software to other architectures, and I can check them on the mini. Also, it's big-endian.
At some point I'm going to buy a nice Athlon 64 box and run it in pure AMD64 mode. That will give me a sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int) box, and mostly a non-i386 machine. (It's still little-endian, though.) Between the mini and the Athlon 64, I figure I've covered most of the common portability problems, without spending too much money on hardware I can't use for something else like OS X or Halflife 2.
You don't screw around with HIPAA violations. You will get nailed good and hard.
Parent NessusRed writes:
sorry idiot no one has been charged with HIPAA violations to date. settle down diaherra mouth.
...and this guy's at -1??
I'm not aware of any HIPAA violations prosecuted to date, and I'd love to hear about them if they exist. One of the great tricks done by the HIPAA legislation and its industrial camp followers is to convince people that it's scary shit. No doubt the possibility of criminal sanctions helps a lot here, leading yupppie scum like me to pay attention. But the screaming and yelling of those who'll make a buck out of it works some too.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if email addresses, web site privacy policy, and spam were covered by regulations as strong as HIPAA? With major corporations scrambling to make sure their CIOs wouldn't be sent to prison for outsourcing spam to "affiliate" freelancers?
OK, enough of that. I did ace Macroecon, so I have to admit to the possibility of a benefit of inelastic demand for infosec experience in conformance to new regulations. Still, why can't *I* be the one to dig up the bottles of cash buried in the sand?
Too many developers have "embraced" XML by simply dumping their data into a handful of CDATA blocks.
And a lot of people think that CDATA sections are a structural element.
They're not. CDATA is just another way of quoting text. For example, these two fragments are identical:
<b>Here is a < character.</b>
<b><![CDATA[Here is a < character.]]></b>
Many XML parsers will not distinguish between these two. And you still have to do quoting when writing a CDATA section. If you see the string "]]>" you have to emit:
]]]]>><
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go rerun some benchmarks, but the fastest Mac I currently own is a mini, and I don't think anybody would pay attention to benchmarks against Apple's cheapest computer. Even if price/performance was a goal.
Language Weaver has been selling statistical machine translation systems for a while.
Their quick glance page indicates >500 words per minute on a minimum-spec'd 2.4GHz box with 2G of memory, though...
Of course, I'm lobbying to have my business cards changed to list my title as "Principal Cynic".
This is a reasonable thing to do under trademark law; the Java mark would guarantee that customers would be receiving a system that met a particular quality standard.
So therefore Sun has no problem releasing all of its current implementation under a DFSG-free license, as "naji" (Not A J*va Implementation)? I could give you a nice shell script to fix any "java"-related trademarks in that case.
While you're at it, it would be a good idea to renounce any legal action against anyone practicing patents involved in any naji-related implementation, like IBM did in its blanket patent releases.
Oh right. That would mean Sun might give up control. Of anything. And since this is 2005, Sun has forgotten their spirit of 1988: "anybody can do this, but we're going to be the best."
I just wish Sun would try to lead rather than rule.
You obviously have no grasp of economics. Free trade works BECAUSE countries are not equal. A country should specialize according to its comparitive advantage.
Is this a sideways argument for a relative economic advantage for the US in providing the service of violence?
On the short but oil-powered commute home, there was a report of 100 insurgents (nationalities undetermined) in Iraq killed vs 3 US Marine casualties. I play FPS games. Let's just say I don't get a 30:1 ratio.
I'm not really seeing the new dinar in the table of currencies in The Economist's Big Mac Index. Last I heard, the airport Burger King just took USD. (500 bonus points to the first person with convincing evidence they take EUR.)
I guess what I'm saying here is that there are lots of externalities that a naive libertarian may ignore, but that you can bet the exchange rates take into account. Recent US visitors to Europe may feel bad economically, but in the medium term, well...does it matter where the boat springs a leak?
The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world.
I'm not trying to get be overly difficult here (watching Cowboy Bebop on my Mac mini MythTV frontend; how could I, with such a blatant stereotype?) but I have just one thing to say to you:
What the fuck?
The transformations we have seen in the past 20 years have brought all of our fantastically cool toys out to everybody. And that's expanded the scope of digitally available information from "what random l33t k1d5 post on Apple II BBS textfiles" (btdt) to make the authoring of the new Library Of Everything vaguely possible. Even to weirdos who think that cataloging the differences between various railroad market games to the 72 eggheads listed on the Eiffel Tower to groups flailing to understand the etiology of autism. Oh, and lots of sites with pictures of celebrities and NASCAR drivers, but I'm not hip enouugh to know which ones to cite here.
Not to mention the absurdly cheap laptop (dynabook) I'm typing on, nor the self-supporting ideology of Open Source that props all of this up. You too, of course---what software did you type your response into? Even if it was IE, the open standards let you type your words into a program written in perl hundreds of miles away running a giant pile of stuff written by people like you and me as a collaborative effort that may eventually be mentioned in the same breath as the physical cathedrals of Europe.
I think the problem we have, in the here and now, is that the things that will prove truly transformative of the next era are not readily identifiable in the same way that PostScript, Smalltalk, network mail, etc are visible to us today.
Besides, the article summary says the Alto was doomed. Says who? One of the environments hosted on the Alto was Mesa (think Modula-2 or Lilith), which led to Cedar (think Modula-3 or the Oberon UI), which was vastly influential on Java. Which is a language you might have heard of; surely monster.com (heh heh heh) has heard of it.
Oh, and one more thing. There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist. The Wayback Machine is just a start. You trolls: your "only old Stephen Kings die in Korea" posts may be considered a part of the archeological record.
At least as a statistic.
It uses modular exponentation to generate a cryptographically random sector distribution list, ... then cuts power to the drive and degausses the entire disk.
50% Informative and 50% Interesting? For such a pile of random buzzwords shoved into sentences like five year old stacking their toys into a big heap, I was expecting 20% Funny, 40% Overrated, and 60% Troll.
Oh come on, slashdot math DOES work like that.
nop@prentice:~$ sepdate
Wed Sep 4236 17:38:23 EDT 1993
Quoting from the original post:
Quoting Larry in the article:
"our position is that we don't think we have any chance of changing how the 'open source community' behaves. Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples). [...]
Unlike the Marine CorpS, people who contribute to Linux have no special cadre bond. Nobody, by dint of writing kernel patches, implicitly decided to give up elements of personal freedom in other areas of their lives, professional or personal.
What was especially galling here, I think, was that Larry decided that reverse engineering, interoperability, and parallel development is what made a bad apple. Um, hello? You're marketing this to Linux hackers?
If Microsoft asked for this, hackers would rebel. If Sun asked for this, hackers would rebel. And even if Red Hat or Ximian asked for it, you'd see a bunch of ornery hackers getting out ethereal, ddd, and strace. It's just their nature.
Just think if Minix's license said "you can use this for free, as long as you aren't creating a competing operating system". Or if AT&T's educational Unix license said "we can revoke this if somebody on the other side of campus is releasing a free compiler that competes with ours."
A big part of the problem is that they guy that a *lot* of users and developers would like to see run didn't...Long live Overfiend.
What are you talking about? Branden's running.
My iMac 450MHz is named "style-over-substance" and my mini is named "appeal-to-pity".
Note also that due to network effects, users of a platform have an incentive to find more users for it. If articles like this can convince people that cool things will happen because more hackers will use the platform, this may become self-fulfilling.
And yes, my main Linux box is named "bandwagon", so I'm quite aware that a lot of the behavior of Linux fanboys can be explained this way as well.
PS: Apple's episodes of "we must control the platform" (exemplified by the original Torx-screwed-shut Mac, disappearance of the iMac mezzanine slot, slapping of OS X rethemers, etc) make them a strange long-term commitment for Real Hackers, as opposed to just the digerati.
I'll send offline---my google/bookmark mojo on a hoppin' Saturday night is low. Since you're willing to follow up to such a c.s.a.a-style flame, I'll keep the discrete discreet. (Or I'll post here; your call.)
no copy protection/DRM nonsense imposed on your media files,
From the author of everybody's favorite snow-on-the-workbench hack, I'd expect no less. (Is that too transparent an in-joke invitation to mod up? Guess we'll see.)
However, I do expect more. I want no copy protection/DRM nonsense imposed on applications I've built myself, dammit.
To use any of the Zodiac-specific functions in your app, you need to have it signed by Tapwave.
Let's put that another way. Tapwave can veto the cool parts of any application that they don't like, or any application they're afraid of. And because they have that control, they may have to assert it.
There was one recent case where Tapwave decided not to sign an emulator binary, no doubt due to the fear of a lawsuit from the original platform designer. As a result, that emulator can't run on a standard Zodiac. If Tapwave had, oh, a normal open platform like...Windows 95 then Tapwave could just shrug and say "our users are responsible for their own activities."
But because you guys decided to create a mechanism (yes I know why) to provide an external, third-party control on what software uses what features on MY HARD-EARNED HARDWARE...you now are stuck making sure that you do apply that control mechanism in any way that could keep your company from plausibly getting sued.
And you can get sued for anything in the US (thank god). But in today's climate it seems like you can get plausibly sued for more than you used to.
Before you reply with something like "get the DAA" or "we'll sign almost anything, look at our track record", I'd like to point out that I have absolutely no guarantee that this will continue.
If your company would like to make the above statements legally binding on you, your successor companies, and (god forbid) your liquidation proceedings, feel free. Until then, your company is only entitled to partial credit on the "our gaming platform is open" question.
The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.
That's not true. The 1541 has a 6502 at 1MHz, and that's from the service manual and the schematics therein.
The main C64 clock is close. I'm going to quote a stunning description of the C64 and its video architecture:
However, 25 times per video frame (so 1500 times a second in NTSC) the video chip needs more cycles:
I highly recommend the paper above for anybody interested in just how far blackbox reverse engineering of LSI chips can go, and just how many amazing ways to stretch the C64 architecture have been discovered between 1982 and 1996, when the paper was written.
Most notable, web form generation from meta data (in a well designed way) that can generate forms for passage through XML middleware (like biztalk and some java stuff out there)
I don't know about you, but over the last ten years the term "middleware" has had one reasonable translation, brought to us by both The Holy Grail and the Teletubbies:
Run away! Run awaaaay! What a Teletubby says when they want to get away from something or some event in Teletubby-land. As an actual object, middleware has survived when nobody really thinks it's middleware. For instance, Apache looks an awful lot like an Object Request Broker, complete with the usual maze of activation policies, but it's low-brow enough that almost everybody has ignored this.
Taking that generation of iMacs apart is a pain. The only easily exposed parts are the RAM (already upgraded) and the Airport slot. To replace the hard drive, you have to crack the case open, and be prepared to deal with all the handling concerns involved with servicing exposed CRTs. Putting them back together is reported to be difficult for newbies, especially if they want to keep them from cracking.
I suppose I could go to a dealer, but I've been too lazy.
Another minus of the fanless CRT iMacs is that they use the heat generated by the CRT as a source of air movement by convection. Even when the screen is blank, the CRT is still powered up in order to keep pulling air up the chimney. Bad in the summer.
I'm going to declare moderation victory when my relatively reasonable post gets marked down as flamebait for one joking word, and there's an unmoderated child that says "This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the world would just use English."
This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the world would just use English.
Be careful what you wish for.
Wait, this is slashdot, where I wish the editors would just use English.
Oh, I love it when big web sites screw up their characters trying to be clever.
In the second page we see the "word":
déjÃ
Off to view source. It shows:
For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu
Oops. They meant déjà, and just had to get the snotty accents right. Unfortunately, they fed their UTF-8 text into a web publishing tool that assumed it was ISO Latin 1 or no doubt Win1252. Oops.
The sequence "0xC3 0xA9" is "é" when interpreted as UTF-8, but you can't escape it like that in HTML. Either put those actual UTF-8 octets into your source and declare the charset when serving it, or put in an HTML character reference to the decoded Unicode codepoint.
What they should have written was:
For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu
giving
For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu
I bought a Mac mini the day it came out because it was the lowest price for a OS X dongle I've seen, and I needed something quiet. The old fanless G3/450 iMac is the loudest machine in the house because it has one of those Maxtor drives that goes "weerrrerrrowwwwwwEEEERERROOWrrrrreeeoor".
I installed dual-boot Debian testing the day I got the mini, however. (debian-ppc lost my success report mail from weeks ago, so I can't cite precedence over this guy.)
Why install Linux on an OS X dongle?
Because it's probably the cheapest new non-x86 machine you can buy. I care about the portability of my software to other architectures, and I can check them on the mini. Also, it's big-endian.
At some point I'm going to buy a nice Athlon 64 box and run it in pure AMD64 mode. That will give me a sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int) box, and mostly a non-i386 machine. (It's still little-endian, though.) Between the mini and the Athlon 64, I figure I've covered most of the common portability problems, without spending too much money on hardware I can't use for something else like OS X or Halflife 2.
A while back I said to a coworker:
"North Korea is being bad again. What are we going to give them this time?"
His response sticks with me:
"Oh, probably about 15 megatons. You know, there's a difference between nuclear and thermonuclear weapons that they may have forgotten..."
Grandparent bryanp writes:
You don't screw around with HIPAA violations. You will get nailed good and hard.
Parent NessusRed writes:
sorry idiot no one has been charged with HIPAA violations to date. settle down diaherra mouth.
...and this guy's at -1??
I'm not aware of any HIPAA violations prosecuted to date, and I'd love to hear about them if they exist. One of the great tricks done by the HIPAA legislation and its industrial camp followers is to convince people that it's scary shit. No doubt the possibility of criminal sanctions helps a lot here, leading yupppie scum like me to pay attention. But the screaming and yelling of those who'll make a buck out of it works some too.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if email addresses, web site privacy policy, and spam were covered by regulations as strong as HIPAA? With major corporations scrambling to make sure their CIOs wouldn't be sent to prison for outsourcing spam to "affiliate" freelancers?
OK, enough of that. I did ace Macroecon, so I have to admit to the possibility of a benefit of inelastic demand for infosec experience in conformance to new regulations. Still, why can't *I* be the one to dig up the bottles of cash buried in the sand?
Too many developers have "embraced" XML by simply dumping their data into a handful of CDATA blocks.
And a lot of people think that CDATA sections are a structural element.
They're not. CDATA is just another way of quoting text. For example, these two fragments are identical:
<b>Here is a < character.</b>
<b><![CDATA[Here is a < character.]]></b>
Many XML parsers will not distinguish between these two. And you still have to do quoting when writing a CDATA section. If you see the string "]]>" you have to emit:
]]]]>><![CDATA[
This isn't really directed at you, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
Finally got through on the web site. Order placed. Time to find out whether memory upgrades really have to be done through an authorized Apple service center....
2 years ago, it was "if only Apple sold a cheap headless Mac, I'd buy one!" Okay, your time is now, hero.
I'm too lazy to dig out more of my posting history asking for a goddamn headless iMac than this one, but yeah, I'm a hero.
Now, if I could just get the Apple Store to let me ORDER ONE. How many different WebObjects failure modes have you seen today?
Either the Shuffle or the Mac Mini is a big winner---I wonder what the Mini first day sales will be. I'll feel a little vindicated if Apple has a record-setting first day by finally offering a headless iMac.