About this particular instance, nothing. I'm not a U.S. citizen, I don't get a vote there. I do, however, regularly lobby my M.P. in the U.K. about similar issues (especially ID cards, copyright and patent law, the surveillance society and electronic voting; I use the U.S.A. as a source of examples to show how badly things can go wrong).
Now, what is *everyone else* going to do about it? Are they going to get off their backsides and do what you do? Can you encourage them to in any way?
Anyone who reads The Register regularly would know, Otto Z. Stern is a troll, "his" columns are probably not even written by the same person from week to week. It's quite funny watching how easily the Slashdot crowd rise to such obvious bait.
So what are you going to *do* about it, apart from have a satisfying rant on an irrelevant technology website that your senators and representatives have never heard about?
HT is a bandaid for poor compiler technology and a mediocre architecture.
I may agree that HyperThreading as implemented in the x86 architecture is a hack, but I wouldn't dismiss the original idea of HT, as implemented in the Tera supercomputers. It was designed to have hundreds of thread contexts in hardware, so if it has to wait on memory, there will be some other thread available to run. There are enough threads available that it can do without a cache, while utilising the full memory bandwidth. This quite neatly avoids cache consistency problems that can kill massively parallel performance.
The problem with this is that you pay the incidental costs of the actions of the stupid; in the seatbelt case, the cost of the traffic delays, police investigations into fatalities, etc. In the spyware case, the extra bandwidth provision, the extra spam from zombies, etc.
Society cannot and should not try to protect people from all of their stupid actions, but sometimes it is necessary when their actions impede others.
That may not be possible using the technology as described in the article; it says that they use the shape of the limbus to determine the eye's orientation. Many animals do not have visible white around the cornea, there may not be enough contrast to determine the orientation or the eye.
I'm afraid you're wrong. PostScript uses declarative font hinting, putting the intelligence in the rasteriser. The fonts are not programs (OK, type 3 fonts are, but they are generally not used for high quality typography).
The hints available in older PostScript font formats (read: Type 1) are not very complete (H and V stems, plus font- and family- wide BlueZones), but have been extended in the Compact Font Format to include hint masks and counter hinting. There is still no facility for hinting diagonals.
Good PostScript fonts "know" nothing about human perception. (Before you mention Multiple Master fonts, which can have a size axis designed it, let me point out that Adobe dropped development of them a few years ago.)
...they may decide this is a good time to force customers into broadband.
"Force" users onto broadband? Ha! I have a few relatives in the UK who would love to get broadband, and who would pay for it if it could be got for any reasonable price, but BT has dragged their heels and imposed ridiculous trigger levels for exchanges (sometimes requiring almost as many signatures as there are households). Their recent announcement that all exchanges will be converted to support DSL is way over-due; they have dragged their feet on this issue for ages (just read the Register's on-going coverage hinting that OfCom were getting more and more pissed-off with BT). This should have been a matter of policy.
Even now, after the announcement, the more remote relatives will have to wait more than a year to have their exchanges upgraded. The only other options are prohibitively expensive (satellite uplink, there is no cable service in most of the Scottish Highlands).
4) Did your friend disable unnecessary background processes, or did he just do a "full" install so he didn't miss out on any goodies.
And just how is the new user supposed to know what background processes are unnecessary? This is a problem with all OSes, not just Linux. I could probably point at daemons running on my Linux, MacOS X, and Windows XP machines which I don't know if they are relevant or necessary. Even when given the description of a daemon, it is not always obvious whether it is relevant to the applications and services you want to run.
improved Finder
I think all Mac OS X users will agree with me
I don't. I don't give a toss about the finder, because I can do everything that needs to be done from the command line. What I want, to make MacOS usable, is sloppy focus follows cursor, instead of the abomination of click to type.
I'll take your offer of better keyboard navigation, though.
(Though if Britain joined the EU, the Euro will probably take it's place, but for the time being the UK isn't in a rush to join because of it's oil supplies, but I digress).
Perhaps you should check your facts. Britain has been a member of the EU since 1973 (actually the EEC then). Britain is not part of the Eurozone, but Euros are acceptable as tendered currency in many places in the UK.
Umm...how about 42 Up for persistence? That series was started 40 years ago (though they only film once every 7 years). The last installment was a truly engrossing piece of filmmaking.
Since I'm off topic, I may as well get modded down for trolling too...an indicator of a good film is often the quality of the material that gets left on the cutting room floor. I hope this director has the willingness to make the hard cuts when necessary. Anyone watching the last few Star Wars films should be able to attest that floor sweepings don't make a good movie:-)
If you call yourself a professional, then you go to the interview dressed like one. You are trying to put your best foot forward for them not for you. Wearing a suit does this.
I am a professional, and have never had a problem getting or keeping a job without wearing suits. I have never worked with a software developer who wears a suit. Seems to me that the norms of the profession are not to wear suits, and so I wouldn't say wearing a suit is "dressing like a professional".
You won't offend anybody by wearing a suit (except maybe if you are applying for cowboy), and given enough interviews you will insult people by not wearing one.
If an interviewer is insulted that I wear smart trousers and a shirt to an interview, I don't want to work for their company. It means they aren't looking for the right things (technical competence, quality of work, motivation, creativity, ability to solve problems, etc). I have interviewed many people for technical jobs myself, and honestly cannot remember ever thinking about what they were wearing. I would have been offended if they turned up dirty and smelly, but that affects other employees in the workplace, and so is relevant to their ability to perform their work.
One time a friend of mine got salty slush all over his suit so he had to borrow a change of clothes that happened to be jeans. The IBM rep. he came to see refused to interview him, even though he was early.
Thanks for the tip. I won't ever be looking for a job with IBM.
Many applicants came to the job fair dressed in non-formal attire. This is not good. At least, wear a shirt and tie. Don't roll out of bed and throw on some jeans, take the time to look presentable.
Why on earth would I wear a tie to an interview when I won't wear it on the job? I will not take a job where I have to wear a tie, so it is of no interest for an interviewer to see me in one. Also, it would make me feel uncomfortable, so I'd be less likely to make a good impression. One can be clean, tidy, and well-presented without wearing a suit and tie.
The sole purpose of a tie is to cut off the blood supply to the brain.
These why spend money on expensive Nintendo Power Gloves when you could pick up a pair of trendy mittens for fraction of the price?
I have to wonder about a "fraction of the price". I've been on the lookout for a pair of decent trigger-finger or lobster mittens for backcountry skiing and winter climbing. Serious durable cold weather mittens/gloves are not cheap; the OR Mutant Mittens, RBH designs and Hestra gloves run from about $140 to $200 or more. I doubt that the market will bear much more than those prices, even for a heat-pump glove.
This is to demonstrate that you can control the bike in a confined area. You're also required to test on a 400-horsepower motorcycle.
That, I doubt. Race-tuned GP and superbikes have about about 200 hp.
400cc is more likely. Washington state (USA) has a requirement that to ride a 600cc bike, you have to test on a 600cc. Some other states have similar requirements, but WA doesn't reciprocate licenses with CA because California's test requirements are crap (I know, I've done both tests).
Do I think it's a Good Thing? Not really, do I mind? Not really, after all, I'm not a terrorist!
Do I mind? Yes. Will I kick up a fuss going through the airport next time I travel? No, I don't want to spend hours trying to explain my objections to people who cannot do anything about the situation.
I object to being treated like a criminal. I object to being treated as guilty until proved innocent. I object to simplistic arguments of "nothing to hide" that intrude into my life and interfere with my privacy. I object to having very personal identifying data taken and stored in a "secure" database that I have no way of monitoring for security or misuse. Yes, I should have taken more care with my data shadow years back, but I was rather more optimistic then and didn't believe I would be seeing western society sliding slowly into government by police states.
SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
Notice how these types keep saying that this stuff is good for you....
Just where in that quote did either the doctor or interviewer imply that it was good for you? If anything, I would have interpreted And that's rather gross stimulation as implying the opposite.
So do I - don't dick around on your bike with a laptop in a backpack. Waiting for a commuter train in Menlo Park a few years ago, I was doing track stands then wheelies on the mountain bike. One wheelie went a bit too far, I couldn't disengage from the SPDs in time, went over backwards and landed on my backpack, which contained my work Thinkpad. When I finally handed in the Thinkpad, they never asked why the hinges were bent and the case dented...
And it's not like my former school/current workplace use any significant anti-spam tools. I guess it's just a matter of giving out your email addresses wisely
No, you're just lucky. I have an account that has never been used for anything, ever. It attracts about 50 or 60 spam messages a month, probably all dictionary attacks. My main work email address attracts about 20Mb of spam and trojans a week (about 4,500 messages, or about 97% of my email).
Even with those statistics, I do not think prison is appropriate for spammers. I would like to see convicted spammers fined to take away all of their gains from spamming and penalise their anti-social behaviour. I also want to see knowingly paying for spammers to send adverts penalised in the same way. Remove the profit motive to attack the problem.
So, I see. Installs stuff "mistakenly". And what about other stuff he didn't notice? not all spyware stuff spawn pop-ups.
I lived and worked in Silicon Valley during the height of the dot-com boom, and having interviewed many candidates for programming positions, I can assure you that most of them were no wiser, no smarter, and unfortunately no more technically competent than the average person.
Also, hardware is not giong to help solve this, its a software issue.
Hardware won't stop social engineering attacks, but having an execute protection bit in the CPU/MMU would do a great deal to prevent the spread of worms through stack-smashing attacks. It's not exactly new technology, either, it's just that the most popular architecture in the last 20 years omitted it. Other architectures do the job much better.
Slashdot Mirror
About this particular instance, nothing. I'm not a U.S. citizen, I don't get a vote there. I do, however, regularly lobby my M.P. in the U.K. about similar issues (especially ID cards, copyright and patent law, the surveillance society and electronic voting; I use the U.S.A. as a source of examples to show how badly things can go wrong).
Now, what is *everyone else* going to do about it? Are they going to get off their backsides and do what you do? Can you encourage them to in any way?
Anyone who reads The Register regularly would know, Otto Z. Stern is a troll, "his" columns are probably not even written by the same person from week to week. It's quite funny watching how easily the Slashdot crowd rise to such obvious bait.
So what are you going to *do* about it, apart from have a satisfying rant on an irrelevant technology website that your senators and representatives have never heard about?
Because that wasn't a hot air balloon.
I may agree that HyperThreading as implemented in the x86 architecture is a hack, but I wouldn't dismiss the original idea of HT, as implemented in the Tera supercomputers. It was designed to have hundreds of thread contexts in hardware, so if it has to wait on memory, there will be some other thread available to run. There are enough threads available that it can do without a cache, while utilising the full memory bandwidth. This quite neatly avoids cache consistency problems that can kill massively parallel performance.
Base 16. Base-17 would include 'g'.
Neither the QT components, nor Jordy Mendelson's updated version work properly in QT 6.5, and they crash QT 7 (on MacOS X).
a il&aid=1144430&group_id=41359&atid=430388
Here's the reason why:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=det
Nobody has yet fixed them, so Ogg Vorbis is not an option under iTunes currently.
The problem with this is that you pay the incidental costs of the actions of the stupid; in the seatbelt case, the cost of the traffic delays, police investigations into fatalities, etc. In the spyware case, the extra bandwidth provision, the extra spam from zombies, etc.
Society cannot and should not try to protect people from all of their stupid actions, but sometimes it is necessary when their actions impede others.
That may not be possible using the technology as described in the article; it says that they use the shape of the limbus to determine the eye's orientation. Many animals do not have visible white around the cornea, there may not be enough contrast to determine the orientation or the eye.
I'm afraid you're wrong. PostScript uses declarative font hinting, putting the intelligence in the rasteriser. The fonts are not programs (OK, type 3 fonts are, but they are generally not used for high quality typography).
The hints available in older PostScript font formats (read: Type 1) are not very complete (H and V stems, plus font- and family- wide BlueZones), but have been extended in the Compact Font Format to include hint masks and counter hinting. There is still no facility for hinting diagonals.
Good PostScript fonts "know" nothing about human perception. (Before you mention Multiple Master fonts, which can have a size axis designed it, let me point out that Adobe dropped development of them a few years ago.)
"Force" users onto broadband? Ha! I have a few relatives in the UK who would love to get broadband, and who would pay for it if it could be got for any reasonable price, but BT has dragged their heels and imposed ridiculous trigger levels for exchanges (sometimes requiring almost as many signatures as there are households). Their recent announcement that all exchanges will be converted to support DSL is way over-due; they have dragged their feet on this issue for ages (just read the Register's on-going coverage hinting that OfCom were getting more and more pissed-off with BT). This should have been a matter of policy.
Even now, after the announcement, the more remote relatives will have to wait more than a year to have their exchanges upgraded. The only other options are prohibitively expensive (satellite uplink, there is no cable service in most of the Scottish Highlands).
And just how is the new user supposed to know what background processes are unnecessary? This is a problem with all OSes, not just Linux. I could probably point at daemons running on my Linux, MacOS X, and Windows XP machines which I don't know if they are relevant or necessary. Even when given the description of a daemon, it is not always obvious whether it is relevant to the applications and services you want to run.
I don't. I don't give a toss about the finder, because I can do everything that needs to be done from the command line. What I want, to make MacOS usable, is sloppy focus follows cursor, instead of the abomination of click to type.
I'll take your offer of better keyboard navigation, though.
Perhaps you should check your facts. Britain has been a member of the EU since 1973 (actually the EEC then). Britain is not part of the Eurozone, but Euros are acceptable as tendered currency in many places in the UK.
Umm...how about 42 Up for persistence? That series was started 40 years ago (though they only film once every 7 years). The last installment was a truly engrossing piece of filmmaking.
Since I'm off topic, I may as well get modded down for trolling too...an indicator of a good film is often the quality of the material that gets left on the cutting room floor. I hope this director has the willingness to make the hard cuts when necessary. Anyone watching the last few Star Wars films should be able to attest that floor sweepings don't make a good movie
I am a professional, and have never had a problem getting or keeping a job without wearing suits. I have never worked with a software developer who wears a suit. Seems to me that the norms of the profession are not to wear suits, and so I wouldn't say wearing a suit is "dressing like a professional".
If an interviewer is insulted that I wear smart trousers and a shirt to an interview, I don't want to work for their company. It means they aren't looking for the right things (technical competence, quality of work, motivation, creativity, ability to solve problems, etc). I have interviewed many people for technical jobs myself, and honestly cannot remember ever thinking about what they were wearing. I would have been offended if they turned up dirty and smelly, but that affects other employees in the workplace, and so is relevant to their ability to perform their work.
Thanks for the tip. I won't ever be looking for a job with IBM.
Why on earth would I wear a tie to an interview when I won't wear it on the job? I will not take a job where I have to wear a tie, so it is of no interest for an interviewer to see me in one. Also, it would make me feel uncomfortable, so I'd be less likely to make a good impression. One can be clean, tidy, and well-presented without wearing a suit and tie.
The sole purpose of a tie is to cut off the blood supply to the brain.
I have to wonder about a "fraction of the price". I've been on the lookout for a pair of decent trigger-finger or lobster mittens for backcountry skiing and winter climbing. Serious durable cold weather mittens/gloves are not cheap; the OR Mutant Mittens, RBH designs and Hestra gloves run from about $140 to $200 or more. I doubt that the market will bear much more than those prices, even for a heat-pump glove.
That, I doubt. Race-tuned GP and superbikes have about about 200 hp.
400cc is more likely. Washington state (USA) has a requirement that to ride a 600cc bike, you have to test on a 600cc. Some other states have similar requirements, but WA doesn't reciprocate licenses with CA because California's test requirements are crap (I know, I've done both tests).
Do I mind? Yes. Will I kick up a fuss going through the airport next time I travel? No, I don't want to spend hours trying to explain my objections to people who cannot do anything about the situation.
I object to being treated like a criminal. I object to being treated as guilty until proved innocent. I object to simplistic arguments of "nothing to hide" that intrude into my life and interfere with my privacy. I object to having very personal identifying data taken and stored in a "secure" database that I have no way of monitoring for security or misuse. Yes, I should have taken more care with my data shadow years back, but I was rather more optimistic then and didn't believe I would be seeing western society sliding slowly into government by police states.
Just where in that quote did either the doctor or interviewer imply that it was good for you? If anything, I would have interpreted And that's rather gross stimulation as implying the opposite.
So do I - don't dick around on your bike with a laptop in a backpack. Waiting for a commuter train in Menlo Park a few years ago, I was doing track stands then wheelies on the mountain bike. One wheelie went a bit too far, I couldn't disengage from the SPDs in time, went over backwards and landed on my backpack, which contained my work Thinkpad. When I finally handed in the Thinkpad, they never asked why the hinges were bent and the case dented...
No, you're just lucky. I have an account that has never been used for anything, ever. It attracts about 50 or 60 spam messages a month, probably all dictionary attacks. My main work email address attracts about 20Mb of spam and trojans a week (about 4,500 messages, or about 97% of my email).
Even with those statistics, I do not think prison is appropriate for spammers. I would like to see convicted spammers fined to take away all of their gains from spamming and penalise their anti-social behaviour. I also want to see knowingly paying for spammers to send adverts penalised in the same way. Remove the profit motive to attack the problem.
I lived and worked in Silicon Valley during the height of the dot-com boom, and having interviewed many candidates for programming positions, I can assure you that most of them were no wiser, no smarter, and unfortunately no more technically competent than the average person.
Hardware won't stop social engineering attacks, but having an execute protection bit in the CPU/MMU would do a great deal to prevent the spread of worms through stack-smashing attacks. It's not exactly new technology, either, it's just that the most popular architecture in the last 20 years omitted it. Other architectures do the job much better.