I think you are correct in part -- lots
of it certainly is applicable to Unix in
general, and some of the anecdotes give
warnings that would be useful even on
non-Unix systems like Windows.
But the focus is nonetheless on Linux.
BTW the author posted several comments here
under the user name "Real World Linux Sec"
(it was truncated), but not until fairly
late in the day, so most readers of the
story didn't see them...search the page
if you're interested to see his responses
to questions.
The book's author answered a direct question here...someone
please mod this up to at least a 2 or 3 so
that it stands out from the background
(currently it's just a 1).
Now there are so many books it is almost annoying.
Yah, there are too many books in the world!
Burn them!:-)
sifting through all that to get to the fresh information is tedious
If you're knowledgeable enough to already know
all of the old information, why would you even
consider reading a new book? Perhaps you should
be writing your own book.
Oh wait, no, I forgot the "too many books in
the world" point. Certainly wouldn't want to
contribute to that evil!
Brand new, cutting edge, up-to-the-moment security
information you get from various web sites,
not books -- as you surely know.
The writer were even a developer of the Berkeley Unix.
If you're trying to fault him for an allegiance
to BSD instead of Linux, consider that his BSD
work was 15 years before Linux even existed!
Doh!
I went to U.C. Berkeley with the author and have
a very similar history to his (look for me
in the book;-). We both specialize
in Linux these days, not BSD.
And yes, the book is about Linux.
What, you think that maybe if you open it, it
would be all about BSD security despite the title???
Why comment about what you don't know
and haven't bothered to check? Bizarre.
"Postulate" I can agree to, but "axiom"? As in something obviously and nesessecarily true??
The problem is that the terminology of science
and math has diverged from common usage.
In technical parlance, it is now understood
that there is nothing whatsoever that is
"obviously and necessarily true".
One example of this is Euclidean Geometry,
which was considered inevitable and inescapable...
until non-Euclidean Geometry came along in
the 1800's and turned out to be logical,
consistent, useful, and even to be a better
description of the universe's space-time than
Euclidean Geometry.
Similarly in philosophy and math. It turns out
that you have to have some unproven and unprovable
starting point in order to develop any system.
The items in that starting point are now called
"axioms", yet in some sense they are completely
arbitrary, and anyone can use different axioms.
Philosophically the trouble is that, if two
people don't agree somehow, some way, to use the
same starting axioms, then there can be no
successful discussion (formal proofs) between
them.
Thus technically "axiom" means what you meant
by "postulate" -- sort of, but with the understanding
that it doesn't get any better than to have
some set of starting axioms...you have to
start somewhere.
The technical meaning of "postulate" is...can
you guess? Yep...same thing as what you meant
by axiom. At least some times. Other times it
is taken as equivalent to the technical meaning
of "axiom".
The technical term for "educated unproven guess"
is "conjecture". (Or "lemma" if it is
critical to some important line of argument.)
The technical meaning of "theory" is also
quite different from non-technical language.
In common usage, "theory" is often the same
thing as "conjecture": a guess, educated or not.
But technically, "theory" means a conjecture that
has been widely tested without being proven wrong
and is therefore widely accepted as true by
technical specialists in the relevant field
of study.
Thus when creationists say "evolution is only
a theory", they're mixing up technical and
common language. In common language, evolution
is a *law* of nature. Only in technical
language is evolution a "theory" -- meaning
much more than a mere conjecture.
And that brings us to "law of nature", which
technically is similar to a theory, but which
applies to such a narrow and precise set
of circumstances that it can be described with
a single equation, as with Newton's Law of
Gravity.
Most theories deal with phenomenon far too
complex to describe with just one equation,
which is why, technically, people don't talk
about the Law of Evolution and the Law of
Subatomic Physics (yet), and the Law of
Internal Combustion Engines. They're complex
systems.
so you are talking about virtual pair production being behind the tunneling, then?
No, the other way around. Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle says that a particle always has a
range of positions and a range of momentums,
and the more you reduce one, the more you increase
the other. But there's always a range, not just
a single exact position or momentum. This is
not a funny artifact, it's the underlying nature
of what it means for things to "exist".
(Note to nitpicking physicists reading this:
Dirac Delta functions are an abstraction that
do not exist in the physical universe; they
are only approximated in nature.)
The application of this to tunneling is that
the range of positions of an electron includes
the far side of a potential barrier. The
narrower the barrier, the more likely that
any given electron will turn up on the far side.
The application of this to pair production is
related: there's always a finite probability
that the vacuum energy will give rise to a
particle and its anti-particle, but usually
they both disappear again before they can
be directly detected (even in principle).
Due to the odd nature of space-time near an
event horizon, however, one of the pair might
be created on the outside of the event horizon
while its anti-particle is on the inside.
This prevents their recombination, and thus
the particles escaping from just outside the
event horizon are seen as Unruh-Hawking radiation
(there is a related Unruh radiation in accellerating free bodies).
The mass of the black hole decreases in the process,
thus maintaining the conserveration of mass-energy. Spin and charge and such are
also conserved globally, as is clear if you think about
what is retained by the black hole versus
what it loses, together.
Pair-production is not an absolute; it is
one of several ways of describing the physics.
There are other ways as well. Thus pair
production really shouldn't be considered
to be fundamental to anything at all.
(Note: each of these ranges is real; the
electron is in many positions at the same
time, and has many momentums at the same
time, each represented by a probability
amplitude -- square root of probability.
The area under the curve sums to one, always
("probability is unitary").
The old-fashioned view said that it took
a measurement in order to collapse one or the
other
range down to a single precise number, but
that is as bad of an oversimplification as
is the solar-system model of atoms. Atoms aren't
solar systems, and "measurements" aren't
central to the universe, much less measurements
by conscious beings. The new understanding is
based on entanglement and coherence of state.
But all of this is exceedingly difficult to
intuit without lots of practice.)
I missed the "It's Funny, Laugh" icon [...]
I still don't see that icon at http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/VicN2/vicN2.html. Where is it?
They're talking about the slashdot icon,
not an icon at the lateralscience site.
It was posted with topic
It's funny. Laugh.
(icon: bare left foot) rather
than topic
Science
(icon: Einstein's head)
Scroll up to the top of the page you're
staring at right now and you'll see it.:-)
Okay, so you and some others missed the humor;
the site is, after all, beautifully done,
and convincing in tone and style (.e.g there
are lots of well-documented stories about
early chemists badly mistreating and maiming
assistants exactly as Hodges was -- and worse).
What I don't understand is why anyone
would complain about this if it were real news.
I mean, this would be an earth-shattering
change to the history of science -- the biggest
ever! But you say "ho hum, who cares, why are
boring stories getting posted"????!!!
That's much sadder than merely missing that
it's humor.
Two secret cheeses, eh? Hmm.
Must be part of the professional chef
thing. You already mentioned Parmigiano (Reggiano?) on out-of-the-box stuff,
I don't see why not with the gourmet version,
too.
Hmm, let's see...almost all Italian...
Mozzarella Di Bufala would be nicely
exotic. Ricotta would take it in an
interesting direction, but naw, too
different than the other ones.
Mozzarella Fresca is the safest guess.
If it's not Italian, there are too many choices.
I ran into a Dutch Mimolette in France that
is my current favorite (because I haven't
been able to find it here), so that'd be
my second choice. Not that it would be a
perfect match to the others.
By far my favorite cheddar is New York cheddar,
but I suppose that's irrelevent.
(I had a feeling you'd have the
response-notification-by-email turned on, and took
a chance on replying days late...most
people don't seem to have it turned on,
and I only noticed its existence myself
by accident maybe a month ago.)
No, no, a thousand times no. I specifically said that arguing about individual films is completely fine
with me. I do it all the time myself, and I'm not a professional critic. But people who look at
Hollywood from outside-- with no knowledge of how or why things happen there-- and dismiss the
whole thing with a hand-wave are just being idiots.
Oh! So hexapodia are the key!
Skroderiders! Right right right.
Sorry, I guess I didn't read closely enough before.:-)
(Note to onlookers: that's a reference to
what Twirlip said in Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep.)
Seriously, the philosophy of aesthetics
is very very complicated even when one
tries hard to be informed and discriminating,
because then there's the problem of
snobbish-ness, which can cause
perfectly good but low-brow things to be
considered low-quality when they are not,
they're merely low-prestige to the high culture.
Examples:
the better teen comedies shouldn't
be dismissed just because they're aimed at
a teen audience (despite the fact that the
average ones are indeed pretty bad).
I rather like macaroni and cheese, hot dogs,
etc; plain fare and recipes popular
with the lower socio-economic strata
certainly are not identical to high cuisine,
but neither are they inherently low quality.
Every culture has a prestige dialect,
such as Standard American English.
Contrary to popular opinion, this doesn't
mean that other dialects are "ungrammatical";
each dialect has its own precise grammar
which is followed closely by the appropriate
in-group, but outsiders have difficulty
talking the talk.
That doesn't mean that Ebonics should be
considered the high culture prestige
dialect; prestige can't be voted on, it's
an outcome of complex factors.
I used to
categorically dislike country music and hip hop,
then I eventually discovered that both genres
have some very high quality stuff.
Again, they're not high culture prestige like
classical music, but they can have their own
kinds of Quality, either in the sense of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
or in the common sense.
So it's a difficult path to follow, trying
to recognize Quality wherever it appears
without falling into the twin traps of
Uninformed Opinions nor of Overly-informed
snobbishness.
I sympathize with your broad position, but
your chosen expression, well, sucks, because
you're saying right out that audiences can't
critique movies, only movie-makers can critique
movies.
Yet that is inherently absurd. Movies are
for audiences. Percentagewise, almost
no one has made a serious movie.
I prefer the old saying that
"Everyone has a right to an informed
opinion. Ignorant opinions are antisocial."
(Someone will doubtless now explain that
this is a form of totalitarianistic censorship
and how dare I do that, etc, but at least
now it's clear in advance that I think they're
antisocial to say so.;-)
Confidence as the basis for systems
on
Spielberg's Taken
·
· Score: 2
Sarcasm aside, if confidence is the only thing holding a system together, maybe it's time for it to
collapse.
Nay nay! Confidence is exactly the mechanism that
makes many useful systems work:
currency (especially immediately after a transition
away from a gold standard,
but even now as the reason why the
U.S. dollar is considered the replacement
for the gold standard internationally),
banks and banking deposits (consider panics
and runs, as in South America quite recently),
politics (if people lose confidence in
the food supply and think they'll starve,
they'll try to revolt),
dating (just try to strike up
conversations with strangers if you have
no self-confidence:-)
Not the same at all. 24 comes on once a
week, a much smaller commitment than
asking people to watch every single
f*#&ing day for two weeks, two hours
every night.
Back in the 80's, the miniseries Roots
and Shogun did manage to get people to
ditch their lives for a little while, but
they offered something new and different
and informative. Taken is just a rehash
of flying saucer mythos we've already
heard endlessly.
I was however amused; instead of the
usual (ahem) probing, judging by all the
nosebleeds, they were getting nasal-probed
instead.:-)
Subjectively it seems like 90% of the commercials
during Taken were for upcoming 2003 shows on
the SciFi channel -- meta-commercials, you
could call them, since obviously there's no
direct income from people watching them, only
an indirect effect by inducing people to
watch more SciFi channel next year, and
to then see commercials that bring revenue.
What's the economic slant on watching versus
skipping meta-commercials??
For what it's worth, I watched an unusually
high percentage of them. I had fallen
somewhat out of touch with the SciFi
channel and I was fascinated by some of
the teasers for next year.
(Although doubtless I'm a glutton for
punishment...imagine me being gullible
enough to actually look forward to seeing
Children of Dune. They'll punish me with
a poor production, of course.)
BTW you are implying that the Dot Com Bomb
happened due to loss of confidence of
advertising sponsors, but that's not the case.
Most of it was companies overspending without
a good business model (including those who
idiotically thought they could make billions
from banner ads).
The exact definition of the boom and crash
is multi-faceted, so it's also fair to say
that another part of it was an unrealistic
run-up in stock prices (by both professionals
and amateurs) to unmaintainable levels measured
by any means (price to book, price to conceivable
future earnings, etc etc).
To imply that it was a matter of things like
Replay users skipping ads, people installing
ad-blockers on their browsers, Napster users
sharing music, etc, is to grossly misunderstand
recent history.
I watched the full two hours, and I'll watch
at least a little more, but I think it is
simple pandering to the current UFO fad that
seems to have been re-ignited by the X-files.
Everything that has happened seems like it's
just rehashing the cliche'd mythos: crash
at Roswell, abductions, military cover-up,
etc etc etc.
All of this stuff was really old news even
back in the 60's; is the show going to dare
to do anything new at all?
I doubt it, but I'll watch a bit more to
give Spielberg the benefit of the doubt.
Unsurprisingly, each amino acid has a slightly
different bond with a different stiffness.
The DNA coil doesn't curl exactly the same
way everywhere; it curves more sharply in
some places and less sharply in other places.
Mostly this averages out, and in many places
it doesn't matter, but like every other
imaginable property, sometimes evolution
has taken advantage of this.
BREITLING has accomplished a new technical feat with the launch of the
AVENGER SEAWOLF
a professional diver's watch that is water-resistant to
10,000 feet (3,000 meters)
And yes, they say "water resistant".
It seems to imply that helium is forced into
the case at great depths, which they evacuate
through a safety valve. Helium is an extremely
agile molecule, so it makes sense that it would
creep in through the best of seals, but I
was not aware that there was any appreciable
amount of helium dissolved in sea water. Hmm.
The second hit in the search seemed to be about
robustly water-resistant makeup that can withstand
facial expressions being projected over a thousand feet...I believe they're talking about some theater thing, not diving, though, unless diving has changed
really radically since I last went!:-)
those that write the compilers don't spend as much
time on getting good, compact, precise and optimized code out of high-level code. Nobody cares.
Speaking as a compiler developer, who as
a contractor has done major compiler work in
recent years for HP, Microsoft, SGI, etc, I
strongly disagree.
The speed of generated code is very important
to hardware vendors (because it is essential
to the speed of their hardware), to software
developers (because the easiest way to get
faster code is with zero effort -- buy a compiler
that generates better code), and to compiler
developers because they sell to the other two
camps. (Or often, are also one of the
other camps.)
Sure, we all know that programmers in general
don't care about speed of generated code the
way we did back when it was truly critical to
literally count every cpu cycle burned. But
don't blame us compiler guys -- we're the good
guys!
On the other hand, you've a more legitimate
complaint in talking about no one caring about
the size of generated code. If
you check the literature, you'll find that
the almost the only famous reference on the
subject of compilers minimizing code size
was the landmark Bliss compiler, circa 1970.
It's almost never been a concern. (I
know there have always been exceptions to
that, but I can't remember any exceptions
that were famous, whereas issues of code
speed are extremely famous.)
You can't win with just the wrong pieces!
on
Tetris Is Hard: NP-Hard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ages ago I modified Xtetris to play automatically.
I figured I had succeeded when it continued to
play at top speed for a full week without losing.
But interestingly enough, then I decided to see
whether the game was deterministically winnable,
or only statistically winnable -- so I used the
same strategy algorithm to "cheat" by always picking the piece that was hardest to fit, and
then presenting that piece as the next one
for the human player to deal with.
Both when I played, and when my autoplayer algorithm played, we always lost immediately
without being able to remove even one row.
It is truly maddening to get absolutely nothing
but the "wrong" pieces. Even in slow motion,
they just don't fit.
The way to interpret this is that tetris is
unplayable in the absolute worst case of bad
luck, but that it is strangely nicely tuned
so that it is winnable in a statistical sense --
for a while .
But even if it
doesn't speed up too much, eventually you'll
run into a statistical streak of bad luck with
just the wrong pieces, and you will lose!
Guaranteed.
Alexey was a friend of a friend at the time,
and I mentioned this result to him. He said
he was not at all surprised, but didn't say
much else about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are correct in part -- lots of it certainly is applicable to Unix in general, and some of the anecdotes give warnings that would be useful even on non-Unix systems like Windows.
But the focus is nonetheless on Linux.
BTW the author posted several comments here under the user name "Real World Linux Sec" (it was truncated), but not until fairly late in the day, so most readers of the story didn't see them...search the page if you're interested to see his responses to questions.
The book's author answered a direct question here...someone please mod this up to at least a 2 or 3 so that it stands out from the background (currently it's just a 1).
Thanks for putting up the link to the article
I wrote with Bob for Unix Review; browsing
it really brings back nostalgic memories.
Yah, there are too many books in the world! Burn them! :-)
sifting through all that to get to the fresh information is tedious
If you're knowledgeable enough to already know all of the old information, why would you even consider reading a new book? Perhaps you should be writing your own book.
Oh wait, no, I forgot the "too many books in the world" point. Certainly wouldn't want to contribute to that evil!
Brand new, cutting edge, up-to-the-moment security information you get from various web sites, not books -- as you surely know.
If you're trying to fault him for an allegiance to BSD instead of Linux, consider that his BSD work was 15 years before Linux even existed!
Doh!
I went to U.C. Berkeley with the author and have a very similar history to his (look for me in the book ;-). We both specialize
in Linux these days, not BSD.
And yes, the book is about Linux.
What, you think that maybe if you open it, it would be all about BSD security despite the title??? Why comment about what you don't know and haven't bothered to check? Bizarre.
The problem is that the terminology of science and math has diverged from common usage. In technical parlance, it is now understood that there is nothing whatsoever that is "obviously and necessarily true".
One example of this is Euclidean Geometry, which was considered inevitable and inescapable... until non-Euclidean Geometry came along in the 1800's and turned out to be logical, consistent, useful, and even to be a better description of the universe's space-time than Euclidean Geometry.
Similarly in philosophy and math. It turns out that you have to have some unproven and unprovable starting point in order to develop any system. The items in that starting point are now called "axioms", yet in some sense they are completely arbitrary, and anyone can use different axioms.
Philosophically the trouble is that, if two people don't agree somehow, some way, to use the same starting axioms, then there can be no successful discussion (formal proofs) between them.
Thus technically "axiom" means what you meant by "postulate" -- sort of, but with the understanding that it doesn't get any better than to have some set of starting axioms...you have to start somewhere.
The technical meaning of "postulate" is...can you guess? Yep...same thing as what you meant by axiom. At least some times. Other times it is taken as equivalent to the technical meaning of "axiom".
The technical term for "educated unproven guess" is "conjecture". (Or "lemma" if it is critical to some important line of argument.)
The technical meaning of "theory" is also quite different from non-technical language. In common usage, "theory" is often the same thing as "conjecture": a guess, educated or not.
But technically, "theory" means a conjecture that has been widely tested without being proven wrong and is therefore widely accepted as true by technical specialists in the relevant field of study.
Thus when creationists say "evolution is only a theory", they're mixing up technical and common language. In common language, evolution is a *law* of nature. Only in technical language is evolution a "theory" -- meaning much more than a mere conjecture.
And that brings us to "law of nature", which technically is similar to a theory, but which applies to such a narrow and precise set of circumstances that it can be described with a single equation, as with Newton's Law of Gravity.
Most theories deal with phenomenon far too complex to describe with just one equation, which is why, technically, people don't talk about the Law of Evolution and the Law of Subatomic Physics (yet), and the Law of Internal Combustion Engines. They're complex systems.
No, the other way around. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that a particle always has a range of positions and a range of momentums, and the more you reduce one, the more you increase the other. But there's always a range, not just a single exact position or momentum. This is not a funny artifact, it's the underlying nature of what it means for things to "exist".
(Note to nitpicking physicists reading this: Dirac Delta functions are an abstraction that do not exist in the physical universe; they are only approximated in nature.)
The application of this to tunneling is that the range of positions of an electron includes the far side of a potential barrier. The narrower the barrier, the more likely that any given electron will turn up on the far side.
The application of this to pair production is related: there's always a finite probability that the vacuum energy will give rise to a particle and its anti-particle, but usually they both disappear again before they can be directly detected (even in principle).
Due to the odd nature of space-time near an event horizon, however, one of the pair might be created on the outside of the event horizon while its anti-particle is on the inside. This prevents their recombination, and thus the particles escaping from just outside the event horizon are seen as Unruh-Hawking radiation (there is a related Unruh radiation in accellerating free bodies).
The mass of the black hole decreases in the process, thus maintaining the conserveration of mass-energy. Spin and charge and such are also conserved globally, as is clear if you think about what is retained by the black hole versus what it loses, together.
Pair-production is not an absolute; it is one of several ways of describing the physics. There are other ways as well. Thus pair production really shouldn't be considered to be fundamental to anything at all.
(Note: each of these ranges is real; the electron is in many positions at the same time, and has many momentums at the same time, each represented by a probability amplitude -- square root of probability. The area under the curve sums to one, always ("probability is unitary"). The old-fashioned view said that it took a measurement in order to collapse one or the other range down to a single precise number, but that is as bad of an oversimplification as is the solar-system model of atoms. Atoms aren't solar systems, and "measurements" aren't central to the universe, much less measurements by conscious beings. The new understanding is based on entanglement and coherence of state. But all of this is exceedingly difficult to intuit without lots of practice.)
That works for "howsomeever", but m-w.com doesn't think that's a word.
It doesn't seem to work for awe-, grue-, hand-, whole-, worri-, etc.
"...some X years" -- seems like an adjective there. Dictionary.com says "some: adj. 1. Being an unspecified number or quantity". Works for me.
They're talking about the slashdot icon, not an icon at the lateralscience site. It was posted with topic It's funny. Laugh. (icon: bare left foot) rather than topic Science (icon: Einstein's head)
Scroll up to the top of the page you're staring at right now and you'll see it. :-)
My favorite Super Chicken quote!
Which inspired me to find an audio file for that: see www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/5991/sounds.htm
(I don't think anyone who has watched Super Chicken would call this way off topic, but I could be wrong :-)
What I don't understand is why anyone would complain about this if it were real news.
I mean, this would be an earth-shattering change to the history of science -- the biggest ever! But you say "ho hum, who cares, why are boring stories getting posted"????!!!
That's much sadder than merely missing that it's humor.
Two secret cheeses, eh? Hmm. Must be part of the professional chef thing. You already mentioned Parmigiano (Reggiano?) on out-of-the-box stuff, I don't see why not with the gourmet version, too.
Hmm, let's see...almost all Italian... Mozzarella Di Bufala would be nicely exotic. Ricotta would take it in an interesting direction, but naw, too different than the other ones. Mozzarella Fresca is the safest guess.
If it's not Italian, there are too many choices. I ran into a Dutch Mimolette in France that is my current favorite (because I haven't been able to find it here), so that'd be my second choice. Not that it would be a perfect match to the others.
By far my favorite cheddar is New York cheddar, but I suppose that's irrelevent.
(I had a feeling you'd have the response-notification-by-email turned on, and took a chance on replying days late...most people don't seem to have it turned on, and I only noticed its existence myself by accident maybe a month ago.)
What's the brand on that elbow noodle?
Oh! So hexapodia are the key! Skroderiders! Right right right.
Sorry, I guess I didn't read closely enough before. :-)
(Note to onlookers: that's a reference to
what Twirlip said in Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep.)
Seriously, the philosophy of aesthetics is very very complicated even when one tries hard to be informed and discriminating, because then there's the problem of snobbish-ness, which can cause perfectly good but low-brow things to be considered low-quality when they are not, they're merely low-prestige to the high culture.
Examples:
So it's a difficult path to follow, trying to recognize Quality wherever it appears without falling into the twin traps of Uninformed Opinions nor of Overly-informed snobbishness.
But worth the effort.
Yet that is inherently absurd. Movies are for audiences. Percentagewise, almost no one has made a serious movie.
I prefer the old saying that "Everyone has a right to an informed opinion. Ignorant opinions are antisocial."
(Someone will doubtless now explain that this is a form of totalitarianistic censorship and how dare I do that, etc, but at least now it's clear in advance that I think they're antisocial to say so. ;-)
Nay nay! Confidence is exactly the mechanism that makes many useful systems work:
Back in the 80's, the miniseries Roots and Shogun did manage to get people to ditch their lives for a little while, but they offered something new and different and informative. Taken is just a rehash of flying saucer mythos we've already heard endlessly.
I was however amused; instead of the usual (ahem) probing, judging by all the nosebleeds, they were getting nasal-probed instead. :-)
What's the economic slant on watching versus skipping meta-commercials??
For what it's worth, I watched an unusually high percentage of them. I had fallen somewhat out of touch with the SciFi channel and I was fascinated by some of the teasers for next year.
(Although doubtless I'm a glutton for punishment...imagine me being gullible enough to actually look forward to seeing Children of Dune. They'll punish me with a poor production, of course.)
BTW you are implying that the Dot Com Bomb happened due to loss of confidence of advertising sponsors, but that's not the case.
Most of it was companies overspending without a good business model (including those who idiotically thought they could make billions from banner ads).
The exact definition of the boom and crash is multi-faceted, so it's also fair to say that another part of it was an unrealistic run-up in stock prices (by both professionals and amateurs) to unmaintainable levels measured by any means (price to book, price to conceivable future earnings, etc etc).
To imply that it was a matter of things like Replay users skipping ads, people installing ad-blockers on their browsers, Napster users sharing music, etc, is to grossly misunderstand recent history.
Everything that has happened seems like it's just rehashing the cliche'd mythos: crash at Roswell, abductions, military cover-up, etc etc etc.
All of this stuff was really old news even back in the 60's; is the show going to dare to do anything new at all?
I doubt it, but I'll watch a bit more to give Spielberg the benefit of the doubt.
skill these days. I've always wanted to study
the subject.
You may never see this comment. Pity that
people don't have email on slashdot.
See for instance the 8 year old research in:
CA Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann, RMF Streffer, D Larhammar (1994), "Are there any fractals in DNA of living organisms"
RF Voss (1994), "Long-range fractal correlations in DNA introns and exons", Fractals, 2(1):1-6.
The DNA coil doesn't curl exactly the same way everywhere; it curves more sharply in some places and less sharply in other places.
Mostly this averages out, and in many places it doesn't matter, but like every other imaginable property, sometimes evolution has taken advantage of this.
BREITLING has accomplished a new technical feat with the launch of the AVENGER SEAWOLF a professional diver's watch that is water-resistant to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters)
And yes, they say "water resistant".
It seems to imply that helium is forced into the case at great depths, which they evacuate through a safety valve. Helium is an extremely agile molecule, so it makes sense that it would creep in through the best of seals, but I was not aware that there was any appreciable amount of helium dissolved in sea water. Hmm.
The second hit in the search seemed to be about robustly water-resistant makeup that can withstand facial expressions being projected over a thousand feet...I believe they're talking about some theater thing, not diving, though, unless diving has changed really radically since I last went! :-)
Speaking as a compiler developer, who as a contractor has done major compiler work in recent years for HP, Microsoft, SGI, etc, I strongly disagree.
The speed of generated code is very important to hardware vendors (because it is essential to the speed of their hardware), to software developers (because the easiest way to get faster code is with zero effort -- buy a compiler that generates better code), and to compiler developers because they sell to the other two camps. (Or often, are also one of the other camps.)
Sure, we all know that programmers in general don't care about speed of generated code the way we did back when it was truly critical to literally count every cpu cycle burned. But don't blame us compiler guys -- we're the good guys!
On the other hand, you've a more legitimate complaint in talking about no one caring about the size of generated code. If you check the literature, you'll find that the almost the only famous reference on the subject of compilers minimizing code size was the landmark Bliss compiler, circa 1970.
It's almost never been a concern. (I know there have always been exceptions to that, but I can't remember any exceptions that were famous, whereas issues of code speed are extremely famous.)
But interestingly enough, then I decided to see whether the game was deterministically winnable, or only statistically winnable -- so I used the same strategy algorithm to "cheat" by always picking the piece that was hardest to fit, and then presenting that piece as the next one for the human player to deal with.
Both when I played, and when my autoplayer algorithm played, we always lost immediately without being able to remove even one row. It is truly maddening to get absolutely nothing but the "wrong" pieces. Even in slow motion, they just don't fit.
The way to interpret this is that tetris is unplayable in the absolute worst case of bad luck, but that it is strangely nicely tuned so that it is winnable in a statistical sense -- for a while .
But even if it doesn't speed up too much, eventually you'll run into a statistical streak of bad luck with just the wrong pieces, and you will lose! Guaranteed.
Alexey was a friend of a friend at the time, and I mentioned this result to him. He said he was not at all surprised, but didn't say much else about it.