Are you looking for the tightest possible compression, or are you looking for "good enough" compression that's fairly standard? Or do you want "good enough" compression that can be quickly implemented?
If you're looking for tightest possible compression, that requires a good statistical model of your data and is far beyond the scope of any answer here. Depending on your data, a good encoder could require far less bandwidth than any generic compressor, but it's highly nonstandard.
If you're looking for something that's "good enough" and standard, there's absolutely no doubt that you should use zlib (gzip) and call it a day.
If you're willing to stray from the standards for better compression, then bzlib generally offers better compression than zlib.
Bottom line: figure out what you really need, then pick the tool. Don't just grab the first thing that comes to mind, or a tool that others swear by but which doesn't meet your needs.
Global warming is incredibly complex - it does not mean that everything is the same except that the temperature is a few degrees warmer everywhere.
Specifically, there were some predictions that GLOBAL warming would cause LOCAL cooling and increased snowfall. The reason is simple - increased temperatures means increased evaporation and increased clouds. Some early naive rebuttals thought that the cloud cover would increase globally, reducing the amount of sunlight and throttling global warming, but more sophisticated models (and experience) shows that there will be stronger "high pressure bubbles" that keep the skies clear of all clouds for prolonged periods. Read: expect more droughts, and more severe droughts.
In the high latitudes, there's been relatively little cloud cover or snowfall because cold air can't hold much moisture. I live in Colorado and can definitely see that here - we get heavy snow in the fall and spring, but in deep winter a heavy snowfall will be 2-3 inches instead of 9-12 inches. Global warming means that upper atmosphere warms up enough to sustain more clouds and more moisture, so you'll see local temperature drop and increased snowfall.
I saw a map of predicted changes over North America a while back. There were small pockets over SE Alaska and coastal British Columbia (IIRC) that showed modest temperature drops, but most of the rest of the continent showed larger temperature increases. In the dustbowl states the temperature was much higher.
Bottom line - the real question here is if this was predicted by the current global warming models.
If you need to maintain a consistent filesystem image across multiple sites, you don't need a journaling filesystem. You need a distributed filesystem.
There's a huge difference. Journaling filesystems write a bit more information to the local disk before they report 'success' to the caller. Distributed filesystems write data to systems at multiple sites before they report 'success.'
This means that one of your key issues is network performance. Locally distribtued filesystems (over a 100 Mbps LAN won't show much of a performance hit, but you're going to notice it if you are writing to a distributed FS with nodes in multiple cities. For a lot of applications the latency is not an issue (e.g., if you're selling commodities and need a consistent time sequence everywhere.), but in other applications the latency will be unacceptable.
Another key issue is how you handle network partitioning. You need to be able to continue functioning when the network is down, or individual nodes are down, but that means you need to handle resyncing the systems.
The good news is that this is possible, but the bad news is that there's not a lot of good free software yet. CODA is probably your best bet, but I've heard some reports that it has some serious shortcomings. I think some of those problems are because the authors misunderstood what CODA was designed to do, but not all.
If you're willing to lose a day's worth of data you would be better off making nightly backups and fedexing them to remote locations. But be sure this is acceptable - there are many applications where any data loss is unacceptable.
I strongly disagree with the claim that blocking outgoing SMTP is mostly justifiable.
Several counterpoints:
1) I own my own domains, and mail sent to them is forwarded to my home system. Naturally I respond from the same system, which isn't a problem since all of my network information is set up for these domains, not my ISP connection. But if my ISP forces me to bounce mail through them, the mail will come from my ISP not my own company. This harms my credibility.
2) Worse, many ISPs insert extra content in outbound mail. Again, that little spiel for my ISP harms my credibility.
3) Finally and potentially most damaging, bouncing mail through the ISP means that they can easily monitor everything that goes through their system. Including sensitive business information. This information may get to my competitors.
That last item is why I use encryption when possible, and my MTA uses TLS when possible. But end-to-end encryption is still rare, and TLS is worthless if a third party acts as a middleman.
Is spamming from residential systems a problem? Of course... and I fully support ISPs that have a "death penalty" clause for spammers. They get complaints showing spam came from your IP address, and you get a phone call and a dead line until you discuss the situation with the ISP. First offense is "reinstall the OS, run virus checkers, etc." with account termination for repeat offenders.
But ISPs can't claim that there is no legitimate argument against an anti-spam policy that requires everyone use their mail servers. This is especially true in the broadband market where many people are paying for connectivity, not "ISP" services, and any attempt to force them to convert will cause massive disruption. (E.g., I lost *no* mail during the transition from @home to AT&T because I always use my own domain name precisely to avoid such problems.)
I don't think they're worried about a Gartner report, Microsoft has been slammed on its poor security record for some time now. (Maybe not by the Gartner Group, but certainly in other PHB reports.)
What probably got their attention was the recent visit from the FBI. Something most people forget is that one of the primary responsibilities of the FBI is counterespionage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how much damage a subtle virus could do on government computers. (Esp. after other countries had sensitive documents leak out with that "I write you for your advice" virus.)
We'll never know what the FBI told them... but we can guess based on what we now know. Every group must explicitly consider security issues, senior management remindning the troops to take it seriously. Maybe this is my one cynical-free day each year, but I really don't see this as an ploy to attack open source software such as Samba. I think they finally understand that they have a serious problem.
But, ironically, I'm now concerned that they don't have enough experienced security people. The corporate culture just hasn't encouraged development of the right skills. Any semi-decent programmer can check for buffer overflows and the like - even automated tools can do that in many cases now - but true security comes from an ability and willingness to challenge the most basic assumptions, to question the most sacred code, etc.
I used to support the Libertarians. Why should The Man have the right to tell idiots to wear helmets? Just make motorcycle riders carry enough insurance to cover their costs when they get non-fatal brain injuries (so I don't have to pay for their mistakes) and let them have fun.
But then there's the impaired drunk drivers (not to trivialize the 0.08 crowd, but I'm far more worried about Bubba with a 0.24 BAC than the 0.08 crowd). They tend to take out other people as well. When they drive impaired, they're at threat to all of us. I don't think we should ban alcohol, but I don't see a problem the state having the right to crack down on repeat drunk drivers because there are documented cases of some drunk drivers who have been in multiple accidents resulting in death.
Taking it one step further, I remember being poor and in college and resenting the mandatory vehicle checks my state required. Then I moved to a state that didn't have mandatory vehicle checks... and heard some horror stories of what those vehicle inspections found in other states. Again, I don't give a damn if some moron wants to jack up his pickup with ice hockey pucks... until he takes it on the road and they suddenly shear, forcing his vehicle to roll/tumble into my oncoming traffic lane.
Now let's revisit the software issue. Once again, I really don't give a damn what people do on their own systems that are not attached to the net. But I do care when I can't use my cable modem because NIMBA a NIMBA stupid NIMBA coding NIMBA bug NIMBA NIMBA left NIMBA many NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA systems NIMBA NIMBA open NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA.
The Libertarians have a point when they argue that the state should rarely, if ever, protect an individual from themselves. And that the state should rarely, if ever, protect people from inconsequential behavior of their neighbors. (You don't like the fact that your neighbors are gay? It's your problem, not theirs, unless they're doing stuff that would be a problem regardless of their sexual orientation.)
But once you get into behavior that demonstratively harms others, or could reasonably result in harm to others, it's a whole new game. Unfortunately far too many Libertarians don't get this.
In this particular case, we need to see the proposals. But there is absolutely no way you can argue that Microsoft's sloddy practices have not harmed many innocent people. If it takes a law to force them to accept that their indifference demonstratively harms others, so be it.
Besides the "it's the taxes, stupid" aspect covered by others, be specific about what you see Linux offering. What services do you see replacing, or offering for the first time? What problems (e.g., software audits) are you trying to avoid?
Finally, have you verified that you can actually have any effect? Many cities have charters that explicitly prohibit the city council from interfering with the daily operations of the city departments - that's province of the city manager.
I saw your other post... and your inability to read your own reference material. (Bill Gates may have announced Windows in 1983, but the very same page says that the first release didn't come out until late 1985. I guess you didn't read to the bottom of the page.)
But as a practical matter, answer me this: how is it that when I bought a 386 in early 1992 or so, it came with DOS 5. I don't recall Windows even being offered for the system.
Yet at the very same time (about a year before Windows 3.x became a standard feature on new systems), I had been developing against the X API for about three years, and I had known about it for a few years before that.
Maybe Bill Gates announced Windows in 1983, but so what? Nothing matters until you can develop real software with it. The Lisa and the Macintosh were doing GUI in the early 80s. MIT and the Athena Project were doing GUI in the mid 80s. Microsoft Windows was not a practical development platform until Windows 3.x, around 1993 or so as I recall, and even then most major applications used their own graphics libraries until Windows 95 (1996).
As an aside, I can run the current version of Debian software on that 386/20. I can even run the current version of xfree86 on that monochrome card. One guess on whether any version of Windows, even 3.11, could be installed on the original system 100 MB hard disk. I was sad when it died.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the X Window System came out of the academic world, so the first COMMERCIAL release is irrelevant. What matters is when other academic users started to use that system, and it was well before 1986.
As for Windows 1.0... I was working as a professional graphics programmer when Windows 1.0 came out. It was unusable crap. Windows 2.0 was unusable crap. Everyone used their own libraries or third-party packages until the release of 3.x.
Pre-Motif X was also a pain to use, but it could be used if you had the display hardware. (VT100s tend to be hard on any GUI.)
BTW, I am not the person who claimed that MS Windows was released in 1983, and "proved" it with a link that clearly stated it was "announced" in 1983, but not released until late 1985. You're awful fast to label other people "liars" and "zealots"
Go back into your Redmond cubicle and tell Bill that you've been caught astroturfing.
1) That site you linked to clearly states that MS Windows was not released until late November, 1985, two years after the announcement. It may have been announced in 1983, but every Windows release has come out years late. Windows 95 was not originally called '95, and it barely made it. Same with Windows 2000.
2) MS Windows 1.0 followed the Microsoft tradition established by MS DOS 1.0. It was unusable crap that satisfied nobody but the lawyers. Did Microsoft release software in 1985? Sure. It was totally unusable on any real system, but it satisfied the terms of the contract and gave Microsoft some breathing room to try again.
And just like DOS, Windows did not become a viable package until the 3.x days.
(IIRC, Office followed the same pattern. Microsoft is nothing if not consistent.)
3) The first commercial release of X might have been in 1986, but that's completely irrelevant since X was developed in the academic world. The X Window System was out for years by this point.
4) For the same reason, X was a viable package by the time it was commercially released.
Put it all together, and you have the situation reported by many people here - the X Window System predates MS Windows by about a decade, and is roughly contemporary with the Lisa and Mac. Microsoft may have announced its windowing system at about the same time, but in practice *everyone* used their own or third-party graphics routines until Windows 3.1 came out... and suddenly Microsoft applications couldn't run on DR-DOS, etc.
Strictly speaking, it's "X Window System" or something like that, and it definitely predates Microsoft Windows by many years.
But you forget about the special place for Microsoft under the law. It can use "Window" without infringing on "X Window System," it can even use "X" (for X-box) without infringing on "X Window System" or causing the slightest amount of confusion about what "X programming" is.
Meanwhile, it's nothing but piracy if any other company uses "Micro-", "-soft" or more than three consecutive letters out of "Windows."
We might think this shows the emotional maturity of a 2-year-old, but we're not billionaires.
I haven't been following it closely, but apparently some early experimental work has shown some exotic particles with imaginary mass!
You find yourself in this rather unusual state of affairs because the mass isn't measured directly. What you can measure works out to m^2 and it's always been a positive number. Until recently, when the number works out as a negative number. Hence negative numbers.
This would mean that gravity is repulsive between two objects of the same imaginary mass. But what's the attraction/repulsion between normal mass and imaginary mass?
Newton's laws get even weirder. Negative mass is annoying - if I push on it, it doesn't push back. It actually pulls me towards it. Push on imaginary mass and you get... what? Maybe it only responds to imaginary accelerations... and that answers the questions about gravitational attraction as well.
This is probably some subtle experimental error, even if the results have been verified at several sites. More data will show positive m^2. Or a subtle error in the design of the instrumentation.
It was also used in the drop tests. The very first flights were on top of the 747 to test basic aerodynamics, later tests used explosive bolts to separate from the 747 and simulate the final stages of reentry.
Remember - up until this time every spacecraft went "splat" when it landed. Americans landed in the water, Soviets landed in farm land... and according to the standards boards Yuri Gagarin was *not* the first man to pilot a spacecraft in orbit since he bailed before the capsule even got back to earth. (The standards require the pilot remain with the craft from stationary start on ground to stationary stop on ground.)
The problem with a national law, with any law, is that it defines "safe turf" for both sides.
If Congress debated such a law, I'm sure that the DMA would yell and scream and "compromise" that it is willing to make it illegal to send unsolicited email of a criminal nature. Outlaw the pyramid schemes, outlaw the cock&tit creams that don't have FDA approval, etc.
Meanwhile, in the same spirit of compromise, it's now Federal law that companies can ignore repeated requests that you be removed from their spam lists because you have a bona fide business relationship. It doesn't matter that this "relationship" was a one-time purchase of a Christmas present a decade ago for a person who's long been out of your life - you might need another left-handed bacon turner some day and if they can't sent you reminders, you'll buy it elsewhere!
Likewise the legislation would undoubtably protect affiliated businesses - the reason I briefly got investment solicitations from my car insurance carrier, until I made it clear they were about to lose the latter account. It will even protect attempts to woo you away from existing businesses - you drive, so therefore you should hear about Fly-By-Night insurance rates. And Bob's detailing shop. And on and on and on....
I'm not saying that legislation would never be appropriate, just that it's too early to do it at the national level. Let's get a clear concensus that spam is a problem, then use the federal law *only* to normalize things like mandatory subject lines.
I think it's time to apply Truth in Advertising standards to spam.
You say your product will help me lose weight? We send a rebuttal picture of your naked fat ass to everyone you know.
You say your product will make my penis gain 3"? We get testimonial from your two mercy fucks about how you need to use this product yourself.
You say your product will get me hot dates every weekend? We distribute a copy of your busy social calendar - with a note that you were stood up for the sole entry, your Jr. Prom in 1989.
And lest we forget it, you say your product will net me $50,000 in only 10 weeks? We show your credit card bills, and how even Miss Cleo has cut you off as a deadbeat.
The best thing of all si that this doesn't really require any new laws. (Well, the suggestions above do, but not the concept.) Don't just nail the spammers with small fines for sending spam, hit them with large fines for fradulant advertising, participation in criminal enterprises, etc.
Star Fleet entrance exams may say this is a "trick question," but you really don't want to use a 1:1 matter/antimatter mixture.
The core issue is that energy, per se, is irrelevant in spacecraft propulsion. What matters is momentum transfer.
Kinetic energy scales as mv^2/2. Momentum scales as mv. So the "ideal" system would make a lot of mass move slowly... but that would require you carry around a lot of mass so you can throw it overboard.
Matter/antimatter is on the other extreme. Lots of energy, very little momentum transfer. If it were a sports car, the driver would be spinning his wheels and burning rubber, but barely moving because the tires aren't gripping the road.
I vaguely recall ideal matter/antimatter ratios being something like 10:1 to 20:1. If you assume the amount of junk thrown out goes up by a factor of 16 or so, the velocity will drop by a factor of 4. However the momentum transfer will be bumped by a factor of 4. You have to carry more reaction mass, but if you're talking about a less than an ounce of antimatter, a 16:1 ratio means a whopping pound of reaction mass.
A more advanced version of this gives you variable thrust engines. If you're in a deep gravity well, you toss in more mass so you burn more consumables but have better momentum transfer where it's critical. When you're in deep space, you use less reaction mass for the same amount of fuel.
The tobacco industry did not "just get tired of it."
They had successfully defended every suit, basically arguing that either nobody knew smoking was dangerous, nobody had proved that smoking was dangerous to their satisfaction, or the "victim" was an idiot who ignored the warning labels on every package of cigarettes.
Then they lost a case. Too much evidence that they targeted teens unable to make an informed decision, that they deliberately made the product addictive, it doesn't matter.
Suddenly they were looking at hundreds of thousands of suits every year from people with lung disease. Their reputation as a "hard target" was in tatters. Many potential jurors were pissed off at their decades of foot dragging, at their use of cartoon characters - Joe Camel was recognized by something like 98% of 6th graders, comparable to Mickey Mouse and far more than any real figure. They were looking at potential liability in the billions of dollars.
So they made an informed decision - something they denied their customers - to settle with the government. One massive payment, and immunity from further civil suits. It was nothing more than a decision intended to minimize their costs.
MS knows that the judgement that they violated antitrust law makes them a far "softer" target than before. They tried to short-circuit the process with a similar settlement, but they got greedy.
Over the past few weeks I've become increasingly convinced that Microsoft is astroturfing Slashdot ("I hate to say it, but Microsoft's XYZ does this and more!"), but this response is so over-the-top that it's clearly either astroturfed by a clueless droid or written by an idiot.
Word processors predate MS Word by a LONG time. Ever hear of.nroff? Or Word Star? Or any of a dozen other applications?
Microsoft didn't invent word processors, or even WYSIWYG editors. Hell, Word was a pathetic joke for many, many revisions - back when there was a true market in word processors Word was an "also-ran."
But Word (and Office) came to dominate this market for one reason, and one reason only: it became mandatory. You buy a business class system from any major OEM, and it came bundled with Word. You could not get a system without it. Since everyone already had the software on their system, the PHBs didn't see any point in paying for a "second" word processing system.
Unless they actually have to deal with text for a living. E.g., I think most lawyers still use Word Perfect.
Fortunately, none of this matters since your world apparently started in the mid-90s when the last of the legacy competing tools became "also rans." That allows you to pretend that Office has no competition, and has never had any competition, than a few unnamed emacs knockoffs.
Here's a clue - the competition to Office isn't emacs, it's emacs + docbook + SGML processing tools. Office wins the "hello world!" competition, but my experience maintaining 50+ page technical documents is that DocBook is FAR easier to use than Office. Office is WYSIWYG, but it's terminal technology. Information goes in, but then it can't be processed by anything other than Office or Office add-ins. Docbook doesn't give me immediate feedback on what it will look like on the paper, but I can use any XML processing tool in the world to extract information from that document, to fold in additional information from outside, to scan the text for all uses of registered trademarks, etc. In the real world, that saves me *far* more time than the time I lose compiling DocBook to HTML or PS for review of the formatted material.
The thing about hashes is that they're one-way functions, you have to have a copy of every possible message and its hash.
If you send *only* 16-byte messages, no larger, no smaller, that's 2^(8*16) = 2^128 possible messages. Each message is 16 bytes, so 2^132 bytes, or 5.4e39 bytes. Oops, twice that since you need to store what each message transform to, so call it an even 1e40 bytes.
Let's say a 100GB = 1e11 disk costs $100=1e2 in volume today. You'll need only 1e40/1e11 = 1e29 disks, costing a low, low $1e31. That's
$10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I will leave other considerations - where will you store these disks, how will you power them, etc., as an exercise for the reader.
Fortunately, the sum total of all bit patterns of less than 16 bytes is the same. (Ignoring the storage requirements for the hashed value, I assume you'll create a 'bin' for each hash value.) Unforutnately, the price doubles again as you add each bit.
A second exercise for the reader: how may bits can you handle before you need more storage requirements than number of atoms in the earth? I haven't done the math, but I doubt it's more than a hundred bytes or so.
There are many possible cost metrics. One puts the most value in the most commonly used cases - if 99% of all users are local, focus on them and drop remote users.
Another valid metric tries to minimize the cost of the legitimate, but rare, users. Network transparency has a small cost, but it's critical for the people who need it.
Yet another valid metric tries to minimize the cost of development. It is extremely cheap to develop X Windows applications in the sense that the API I learned a decade ago is still in use today. Motif has come and gone, and there are now several additional toolkits, but it's nothing like the mishmash that Microsoft has produced in the same period.
(On a similar note, compare how little C has changed between K&R C to ANSI C9X, vs. the massive changes Visual Basic has repeatedly suffered in far less time.)
Yet another metric tries to minimize the cost of developing new drivers. The X wire protocol is well documented, and anyone who develops a driver that speaks it (as either client or server) can be confident that their code can be widely used. Non-wire protocols tend to mutate far more quickly, either decimating the potential user base or driving up development costs.
Put it all together, and the costs of network transparency are outweighed by its many benefits for all but the most demanding local users. And even they gain from it, albeit in more subtle ways.
Is X perfect? Of course not, but many of the "flaws" were actually design goals for long-gone hardware. When was the last time you used a monochrome dumb terminal? The wire protocols need to be extended to reflect the fact that commodity PC prices are now far lower than dumb terminal prices - use the power of those systems! But the key word there is extending the protocols, not replacing them. E.g., make the font system more flexible.
But at the same time, at least once a month I find I need to run an X session remotely, and I can do that from both Unix and Windows boxes. I have never been able to run Windows remotely, although I've heard that BackOrifice is pretty good for that.
MS Word is about the worst tool around for writers.
The problem is that it forces, FORCES, you to deal with presentation issues at all times. When I'm writing, I want to focus on the content. How is the material broken down into major sections, into chapters, into topics? What information needs to be presented before a new topic will make sense? What topics will be treated as reference material, needing easy lookup?
This is hard enough to do with regular interruptions, but with text it's possible. I write an outline, DocBookify it, then write straight text within it while using minimal tags. When I'm happy with the content, I work on presentation (and usually loop between them a few times.)
But Word is so damn helpful that I'm constantly interrupted. I mispelled a wrod or two, gotta fix it NOW. Esp. with the increasingly intrusive "autocorrection" that insists on "fixing" things. (And don't get me started on it's ideas of what a properly formed URL looks like, never mind the RFCs.) There's the issues around the Redmondian English. My grammar isn't perfect, but highly technical material often requires extremely complex sentences to adequately convey the nuances. Green lines are another distraction. Then there's the whole issue of lists, tables, indentations, etc. sucking your attention because you're forced to deal with presentation before you're entirely sure what's going into them. (Two tables or three? What drives columns, what drives rows?)
Is it any wonder I, and many other people, find Word documents to be unusually vacuous? Not every text document in a Jon Postel RFC, of course, but there seems to be a direct correlation between the meat in a document and its original format. Straight text seem to be written to HS or college level, Word documents seem to be written to Jr High level at most. The problem is the polish - Word documents often strike me as first or second drafts, not finished documents. But they sure are pretty.
The overpriced chain has sued a number of small restaurants in mining towns for trademark infringement, even though the mining town restaurants usually predated the "victims" by many decades.
The chain, having deep pockets, usually won by simply outspending the Mom&Pop restaurants in economically depressed towns. But I don't think it ever won in a case where the owner had the resources to force the issue into court. After all, these cafes took their name from "hard rock mining" (as opposed to "white metal mining," soft metal mining, et al.)
Since the restaurants didn't have a federal trademark on the term they couldn't stop the chain from using the same name, but they never sought that. But since the restaurants didn't engage in interstate commerce and clearly predated the national chain, the chain couldn't force the restaurants to change their name.
Slashdot Mirror
Define "best," as in "best" option.
Are you looking for the tightest possible compression, or are you looking for "good enough" compression that's fairly standard? Or do you want "good enough" compression that can be quickly implemented?
If you're looking for tightest possible compression, that requires a good statistical model of your data and is far beyond the scope of any answer here. Depending on your data, a good encoder could require far less bandwidth than any generic compressor, but it's highly nonstandard.
If you're looking for something that's "good enough" and standard, there's absolutely no doubt that you should use zlib (gzip) and call it a day.
If you're willing to stray from the standards for better compression, then bzlib generally offers better compression than zlib.
Bottom line: figure out what you really need, then pick the tool. Don't just grab the first thing that comes to mind, or a tool that others swear by but which doesn't meet your needs.
Global warming is incredibly complex - it does not mean that everything is the same except that the temperature is a few degrees warmer everywhere.
Specifically, there were some predictions that GLOBAL warming would cause LOCAL cooling and increased snowfall. The reason is simple - increased temperatures means increased evaporation and increased clouds. Some early naive rebuttals thought that the cloud cover would increase globally, reducing the amount of sunlight and throttling global warming, but more sophisticated models (and experience) shows that there will be stronger "high pressure bubbles" that keep the skies clear of all clouds for prolonged periods. Read: expect more droughts, and more severe droughts.
In the high latitudes, there's been relatively little cloud cover or snowfall because cold air can't hold much moisture. I live in Colorado and can definitely see that here - we get heavy snow in the fall and spring, but in deep winter a heavy snowfall will be 2-3 inches instead of 9-12 inches. Global warming means that upper atmosphere warms up enough to sustain more clouds and more moisture, so you'll see local temperature drop and increased snowfall.
I saw a map of predicted changes over North America a while back. There were small pockets over SE Alaska and coastal British Columbia (IIRC) that showed modest temperature drops, but most of the rest of the continent showed larger temperature increases. In the dustbowl states the temperature was much higher.
Bottom line - the real question here is if this was predicted by the current global warming models.
You're asking the wrong question
If you need to maintain a consistent filesystem image across multiple sites, you don't need a journaling filesystem. You need a distributed filesystem.
There's a huge difference. Journaling filesystems write a bit more information to the local disk before they report 'success' to the caller. Distributed filesystems write data to systems at multiple sites before they report 'success.'
This means that one of your key issues is network performance. Locally distribtued filesystems (over a 100 Mbps LAN won't show much of a performance hit, but you're going to notice it if you are writing to a distributed FS with nodes in multiple cities. For a lot of applications the latency is not an issue (e.g., if you're selling commodities and need a consistent time sequence everywhere.), but in other applications the latency will be unacceptable.
Another key issue is how you handle network partitioning. You need to be able to continue functioning when the network is down, or individual nodes are down, but that means you need to handle resyncing the systems.
The good news is that this is possible, but the bad news is that there's not a lot of good free software yet. CODA is probably your best bet, but I've heard some reports that it has some serious shortcomings. I think some of those problems are because the authors misunderstood what CODA was designed to do, but not all.
If you're willing to lose a day's worth of data you would be better off making nightly backups and fedexing them to remote locations. But be sure this is acceptable - there are many applications where any data loss is unacceptable.
I strongly disagree with the claim that blocking outgoing SMTP is mostly justifiable.
Several counterpoints:
1) I own my own domains, and mail sent to them is forwarded to my home system. Naturally I respond from the same system, which isn't a problem since all of my network information is set up for these domains, not my ISP connection. But if my ISP forces me to bounce mail through them, the mail will come from my ISP not my own company. This harms my credibility.
2) Worse, many ISPs insert extra content in outbound mail. Again, that little spiel for my ISP harms my credibility.
3) Finally and potentially most damaging, bouncing mail through the ISP means that they can easily monitor everything that goes through their system. Including sensitive business information. This information may get to my competitors.
That last item is why I use encryption when possible, and my MTA uses TLS when possible. But end-to-end encryption is still rare, and TLS is worthless if a third party acts as a middleman.
Is spamming from residential systems a problem? Of course... and I fully support ISPs that have a "death penalty" clause for spammers. They get complaints showing spam came from your IP address, and you get a phone call and a dead line until you discuss the situation with the ISP. First offense is "reinstall the OS, run virus checkers, etc." with account termination for repeat offenders.
But ISPs can't claim that there is no legitimate argument against an anti-spam policy that requires everyone use their mail servers. This is especially true in the broadband market where many people are paying for connectivity, not "ISP" services, and any attempt to force them to convert will cause massive disruption. (E.g., I lost *no* mail during the transition from @home to AT&T because I always use my own domain name precisely to avoid such problems.)
I don't think they're worried about a Gartner report, Microsoft has been slammed on its poor security record for some time now. (Maybe not by the Gartner Group, but certainly in other PHB reports.)
What probably got their attention was the recent visit from the FBI. Something most people forget is that one of the primary responsibilities of the FBI is counterespionage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how much damage a subtle virus could do on government computers. (Esp. after other countries had sensitive documents leak out with that "I write you for your advice" virus.)
We'll never know what the FBI told them... but we can guess based on what we now know. Every group must explicitly consider security issues, senior management remindning the troops to take it seriously. Maybe this is my one cynical-free day each year, but I really don't see this as an ploy to attack open source software such as Samba. I think they finally understand that they have a serious problem.
But, ironically, I'm now concerned that they don't have enough experienced security people. The corporate culture just hasn't encouraged development of the right skills. Any semi-decent programmer can check for buffer overflows and the like - even automated tools can do that in many cases now - but true security comes from an ability and willingness to challenge the most basic assumptions, to question the most sacred code, etc.
I used to support the Libertarians. Why should The Man have the right to tell idiots to wear helmets? Just make motorcycle riders carry enough insurance to cover their costs when they get non-fatal brain injuries (so I don't have to pay for their mistakes) and let them have fun.
But then there's the impaired drunk drivers (not to trivialize the 0.08 crowd, but I'm far more worried about Bubba with a 0.24 BAC than the 0.08 crowd). They tend to take out other people as well. When they drive impaired, they're at threat to all of us. I don't think we should ban alcohol, but I don't see a problem the state having the right to crack down on repeat drunk drivers because there are documented cases of some drunk drivers who have been in multiple accidents resulting in death.
Taking it one step further, I remember being poor and in college and resenting the mandatory vehicle checks my state required. Then I moved to a state that didn't have mandatory vehicle checks... and heard some horror stories of what those vehicle inspections found in other states. Again, I don't give a damn if some moron wants to jack up his pickup with ice hockey pucks... until he takes it on the road and they suddenly shear, forcing his vehicle to roll/tumble into my oncoming traffic lane.
Now let's revisit the software issue. Once again, I really don't give a damn what people do on their own systems that are not attached to the net. But I do care when I can't use my cable modem because NIMBA a NIMBA stupid NIMBA coding NIMBA bug NIMBA NIMBA left NIMBA many NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA systems NIMBA NIMBA open NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA NIMBA.
The Libertarians have a point when they argue that the state should rarely, if ever, protect an individual from themselves. And that the state should rarely, if ever, protect people from inconsequential behavior of their neighbors. (You don't like the fact that your neighbors are gay? It's your problem, not theirs, unless they're doing stuff that would be a problem regardless of their sexual orientation.)
But once you get into behavior that demonstratively harms others, or could reasonably result in harm to others, it's a whole new game. Unfortunately far too many Libertarians don't get this.
In this particular case, we need to see the proposals. But there is absolutely no way you can argue that Microsoft's sloddy practices have not harmed many innocent people. If it takes a law to force them to accept that their indifference demonstratively harms others, so be it.
Besides the "it's the taxes, stupid" aspect covered by others, be specific about what you see Linux offering. What services do you see replacing, or offering for the first time? What problems (e.g., software audits) are you trying to avoid?
Finally, have you verified that you can actually have any effect? Many cities have charters that explicitly prohibit the city council from interfering with the daily operations of the city departments - that's province of the city manager.
I saw your other post... and your inability to read your own reference material. (Bill Gates may have announced Windows in 1983, but the very same page says that the first release didn't come out until late 1985. I guess you didn't read to the bottom of the page.)
But as a practical matter, answer me this: how is it that when I bought a 386 in early 1992 or so, it came with DOS 5. I don't recall Windows even being offered for the system.
Yet at the very same time (about a year before Windows 3.x became a standard feature on new systems), I had been developing against the X API for about three years, and I had known about it for a few years before that.
Maybe Bill Gates announced Windows in 1983, but so what? Nothing matters until you can develop real software with it. The Lisa and the Macintosh were doing GUI in the early 80s. MIT and the Athena Project were doing GUI in the mid 80s. Microsoft Windows was not a practical development platform until Windows 3.x, around 1993 or so as I recall, and even then most major applications used their own graphics libraries until Windows 95 (1996).
As an aside, I can run the current version of Debian software on that 386/20. I can even run the current version of xfree86 on that monochrome card. One guess on whether any version of Windows, even 3.11, could be installed on the original system 100 MB hard disk. I was sad when it died.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the X Window System came out of the academic world, so the first COMMERCIAL release is irrelevant. What matters is when other academic users started to use that system, and it was well before 1986.
As for Windows 1.0... I was working as a professional graphics programmer when Windows 1.0 came out. It was unusable crap. Windows 2.0 was unusable crap. Everyone used their own libraries or third-party packages until the release of 3.x.
Pre-Motif X was also a pain to use, but it could be used if you had the display hardware. (VT100s tend to be hard on any GUI.)
BTW, I am not the person who claimed that MS Windows was released in 1983, and "proved" it with a link that clearly stated it was "announced" in 1983, but not released until late 1985. You're awful fast to label other people "liars" and "zealots"
Go back into your Redmond cubicle and tell Bill that you've been caught astroturfing.
Statistics lie, and you just told some whoopers.
1) That site you linked to clearly states that MS Windows was not released until late November, 1985, two years after the announcement. It may have been announced in 1983, but every Windows release has come out years late. Windows 95 was not originally called '95, and it barely made it. Same with Windows 2000.
2) MS Windows 1.0 followed the Microsoft tradition established by MS DOS 1.0. It was unusable crap that satisfied nobody but the lawyers. Did Microsoft release software in 1985? Sure. It was totally unusable on any real system, but it satisfied the terms of the contract and gave Microsoft some breathing room to try again.
And just like DOS, Windows did not become a viable package until the 3.x days.
(IIRC, Office followed the same pattern. Microsoft is nothing if not consistent.)
3) The first commercial release of X might have been in 1986, but that's completely irrelevant since X was developed in the academic world. The X Window System was out for years by this point.
4) For the same reason, X was a viable package by the time it was commercially released.
Put it all together, and you have the situation reported by many people here - the X Window System predates MS Windows by about a decade, and is roughly contemporary with the Lisa and Mac. Microsoft may have announced its windowing system at about the same time, but in practice *everyone* used their own or third-party graphics routines until Windows 3.1 came out... and suddenly Microsoft applications couldn't run on DR-DOS, etc.
Strictly speaking, it's "X Window System" or something like that, and it definitely predates Microsoft Windows by many years.
But you forget about the special place for Microsoft under the law. It can use "Window" without infringing on "X Window System," it can even use "X" (for X-box) without infringing on "X Window System" or causing the slightest amount of confusion about what "X programming" is.
Meanwhile, it's nothing but piracy if any other company uses "Micro-", "-soft" or more than three consecutive letters out of "Windows."
We might think this shows the emotional maturity of a 2-year-old, but we're not billionaires.
I haven't been following it closely, but apparently some early experimental work has shown some exotic particles with imaginary mass!
You find yourself in this rather unusual state of affairs because the mass isn't measured directly. What you can measure works out to m^2 and it's always been a positive number. Until recently, when the number works out as a negative number. Hence negative numbers.
This would mean that gravity is repulsive between two objects of the same imaginary mass. But what's the attraction/repulsion between normal mass and imaginary mass?
Newton's laws get even weirder. Negative mass is annoying - if I push on it, it doesn't push back. It actually pulls me towards it. Push on imaginary mass and you get... what? Maybe it only responds to imaginary accelerations... and that answers the questions about gravitational attraction as well.
This is probably some subtle experimental error, even if the results have been verified at several sites. More data will show positive m^2. Or a subtle error in the design of the instrumentation.
Yet....
It was also used in the drop tests. The very first flights were on top of the 747 to test basic aerodynamics, later tests used explosive bolts to separate from the 747 and simulate the final stages of reentry.
Remember - up until this time every spacecraft went "splat" when it landed. Americans landed in the water, Soviets landed in farm land... and according to the standards boards Yuri Gagarin was *not* the first man to pilot a spacecraft in orbit since he bailed before the capsule even got back to earth. (The standards require the pilot remain with the craft from stationary start on ground to stationary stop on ground.)
The problem with a national law, with any law, is that it defines "safe turf" for both sides.
If Congress debated such a law, I'm sure that the DMA would yell and scream and "compromise" that it is willing to make it illegal to send unsolicited email of a criminal nature. Outlaw the pyramid schemes, outlaw the cock&tit creams that don't have FDA approval, etc.
Meanwhile, in the same spirit of compromise, it's now Federal law that companies can ignore repeated requests that you be removed from their spam lists because you have a bona fide business relationship. It doesn't matter that this "relationship" was a one-time purchase of a Christmas present a decade ago for a person who's long been out of your life - you might need another left-handed bacon turner some day and if they can't sent you reminders, you'll buy it elsewhere!
Likewise the legislation would undoubtably protect affiliated businesses - the reason I briefly got investment solicitations from my car insurance carrier, until I made it clear they were about to lose the latter account. It will even protect attempts to woo you away from existing businesses - you drive, so therefore you should hear about Fly-By-Night insurance rates. And Bob's detailing shop. And on and on and on....
I'm not saying that legislation would never be appropriate, just that it's too early to do it at the national level. Let's get a clear concensus that spam is a problem, then use the federal law *only* to normalize things like mandatory subject lines.
I think it's time to apply Truth in Advertising standards to spam.
You say your product will help me lose weight? We send a rebuttal picture of your naked fat ass to everyone you know.
You say your product will make my penis gain 3"? We get testimonial from your two mercy fucks about how you need to use this product yourself.
You say your product will get me hot dates every weekend? We distribute a copy of your busy social calendar - with a note that you were stood up for the sole entry, your Jr. Prom in 1989.
And lest we forget it, you say your product will net me $50,000 in only 10 weeks? We show your credit card bills, and how even Miss Cleo has cut you off as a deadbeat.
The best thing of all si that this doesn't really require any new laws. (Well, the suggestions above do, but not the concept.) Don't just nail the spammers with small fines for sending spam, hit them with large fines for fradulant advertising, participation in criminal enterprises, etc.
Star Fleet entrance exams may say this is a "trick question," but you really don't want to use a 1:1 matter/antimatter mixture.
The core issue is that energy, per se, is irrelevant in spacecraft propulsion. What matters is momentum transfer.
Kinetic energy scales as mv^2/2. Momentum scales as mv. So the "ideal" system would make a lot of mass move slowly... but that would require you carry around a lot of mass so you can throw it overboard.
Matter/antimatter is on the other extreme. Lots of energy, very little momentum transfer. If it were a sports car, the driver would be spinning his wheels and burning rubber, but barely moving because the tires aren't gripping the road.
I vaguely recall ideal matter/antimatter ratios being something like 10:1 to 20:1. If you assume the amount of junk thrown out goes up by a factor of 16 or so, the velocity will drop by a factor of 4. However the momentum transfer will be bumped by a factor of 4. You have to carry more reaction mass, but if you're talking about a less than an ounce of antimatter, a 16:1 ratio means a whopping pound of reaction mass.
A more advanced version of this gives you variable thrust engines. If you're in a deep gravity well, you toss in more mass so you burn more consumables but have better momentum transfer where it's critical. When you're in deep space, you use less reaction mass for the same amount of fuel.
I thought MSC (and maybe MSVC) had that clause. It might have been common, albeit silly, practice at the time.
The tobacco industry did not "just get tired of it."
They had successfully defended every suit, basically arguing that either nobody knew smoking was dangerous, nobody had proved that smoking was dangerous to their satisfaction, or the "victim" was an idiot who ignored the warning labels on every package of cigarettes.
Then they lost a case. Too much evidence that they targeted teens unable to make an informed decision, that they deliberately made the product addictive, it doesn't matter.
Suddenly they were looking at hundreds of thousands of suits every year from people with lung disease. Their reputation as a "hard target" was in tatters. Many potential jurors were pissed off at their decades of foot dragging, at their use of cartoon characters - Joe Camel was recognized by something like 98% of 6th graders, comparable to Mickey Mouse and far more than any real figure. They were looking at potential liability in the billions of dollars.
So they made an informed decision - something they denied their customers - to settle with the government. One massive payment, and immunity from further civil suits. It was nothing more than a decision intended to minimize their costs.
MS knows that the judgement that they violated antitrust law makes them a far "softer" target than before. They tried to short-circuit the process with a similar settlement, but they got greedy.
This means that the HTML encoding (e.g,. in "bgcolor") is "#B1FFE1" - script kiddie biff'.
My God, this means that the universe is someone's middle-school science faire project... and God himself is said student.
It explains so much!....
I've heard reports that this is exactly what they did - instead of
BLOB
you have the new and improved
<ms-office>BLOB</ms-office>
However that might have just been the first generation. I haven't heard any reports, either way, on now Office XP handles XML.
Over the past few weeks I've become increasingly convinced that Microsoft is astroturfing Slashdot ("I hate to say it, but Microsoft's XYZ does this and more!"), but this response is so over-the-top that it's clearly either astroturfed by a clueless droid or written by an idiot.
.nroff? Or Word Star? Or any of a dozen other applications?
Word processors predate MS Word by a LONG time. Ever hear of
Microsoft didn't invent word processors, or even WYSIWYG editors. Hell, Word was a pathetic joke for many, many revisions - back when there was a true market in word processors Word was an "also-ran."
But Word (and Office) came to dominate this market for one reason, and one reason only: it became mandatory. You buy a business class system from any major OEM, and it came bundled with Word. You could not get a system without it. Since everyone already had the software on their system, the PHBs didn't see any point in paying for a "second" word processing system.
Unless they actually have to deal with text for a living. E.g., I think most lawyers still use Word Perfect.
Fortunately, none of this matters since your world apparently started in the mid-90s when the last of the legacy competing tools became "also rans." That allows you to pretend that Office has no competition, and has never had any competition, than a few unnamed emacs knockoffs.
Here's a clue - the competition to Office isn't emacs, it's emacs + docbook + SGML processing tools. Office wins the "hello world!" competition, but my experience maintaining 50+ page technical documents is that DocBook is FAR easier to use than Office. Office is WYSIWYG, but it's terminal technology. Information goes in, but then it can't be processed by anything other than Office or Office add-ins. Docbook doesn't give me immediate feedback on what it will look like on the paper, but I can use any XML processing tool in the world to extract information from that document, to fold in additional information from outside, to scan the text for all uses of registered trademarks, etc. In the real world, that saves me *far* more time than the time I lose compiling DocBook to HTML or PS for review of the formatted material.
The thing about hashes is that they're one-way functions, you have to have a copy of every possible message and its hash.
If you send *only* 16-byte messages, no larger, no smaller, that's 2^(8*16) = 2^128 possible messages. Each message is 16 bytes, so 2^132 bytes, or 5.4e39 bytes. Oops, twice that since you need to store what each message transform to, so call it an even 1e40 bytes.
Let's say a 100GB = 1e11 disk costs $100=1e2 in volume today. You'll need only 1e40/1e11 = 1e29 disks, costing a low, low $1e31. That's
$10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I will leave other considerations - where will you store these disks, how will you power them, etc., as an exercise for the reader.
Fortunately, the sum total of all bit patterns of less than 16 bytes is the same. (Ignoring the storage requirements for the hashed value, I assume you'll create a 'bin' for each hash value.) Unforutnately, the price doubles again as you add each bit.
A second exercise for the reader: how may bits can you handle before you need more storage requirements than number of atoms in the earth? I haven't done the math, but I doubt it's more than a hundred bytes or so.
There are many possible cost metrics. One puts the most value in the most commonly used cases - if 99% of all users are local, focus on them and drop remote users.
Another valid metric tries to minimize the cost of the legitimate, but rare, users. Network transparency has a small cost, but it's critical for the people who need it.
Yet another valid metric tries to minimize the cost of development. It is extremely cheap to develop X Windows applications in the sense that the API I learned a decade ago is still in use today. Motif has come and gone, and there are now several additional toolkits, but it's nothing like the mishmash that Microsoft has produced in the same period.
(On a similar note, compare how little C has changed between K&R C to ANSI C9X, vs. the massive changes Visual Basic has repeatedly suffered in far less time.)
Yet another metric tries to minimize the cost of developing new drivers. The X wire protocol is well documented, and anyone who develops a driver that speaks it (as either client or server) can be confident that their code can be widely used. Non-wire protocols tend to mutate far more quickly, either decimating the potential user base or driving up development costs.
Put it all together, and the costs of network transparency are outweighed by its many benefits for all but the most demanding local users. And even they gain from it, albeit in more subtle ways.
Is X perfect? Of course not, but many of the "flaws" were actually design goals for long-gone hardware. When was the last time you used a monochrome dumb terminal? The wire protocols need to be extended to reflect the fact that commodity PC prices are now far lower than dumb terminal prices - use the power of those systems! But the key word there is extending the protocols, not replacing them. E.g., make the font system more flexible.
But at the same time, at least once a month I find I need to run an X session remotely, and I can do that from both Unix and Windows boxes. I have never been able to run Windows remotely, although I've heard that BackOrifice is pretty good for that.
MS Word is about the worst tool around for writers.
The problem is that it forces, FORCES, you to deal with presentation issues at all times. When I'm writing, I want to focus on the content. How is the material broken down into major sections, into chapters, into topics? What information needs to be presented before a new topic will make sense? What topics will be treated as reference material, needing easy lookup?
This is hard enough to do with regular interruptions, but with text it's possible. I write an outline, DocBookify it, then write straight text within it while using minimal tags. When I'm happy with the content, I work on presentation (and usually loop between them a few times.)
But Word is so damn helpful that I'm constantly interrupted. I mispelled a wrod or two, gotta fix it NOW. Esp. with the increasingly intrusive "autocorrection" that insists on "fixing" things. (And don't get me started on it's ideas of what a properly formed URL looks like, never mind the RFCs.) There's the issues around the Redmondian English. My grammar isn't perfect, but highly technical material often requires extremely complex sentences to adequately convey the nuances. Green lines are another distraction. Then there's the whole issue of lists, tables, indentations, etc. sucking your attention because you're forced to deal with presentation before you're entirely sure what's going into them. (Two tables or three? What drives columns, what drives rows?)
Is it any wonder I, and many other people, find Word documents to be unusually vacuous? Not every text document in a Jon Postel RFC, of course, but there seems to be a direct correlation between the meat in a document and its original format. Straight text seem to be written to HS or college level, Word documents seem to be written to Jr High level at most. The problem is the polish - Word documents often strike me as first or second drafts, not finished documents. But they sure are pretty.
Another good example is the "Hard Rock Cafe."
The overpriced chain has sued a number of small restaurants in mining towns for trademark infringement, even though the mining town restaurants usually predated the "victims" by many decades.
The chain, having deep pockets, usually won by simply outspending the Mom&Pop restaurants in economically depressed towns. But I don't think it ever won in a case where the owner had the resources to force the issue into court. After all, these cafes took their name from "hard rock mining" (as opposed to "white metal mining," soft metal mining, et al.)
Since the restaurants didn't have a federal trademark on the term they couldn't stop the chain from using the same name, but they never sought that. But since the restaurants didn't engage in interstate commerce and clearly predated the national chain, the chain couldn't force the restaurants to change their name.