As I recall there was a conference paper in Extreme Programming Perspectives which describes an "infection" model for bug creation, fixing, etc. They were trying to model exactly the effect you describe to see if they could (in a model) find any justification for XP's argument against the increasing cost of bugs through phases. Again, just from memory, they do try to validate the model against figures from real studies.
There's also material in Watts Humphrey's book on the Personal Software Process (about as far from XP as you can get). That book is illustrated throughout with statistics about students who tried to complete the exercises in the book, including in Chapter 13, where there's a section on "The Costs of Finding and Fixing Defects.".
...its interesting in this context. The UK Government's Public Records Office issued a standard a while back that all their records management systems are supposed to adhere to (RMS systems sit on the same spectrum as document- and content- management systems). Every supplier has to get their product certified against this spec. The main thing the spec mandates is an import and export format for all the document metadata.
It takes someone as big as a government to demand "no lock in please, we're british" to get things like this sorted out. Hopefully the JCR API will sort out the content management space as well. All a bit too late for you.
"the holy grail of rendering systems is real-time rendering - and after that point, the creative language shifts and becomes more like filmmaking where shots are recorded in real-time."
Having the ability to "film" a virtual world in real time, as if you were using a camera, is only possible if your virtual world has rules - like physics in the real world - that allows the world to change over time without the intervention of a human - the animator.
Thinking about it that way, I'd guess a whole lot of animators don't see replacing them by virtual cameramen and cartoon physics as the "holy grail". Part of the attraction of animation has always been where the animator breaks the rules in the viewers head about what should happen next.
Or put another way, if you remove God from the universe, you won't see miracles.
Not entirely non-technical...and a little more work for you.
For exercises that involve a bunch of questions being answered, you need to ensure that each person only has to answer a subset of the questions. The plan is that they can't simply copy one person's answers, they have to find enough people to 'collect the whole set', which is a little harder.
Generating a list of variations on which person should answer is easy (think binary). Assign each person a variation number along with an assignment (write this down!) and tell them what questions they need to answer. You can do this by telling them their numbers and giving everyone a list of what numbers mean what question - but don't give everyone a list of what names correspond to which number! (otherwise they can figure out easily who's answered each question)
The outcome is you will always be marking, say, 4 questions from the 8 you set. If you do this for each exercise, vary the variation number assigned to each student, so that the people they copy from would have to change.
This approach isn't original, but its more used for an automated multiple-choice approach rather than essay questions and a pencil-and-paper scheme. The downside is you would need to set more questions - but an exercise where you set 8 questions and a student does 4 gives 35 variations, enough for a typical high school class (here at least!).
If you are only setting a single question in each homework exercise, here's a variation: instead of letting each student answer 4 from 8 on an individual exercise, over the course of 8 exercises, only some of the students answer each exercise, so that in the end each has done 4. In this way you can deal with single essays.
Talking of shitty artists, I noticed this sundial is the equivalent of the spot painting on Beagle II. The Beagle II device is also intended for camera calibration, but they had theirs made by Brit-artist Damien Hirst, styled after his spot paintings that can be seen in places like Lot 61 in NY.
A lot of people think Hirst might just be spending his whole life taking the piss.
There's a lot of comments here to this effect already, I'm just going to add my voice.
If you have 100s of K per login it almost certainly isn't the platforms fault, and it probably isn't the developer's fault either - all that memory must be going to customize content for the user, which means you can trace the performance problems back to the requirements. (your developers could be crap too, but profiling will tell you!)
If the user gets content which requires a massive amount of customisation on each and every page - and this a requirement - then performance will suck no matter what the platform, as that memory will still need to be used.
I've been through this before with a customer who demanded we try out every app server under the sun to resolve performance problems even though we showed him profiling figures that proved only 1% of the time per request was appserver overhead - 80-85% was in the DB, and the rest was the app code. Because the customer took a "religious viewpoint" that the appserver was wrong rather than believing at the profiling data, we wasted weeks.
You need to profile before you can state that java is the problem - and equally, you need to profile before you can state that it's not.
Re:How old are vampires and Shakespeare again? ;p
on
White Wolf Sues Sony
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I was under the impression that Werewolves (or at least, a couple of important werewolf 'facts') are much more recent than vampires or Shakespeare - Curt Siodmak, who wrote the novel and then the screenplay of the 1941 film "The Wolf Man", invented the connection between werewolves and the moon, and their achilles heel of silver bullets. This would probably make for significant parts of werewolf anything being the property of Universal Studios, if anyone. (Werewolf legends date back hundreds of years, but the werewolf we know today is Siodmak's creation.)
Since the Sun is always heavy on opinion and light on fact, I looked up the stuff it was talking about.
There is currently an EU wide project looking into Electronic Vehicle Identification. ACPO (the UK's association of chief police officers) is just one of the bodies involved:
"Ministries of Transport of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, as well as ACPO (UK), KLPD (Netherlands), RDW (Netherlands), Q-Free (Norway), EFKON (Austria), TNO (Netherlands), ERTICO."
(Hardly a pet project of Blairs then?) I think the report referred to is this one which is part of a requirements gathering exercise, not a policy document. Here's a one of the requirements (Section 5, User Needs):
"The issues of privacy, safety, and security must be clear and understandable if the public are to have any confidence in the system. ("Big Brother" concerns by invasion of privacy by authorities)"
I don't think much of Blair and the lickspittles he has running the country just now, but the Sun is just about the bottom of the journalistic barrel, you might want to read the report and judge for yourself.
"marketing will always exist"...got me thinking...
Luke struggles to remove a small metal fragment from Artoo's neck joint. He uses a larger pick.
LUKE: Well, my little friend, you've got something jammed in here real good. Were you on a cruiser or...
The fragment breaks loose with a snap, sending Luke tumbling. He sits up and sees a twelve-inch three-dimensional hologram of Leia Organa, being projected from Artoo. The image flickers and jiggles in the dimly lit garage. Luke's mouth hangs open in awe.
VOICE: Help me, you're my only hope. My name is OBI-WAN KENOBI, if you help me by transfering $12BN credits into your account, you too can have a 12 inch Organa like mine!
And here is the full text of that directive. Sections 24 and 25 are the ones referring to the use of cookies.
"Where [...] cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information [...] Access to specific website content may still be made conditional on the well-informed acceptance of a cookie or similar device, if it is used for a legitimate purpose."
ie. it is actually ok to refuse access to a section that requires you to use a session cookie in order to log in. This is not a ban on using cookies, or even requiring the use of cookies to get part of a site to work - its a ban on using cookies without consent.
I've not tried the game yet but it sounds like this would be an interesting shareware tactic, rather than nag screens; make the game free to download, but other than yer basic game intro, unlicensed and license-revoked players just attract a LOT of attention from huge evil alien bastard hordes.
"Heh heh I've just about sneaked past the enemy death squads..." [SYSOP: Cheat mods detected on your client. License revoked] *whirrrrr* *click*... 100 Terminators turn to face you in unison... "Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitt!!" [SARGE: Squad: charge the base while they're chasing... *squishing noise*...ouch, thats gotta hurt]
First off, any chance you could post those benchmarks? 20 requests/second seems low, I'm wondering what the rest of the setup was.
For the first part: we had performance problems on an app where the customer had insisted on xml everywhere. However, in one particularly critical part of the system we were getting hammered by the garbage collection overhead of SAX (its efficient for text in elements, but not for attribute values or element names).
Anyway - we knew what was coming into the system as we were also the producers of this xml at an earlier stage. So we wrote a custom SAX parser that only supported ASCII, no DTDs, internal subsets etc; and wrote it to return element/attribute names from a pool (IIRC we used a ternary tree to store this stuff, so we didn't need to create a string to do the lookup).
It was like night and day. XML parsing dropped from generating 80% of the garbage to about 5% and it just didn't appear on my list of performance issues from then on.
Java strings do a lot of copying, the point is to get yourself as close as possible to a zero-copy xml parser as you can.
You might want to look at switching toolkits entirely as well - GLUEs benchmarks sound a lot better than yours.
I don't have it handy but I'm sure Asimov's book Caves of Steel has the same thing going on - ide travelators which get faster at the centre are the means used to get around the city. Reading that guys' page I see they were called 'strips'.
If you look at this cover which was used for the book you'll see the hero is standing on one! Heinlin appears to have got there first though (he wrote Roads in 1940, Asimov wrote Caves in 1953)
I guess this was the Asimov reference in the slashdot article, but no-one else seems to be mentioning it... -Baz
You're right that that allows you to have mutliple singletons (since thats what the parent post was about), but classloaders don't completely isolate programs from each other. A classloader can't load a dll if its already been loaded by another classloader in the same VM, for example. And unless a classloader is badly behaved, you're going to get the same stdout, stderr, and system properties.
The press release also mentions patent no.s 5,991,809, 6,370,580 and 6,480,893.
It turns out the last two deal with offloading requests for static content to a separate webserver. Well, isn't that a common use for mod_rewrite? It certainly existed back then, this is the earliest page I can find where it became an 'official' part of apache (I am sure theres more in the cvs logs) - thats from Jan 97, version *3* of mod_rewrite. The patents weren't filed until 5 months later.
Before it was an official apache module, mod_rewrite was released in 1996 and there is evidence of people using it for offloading requests from one server to another that same year.
"This time, the entire forces of the netherworld have overrun Earth. To save her, you must descend into the stygian depths of Hell itself! Battle mightier, nastier, deadlier demons and monsters. Use more powerful weapons."
"Choose from eight powerful spiritual weapons. Each weapon has its own unique use. Maximize your firepower by learning each weaponâ(TM)s abilities...Encounter Satanâ(TM)s minions and banish them back to their evil realm. Evil lurks everywhere you turn....Descend deeper and deeper into the depths of the underworld. Your journey will take you into the very heart of evil, through 18 hand-crafted, highly detailed levels."
One of these is a blurb for Catechumen (one of N'Lightnings games). The other is part of the blurb for Doom II. Frankly there doesn't seem all that much different here, except for the marketing.
Well, at least its better to see people doing something creative, rather than campaigning to get games banned.
He's talkin about MD5 hashing of small sections, as someone suggested the other day here.
If you actually have the source code, there are other fairly quick ways to find copy & pastes, eg the BWT-based method I implemented in CPD.
That method is pretty fast - it mainly depends on the file scanning time, not the sort we used to find the duplicates (eg using a suffix tree sort instead of quicksort won't gain you much here). However its a bit of a memory hog. I originally wrote the algorithm in perl, though, and it used a lot less - it would probably work on something the size of Linux.
I've come up with a new variation based on rysnc that will be quicker than the original MD5 suggestion, still requires no access to the original source, and sucks a hell of a lot less memory than the BWT method. Its also possible to do incremental checks (extremely quickly) using this method, something we couldn't do before.
There are other interesting techniques based on gzip and the like if this kind of thing interests you.
Well, you're both talking nonsense. EROS does have orthogonal persistence, which does away with *much of* the need to deal with files in typical applications, but EROS does deal with files and file systems - they haven't been thrown away. So yes you can share files over the network (for example).
"Orthogonal Persistence = leave machine on indefinitely." Eh? The data has been persisted (ie 'written to secondary storage'), you turn off whenever you like, the machine will come back up in a consistent state. That's the whole *point* of EROS. What about backups? You just back up the memory checkpoints. The memory is written to a filesystem you can back up like any other.
I'm sure the AC above knows something about BSD and may have simply been mislead by the hopelessly inaccurate picture of EROS given in the first post. I think this paragraph from one of the EROS introductory essays gives a more balanced, less gushing, view of its abilities:
"The moral of the story is that mechanisms for explicit persistence are necessary to support databases applications. My view, however, is that these applications are the exceptional case. Most applications should not have to deal with files or persistence at all. EROS shows that transparent persistence is feasible and efficient."
So it looks great. So you can mod your car to your hearts content. But its very, very easy to get a car big enough and fast enough to beat all comers by enormous margins, and because your car takes no damage on the most ridiculous cars (960 bhp and the like) you can just drive it round the barriers on many courses without even steering.
I was sorely disappointed that the screenshots once again seem to show only pristine cars. Every release they do this, and every release people complain like hell.
It starts from the premise of looking at software industry growth rates from 1996 to 2001 and predicting that even without piracy reduction, the growth of the software industry would be *greater* (in percentage terms) from 2002 to 2006.
Obviously after the bubble burst the IDC guys spent the last of their stock earnings on crack.
The postcode doesn't describe a geographic location so much as a route. The bits of the postcode variously describe the main sorting office, the postal area the mail should go to - which is effectively a mail van route - and then the final part of the postcode sorts in the order that a postman would walk it (piecewise, anyway). Individual postcodes here describe only a handful of premises, unlike in the states where I understand its more like 50 on average.
By doing it this way it becomes possible to sort mail efficiently for delivery using just the postcode.
Ignoring for the moment that UK GIS systems also use other references (UPRN, TOID, PAF ref, grid ref) it would seem that retooling for this new system is all cost and no benefit - except to the company selling that data.
You might want to look into the 2002 EU teleworking agreement. This page has a reasonable description (skip down to the bit about the main points) although some of the links seem to be broken.
The agreement is voluntary but lots of large companies do follow this. My own experience was that companies often prefer to have you work *part time* in the office rather than full time at home, to avoid the onus of a health and safety inspection of your house (I can't remember if this one is required under UK law, we have some regs which differ from the EU agreement). There are definite tax implications in the UK when you work from home, and you should allocate a room or an area in your house as your 'home office'. (the issue was, IIRC, that if the company provide you with furniture and/or equipment - as is often the case because of their health and safety duty of care - then this can be taxed as an additional benifit, unless you use it *exclusively* for work)
If you belong to a professional organization or union they will almost certainly be able to provide you with better advice than anyone/. . If you are self-assessed for tax you definitely want to contact the DTI/Revenue or your accountant to make sure you're not going to get screwed for extra tax.
You should also read this note on working outside of the UK.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I did serve as a union official 3 years or so ago, and dealt with a couple of teleworking cases.
Are you insane? I don't care for Windows, but it is the most advanced mouseless UI there is.
My Dell laptop's touchpad is knackered to the extent I have to turn it off permanently, so I have plenty of experience of using windows without a mouse (in the office I use a trackball). While quite a lot of features are available without the mouse, it isn't particularly easy to use and in general 'skinnable' apps (ie anything that isn't using standard windows widgets, increasingly common) suck bigtime.
I find the best thing to do when I'm unplugged from my mouse is to fire up xemacs full screen. Its no longer my day-to-day tool of choice, but emacs has so many built in features I can pretty much get by without using anything else, and mouseless operation is trivial - its what it was designed for.
For example, there is nothing in windows like C-h k (describes a single key binding) or C-h m (describes the current mode's key bindings)[1], or even a hint that will describe the key binding for actions you take.
Windows may well be the best mouseless UI that was originally designed to be used with a mouse but its not even close to being the best mouseless UI.
-Baz
[1] I know windows-space is roughly equivalent if you have intellitype, but its not a default feature of windows, and doesn't show app-specific bindings.
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall there was a conference paper in Extreme Programming Perspectives which describes an "infection" model for bug creation, fixing, etc. They were trying to model exactly the effect you describe to see if they could (in a model) find any justification for XP's argument against the increasing cost of bugs through phases. Again, just from memory, they do try to validate the model against figures from real studies.
There's also material in Watts Humphrey's book on the Personal Software Process (about as far from XP as you can get). That book is illustrated throughout with statistics about students who tried to complete the exercises in the book, including in Chapter 13, where there's a section on "The Costs of Finding and Fixing Defects.".
...its interesting in this context. The UK Government's Public Records Office issued a standard a while back that all their records management systems are supposed to adhere to (RMS systems sit on the same spectrum as document- and content- management systems). Every supplier has to get their product certified against this spec. The main thing the spec mandates is an import and export format for all the document metadata.
It takes someone as big as a government to demand "no lock in please, we're british" to get things like this sorted out. Hopefully the JCR API will sort out the content management space as well. All a bit too late for you.
"the holy grail of rendering systems is real-time rendering - and after that point, the creative language shifts and becomes more like filmmaking where shots are recorded in real-time."
Having the ability to "film" a virtual world in real time, as if you were using a camera, is only possible if your virtual world has rules - like physics in the real world - that allows the world to change over time without the intervention of a human - the animator.
Thinking about it that way, I'd guess a whole lot of animators don't see replacing them by virtual cameramen and cartoon physics as the "holy grail". Part of the attraction of animation has always been where the animator breaks the rules in the viewers head about what should happen next.
Or put another way, if you remove God from the universe, you won't see miracles.
-Baz
Favorite System Administration Tool: CTRL-ALT-DEL
Favorite Office Program: CLIPPY
Not entirely non-technical...and a little more work for you.
For exercises that involve a bunch of questions being answered, you need to ensure that each person only has to answer a subset of the questions. The plan is that they can't simply copy one person's answers, they have to find enough people to 'collect the whole set', which is a little harder.
Generating a list of variations on which person should answer is easy (think binary). Assign each person a variation number along with an assignment (write this down!) and tell them what questions they need to answer. You can do this by telling them their numbers and giving everyone a list of what numbers mean what question - but don't give everyone a list of what names correspond to which number! (otherwise they can figure out easily who's answered each question)
The outcome is you will always be marking, say, 4 questions from the 8 you set. If you do this for each exercise, vary the variation number assigned to each student, so that the people they copy from would have to change.
This approach isn't original, but its more used for an automated multiple-choice approach rather than essay questions and a pencil-and-paper scheme. The downside is you would need to set more questions - but an exercise where you set 8 questions and a student does 4 gives 35 variations, enough for a typical high school class (here at least!).
If you are only setting a single question in each homework exercise, here's a variation: instead of letting each student answer 4 from 8 on an individual exercise, over the course of 8 exercises, only some of the students answer each exercise, so that in the end each has done 4. In this way you can deal with single essays.
Talking of shitty artists, I noticed this sundial is the equivalent of the spot painting on Beagle II. The Beagle II device is also intended for camera calibration, but they had theirs made by Brit-artist Damien Hirst, styled after his spot paintings that can be seen in places like Lot 61 in NY.
A lot of people think Hirst might just be spending his whole life taking the piss.
There's a lot of comments here to this effect already, I'm just going to add my voice.
If you have 100s of K per login it almost certainly isn't the platforms fault, and it probably isn't the developer's fault either - all that memory must be going to customize content for the user, which means you can trace the performance problems back to the requirements. (your developers could be crap too, but profiling will tell you!)
If the user gets content which requires a massive amount of customisation on each and every page - and this a requirement - then performance will suck no matter what the platform, as that memory will still need to be used.
I've been through this before with a customer who demanded we try out every app server under the sun to resolve performance problems even though we showed him profiling figures that proved only 1% of the time per request was appserver overhead - 80-85% was in the DB, and the rest was the app code. Because the customer took a "religious viewpoint" that the appserver was wrong rather than believing at the profiling data, we wasted weeks.
You need to profile before you can state that java is the problem - and equally, you need to profile before you can state that it's not.
I was under the impression that Werewolves (or at least, a couple of important werewolf 'facts') are much more recent than vampires or Shakespeare - Curt Siodmak, who wrote the novel and then the screenplay of the 1941 film "The Wolf Man", invented the connection between werewolves and the moon, and their achilles heel of silver bullets. This would probably make for significant parts of werewolf anything being the property of Universal Studios, if anyone. (Werewolf legends date back hundreds of years, but the werewolf we know today is Siodmak's creation.)
As for Vampires vs Werewolves being original - has noone seen "Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein" (1948)?
Since the Sun is always heavy on opinion and light on fact, I looked up the stuff it was talking about.
There is currently an EU wide project looking into Electronic Vehicle Identification. ACPO (the UK's association of chief police officers) is just one of the bodies involved:
"Ministries of Transport of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, as well as ACPO (UK), KLPD (Netherlands), RDW (Netherlands), Q-Free (Norway), EFKON (Austria), TNO (Netherlands), ERTICO."
(Hardly a pet project of Blairs then?) I think the report referred to is this one which is part of a requirements gathering exercise, not a policy document. Here's a one of the requirements (Section 5, User Needs):
"The issues of privacy, safety, and security must be clear and understandable if the public are to have any confidence in the system. ("Big Brother" concerns by invasion of privacy by authorities)"
I don't think much of Blair and the lickspittles he has running the country just now, but the Sun is just about the bottom of the journalistic barrel, you might want to read the report and judge for yourself.
The screenshots are in the documentation,
for example the Getting Started Guide (PDF 634Kb).
"marketing will always exist"...got me thinking...
Luke struggles to remove a small metal fragment from Artoo's neck joint. He uses a larger pick.
LUKE: Well, my little friend, you've got something jammed in here real good. Were you on a cruiser or...
The fragment breaks loose with a snap, sending Luke tumbling. He sits up and sees a twelve-inch three-dimensional hologram of Leia Organa, being projected from Artoo. The image flickers and jiggles in the dimly lit garage. Luke's mouth hangs open in awe.
VOICE: Help me, you're my only hope. My name is OBI-WAN KENOBI, if you help me by transfering $12BN credits into your account, you too can have a 12 inch Organa like mine!
LUKE: Aaaagh!!*%^$_"$£!!!!!?
Thats 2002/58/EC (not EG)
And here is the full text of that directive. Sections 24 and 25 are the ones referring to the use of cookies.
"Where [...] cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information [...] Access to specific website content may still be made conditional on the well-informed acceptance of a cookie or similar device, if it is used for a legitimate purpose."
ie. it is actually ok to refuse access to a section that requires you to use a session cookie in order to log in. This is not a ban on using cookies, or even requiring the use of cookies to get part of a site to work - its a ban on using cookies without consent.
I've not tried the game yet but it sounds like this would be an interesting shareware tactic, rather than nag screens; make the game free to download, but other than yer basic game intro, unlicensed and license-revoked players just attract a LOT of attention from huge evil alien bastard hordes.
... 100 Terminators turn to face you in unison... ...ouch, thats gotta hurt]
"Heh heh I've just about sneaked past the enemy death squads..."
[SYSOP: Cheat mods detected on your client. License revoked]
*whirrrrr* *click*
"Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitt!!"
[SARGE: Squad: charge the base while they're chasing... *squishing noise*
First off, any chance you could post those benchmarks? 20 requests/second seems low, I'm wondering what the rest of the setup was.
For the first part: we had performance problems on an app where the customer had insisted on xml everywhere. However, in one particularly critical part of the system we were getting hammered by the garbage collection overhead of SAX (its efficient for text in elements, but not for attribute values or element names).
Anyway - we knew what was coming into the system as we were also the producers of this xml at an earlier stage. So we wrote a custom SAX parser that only supported ASCII, no DTDs, internal subsets etc; and wrote it to return element/attribute names from a pool (IIRC we used a ternary tree to store this stuff, so we didn't need to create a string to do the lookup).
It was like night and day. XML parsing dropped from generating 80% of the garbage to about 5% and it just didn't appear on my list of performance issues from then on.
Java strings do a lot of copying, the point is to get yourself as close as possible to a zero-copy xml parser as you can.
You might want to look at switching toolkits entirely as well - GLUEs benchmarks sound a lot better than yours.
I don't have it handy but I'm sure Asimov's book Caves of Steel has the same thing going on - ide travelators which get faster at the centre are the means used to get around the city. Reading that guys' page I see they were called 'strips'.
If you look at this cover which was used for the book you'll see the hero is standing on one! Heinlin appears to have got there first though (he wrote Roads in 1940, Asimov wrote Caves in 1953)
I guess this was the Asimov reference in the slashdot article, but no-one else seems to be mentioning it...
-Baz
You're right that that allows you to have mutliple singletons (since thats what the parent post was about), but classloaders don't completely isolate programs from each other. A classloader can't load a dll if its already been loaded by another classloader in the same VM, for example. And unless a classloader is badly behaved, you're going to get the same stdout, stderr, and system properties.
There is a JSR on this which is going to introduce more isolation facilties, as part of the 1.5 "Tiger" release.
The press release also mentions patent no.s 5,991,809, 6,370,580 and 6,480,893.
It turns out the last two deal with offloading requests for static content to a separate webserver. Well, isn't that a common use for mod_rewrite? It certainly existed back then, this is the earliest page I can find where it became an 'official' part of apache (I am sure theres more in the cvs logs) - thats from Jan 97, version *3* of mod_rewrite. The patents weren't filed until 5 months later.
Before it was an official apache module, mod_rewrite was released in 1996 and there is evidence of people using it for offloading requests from one server to another that same year.
-Baz
"This time, the entire forces of the netherworld have overrun Earth. To save her, you must descend into the stygian depths of Hell itself! Battle mightier, nastier, deadlier demons and monsters. Use more powerful weapons."
"Choose from eight powerful spiritual weapons. Each weapon has its own unique use. Maximize your firepower by learning each weaponâ(TM)s abilities...Encounter Satanâ(TM)s minions and banish them back to their evil realm. Evil lurks everywhere you turn....Descend deeper and deeper into the depths of the underworld. Your journey will take you into the very heart of evil, through 18 hand-crafted, highly detailed levels."
One of these is a blurb for Catechumen (one of N'Lightnings games). The other is part of the blurb for Doom II. Frankly there doesn't seem all that much different here, except for the marketing.
Well, at least its better to see people doing something creative, rather than campaigning to get games banned.
-Baz
He's talkin about MD5 hashing of small sections, as someone suggested the other day here.
If you actually have the source code, there are other fairly quick ways to find copy & pastes, eg the BWT-based method I implemented in CPD.
That method is pretty fast - it mainly depends on the file scanning time, not the sort we used to find the duplicates (eg using a suffix tree sort instead of quicksort won't gain you much here). However its a bit of a memory hog. I originally wrote the algorithm in perl, though, and it used a lot less - it would probably work on something the size of Linux.
I've come up with a new variation based on rysnc that will be quicker than the original MD5 suggestion, still requires no access to the original source, and sucks a hell of a lot less memory than the BWT method. Its also possible to do incremental checks (extremely quickly) using this method, something we couldn't do before.
There are other interesting techniques based on gzip and the like if this kind of thing interests you.
Well, you're both talking nonsense. EROS does have orthogonal persistence, which does away with *much of* the need to deal with files in typical applications, but EROS does deal with files and file systems - they haven't been thrown away. So yes you can share files over the network (for example).
"Orthogonal Persistence = leave machine on indefinitely." Eh? The data has been persisted (ie 'written to secondary storage'), you turn off whenever you like, the machine will come back up in a consistent state. That's the whole *point* of EROS. What about backups? You just back up the memory checkpoints. The memory is written to a filesystem you can back up like any other.
I'm sure the AC above knows something about BSD and may have simply been mislead by the hopelessly inaccurate picture of EROS given in the first post. I think this paragraph from one of the EROS introductory essays gives a more balanced, less gushing, view of its abilities:
"The moral of the story is that mechanisms for explicit persistence are necessary to support databases applications. My view, however, is that these applications are the exceptional case. Most applications should not have to deal with files or persistence at all. EROS shows that transparent persistence is feasible and efficient."
So it looks great. So you can mod your car to your hearts content. But its very, very easy to get a car big enough and fast enough to beat all comers by enormous margins, and because your car takes no damage on the most ridiculous cars (960 bhp and the like) you can just drive it round the barriers on many courses without even steering.
I was sorely disappointed that the screenshots once again seem to show only pristine cars. Every release they do this, and every release people complain like hell.
the actual white paper is here
It starts from the premise of looking at software industry growth rates from 1996 to 2001 and predicting that even without piracy reduction, the growth of the software industry would be *greater* (in percentage terms) from 2002 to 2006.
Obviously after the bubble burst the IDC guys spent the last of their stock earnings on crack.
The postcode doesn't describe a geographic location so much as a route. The bits of the postcode variously describe the main sorting office, the postal area the mail should go to - which is effectively a mail van route - and then the final part of the postcode sorts in the order that a postman would walk it (piecewise, anyway). Individual postcodes here describe only a handful of premises, unlike in the states where I understand its more like 50 on average.
By doing it this way it becomes possible to sort mail efficiently for delivery using just the postcode.
Ignoring for the moment that UK GIS systems also use other references (UPRN, TOID, PAF ref, grid ref) it would seem that retooling for this new system is all cost and no benefit - except to the company selling that data.
You might want to look into the 2002 EU teleworking agreement.
/. . If you are self-assessed for tax you definitely want to contact the DTI/Revenue or your accountant to make sure you're not going to get screwed for extra tax.
This page has a reasonable description (skip down to the bit about the main points) although some of the links seem to be broken.
The agreement is voluntary but lots of large companies do follow this. My own experience was that companies often prefer to have you work *part time* in the office rather than full time at home, to avoid the onus of a health and safety inspection of your house (I can't remember if this one is required under UK law, we have some regs which differ from the EU agreement). There are definite tax implications in the UK when you work from home, and you should allocate a room or an area in your house as your 'home office'. (the issue was, IIRC, that if the company provide you with furniture and/or equipment - as is often the case because of their health and safety duty of care - then this can be taxed as an additional benifit, unless you use it *exclusively* for work)
If you belong to a professional organization or union they will almost certainly be able to provide you with better advice than anyone
You should also read this note on working outside of the UK.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I did serve as a union official 3 years or so ago, and dealt with a couple of teleworking cases.
-Baz
Are you insane? I don't care for Windows, but it is the most advanced mouseless UI there is.
My Dell laptop's touchpad is knackered to the extent I have to turn it off permanently, so I have plenty of experience of using windows without a mouse (in the office I use a trackball). While quite a lot of features are available without the mouse, it isn't particularly easy to use and in general 'skinnable' apps (ie anything that isn't using standard windows widgets, increasingly common) suck bigtime.
I find the best thing to do when I'm unplugged from my mouse is to fire up xemacs full screen. Its no longer my day-to-day tool of choice, but emacs has so many built in features I can pretty much get by without using anything else, and mouseless operation is trivial - its what it was designed for.
For example, there is nothing in windows like C-h k (describes a single key binding) or C-h m (describes the current mode's key bindings)[1], or even a hint that will describe the key binding for actions you take.
Windows may well be the best mouseless UI that was originally designed to be used with a mouse but its not even close to being the best mouseless UI.
-Baz
[1] I know windows-space is roughly equivalent if you have intellitype, but its not a default feature of windows, and doesn't show app-specific bindings.