There is a fundamental problem with OOo and making "an outline". In the same way that Java decided that the base of all objects is the "Object" object, OOo decided that the base of every document was "The Outline".
That is, the outline-ness of the _whole_ document essentially prevents "putting one or more outlines into a document". It is, to use a lose analogy, like trying to put a car into a car. In the old WordPerfect, which did this perfectly, the outline-ness was not part of the document and you could put one or more outlines into the document. This would be like putting one or more cars into a truck.
With the open document standard this has been largely codified into the entire family of the product.
Yea, it sucks.
Oddly enough you have largely the same problem with Word, but they "fake it" by putting the numbering contexts of the outline-ness several levels into the whole hierarchy. That is, they make "lists" instead of "outlines" and then they put a mode around it. It is a sucky approach we have grown used to with all its foibles.
You can fake it by hand in OOo by working out style sets and then saving a template document. But the whole tab-causes-change-of-style thing isn't a happiness.
So I agree. But the comparison should be OOo to WordPerfect when you talk about outlines.
Strike: Dear Microsoft, When used incorrectly and in direct conflict of something that you are promoting, DRM sucks!
Replace With: Dear Microsoft, Technological Measures to Enforce Illegal Prior Restraint, popularly misspelled DRM, sucks, is annoying, and is probably illegal in all contexts. We don't care if you have been "getting away with it", its wrong. Cut it out.
I know, what a lightning rod for the flame wars, but my position isn't without reason.
Seriously, this platform is based on the idea that a person wanting to compile a program in a reasonably provable languages just cannot live without "system calls" written in visual basic. But having made that mistake, the question of which mapping API to use is valid.
In terms of integration, you will be more happy using the MS maps API. I know this sight-unseen because I know some of the people responsible for the work in dot-net. I have heard about what is and isn't tested to work with what, and lots of "it would be funny if people weren't using this for important work" stories about the whole "framework" (which seems to be MS speak for "arbitrary collection of whatever we could find to plug the holes).
In short, because of technical shortcomings in the language platform, you are _less_ likely to run into problems accessing an MS API from dot-net than you will be accessing a non-MS API. In the MS case you may benefit from testing and you probably(*) wont run into cases where the "framework" deliberately sabatoges the API.
---
(*) I say probably because I know, abet second hand, that Windows-ME was largely an aggressive act to sabotage the Win2k effort. It wasn't just bad, it was _designed_ to invalidate many of the things the Win2K team were developing. That is, for purely personal and puerile reasons, the head of the ME team used his knowledge of the Win2k efforts, and his personal dislike of the Win2k project lead, to craft APIs that would break things like Plug-n-Play. Since MS will _never_ discard a bad interface (since they want 100% backward compatibility from future projects) this let the ME team "Beat them to market" with interfaces that deliberately sabotaged the upcoming effort. -- SINCE these same people pulling these same games are still at the company in question, you never know when one MS API/Framework/etc will be secretly designed against another.
Yay for having mendacious personalities in charge of your mono-culture.
And good luck and all with your efforts.
(Bonus Fire Wood: Nobody who has been an MS "Strategic Partner" has survived the experience, so why do people desire that state?... discuss... 8-)
"ln/dir1/file1/dir2/file2" _doesn't_ create any kind of inode at all. It causes the system go to "/dir1/" and find the inode number in the directory entry that contains the text "file1" and then uses that number to create an entry in the relevant directory (/dir2/) that contains the new name "file2" and the previously mentioned inode number (and it "coincidentally" increases the reference count in the inode so the file system knows that the inode previously referenced by the name/dir1/file1 now has two names. NOTE that the inode doesn't know it's "name" or "names" which is why, if you trash your file system and then do an integrity check, the system will reattach lost inodes in lost+found (in ext2/3/4 and similar file systems) and only give them a number (the inode's actual number) as the "file name".
It would be _DISASTEROUS_ to create a second inode who's data pointers pointed to the same data blocks as another inode. Among other things, you could _never_ know when a particular data block was finially deleted. Another problem is that the two inodes could end up owned by different accounts and possess contradictory times, permissions, and sizes. Dang disastrous.
BUT... if you "ln -s/dir1/file1/dir2/file2" you are making a symbolic link. In _this_ case you make a new inode which references (typically) one single data block that contains the string "/dir1/file1" and the number of that new inode is put in a directory slot within/dir2/ tagged by the string "file2" so when the os comes by, and you open/cd/whatever that file/dir2/file2, the request becomes a name lookup of text "/dir1/file1". This leads to the various symlink shenanigans, particularly with chroot and friends.
STILL, a _hard_ link (the first example) just adds a name and number pair to a directory that is a _hard_ alias to the original file, and the _soft_ link is a reference by name.
When you understand why, and you understand that the above exercise has involved 3 inodes (four if you count the current directory), but that the third (fourth if you count the current directory) inode doesn't come into use/existence until the second echo.... then and only then grasshopper should you again correct someone's understanding of inodes in a public forum.
8-)
ASIDE: words like "create" and "come into existence" are used here in the vernacular, for simplicity. In fact, for most current file systems, the inodes are created when the file system is created on the disk, and are allocated from and returned to the free inode pool(s) as opposed to being "created" or "destroyed" but that is a separate conversation...
How dare they paint my darling with the onerous label "virgin"! This is a smear she will never live down! She is as complete a slut as daddy could possibly have raised, and to have her suffer under this libel is intolerable.
Last I heard, you couldn't ruin someone's reputation with positive attributes nor praise. I think you get where the argument is going here.
Meanwhile, while the "photographer" is shait out of luck over the money, the girl shouldn't have gotten a lawyer, she should have gotten a business manager. They are much better at turning this sort of thing into huge piles of cash and follow-on work. She _could_ have leveraged this into he being "the Virgin virgin on the move" or whatever the equivalent to the "can you hear me now guy" would have been.
She should sue her parents for suing, so that she can get all the money they cost her by suing all these other people. 8-)
The questions just let you select the boilerplate license that has the features you claim you want. That is, the site is effectively _indexed_ by the criteria that you yes-and-no to the questions. So it cannot, by a _rational_ _man_ standard, be considered "drafting you" a license. (IMHO of course). [That is, the licenses exist separately and you can go directly to one etc, so you _are_ pulling a "form contract", you are just being asked "which form" in detail.] I surely hope that the questions you ask as a lawyer lead to something more expert-ee (to coin a word in jest) than the process as you describe it.
Meanwhile, I am pretty sure (but I don't use the "service") that each time you upload something to flickr (sp?) web site, they do _not_ direct you to "walk" the questions over at Creative Commons, and then copy the "drafted" license into their server along with the picture. I would bet that they, flickr, provide you with some sort of check-box or drop-down where you pick the license by name from a list (etc). I feel safe in making this guess because the storage cost of all those individually "drafted" licenses would be non-trivial, and you wouldn't then be able to search those images "by license" without doing it as a full text search. (and so on, to short my own "area of art" expertise in the name of brevity.)
So, since we can darn well bet that "photographer" never actually went to the Creative Commons web site, and since we know that Creative Commons didn't do _anything_ to customize the "form" licenses they offer, free of charge and without contract/agreement/etc to everyone whether they visit the site or company itself, they don't, by any stretch of the imagination, have any relationship to the "photographer" at all. To argue otherwise would be to suggest I could hold (Thomas Pane?) liable for the outcome of my actions if I first shouted "give me liberty, or give me death" because he wrote the words and "provided them to me" and via the mechanism of history. (Ok, that's a little over-dramatic 8-)
By your legal theory, all those "Will in a box" kits (etc) are liable and should be party to any action whenever the produced documents go to court.
The fundamental error of law here seems to echo in the summary, where "Creative Commons license" is being read as an affirmative act. The implication that the Creative Commons company _granted_ the license somehow, as opposed to the photographer, is highly confounding, to me at least.
Meanwhile, I don't see any grounds for action in implying that a 16 year old girl is a virgin. By law she is supposed to be, and you cannot libel someone with a positive label anyway. They didn't say "text a slut with virgin mobile". If her friends are pointing and laughing at her yelling "ha, ha, you aren't putting out" etc and it is pissing her off, then something is very wrong and it is happening in the girls immediate environment.
Let's face it, chick's on the poster, and chick wants some scratch. And captain councilor took the picture and wants some lucre himself.
This isn't a complex legal theory. This is greedy people wanting "what they deserve, plus as much as they can get".
Besides, what ever happened to "you cannot trespass with the eyes". The expectation of privacy is pretty non-existent once you post something to the internet. If she didn't object to the picture as posted in the first place, my purely human instinct says she doesn't get to go back and complain about it now. You are not _allowed_ to suck things back out of the common pool of culture. Copyright gives you a limited monopoly, but then its public domain all the way. The photographer chose not to limit that monopoly or require "consideration" when he made the material available. That is, he published and he said "here, use this for business if you want". Horse, this is barn door, barn door, this is horse, I know you will never see each other again, but that was it.
I _do_ know why "model releases" etc, exist. But since the "model" isn't
Actaully, since the lower performance package limits the upload speed by a greater percentage(*) than the download speed, and since the upload speed can be shown to be the dominant factor, they don't have to do a single thing _technically_ to make you "Feel The Pain".
Between that, and the (probable) QOS tiering differences between the two packages, you will also Feel The Pain naturally as your cable modem segment comes under increased load.
They almost certainly want to get the data out of their systems and into yours as fast as possible so that they can have cheaper systems on their end. Backlogging your data behind a throttled link takes memory. It actually costs them money. It's better to set up the systems so that the load characteristics meet the promised numbers in demonstrable but very raw/low-level way and then just move the data as fast as possible. That way if someone tries to sue them about performance they can go "look here, we set it up so that at peak load everybody gets their share, and so what if they _could_ get more when things are idle, that's not bad for the customer". Meanwhile their actual load conditions end up being limited by the much more practical, distributed upstream throttles in the individual modem initialization settings.
This is further demonstrated by the incidents where hackers hacked on their modems and got much higher levels of service. If the systems at the distribution point were actually throttled, tweaking their modems would have only amounted to a slight increase in total throughput. They'd have had to hack the central distribution facility systems as well. (Which they did not have to do.)
Disclaimer: This is a black-box analysis on my part. e.g. this is a well-educated guess based on observations. They may well be doing something stupid with their central facilities. I would only cost them a lot of money for no real benefit (they get charged for wasted retransmits at _their_ meetered access to the internet at large too, so dropping data at the boundaries of the cable segments would be damn stupid). Then again, they have to be wasting all the green they make for overcharging me _somewhere_... 8-)
(*) Consider that when the download speed goes from 6 to 8 Mbps (a 33% increase) the upload speeds goes from 384 to 768 kpbs (a 100% increase).
Comcast has no real interest in preventing faster _download_ speeds than what is advertised if there is no line contention. It would cost more than it was worth to truely throttle data going from them to you. They _do_ have a real interest in throttling their upload speed. Consequently on a really idle link there is no real reason _not_ keep the customer-directed data bandwidth full.
In quality of service terms, you put allocations in the QOS table but you let lower tiers "borrow" from higher tiers when the higher tiers are idle.
Now I have tested and _tuned_ my Comcast service and I _do_ get 8Mbps downstream during peak hours using raw linux measurement (so I know there is no compression tricks etc involved), but I had to QOS tune my outbound path to make sure I didn't drop my ACKs. Relaxing (increasing allow data rates) my outbound throttle by 1% will crash the link from 8Mbps to a bouncy range of 3 to 5 Mbps. Really, the outbound throttling to keep the modem from trashing outbound ACKs (and thereby preventing unnecessary fallbacks and retransmissions) is the key to a good throughput.
Someone above was talking about having bunches of separate channels to do a true test. That's pretty clueless. Since TCP scales up linearly and scales back exponentially, spamming a link with lots of diverse TCP data is not usually a stable measure of that link. One stream with a known-stable path, and a known non-saturated return path, is a more correct measure. Of course you have to know how to read the results to understand when you are measuring the link and when you are measuring "the system" (including both server and client and the other links in the transit etc).
So anyway, I have no idea how Comcast implements the "speed boost" thing. They don't even give hints. I can imagine several different ways such a thing could be managed, but they don't provide any technical information to help me make an educated guess.
I have found Comcast's raw service to be quite stable and reliable, more-so now that I have taken responsibility for the upside link. I can imagine that if you hooked a Windows box directly to the cable modem you would get crappy unstable throughput. With no outbound throttle you have the Windows TCP stack slamming that link and hemmoraging ACK packets.
I use NoScript all the time. If I get to a page who's scripts I _want_ I allow them, or temporarily allow them.
I don't miss much except for the bullcrap. Yea, it takes all of a keystroke or a context menu selection whenever I decided I want "the full web experience".
The truth is, most of the time, nobody _wants_ "the full web experience."
Live and Learn... give it a try for a while and you will get hooked (unless you are incredibly lazy, which I am also, sometimes. 8-)
Lets see, I hook an ammeter up around the wire at any point. I get three current levels. 2xHighREsistance = low current, 2xLowResistance = high current, HighAndLowResistance = medium current.
So I have a 50% chance of knowing a bit with absolute certainty, so you can only use the bits generated when the resisters are mismatched by knowing that I used High, so they used Low.
Now, if they are using DC it is infinitely easy to tell who used low and who used high by the amount of voltage drop.
If they are using AC, and I generate uniform AC waveform and match the frequency and polarity, and measure both signals compared to ground, I can tell by the relative deformation of the voltage wave and the direction of current flow, whether the high resistance.
And you don't need to deal with "Thermal" anything.
The measured "thermal" quantity used in the experiment is bull compared to the simplicity of both ends to observe current.
Someone has already mentioned that if you cut the wire and install two of the transceivers you can intercept the key process in both directions and transport the data between the two intermediate devices as clear text.
Finally, if this isn't just a key-generation protocol, if they actually send the data across the link, the transmitter "must" transmit the "next data bit" until there is a resistance mismatch, so any single unknown bit that happens after a known bit in that usage would be known.
Finally, if I just want to disrupt the data flow between the two endpoints, I can spam the wire so that the "Thermal" properties are always intermediate, inducing a complete key mismatch at both ends.
The more you over-think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop-up the pipes. 8-)
This is why, in Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate statistics.
Seriously, it really shouldn't surprise people when someone who has passed through academia, or life for that matter, turn out to be complete bone heads. This is how middle management happens in the first place. Wisdom, or whatever you want to call it, is really the ability to generalize knowledge from the specific. I constantly deal with mathematicians who cannot construct a valid argument from basic statistics and so on.
To para-quote Men In Black: "A person can be smart, but people are dumb panicky animals who are much happier when they don't have to know what is really happening."
The ability to follow a cogent argument through to its rational conclusion is damn rare. The ability to form a cogent argument that is rational through to its conclusion is even more rare.
I am _never_ surprised by the unwisdom of people, even when I find myself doing it... Humanity is not wired for smart, its only wired for short-term cleverness and evasion. Being smart takes a lot of work, and constant vigilance of ones self.
So when people get lazy, they get stupid. If you catch my drift. Always remember to factor in the laziness...
Any organization that doesn't want to play this game should use NAT to map their public addresses to their internal network no matter how big their address range.
Think about it. If you have a class C address range, and you psudo-dynamically (e.g. randomly) map each private (internal) address to a public address then there is no possibility of correlation.
So the fixed servers are given fixed addresses, and the client machines get issued a public address when they go public. Do it in a first requested, next issued basis. The mapping would be pretty straight forward and consistent on a session by session basis.
Make the rotations happen arbitrarily at DHCP cliam/renew and leave it at that.
Lets see, the entire ISDN standard is awash with places where the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is bridged to the packet switched "public network" of the ISDN networks run by the various providers.
ISDN phones directly call regular analog voice phones as well.
So there is no "Internet Protocol" but there are both required "public" networks.
Voice over Frame Relay and X.25 was old hat for the "Dimension" premises telephone switches sold and rented by AT&T back in 1986.
1) make liquid CO2 via pressurization. 2) pour liquid CO2 into container of desired shape (in a closed system, as in tank to hose to box). 3) disconnect tank and hose from container. 4) flip open valve to container.
The heat in the liquid CO2 is expended in the state change to gas as "a good bit" of the CO2 boils away and the remaining liquid is frozen. The liquid doesn't stop cooling when it reaches a "CO2 as a liquid" temperature, it just keeps getting colder because the vapor pressure difference between the surrounding air and the "pool" of liquid doesn't reach equilibrium. The block of resulting "dry ice" remains cold for a very long time because after that, the block can only sublimate, which involves paying the price of both state changes.
Now if we follow your references:
"The standard enthalpy change of vaporization, vHo, also (less correctly) known as the heat of vaporization is the energy required to transform a given quantity of a substance into a gas. It is measured at the boiling point of the substance, although tabulated values are usually corrected to 298 K: the correction is small, and is often smaller than the uncertainty in the measured value. Values are usually quoted in kJ/mol, although kJ/kg, kcal/mol, cal/g and Btu/lb (obsolete) are also possible, among others.... As neither entropy nor enthalpy vary greatly with temperature, it is normal to use the tabulated standard values without any correction for the difference in temperature from 298 K. A correction must be made if the pressure is different from 100 kPa, as the entropy of a gas is proportional to its pressure (or, more precisely, to its fugacity): the entropies of liquids vary little with pressure, as the compressibility of a liquid is small.
These two definitions are equivalent: the boiling point is the temperature at which the increased entropy of the gas phase overcomes the intermolecular forces. As a given quantity of matter always has a higher entropy in the gas phase than in a condensed phase (vS is always positive), and from"
We see that the measurements are made "at the boiling point of the substance", but we also learn that the entropy of the _GAS_ is "proportional to its pressure" but the entropies of _liquids_ "vary little with pressure as the compressibility of a liquid is small". We note that the energy cost is expressed as "kJ/mol" and we note the lack of any equivocation about pressure or density in that unit of measure. (That is, it is measured at the boiling point of the material, not the boiling point of the material at a given pressure, etc)
Since I sweat _liquid_ and not _gas_ things are still on track.
Now, as you have observed, the ambient pressure in a vacuum is approximately zero. This means that there will be virtually no noticeable "evaporation" as there will be a _HIUGE_ amount of boiling. Oh, wait, you are a pendant and will need a reference:
"Boiling, a type of phase transition, is the rapid vaporization of a liquid, which typically occurs when a liquid is heated to its boiling point, the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid is equal to the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding atmospheric pressure. Thus, a liquid may also boil when the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere is sufficiently reduced, such as the use of a vacuum pump or at high altitudes. Boiling occurs in three characteristic stages, which are nucleate, transition and film boiling. These stages generally take place from low to high surface temperatures, respectively."
Note the explicit mention of the low pressure states (q.v. "vacuum pump") leading to boiling.
So if you can generalize your knowledge at all, you now know that sweat will "boil" off your skin in a vacuum, and the "heat of vaporization" (which is a function of that boiling independent of pressure because the initial state is a liquid at least until you freeze solid and begin to sublimate) will be paid by some
(Initial Aside: the one thing nobody is considering in these comments about freezing in space is the Heat of Vaporization. The sweat boiling off your body would freeze you damn skippy. Look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization and consider that that energy has to come from somewhere, while the reduction of pressure will lower the boiling point very very far, it costs a fixed number of calories for that boiling to effect a change in state of the water.)
Things that Bugged the snot out of me about that episode:
1) at the rate the air was leaking, there was no way enough cooling was taking place to make them cold like that. (My excuse for them: stress and shock related changes in the extremity.)
2) If one of them had pissed on a rag and stuck it in the hole the episode would have been over. Even if the rag didn't freeze into a solid plug (which it would, given that the Heat of Vaporization would have acted very fast such a rag in space) a wet rag is a _really_ good gasket for preventing the flow of air.
3) They are a space-faring race. This wouldn't be "unheard of scenerio X" it would be in the operations binder of every ship as "jammed door leading to occupied but slowly depressurizing compartment, scenarios 1 through 100, 101 and above continued in next manual."
4) These space superstars apparently haven't invented "the tent", you know, that air-tight plastic wrapping you glue to the side of a ship to hold in the air while you work on the hull. Or, you know, the tent we could attach to the outside of the big door and pressurize so that when we opened the door we could walk in and hand them some space suits. (Or for that matter the flat piece of plastic we could slip two space suits under and then glue/melt around the edge of the door and pressurize so that we can pass in two space suits.
5) We an put people in space, in ships, and suits, but we cannot give them a caulking gun to fill a quarter sized hole in a known and accessible location.
6) The chief has a pressure patch, which he uses, and which is apparently designed with the structural integrity of play-dough since it clearly cannot hold in one bloody atmosphere of pressure.
7) The chief has a tool kit, and it _doesn't_ contain any of: Duct Tape, Bubble Wrap, Caulk, Plumbers Putty, etc, etc, etc.
And now, for my single favorite mistake in every science fiction movie ever:
Commander: "What about the manual override?" Worker: (pushing _button_ for damn sake) "It doesn't work." (WTF?)
By definition, the _manual_ override wouldn't be a button. A button would be an electrical override.
The manual override would be a Lever, or a Crank, or a Wheel (or a chuck one would fit a wrench too) that one operated with one's hands, directly at the point of attachment. Hence "manual".
All that being said, the performances in the episode were excellent and, once turned off the "you have to be kidding" part of my brain, I found the episode to be "pretty good". (It didn't bare a second watching because then I was all MST3K on its ass... 8-)
The other thing that nobody seems to be addressing here is the Heat of Vaporization.
While I cannot speak to whether the "sweat" would have a chance to spread, it would still cool you _very_ fast. The sweat would effectively boil off your body because of the vacuum, and your body would be the heat source for that boiling.
More explicitly (though I don't have the math here, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization does) as pressure decreases, the boiling temperature of water (etc) drops. But regardless of the boiling temperature, the total amount of energy it takes for the liquid to become a gas is fixed by volume. This is why sweat can "keep you cool" when the ambient temperature is higher than your body temperature. The Heat of Fusion is why we add salt to ice to make the ice cold enough to freeze the cream to make ice cream.
The danegeld must be paid and you do sweat, _lots_ of cold to be had there.
So, for instance, in the Battlestar Galactica episode referenced by someone else I was like "dude, piss on a rag and stuff it in the hole!" Both media were available in the scene, the evaporating urine from the hole would have super-cooled the rag and frozen it solid and then the ice chunk would last until the ice sublimated, which would have easily been long enough to re-pressurize the bay.
So yea, only women get cervical cancer, but HPV sucks for both genders. It isn't just an amusement for men. Shouldn't we want to stop the disease wherever possible?
As it is now, a guy who wanted to get the shots would probably have trouble getting the protection for various social reasons (poorly educated clinic workers who think the treatment is gender specific etc). Heck, since it has been marketed as a "girl thing" a lot of guys probably wouldn't even think to ask.
It's great to stop the cancer, but stopping the STD is just as important.
Besides if you can inoculate all sexually active people with health insurance then you would reduce the exposure of those who don't (etc).
I use OpenOffice. I support Open Document Format over MS/XML and.doc.
That said, ODF it kind of blows. Really.
I write novel-length "books" and it is FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to do some very basic things in any/every ODF based word processor I have tried to date.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with an automatic table of contents, said table to contain an "Authors Note", "Prologue", auto-numbered chapters 1 to N with their associated chapter titles (where the actual chapter number is the chapter number internal variable), and finally "Epilogue" all at the same level of the index.
This simple task is essentially impossible. The flaw is caused by the fact that everything goes through the "styles" and the styles don't inherit their list membership properties. You should be able to make a style "TOC Entry" that is assigned to a particular table of contents level (e.g. level 1) then make a sub-style "Chapter Heading" based on "TOC Entry" but with the chapter numbering magic attached, and in so doing, create "different styles" that go to the same level/point in the list.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with each chapter, and the prolog, and the epilog in separate sub documents. The linkage thing is a mess, it is hard to move "the pile of files" around especially if you want to use subdirectories (etc). If you have a custom style in the master document style list you have to _USE_ it in the master document if you want it to be pushed into the created sub-documents. Once the sub-documents are created it is a royal pain (read effectively impossible, or "supremely hidden feature required") to update those styles in those sub documents if you change that style.
Exercise for the Interested:
Put three separate "outlines" into one ODF Document. In ODF the outline is a function of the style headers, they only exist as implications of structure instead of first class abstractions. This is largely the fault of Microsoft Word, since the Word folks totally messed this up when they supplanted WordPerfect (which did this inset outline/object sort of thing right).
ODF was, IMHO, poisoned by the slavish attempt by someone trying to make a Word killer instead of a "good word processor."
And there are stacks more of these issues.
And all that said, I *STILL* use ODF (Open Office etc) because I CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to _RENT_ the right to access my own work from a third party. Microsoft has plainly stated that such rental model is their intended business plan, which makes them a non-starter.
In my opinion, having used both Word and OpenOffice for years; and having used Word Perfect and wordstar before them, ODF is a "workman like effort" to create a document format suitable for "normal business purposes". There is a reason that the legal profession never moved over to Word, and they likewise will not move to ODF, when you need to get to a tightly proscribed document format, both Word and ODF have a "you can't get there from here" fundamental limitation. Both formats simply refuse to represent some things because the designers "know" that a different format is better. Neither ODF nor Word has any allowances for _art_, professional or poetical.
So, governments should use ODF because it is "no worse" than Word in terms of the ability to represent the documents it can represent, and given that congruence, the shorter, 100% open standard is, or should be, a hard minimum requirements.
In terms of ODF being the be-all and end-all of document representation, I'd have to say "hardly!" I looked into the OpenOffice code base a while back to see if adding/changing the format to allow for "a book" would be reasonable. It didn't appear to be. Too many of the original StarOffice assumptions about document structure seemed pathologically uninspired. It was like looking at a big pile of Visual Basic. Everything in the standard is way too global, nothing "nests organically" it all nests pedagogically. (Every
Nice AC post, but you are wrong in decrying "us" with your factlessness.
First: TCP doesn't start at full window size. Then gains throughput linearly adding one MTU length to the amount of the window size it is willing to risk/fill per ACK. TCP falls back exponentially, that is, every single fault detected cuts the senders willingness to fill the TCP window by half. Maot (all?) TCP implementations actually only ACK every other frame if they don't have any data to send in the other direction. When you factor all this together and add some numbers (which I may get wrong here as I typing without ready reference) it only takes 1 lost outgoing ACK per 2n*log(n) frames where n = window_size/mtu, to limit your downstream speed to an aggregate of 1/2 the channel maximum. So lost upstream packets are quite expensive as a limit.
Next: Everything you said about UDP was immaterial or misleading at best. The reason "streaming" video is usually UDP has to do with the fact that it is generally better to drop frames than delay the program. This is especially true if you are trying to get anywhere near your hardware bandwidth. The ramp-up rate and the exponential fallback mean that you can _only_ loose time to dropouts, but you cannot ever "catch up to 'now'" on a live broadcast because even when you _do_ get the data and you _do_ have the bandwidth to catch up, if you show every frame at the encoded framerate after the pause, it wont ever go "slightly faster than normal" to catch up without the operator doing a seek/fast-forward. So every time you drop frames you permanently lose real wall-clock time. With even minimal frame dropping your schedule would slowly sag back in time. EVEN WITHOUT ALL THAT the streamer/broadcaster doesn't want to have to buffer-for-retransmit N frames for N sessions. It would be very expensive in server hardware alone. So non-UDP is a non-Starter for all streaming media.
Next: I don't know about the 1meg statistic and argument made by the grandparent, but empirical evidence suggests it is invalid. I can demonstrate massive changes in performance for _tiny_ tweaks once I relax throttle beyond the outgoing rate of the modem. (That is, if I throttle to 767kbps I get nearly perfect 8mbps download. Up the throttle to 769kbps and the throughput drops to median 3mbps and so on. I _did_ the experiment.) I have no provenance for that "1 meg" number, nor do I know whether that number is for upstream cache, downstream cache, or both; nor do I know whether that buffer is subject to fragmentation. So I really cannot address this number. Empirical evidence suggests that the practical value of this buffer is apparently minimal.
Next: The cable side of the cable modem is running (essentially) ATM. In particular, this means (1) that the cable side for data flowing from your modem to the carrier is restricted by the rules of pure Time Division Multiplexing and (2) any dropouts in the ATM stream will _not_ be corrected by the cable modem/carrier link, so any misses/drops will have to be resolved at the TCP transport level. Skipping that for a moment, since the cable modem doesn't get any "credit" for unused ATM slots when the modem buffer _didn't_ have data to send. That means that "bursting" from the link to the modem is "bad". Your modem can send 768kbits (if you have the "good package") and your Ethernet link can send 10mbits per second. It isn't that hard for the later to overwhelm the former in a burst because the upstream buffer can be filled 12(?) times faster than it can be emptied in uniformly optimal conditions.
Next: Is it likely that during normal network activity, that a customer would be likely to fulfill the conditions likely to cause fault. In my house it is typical to have at least three computers actively using the network. Before considering the bidirectional UDP of streaming games, we have to consider that each element of a web page is a complete outbound HTTP request (with cookies and all you get a typical upstream size of 2k, and then it can be i
If the net needs anything it needs Quality of Service routing at the customer access point.
NO, I am _NOT_ talking about a non-neutral net. I think net neutrality is mandatory.
What I am talking about is an end to TCP Retransmits in our lifetime. (Ok, that is overstating it a little 8-).
At my home I put together a QOS gateway that throttled my _outgoing_ packets to the speed of my cable modem _and_ made sure that if it had to drop something it would _not_ drop outgoing "mostly ACK" packets. (e.g. outgoing TCP packets with little or no data payload get best delivery.)
This action lowered my incomming packet count and got my effective download speed to closely approach the bandwidth tier I am paying for. This was a 3x to 4x improvement in throughput. This, when combined with the lower packet count, implies that previously I was wasting 2 out of every 3 packets due to unnecessary "recovery" (read useless retransmits).
That cost must, then, have been paid at every step along every trip etc.
Then I turned on HTTP Pipelining on all the (forefox) browsers in my house (etc).
I suspect that if we could do something about the waste ratio, and generally speed up each transaction by squelching the noise and getting better effective throughput, "the intertubes" would be a lot clearer and the capacity wouldn't fall apart so readily.
[aside] If we could (pie in the sky) get the porn and ewe-tube traffic onto the mbone with smart caching near the client so that each person didn't have to get each part "the whole way" from the provider even though everybody else is watching the same top-ten clips of the day, we could make more progress. This falls apart because it messes up the charging model for porn and advertising, and ewe-tube gawkers couldn't possibly stand waiting 2 to 6 seconds to join a synchronized swarm... [/aside]
This is very like the whole thing where a guy with half-flat tires is standing around complaining about his gas mileage.
Collision detect style arbitration falls apart when you saturate the link, and cable providers screwed themselves with the way most cable modems fail to buffer outgoing traffic. Penny wise and Pound foolish of them to make the default devices so cheap. Iterate as necessary for businesses and ISPs with their underpowered gateway machines terminating their PPOE (etc).
As for the part where that failure to schedule packets at the most basic level will be turned into "demonstrable evidence" for the "need" non-neutral networks... That will be the "WMDs" of the net neutrality war.
You actually made a unique post, so it's alright. The previous posters were "nuh hua, you are so wrongorzs cus like da SIMs is so _exactly_ a game *about* accountants" (and so on 8-)
At least you apparently got the point, and on slashdot that makes you totally a new thing.
Where exactly did I say "two wrongs do make a right"? Where did I even hint at that.
I'm pretty sure I said "no wrongs make for a complete failure of marketability".
I'm also pretty sure that I said that people who cherry-pick their outrage from within a complete festering scab of outrageousness are not worth taking seriously because selective rage about something no worse than the background noise was crying wolf in a crowded theater full of sheep... or maybe not that last one...
I think it _would_ be safe to presume that I think anybody who considers the characters portrayed in a GTA game (or most television shows, or a lot of books, or religious texts for that matter) are _intended_ or suitable as "role models" should just STFU because they are idiots.
You see, I can at least sympathize with people who think the whole genre is flawed. It's when the people decide that one particular element of the genre is somehow aimed just at them that I call bullshit.
If the diatribe from the original article was a (sad rehash) of the whole "these games are bad, um-kay" argument I'd at least have _some_ sympathy. I wouldn't necessarily _agree_ but I'd have some _sympathy_.
You see, I have some _perspective_. I try to write, and I try to read, and so I _know_ and _understand_ that "effective story telling" _usually_ requires the author to grotesquely simplify the characters they present. If you try to unfold each entity into the unique and delicate snowflake that they are, full of their own passions and reasons and heartbreaking back-story they bring to the rich tableau of life, you never get to tell the story you are actually trying to tell.
So yea, the "rice burner" who has come into town to challenge your ability to take a street racer through a dirt track (of all the stupid things), rendered in the active memory of a PS2 "region" and with a full seven words of dialog in the course of a 12 second cut-scene, is in all likelihood, going to come out "a touch stereotyped". Let's not even start on the touching back-story of each of the 200 rubber-stamped drug dealing pimps that seem to endlessly and innocently wander that one street oblivious to the death and mayhem happening not one step away day after day...
Having accepted the limits of the media, and the goal of the story, _and_ it's placement as part-5 of a series, it is just a _little_ to late to start yammering because, sweet mary and joseph, this one is *GASP* _black_.... oh the horror!
If you think your kids are too stupid to know its a freaking game, you shouldn't be letting them play it.
If you cannot control your own children then why should we let you try to control an _industry_?
If you don't even _have_ children then your role-model talk is really self-serving political bullcrap.
So to recap:
Video Game? Not a Role Model.
Sports Figure? Not a Role Model.
Politician? Not a Role Model.
Stranger on the street? Not a Role Model.
Political Stranger on the street of a Video Game?... you guessed it... Not a role model.
[sarcasm] yes, this _clearly_ is the perfect drop-in replacement for GTA on the PS(x) where I can sit down and follow the rich action experience of...
oh wait, this is a "turn based strategy game where you..."
So there isn't a plot, as such.
Oh, I see, this is a completely different kind of game, but I can totally see how it would just draw in the GTA crowd because nothing says "fast action" and "good story telling" like an open-ended turn-based strategy game. Gee, let me at it. I can hardly wait to throw off my life as a programmer to assume the unmatched adrenaline of "saxophone playing drug addict"! No wait! A waiter! That will get the blood pumping like nothing else! How did we miss this blockbuster at E3, it must have been just leaping off shelf, so we couldn't find it, and _that's_ how we missed it... It all comes clear to me now.
Oh, and the role-modely goodness that comes from the fact that the doped out musician could be _any_ _race_ _at_ _all_ is just so liberating.... [/sarcasm]
Look, you might as well bring up Sudoku. I play that. I _like_ that. But it has no bearing here. Heck I can name countless good and bad games in countless other genres, but they are _in_ _other_ _genres_.
We are talking about a particular game genre when we talk about games where the characters we are meant to follow (or revile and kill) are walking their paces according to scripts and cut-scenes. It's a kind of interactive literature. Someone scripted the thing. And since it isn't "like make your dude and do whatever... dude" there is the task of authorship and the player also has the role of viewer and critic. That means the _story_ has to sell along with the action. And lets face it "Accountant: the good black father and his heroic struggle with everyday life" isn't going to sell even _if_ the story is a masterwork, because "up-down-up-down-left-right-start to get the dried on stuff of the plate before putting it in the dishwasher" just isn't that compelling.
So the question of a story game that would sell to the people who would buy GTA:(whatever) is in no way explored by bringing up "eve2" or "tetris" or "WoW" or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a fundamental problem with OOo and making "an outline". In the same way that Java decided that the base of all objects is the "Object" object, OOo decided that the base of every document was "The Outline".
That is, the outline-ness of the _whole_ document essentially prevents "putting one or more outlines into a document". It is, to use a lose analogy, like trying to put a car into a car. In the old WordPerfect, which did this perfectly, the outline-ness was not part of the document and you could put one or more outlines into the document. This would be like putting one or more cars into a truck.
With the open document standard this has been largely codified into the entire family of the product.
Yea, it sucks.
Oddly enough you have largely the same problem with Word, but they "fake it" by putting the numbering contexts of the outline-ness several levels into the whole hierarchy. That is, they make "lists" instead of "outlines" and then they put a mode around it. It is a sucky approach we have grown used to with all its foibles.
You can fake it by hand in OOo by working out style sets and then saving a template document. But the whole tab-causes-change-of-style thing isn't a happiness.
So I agree. But the comparison should be OOo to WordPerfect when you talk about outlines.
Strike: Dear Microsoft, When used incorrectly and in direct conflict of something that you are promoting, DRM sucks!
Replace With: Dear Microsoft, Technological Measures to Enforce Illegal Prior Restraint, popularly misspelled DRM, sucks, is annoying, and is probably illegal in all contexts. We don't care if you have been "getting away with it", its wrong. Cut it out.
Er, doing anything with dot-net...
I know, what a lightning rod for the flame wars, but my position isn't without reason.
Seriously, this platform is based on the idea that a person wanting to compile a program in a reasonably provable languages just cannot live without "system calls" written in visual basic. But having made that mistake, the question of which mapping API to use is valid.
In terms of integration, you will be more happy using the MS maps API. I know this sight-unseen because I know some of the people responsible for the work in dot-net. I have heard about what is and isn't tested to work with what, and lots of "it would be funny if people weren't using this for important work" stories about the whole "framework" (which seems to be MS speak for "arbitrary collection of whatever we could find to plug the holes).
In short, because of technical shortcomings in the language platform, you are _less_ likely to run into problems accessing an MS API from dot-net than you will be accessing a non-MS API. In the MS case you may benefit from testing and you probably(*) wont run into cases where the "framework" deliberately sabatoges the API.
---
(*) I say probably because I know, abet second hand, that Windows-ME was largely an aggressive act to sabotage the Win2k effort. It wasn't just bad, it was _designed_ to invalidate many of the things the Win2K team were developing. That is, for purely personal and puerile reasons, the head of the ME team used his knowledge of the Win2k efforts, and his personal dislike of the Win2k project lead, to craft APIs that would break things like Plug-n-Play. Since MS will _never_ discard a bad interface (since they want 100% backward compatibility from future projects) this let the ME team "Beat them to market" with interfaces that deliberately sabotaged the upcoming effort. -- SINCE these same people pulling these same games are still at the company in question, you never know when one MS API/Framework/etc will be secretly designed against another.
Yay for having mendacious personalities in charge of your mono-culture.
And good luck and all with your efforts.
(Bonus Fire Wood: Nobody who has been an MS "Strategic Partner" has survived the experience, so why do people desire that state?... discuss... 8-)
You are "more right" than him, but you are wrong.
/dir1/file1 /dir2/file2" _doesn't_ create any kind of inode at all. It causes the system go to "/dir1/" and find the inode number in the directory entry that contains the text "file1" and then uses that number to create an entry in the relevant directory (/dir2/) that contains the new name "file2" and the previously mentioned inode number (and it "coincidentally" increases the reference count in the inode so the file system knows that the inode previously referenced by the name /dir1/file1 now has two names. NOTE that the inode doesn't know it's "name" or "names" which is why, if you trash your file system and then do an integrity check, the system will reattach lost inodes in lost+found (in ext2/3/4 and similar file systems) and only give them a number (the inode's actual number) as the "file name".
/dir1/file1 /dir2/file2" you are making a symbolic link. In _this_ case you make a new inode which references (typically) one single data block that contains the string "/dir1/file1" and the number of that new inode is put in a directory slot within /dir2/ tagged by the string "file2" so when the os comes by, and you open/cd/whatever that file /dir2/file2, the request becomes a name lookup of text "/dir1/file1". This leads to the various symlink shenanigans, particularly with chroot and friends.
"ln
It would be _DISASTEROUS_ to create a second inode who's data pointers pointed to the same data blocks as another inode. Among other things, you could _never_ know when a particular data block was finially deleted. Another problem is that the two inodes could end up owned by different accounts and possess contradictory times, permissions, and sizes. Dang disastrous.
BUT... if you "ln -s
STILL, a _hard_ link (the first example) just adds a name and number pair to a directory that is a _hard_ alias to the original file, and the _soft_ link is a reference by name.
Consider:
echo "First Name" > file1
ln file1 file2
ln -s file1 file3
rm file1
echo "Second Name" > file1
"cat file1" produces "Second Name"
"cat file2" produces "First Name"
"cat file3" produces "Second Name"
When you understand why, and you understand that the above exercise has involved 3 inodes (four if you count the current directory), but that the third (fourth if you count the current directory) inode doesn't come into use/existence until the second echo.... then and only then grasshopper should you again correct someone's understanding of inodes in a public forum.
8-)
ASIDE: words like "create" and "come into existence" are used here in the vernacular, for simplicity. In fact, for most current file systems, the inodes are created when the file system is created on the disk, and are allocated from and returned to the free inode pool(s) as opposed to being "created" or "destroyed" but that is a separate conversation...
How dare they paint my darling with the onerous label "virgin"! This is a smear she will never live down! She is as complete a slut as daddy could possibly have raised, and to have her suffer under this libel is intolerable.
Last I heard, you couldn't ruin someone's reputation with positive attributes nor praise. I think you get where the argument is going here.
Meanwhile, while the "photographer" is shait out of luck over the money, the girl shouldn't have gotten a lawyer, she should have gotten a business manager. They are much better at turning this sort of thing into huge piles of cash and follow-on work. She _could_ have leveraged this into he being "the Virgin virgin on the move" or whatever the equivalent to the "can you hear me now guy" would have been.
She should sue her parents for suing, so that she can get all the money they cost her by suing all these other people. 8-)
The questions just let you select the boilerplate license that has the features you claim you want. That is, the site is effectively _indexed_ by the criteria that you yes-and-no to the questions. So it cannot, by a _rational_ _man_ standard, be considered "drafting you" a license. (IMHO of course). [That is, the licenses exist separately and you can go directly to one etc, so you _are_ pulling a "form contract", you are just being asked "which form" in detail.] I surely hope that the questions you ask as a lawyer lead to something more expert-ee (to coin a word in jest) than the process as you describe it.
Meanwhile, I am pretty sure (but I don't use the "service") that each time you upload something to flickr (sp?) web site, they do _not_ direct you to "walk" the questions over at Creative Commons, and then copy the "drafted" license into their server along with the picture. I would bet that they, flickr, provide you with some sort of check-box or drop-down where you pick the license by name from a list (etc). I feel safe in making this guess because the storage cost of all those individually "drafted" licenses would be non-trivial, and you wouldn't then be able to search those images "by license" without doing it as a full text search. (and so on, to short my own "area of art" expertise in the name of brevity.)
So, since we can darn well bet that "photographer" never actually went to the Creative Commons web site, and since we know that Creative Commons didn't do _anything_ to customize the "form" licenses they offer, free of charge and without contract/agreement/etc to everyone whether they visit the site or company itself, they don't, by any stretch of the imagination, have any relationship to the "photographer" at all. To argue otherwise would be to suggest I could hold (Thomas Pane?) liable for the outcome of my actions if I first shouted "give me liberty, or give me death" because he wrote the words and "provided them to me" and via the mechanism of history. (Ok, that's a little over-dramatic 8-)
By your legal theory, all those "Will in a box" kits (etc) are liable and should be party to any action whenever the produced documents go to court.
The fundamental error of law here seems to echo in the summary, where "Creative Commons license" is being read as an affirmative act. The implication that the Creative Commons company _granted_ the license somehow, as opposed to the photographer, is highly confounding, to me at least.
Meanwhile, I don't see any grounds for action in implying that a 16 year old girl is a virgin. By law she is supposed to be, and you cannot libel someone with a positive label anyway. They didn't say "text a slut with virgin mobile". If her friends are pointing and laughing at her yelling "ha, ha, you aren't putting out" etc and it is pissing her off, then something is very wrong and it is happening in the girls immediate environment.
Let's face it, chick's on the poster, and chick wants some scratch. And captain councilor took the picture and wants some lucre himself.
This isn't a complex legal theory. This is greedy people wanting "what they deserve, plus as much as they can get".
Besides, what ever happened to "you cannot trespass with the eyes". The expectation of privacy is pretty non-existent once you post something to the internet. If she didn't object to the picture as posted in the first place, my purely human instinct says she doesn't get to go back and complain about it now. You are not _allowed_ to suck things back out of the common pool of culture. Copyright gives you a limited monopoly, but then its public domain all the way. The photographer chose not to limit that monopoly or require "consideration" when he made the material available. That is, he published and he said "here, use this for business if you want". Horse, this is barn door, barn door, this is horse, I know you will never see each other again, but that was it.
I _do_ know why "model releases" etc, exist. But since the "model" isn't
Actaully, since the lower performance package limits the upload speed by a greater percentage(*) than the download speed, and since the upload speed can be shown to be the dominant factor, they don't have to do a single thing _technically_ to make you "Feel The Pain".
Between that, and the (probable) QOS tiering differences between the two packages, you will also Feel The Pain naturally as your cable modem segment comes under increased load.
They almost certainly want to get the data out of their systems and into yours as fast as possible so that they can have cheaper systems on their end. Backlogging your data behind a throttled link takes memory. It actually costs them money. It's better to set up the systems so that the load characteristics meet the promised numbers in demonstrable but very raw/low-level way and then just move the data as fast as possible. That way if someone tries to sue them about performance they can go "look here, we set it up so that at peak load everybody gets their share, and so what if they _could_ get more when things are idle, that's not bad for the customer". Meanwhile their actual load conditions end up being limited by the much more practical, distributed upstream throttles in the individual modem initialization settings.
This is further demonstrated by the incidents where hackers hacked on their modems and got much higher levels of service. If the systems at the distribution point were actually throttled, tweaking their modems would have only amounted to a slight increase in total throughput. They'd have had to hack the central distribution facility systems as well. (Which they did not have to do.)
Disclaimer: This is a black-box analysis on my part. e.g. this is a well-educated guess based on observations. They may well be doing something stupid with their central facilities. I would only cost them a lot of money for no real benefit (they get charged for wasted retransmits at _their_ meetered access to the internet at large too, so dropping data at the boundaries of the cable segments would be damn stupid). Then again, they have to be wasting all the green they make for overcharging me _somewhere_... 8-)
(*) Consider that when the download speed goes from 6 to 8 Mbps (a 33% increase) the upload speeds goes from 384 to 768 kpbs (a 100% increase).
Comcast has no real interest in preventing faster _download_ speeds than what is advertised if there is no line contention. It would cost more than it was worth to truely throttle data going from them to you. They _do_ have a real interest in throttling their upload speed. Consequently on a really idle link there is no real reason _not_ keep the customer-directed data bandwidth full.
In quality of service terms, you put allocations in the QOS table but you let lower tiers "borrow" from higher tiers when the higher tiers are idle.
Now I have tested and _tuned_ my Comcast service and I _do_ get 8Mbps downstream during peak hours using raw linux measurement (so I know there is no compression tricks etc involved), but I had to QOS tune my outbound path to make sure I didn't drop my ACKs. Relaxing (increasing allow data rates) my outbound throttle by 1% will crash the link from 8Mbps to a bouncy range of 3 to 5 Mbps. Really, the outbound throttling to keep the modem from trashing outbound ACKs (and thereby preventing unnecessary fallbacks and retransmissions) is the key to a good throughput.
Someone above was talking about having bunches of separate channels to do a true test. That's pretty clueless. Since TCP scales up linearly and scales back exponentially, spamming a link with lots of diverse TCP data is not usually a stable measure of that link. One stream with a known-stable path, and a known non-saturated return path, is a more correct measure. Of course you have to know how to read the results to understand when you are measuring the link and when you are measuring "the system" (including both server and client and the other links in the transit etc).
So anyway, I have no idea how Comcast implements the "speed boost" thing. They don't even give hints. I can imagine several different ways such a thing could be managed, but they don't provide any technical information to help me make an educated guess.
I have found Comcast's raw service to be quite stable and reliable, more-so now that I have taken responsibility for the upside link. I can imagine that if you hooked a Windows box directly to the cable modem you would get crappy unstable throughput. With no outbound throttle you have the Windows TCP stack slamming that link and hemmoraging ACK packets.
I use NoScript all the time. If I get to a page who's scripts I _want_ I allow them, or temporarily allow them.
I don't miss much except for the bullcrap. Yea, it takes all of a keystroke or a context menu selection whenever I decided I want "the full web experience".
The truth is, most of the time, nobody _wants_ "the full web experience."
Live and Learn... give it a try for a while and you will get hooked (unless you are incredibly lazy, which I am also, sometimes. 8-)
Lets see, I hook an ammeter up around the wire at any point. I get three current levels. 2xHighREsistance = low current, 2xLowResistance = high current, HighAndLowResistance = medium current.
So I have a 50% chance of knowing a bit with absolute certainty, so you can only use the bits generated when the resisters are mismatched by knowing that I used High, so they used Low.
Now, if they are using DC it is infinitely easy to tell who used low and who used high by the amount of voltage drop.
If they are using AC, and I generate uniform AC waveform and match the frequency and polarity, and measure both signals compared to ground, I can tell by the relative deformation of the voltage wave and the direction of current flow, whether the high resistance.
And you don't need to deal with "Thermal" anything.
The measured "thermal" quantity used in the experiment is bull compared to the simplicity of both ends to observe current.
Someone has already mentioned that if you cut the wire and install two of the transceivers you can intercept the key process in both directions and transport the data between the two intermediate devices as clear text.
Finally, if this isn't just a key-generation protocol, if they actually send the data across the link, the transmitter "must" transmit the "next data bit" until there is a resistance mismatch, so any single unknown bit that happens after a known bit in that usage would be known.
Finally, if I just want to disrupt the data flow between the two endpoints, I can spam the wire so that the "Thermal" properties are always intermediate, inducing a complete key mismatch at both ends.
The more you over-think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop-up the pipes. 8-)
This is why, in Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate statistics.
Seriously, it really shouldn't surprise people when someone who has passed through academia, or life for that matter, turn out to be complete bone heads. This is how middle management happens in the first place. Wisdom, or whatever you want to call it, is really the ability to generalize knowledge from the specific. I constantly deal with mathematicians who cannot construct a valid argument from basic statistics and so on.
To para-quote Men In Black: "A person can be smart, but people are dumb panicky animals who are much happier when they don't have to know what is really happening."
The ability to follow a cogent argument through to its rational conclusion is damn rare. The ability to form a cogent argument that is rational through to its conclusion is even more rare.
I am _never_ surprised by the unwisdom of people, even when I find myself doing it... Humanity is not wired for smart, its only wired for short-term cleverness and evasion. Being smart takes a lot of work, and constant vigilance of ones self.
So when people get lazy, they get stupid. If you catch my drift. Always remember to factor in the laziness...
Any organization that doesn't want to play this game should use NAT to map their public addresses to their internal network no matter how big their address range.
Think about it. If you have a class C address range, and you psudo-dynamically (e.g. randomly) map each private (internal) address to a public address then there is no possibility of correlation.
So the fixed servers are given fixed addresses, and the client machines get issued a public address when they go public. Do it in a first requested, next issued basis. The mapping would be pretty straight forward and consistent on a session by session basis.
Make the rotations happen arbitrarily at DHCP cliam/renew and leave it at that.
Lets see, the entire ISDN standard is awash with places where the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is bridged to the packet switched "public network" of the ISDN networks run by the various providers.
ISDN phones directly call regular analog voice phones as well.
So there is no "Internet Protocol" but there are both required "public" networks.
Voice over Frame Relay and X.25 was old hat for the "Dimension" premises telephone switches sold and rented by AT&T back in 1986.
Yea, sure, I'll just switch to my other cable provider... Oh wait, I only have comcast in my area...
Lets see, the pressure to keep comcast honest in the net neutrality thin is my threat to switch to dialup.
That doesn't seem that threatening.
The oldest method for making dry ice:
...
1) make liquid CO2 via pressurization.
2) pour liquid CO2 into container of desired shape (in a closed system, as in tank to hose to box).
3) disconnect tank and hose from container.
4) flip open valve to container.
The heat in the liquid CO2 is expended in the state change to gas as "a good bit" of the CO2 boils away and the remaining liquid is frozen. The liquid doesn't stop cooling when it reaches a "CO2 as a liquid" temperature, it just keeps getting colder because the vapor pressure difference between the surrounding air and the "pool" of liquid doesn't reach equilibrium. The block of resulting "dry ice" remains cold for a very long time because after that, the block can only sublimate, which involves paying the price of both state changes.
Now if we follow your references:
"The standard enthalpy change of vaporization, vHo, also (less correctly) known as the heat of vaporization is the energy required to transform a given quantity of a substance into a gas. It is measured at the boiling point of the substance, although tabulated values are usually corrected to 298 K: the correction is small, and is often smaller than the uncertainty in the measured value. Values are usually quoted in kJ/mol, although kJ/kg, kcal/mol, cal/g and Btu/lb (obsolete) are also possible, among others.
As neither entropy nor enthalpy vary greatly with temperature, it is normal to use the tabulated standard values without any correction for the difference in temperature from 298 K. A correction must be made if the pressure is different from 100 kPa, as the entropy of a gas is proportional to its pressure (or, more precisely, to its fugacity): the entropies of liquids vary little with pressure, as the compressibility of a liquid is small.
These two definitions are equivalent: the boiling point is the temperature at which the increased entropy of the gas phase overcomes the intermolecular forces. As a given quantity of matter always has a higher entropy in the gas phase than in a condensed phase (vS is always positive), and from"
We see that the measurements are made "at the boiling point of the substance", but we also learn that the entropy of the _GAS_ is "proportional to its pressure" but the entropies of _liquids_ "vary little with pressure as the compressibility of a liquid is small". We note that the energy cost is expressed as "kJ/mol" and we note the lack of any equivocation about pressure or density in that unit of measure. (That is, it is measured at the boiling point of the material, not the boiling point of the material at a given pressure, etc)
Since I sweat _liquid_ and not _gas_ things are still on track.
Now, as you have observed, the ambient pressure in a vacuum is approximately zero. This means that there will be virtually no noticeable "evaporation" as there will be a _HIUGE_ amount of boiling. Oh, wait, you are a pendant and will need a reference:
"Boiling, a type of phase transition, is the rapid vaporization of a liquid, which typically occurs when a liquid is heated to its boiling point, the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid is equal to the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding atmospheric pressure. Thus, a liquid may also boil when the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere is sufficiently reduced, such as the use of a vacuum pump or at high altitudes. Boiling occurs in three characteristic stages, which are nucleate, transition and film boiling. These stages generally take place from low to high surface temperatures, respectively."
Note the explicit mention of the low pressure states (q.v. "vacuum pump") leading to boiling.
So if you can generalize your knowledge at all, you now know that sweat will "boil" off your skin in a vacuum, and the "heat of vaporization" (which is a function of that boiling independent of pressure because the initial state is a liquid at least until you freeze solid and begin to sublimate) will be paid by some
(Initial Aside: the one thing nobody is considering in these comments about freezing in space is the Heat of Vaporization. The sweat boiling off your body would freeze you damn skippy. Look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization and consider that that energy has to come from somewhere, while the reduction of pressure will lower the boiling point very very far, it costs a fixed number of calories for that boiling to effect a change in state of the water.)
Things that Bugged the snot out of me about that episode:
1) at the rate the air was leaking, there was no way enough cooling was taking place to make them cold like that. (My excuse for them: stress and shock related changes in the extremity.)
2) If one of them had pissed on a rag and stuck it in the hole the episode would have been over. Even if the rag didn't freeze into a solid plug (which it would, given that the Heat of Vaporization would have acted very fast such a rag in space) a wet rag is a _really_ good gasket for preventing the flow of air.
3) They are a space-faring race. This wouldn't be "unheard of scenerio X" it would be in the operations binder of every ship as "jammed door leading to occupied but slowly depressurizing compartment, scenarios 1 through 100, 101 and above continued in next manual."
4) These space superstars apparently haven't invented "the tent", you know, that air-tight plastic wrapping you glue to the side of a ship to hold in the air while you work on the hull. Or, you know, the tent we could attach to the outside of the big door and pressurize so that when we opened the door we could walk in and hand them some space suits. (Or for that matter the flat piece of plastic we could slip two space suits under and then glue/melt around the edge of the door and pressurize so that we can pass in two space suits.
5) We an put people in space, in ships, and suits, but we cannot give them a caulking gun to fill a quarter sized hole in a known and accessible location.
6) The chief has a pressure patch, which he uses, and which is apparently designed with the structural integrity of play-dough since it clearly cannot hold in one bloody atmosphere of pressure.
7) The chief has a tool kit, and it _doesn't_ contain any of: Duct Tape, Bubble Wrap, Caulk, Plumbers Putty, etc, etc, etc.
And now, for my single favorite mistake in every science fiction movie ever:
Commander: "What about the manual override?"
Worker: (pushing _button_ for damn sake) "It doesn't work."
(WTF?)
By definition, the _manual_ override wouldn't be a button. A button would be an electrical override.
The manual override would be a Lever, or a Crank, or a Wheel (or a chuck one would fit a wrench too) that one operated with one's hands, directly at the point of attachment. Hence "manual".
All that being said, the performances in the episode were excellent and, once turned off the "you have to be kidding" part of my brain, I found the episode to be "pretty good". (It didn't bare a second watching because then I was all MST3K on its ass... 8-)
The other thing that nobody seems to be addressing here is the Heat of Vaporization.
While I cannot speak to whether the "sweat" would have a chance to spread, it would still cool you _very_ fast. The sweat would effectively boil off your body because of the vacuum, and your body would be the heat source for that boiling.
More explicitly (though I don't have the math here, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization does) as pressure decreases, the boiling temperature of water (etc) drops. But regardless of the boiling temperature, the total amount of energy it takes for the liquid to become a gas is fixed by volume. This is why sweat can "keep you cool" when the ambient temperature is higher than your body temperature. The Heat of Fusion is why we add salt to ice to make the ice cold enough to freeze the cream to make ice cream.
The danegeld must be paid and you do sweat, _lots_ of cold to be had there.
So, for instance, in the Battlestar Galactica episode referenced by someone else I was like "dude, piss on a rag and stuff it in the hole!" Both media were available in the scene, the evaporating urine from the hole would have super-cooled the rag and frozen it solid and then the ice chunk would last until the ice sublimated, which would have easily been long enough to re-pressurize the bay.
Or more precisely "Illegal Prior Restraint implemented with Arbitrary, Unregulated Technical Measures.
It is just commonly misspelled DRM.
"DRM" is the "aint" of No F-ing Way.
So yea, only women get cervical cancer, but HPV sucks for both genders. It isn't just an amusement for men. Shouldn't we want to stop the disease wherever possible?
As it is now, a guy who wanted to get the shots would probably have trouble getting the protection for various social reasons (poorly educated clinic workers who think the treatment is gender specific etc). Heck, since it has been marketed as a "girl thing" a lot of guys probably wouldn't even think to ask.
It's great to stop the cancer, but stopping the STD is just as important.
Besides if you can inoculate all sexually active people with health insurance then you would reduce the exposure of those who don't (etc).
I use OpenOffice. I support Open Document Format over MS/XML and .doc.
That said, ODF it kind of blows. Really.
I write novel-length "books" and it is FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to do some very basic things in any/every ODF based word processor I have tried to date.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with an automatic table of contents, said table to contain an "Authors Note", "Prologue", auto-numbered chapters 1 to N with their associated chapter titles (where the actual chapter number is the chapter number internal variable), and finally "Epilogue" all at the same level of the index.
This simple task is essentially impossible. The flaw is caused by the fact that everything goes through the "styles" and the styles don't inherit their list membership properties. You should be able to make a style "TOC Entry" that is assigned to a particular table of contents level (e.g. level 1) then make a sub-style "Chapter Heading" based on "TOC Entry" but with the chapter numbering magic attached, and in so doing, create "different styles" that go to the same level/point in the list.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with each chapter, and the prolog, and the epilog in separate sub documents. The linkage thing is a mess, it is hard to move "the pile of files" around especially if you want to use subdirectories (etc). If you have a custom style in the master document style list you have to _USE_ it in the master document if you want it to be pushed into the created sub-documents. Once the sub-documents are created it is a royal pain (read effectively impossible, or "supremely hidden feature required") to update those styles in those sub documents if you change that style.
Exercise for the Interested:
Put three separate "outlines" into one ODF Document. In ODF the outline is a function of the style headers, they only exist as implications of structure instead of first class abstractions. This is largely the fault of Microsoft Word, since the Word folks totally messed this up when they supplanted WordPerfect (which did this inset outline/object sort of thing right).
ODF was, IMHO, poisoned by the slavish attempt by someone trying to make a Word killer instead of a "good word processor."
And there are stacks more of these issues.
And all that said, I *STILL* use ODF (Open Office etc) because I CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to _RENT_ the right to access my own work from a third party. Microsoft has plainly stated that such rental model is their intended business plan, which makes them a non-starter.
In my opinion, having used both Word and OpenOffice for years; and having used Word Perfect and wordstar before them, ODF is a "workman like effort" to create a document format suitable for "normal business purposes". There is a reason that the legal profession never moved over to Word, and they likewise will not move to ODF, when you need to get to a tightly proscribed document format, both Word and ODF have a "you can't get there from here" fundamental limitation. Both formats simply refuse to represent some things because the designers "know" that a different format is better. Neither ODF nor Word has any allowances for _art_, professional or poetical.
So, governments should use ODF because it is "no worse" than Word in terms of the ability to represent the documents it can represent, and given that congruence, the shorter, 100% open standard is, or should be, a hard minimum requirements.
In terms of ODF being the be-all and end-all of document representation, I'd have to say "hardly!" I looked into the OpenOffice code base a while back to see if adding/changing the format to allow for "a book" would be reasonable. It didn't appear to be. Too many of the original StarOffice assumptions about document structure seemed pathologically uninspired. It was like looking at a big pile of Visual Basic. Everything in the standard is way too global, nothing "nests organically" it all nests pedagogically. (Every
Nice AC post, but you are wrong in decrying "us" with your factlessness.
First: TCP doesn't start at full window size. Then gains throughput linearly adding one MTU length to the amount of the window size it is willing to risk/fill per ACK. TCP falls back exponentially, that is, every single fault detected cuts the senders willingness to fill the TCP window by half. Maot (all?) TCP implementations actually only ACK every other frame if they don't have any data to send in the other direction. When you factor all this together and add some numbers (which I may get wrong here as I typing without ready reference) it only takes 1 lost outgoing ACK per 2n*log(n) frames where n = window_size/mtu, to limit your downstream speed to an aggregate of 1/2 the channel maximum. So lost upstream packets are quite expensive as a limit.
Next: Everything you said about UDP was immaterial or misleading at best. The reason "streaming" video is usually UDP has to do with the fact that it is generally better to drop frames than delay the program. This is especially true if you are trying to get anywhere near your hardware bandwidth. The ramp-up rate and the exponential fallback mean that you can _only_ loose time to dropouts, but you cannot ever "catch up to 'now'" on a live broadcast because even when you _do_ get the data and you _do_ have the bandwidth to catch up, if you show every frame at the encoded framerate after the pause, it wont ever go "slightly faster than normal" to catch up without the operator doing a seek/fast-forward. So every time you drop frames you permanently lose real wall-clock time. With even minimal frame dropping your schedule would slowly sag back in time. EVEN WITHOUT ALL THAT the streamer/broadcaster doesn't want to have to buffer-for-retransmit N frames for N sessions. It would be very expensive in server hardware alone. So non-UDP is a non-Starter for all streaming media.
Next: I don't know about the 1meg statistic and argument made by the grandparent, but empirical evidence suggests it is invalid. I can demonstrate massive changes in performance for _tiny_ tweaks once I relax throttle beyond the outgoing rate of the modem. (That is, if I throttle to 767kbps I get nearly perfect 8mbps download. Up the throttle to 769kbps and the throughput drops to median 3mbps and so on. I _did_ the experiment.) I have no provenance for that "1 meg" number, nor do I know whether that number is for upstream cache, downstream cache, or both; nor do I know whether that buffer is subject to fragmentation. So I really cannot address this number. Empirical evidence suggests that the practical value of this buffer is apparently minimal.
Next: The cable side of the cable modem is running (essentially) ATM. In particular, this means (1) that the cable side for data flowing from your modem to the carrier is restricted by the rules of pure Time Division Multiplexing and (2) any dropouts in the ATM stream will _not_ be corrected by the cable modem/carrier link, so any misses/drops will have to be resolved at the TCP transport level. Skipping that for a moment, since the cable modem doesn't get any "credit" for unused ATM slots when the modem buffer _didn't_ have data to send. That means that "bursting" from the link to the modem is "bad". Your modem can send 768kbits (if you have the "good package") and your Ethernet link can send 10mbits per second. It isn't that hard for the later to overwhelm the former in a burst because the upstream buffer can be filled 12(?) times faster than it can be emptied in uniformly optimal conditions.
Next: Is it likely that during normal network activity, that a customer would be likely to fulfill the conditions likely to cause fault. In my house it is typical to have at least three computers actively using the network. Before considering the bidirectional UDP of streaming games, we have to consider that each element of a web page is a complete outbound HTTP request (with cookies and all you get a typical upstream size of 2k, and then it can be i
If the net needs anything it needs Quality of Service routing at the customer access point.
NO, I am _NOT_ talking about a non-neutral net. I think net neutrality is mandatory.
What I am talking about is an end to TCP Retransmits in our lifetime. (Ok, that is overstating it a little 8-).
At my home I put together a QOS gateway that throttled my _outgoing_ packets to the speed of my cable modem _and_ made sure that if it had to drop something it would _not_ drop outgoing "mostly ACK" packets. (e.g. outgoing TCP packets with little or no data payload get best delivery.)
This action lowered my incomming packet count and got my effective download speed to closely approach the bandwidth tier I am paying for. This was a 3x to 4x improvement in throughput. This, when combined with the lower packet count, implies that previously I was wasting 2 out of every 3 packets due to unnecessary "recovery" (read useless retransmits).
That cost must, then, have been paid at every step along every trip etc.
Then I turned on HTTP Pipelining on all the (forefox) browsers in my house (etc).
I suspect that if we could do something about the waste ratio, and generally speed up each transaction by squelching the noise and getting better effective throughput, "the intertubes" would be a lot clearer and the capacity wouldn't fall apart so readily.
[aside]
If we could (pie in the sky) get the porn and ewe-tube traffic onto the mbone with smart caching near the client so that each person didn't have to get each part "the whole way" from the provider even though everybody else is watching the same top-ten clips of the day, we could make more progress. This falls apart because it messes up the charging model for porn and advertising, and ewe-tube gawkers couldn't possibly stand waiting 2 to 6 seconds to join a synchronized swarm...
[/aside]
This is very like the whole thing where a guy with half-flat tires is standing around complaining about his gas mileage.
Collision detect style arbitration falls apart when you saturate the link, and cable providers screwed themselves with the way most cable modems fail to buffer outgoing traffic. Penny wise and Pound foolish of them to make the default devices so cheap. Iterate as necessary for businesses and ISPs with their underpowered gateway machines terminating their PPOE (etc).
As for the part where that failure to schedule packets at the most basic level will be turned into "demonstrable evidence" for the "need" non-neutral networks... That will be the "WMDs" of the net neutrality war.
You actually made a unique post, so it's alright. The previous posters were "nuh hua, you are so wrongorzs cus like da SIMs is so _exactly_ a game *about* accountants" (and so on 8-)
At least you apparently got the point, and on slashdot that makes you totally a new thing.
Where exactly did I say "two wrongs do make a right"? Where did I even hint at that.
... you guessed it ... Not a role model.
I'm pretty sure I said "no wrongs make for a complete failure of marketability".
I'm also pretty sure that I said that people who cherry-pick their outrage from within a complete festering scab of outrageousness are not worth taking seriously because selective rage about something no worse than the background noise was crying wolf in a crowded theater full of sheep... or maybe not that last one...
I think it _would_ be safe to presume that I think anybody who considers the characters portrayed in a GTA game (or most television shows, or a lot of books, or religious texts for that matter) are _intended_ or suitable as "role models" should just STFU because they are idiots.
You see, I can at least sympathize with people who think the whole genre is flawed. It's when the people decide that one particular element of the genre is somehow aimed just at them that I call bullshit.
If the diatribe from the original article was a (sad rehash) of the whole "these games are bad, um-kay" argument I'd at least have _some_ sympathy. I wouldn't necessarily _agree_ but I'd have some _sympathy_.
You see, I have some _perspective_. I try to write, and I try to read, and so I _know_ and _understand_ that "effective story telling" _usually_ requires the author to grotesquely simplify the characters they present. If you try to unfold each entity into the unique and delicate snowflake that they are, full of their own passions and reasons and heartbreaking back-story they bring to the rich tableau of life, you never get to tell the story you are actually trying to tell.
So yea, the "rice burner" who has come into town to challenge your ability to take a street racer through a dirt track (of all the stupid things), rendered in the active memory of a PS2 "region" and with a full seven words of dialog in the course of a 12 second cut-scene, is in all likelihood, going to come out "a touch stereotyped". Let's not even start on the touching back-story of each of the 200 rubber-stamped drug dealing pimps that seem to endlessly and innocently wander that one street oblivious to the death and mayhem happening not one step away day after day...
Having accepted the limits of the media, and the goal of the story, _and_ it's placement as part-5 of a series, it is just a _little_ to late to start yammering because, sweet mary and joseph, this one is *GASP* _black_.... oh the horror!
If you think your kids are too stupid to know its a freaking game, you shouldn't be letting them play it.
If you cannot control your own children then why should we let you try to control an _industry_?
If you don't even _have_ children then your role-model talk is really self-serving political bullcrap.
So to recap:
Video Game? Not a Role Model.
Sports Figure? Not a Role Model.
Politician? Not a Role Model.
Stranger on the street? Not a Role Model.
Political Stranger on the street of a Video Game?
Even if they are black...
[sarcasm]
yes, this _clearly_ is the perfect drop-in replacement for GTA on the PS(x) where I can sit down and follow the rich action experience of...
oh wait, this is a "turn based strategy game where you..."
So there isn't a plot, as such.
Oh, I see, this is a completely different kind of game, but I can totally see how it would just draw in the GTA crowd because nothing says "fast action" and "good story telling" like an open-ended turn-based strategy game. Gee, let me at it. I can hardly wait to throw off my life as a programmer to assume the unmatched adrenaline of "saxophone playing drug addict"! No wait! A waiter! That will get the blood pumping like nothing else! How did we miss this blockbuster at E3, it must have been just leaping off shelf, so we couldn't find it, and _that's_ how we missed it... It all comes clear to me now.
Oh, and the role-modely goodness that comes from the fact that the doped out musician could be _any_ _race_ _at_ _all_ is just so liberating....
[/sarcasm]
Look, you might as well bring up Sudoku. I play that. I _like_ that. But it has no bearing here. Heck I can name countless good and bad games in countless other genres, but they are _in_ _other_ _genres_.
We are talking about a particular game genre when we talk about games where the characters we are meant to follow (or revile and kill) are walking their paces according to scripts and cut-scenes. It's a kind of interactive literature. Someone scripted the thing. And since it isn't "like make your dude and do whatever... dude" there is the task of authorship and the player also has the role of viewer and critic. That means the _story_ has to sell along with the action. And lets face it "Accountant: the good black father and his heroic struggle with everyday life" isn't going to sell even _if_ the story is a masterwork, because "up-down-up-down-left-right-start to get the dried on stuff of the plate before putting it in the dishwasher" just isn't that compelling.
So the question of a story game that would sell to the people who would buy GTA:(whatever) is in no way explored by bringing up "eve2" or "tetris" or "WoW" or whatever.
Yes?