I also decided to rate George W. Bush on the quiz, and he scored nearly a perfect score of 16 as a psychopath. To be fair, Bill Clinton scored pretty high as well.
The main problem with Exchange (and most Microsoft software in general) is that when it breaks, it's usually very difficult to figure out what broke and how to get it fixed. With Open Source solutions, you can take a look under the covers and figure it out. With Exchange, you either find your problem listed in the MS Knowledge Base, or you're SOL. Even when you call MS, all they do is look it up in the KB, unless you're a really large company, paying them a lot of money. And with Open Source, Google provides a much better knowledge base than Microsoft could ever develop.
I would NEVER use a backup MX server. They typically don't filter spam, so spammers send all their spam to your backup MX record, even when the primary is up. Then your filtering software sees that the message is coming via the backup MX server, and doesn't need to (and can't) do any IP-based filtering.
Maybe if you found a backup MX host that did proper filtering. But then why not have them host your email?
Hmm. Looks like the Microsoft viral (astro-turf) campaign has already started. We learn that their upcoming version of Windows is to be called "Vista", and only a few hours later, we start getting Slashdot submissions talking about "Vista" this and "Vista" that.
Sub-contracting / charging a premium -- what's the difference?
I did tell the poster to factor in the cost of the Mac into the equation, and see if it actually came out better for the client to build it for the PC.
Here's a parable (story) I once heard, which seems rather fitting. It's about offering to give the customer what they want, but making it clear what it will cost when they want something that's not to their benefit.
A consultant was writing a custom application for a company. The program was written to work on a PC. One of the executives at the company used a Mac, so he insisted that they make the program work on his Mac. The consultant says "sure, we can do that". The consulant comes back with an estimate on the cost of making the program work on the Mac: $50,000 and 6 months. The executive decided to use a PC.
So my advice to you is this: provide the guy with 2 estimates -- one for your Mac solution, and one for a solution using the limited tools he's forcing you to use. Don't forget to factor in the Mac hardware costs, your research time, the extra time it will take to work with tools you are not familiar with, and perhaps a premium for working with tools you don't like. Maybe the difference will change his mind; maybe it will change yours.
I've had this idea for a year or so to write a browser as a web app. Sounds really stupid at first, but after a while, you realize that it could be a really great idea. Basically, you can use any web browser to access your proxy page. (See Guardster's free proxy for a simple example.) Your proxy page provides all the normal browser features, so you don't have to worry too much about what your real browser's features. You'd keep all your history and bookmarks centrally located on your server for later access. I think you'd be able to do more with it centrally located on a server like that.
Of course, you are correct -- you need to run it on your own server, or an ISP you can trust.
Other features the proxy could provide are re-writing pages to your liking (sort of like GreaseMonkey), re-writing pages to support the feature set of your browser, encryption of your session and URLs (between the client and your server), etc. I looked through the Firefox menus, and I think you could replicate 80-90% of the functionality, plus add centralized features for an improved browsing experience.
Yes, but when I'm looking for that page on "AJAX stickies" that I saw last week, I want to find the one that I had previously visited, not the one that everyone else was looking at. (This happened to me last night; turns out the one I was looking for was called "webnotes".)
The other thing that my personal browsing history gives is context. First, it'd be easier to search my smaller corpus of pages I've viewed than all of the web. Second, I might have remembered the approximate date/time that I had last seen the thing I'm looking for. Third, I might recall what led me to the result in the first place, and that information (as well as what I viewed immediately afterwards) might also be relevant to the research I'm doing now.
To do the Memex right, I think we need a few more things than we have now: 1) a complete history of my web browsing, including how I got to each page; 2) saved/cached copies of all the pages I've visited, to combat changes or missing pages when I want to revisit something; 3) an easier way to annotate the things we look at. I guess it would look a little more like a scrapbook than anything else. Which reminds me -- I've tried the ScrapBook Firefox extension, but for some reason I didn't seem to "get it". For one, I think all this needs to happen on my "personal server", not on the desktop, since I use several different computers.
I don't think the shelf could hold fish fingers. For the simple reason that fish don't actually have fingers.
And as another poster pointed out, a 750:1 scale whale would break the shelf due to its exceedingly large size. Perhaps a 1:750 scale model whale might fit though.
You'd think there would be some restriction against 1-letter TLDs, but I can't find anything in the RFCs. I did find RFC 1591, which says "it is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created", besides the country-code TLDs and the generic TLDs: EDU, COM, ORG, NET, GOV, MIL, and INT. I'd imagine that due to this, there's some code out there that assumes TLDs must be exactly 2 or 3 letters long.
Four-letter top-level domains (INFO and NAME, along with BIZ) have been around since 2001. Other new gTLDs have been added since then: MUSEUM, COOP, AERO, PRO, with JOBS possibly on the way. The full info can be found at the IANA. I've seen a few BIZ and INFO domains, and an AERO domain once. I don't think I've seen any of the others. On the whole, I'd say none of them ever really caught on. And yet they've got a few more in the works. Morons!
Isn't performance the goal here? How can you fault AMD for increasing CPU speeds and reducing costs? If you're wanting to find a fault, at least find it in their short-term gains leading to a long-term dead end. And AMD aren't keeping Itanium from you. AMD has very little control over Itanium. Do you think Intel would ever let AMD make an Itanium? Come on.
The real question is: what will replace x86? Obviously not Itanium. But like you, I don't see x86-64 lasting all that long either; but maybe we're wrong. So what will be the next CPU architecture? I guess it depends on where software goes. In the small/mobile/gadget space, I think ARM has a lot of room to grow. In the server market, it depends on whether Microsoft will port to any other architecture, or if Linux on another platform becomes popular. The only likely contender in that space is POWER/PowerPC. I had hope for SPARC at one time, but I don't have much confidence in Sun at this point. For PCs, I don't see any clear choice. The interesting thing about all these markets is that power consumption will be a major factor.
Maybe the answer is that we won't really get much faster, or much improvement in architecture. There really isn't all that much demand for significantly faster PCs. And the current trend is toward multiple CPU cores. I think that trend will be significant in the PC and server spaces over the next several years. We also seem to be on the edge of a major shift toward mobile computing devices. So perhaps a slow-down on the PC won't even matter that much. That still leaves the matter of server CPUs, but even there, it's more about I/O than computation.
Diff? Audio recordings are binary data. Diff only works on line-oriented textual data. Also, it's only useful with text documents that are mostly identical. Two recordings of nearly identical sounds will actually end up with VERY different data. Granted, plotting the data will look very similar, but all of the raw sample numbers will be slightly different between the 2 recordings.
To do what you suggest, you'd need to graph the 2 recordings and then use some sort of visual comparison program to determine "how different" the 2 are. There are a few different ways to graph audio data, and there's no simple method to compare large quantities of data like that. So the problem is actually a very difficult one to solve.
We used to play Carmageddon (1 and 2 -- there's also 3, and possibly a 4th coming out soon) on our lunch breaks, and in our hotels when we were travelling. Lots of fun playing "tag" or smashing into each other, or running people over. Still a lot of fun, even if the graphics aren't the best compared to today's games.
Brian Green wrote "The Elegant Universe". And Einstein never said that things can't go fast than light. He said that things can't get to the speed of light, nor cross it. It's possible that there are particles (tachyons) that (always) move faster than the speed of light. It's just that we can't make the matter we're made of and familiar with go faster than light.
It seems to me that it might be possible to create a transporter if we could encode the structure of the matter we want to transport into a tachyon stream, transmit that, and rebuild at the other end. (Which probably isn't feasible.) Of course, this would almost assuredly require someone to have already placed a transporter end-point at the destination, so it really wouldn't be effective for inter-stellar travel, especially "where no man has gone before".
Another method of tranferring information faster than light is entanglement. You'd still have to deal with the matter-information-matter transformations though, and it's not clear if that much information could be transmitted via entanglement.
As others mentioned, the other trick to effectively go faster than light is to bend (warp) space so that the distances we'd have to travel would be much shorter. We'd probably have to find and understand how gravitons work to be able to accomplish that. But it seems to be the most likely to work out as a mechanism for inter-stellar transportation of matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I also decided to rate George W. Bush on the quiz, and he scored nearly a perfect score of 16 as a psychopath. To be fair, Bill Clinton scored pretty high as well.
This has made a lot of people very happy and been widely regarded as a good move.
Excellent point. But I think by using the CEO of Google as an example, the author was trying to make Google see the consequences of their actions.
One of my favorite jokes, with 3 different punch lines, depending how woman-friendly I'm feeling:
Man 1: Do you know how to tell if a woman is having an orgasm?
Man 2: No.
Man 1: Who cares?
Man 1: Do you know how to tell if a woman is having an orgasm?
Man 2: No.
Man 1: Yeah, I figured as much.
Man 1: Do you know how to tell if a woman is having an orgasm?
Man 2: No.
Man 1: Ask her.
That's actually a pretty darn good idea!
Although I'd bet you'd still get quite a bit of spam on the intermediate-priority MX servers.
The main problem with Exchange (and most Microsoft software in general) is that when it breaks, it's usually very difficult to figure out what broke and how to get it fixed. With Open Source solutions, you can take a look under the covers and figure it out. With Exchange, you either find your problem listed in the MS Knowledge Base, or you're SOL. Even when you call MS, all they do is look it up in the KB, unless you're a really large company, paying them a lot of money. And with Open Source, Google provides a much better knowledge base than Microsoft could ever develop.
I would NEVER use a backup MX server. They typically don't filter spam, so spammers send all their spam to your backup MX record, even when the primary is up. Then your filtering software sees that the message is coming via the backup MX server, and doesn't need to (and can't) do any IP-based filtering.
Maybe if you found a backup MX host that did proper filtering. But then why not have them host your email?
Why do I get the feeling that they measured false positives, but not false negatives?
Hmm. Looks like the Microsoft viral (astro-turf) campaign has already started. We learn that their upcoming version of Windows is to be called "Vista", and only a few hours later, we start getting Slashdot submissions talking about "Vista" this and "Vista" that.
Sub-contracting / charging a premium -- what's the difference?
;)
I did tell the poster to factor in the cost of the Mac into the equation, and see if it actually came out better for the client to build it for the PC.
Sheesh.
Well, half circle, I guess.
Here's a parable (story) I once heard, which seems rather fitting. It's about offering to give the customer what they want, but making it clear what it will cost when they want something that's not to their benefit.
A consultant was writing a custom application for a company. The program was written to work on a PC. One of the executives at the company used a Mac, so he insisted that they make the program work on his Mac. The consultant says "sure, we can do that". The consulant comes back with an estimate on the cost of making the program work on the Mac: $50,000 and 6 months. The executive decided to use a PC.
So my advice to you is this: provide the guy with 2 estimates -- one for your Mac solution, and one for a solution using the limited tools he's forcing you to use. Don't forget to factor in the Mac hardware costs, your research time, the extra time it will take to work with tools you are not familiar with, and perhaps a premium for working with tools you don't like. Maybe the difference will change his mind; maybe it will change yours.
I've had this idea for a year or so to write a browser as a web app. Sounds really stupid at first, but after a while, you realize that it could be a really great idea. Basically, you can use any web browser to access your proxy page. (See Guardster's free proxy for a simple example.) Your proxy page provides all the normal browser features, so you don't have to worry too much about what your real browser's features. You'd keep all your history and bookmarks centrally located on your server for later access. I think you'd be able to do more with it centrally located on a server like that.
Of course, you are correct -- you need to run it on your own server, or an ISP you can trust.
Other features the proxy could provide are re-writing pages to your liking (sort of like GreaseMonkey), re-writing pages to support the feature set of your browser, encryption of your session and URLs (between the client and your server), etc. I looked through the Firefox menus, and I think you could replicate 80-90% of the functionality, plus add centralized features for an improved browsing experience.
I noticed that too. I think it's evidence that the moon landing was faked. They didn't even bother generating fake scenery of the whole moon surface.
The other thing that my personal browsing history gives is context. First, it'd be easier to search my smaller corpus of pages I've viewed than all of the web. Second, I might have remembered the approximate date/time that I had last seen the thing I'm looking for. Third, I might recall what led me to the result in the first place, and that information (as well as what I viewed immediately afterwards) might also be relevant to the research I'm doing now.
To do the Memex right, I think we need a few more things than we have now: 1) a complete history of my web browsing, including how I got to each page; 2) saved/cached copies of all the pages I've visited, to combat changes or missing pages when I want to revisit something; 3) an easier way to annotate the things we look at. I guess it would look a little more like a scrapbook than anything else. Which reminds me -- I've tried the ScrapBook Firefox extension, but for some reason I didn't seem to "get it". For one, I think all this needs to happen on my "personal server", not on the desktop, since I use several different computers.
In fact, forget about the movie and the blackjack!
I don't think the shelf could hold fish fingers. For the simple reason that fish don't actually have fingers.
And as another poster pointed out, a 750:1 scale whale would break the shelf due to its exceedingly large size. Perhaps a 1:750 scale model whale might fit though.
You are 110% correct.
What...the....hell? I could have sworn we were just having a conversation on competency in mathematics.
You'd think there would be some restriction against 1-letter TLDs, but I can't find anything in the RFCs. I did find RFC 1591, which says "it is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created", besides the country-code TLDs and the generic TLDs: EDU, COM, ORG, NET, GOV, MIL, and INT. I'd imagine that due to this, there's some code out there that assumes TLDs must be exactly 2 or 3 letters long.
Four-letter top-level domains (INFO and NAME, along with BIZ) have been around since 2001. Other new gTLDs have been added since then: MUSEUM, COOP, AERO, PRO, with JOBS possibly on the way. The full info can be found at the IANA. I've seen a few BIZ and INFO domains, and an AERO domain once. I don't think I've seen any of the others. On the whole, I'd say none of them ever really caught on. And yet they've got a few more in the works. Morons!
Isn't performance the goal here? How can you fault AMD for increasing CPU speeds and reducing costs? If you're wanting to find a fault, at least find it in their short-term gains leading to a long-term dead end. And AMD aren't keeping Itanium from you. AMD has very little control over Itanium. Do you think Intel would ever let AMD make an Itanium? Come on.
The real question is: what will replace x86? Obviously not Itanium. But like you, I don't see x86-64 lasting all that long either; but maybe we're wrong. So what will be the next CPU architecture? I guess it depends on where software goes. In the small/mobile/gadget space, I think ARM has a lot of room to grow. In the server market, it depends on whether Microsoft will port to any other architecture, or if Linux on another platform becomes popular. The only likely contender in that space is POWER/PowerPC. I had hope for SPARC at one time, but I don't have much confidence in Sun at this point. For PCs, I don't see any clear choice. The interesting thing about all these markets is that power consumption will be a major factor.
Maybe the answer is that we won't really get much faster, or much improvement in architecture. There really isn't all that much demand for significantly faster PCs. And the current trend is toward multiple CPU cores. I think that trend will be significant in the PC and server spaces over the next several years. We also seem to be on the edge of a major shift toward mobile computing devices. So perhaps a slow-down on the PC won't even matter that much. That still leaves the matter of server CPUs, but even there, it's more about I/O than computation.
I miss the DEC Alpha.
Diff? Audio recordings are binary data. Diff only works on line-oriented textual data. Also, it's only useful with text documents that are mostly identical. Two recordings of nearly identical sounds will actually end up with VERY different data. Granted, plotting the data will look very similar, but all of the raw sample numbers will be slightly different between the 2 recordings.
To do what you suggest, you'd need to graph the 2 recordings and then use some sort of visual comparison program to determine "how different" the 2 are. There are a few different ways to graph audio data, and there's no simple method to compare large quantities of data like that. So the problem is actually a very difficult one to solve.
Ha! I read that as Dayton Ohio (twice), and was wondering when Ohio had moved to the West Coast.
We used to play Carmageddon (1 and 2 -- there's also 3, and possibly a 4th coming out soon) on our lunch breaks, and in our hotels when we were travelling. Lots of fun playing "tag" or smashing into each other, or running people over. Still a lot of fun, even if the graphics aren't the best compared to today's games.
Interesting. Can you explain that a bit further, or provide some references?
Thanks!
Brian Green wrote "The Elegant Universe". And Einstein never said that things can't go fast than light. He said that things can't get to the speed of light, nor cross it. It's possible that there are particles (tachyons) that (always) move faster than the speed of light. It's just that we can't make the matter we're made of and familiar with go faster than light.
It seems to me that it might be possible to create a transporter if we could encode the structure of the matter we want to transport into a tachyon stream, transmit that, and rebuild at the other end. (Which probably isn't feasible.) Of course, this would almost assuredly require someone to have already placed a transporter end-point at the destination, so it really wouldn't be effective for inter-stellar travel, especially "where no man has gone before".
Another method of tranferring information faster than light is entanglement. You'd still have to deal with the matter-information-matter transformations though, and it's not clear if that much information could be transmitted via entanglement.
As others mentioned, the other trick to effectively go faster than light is to bend (warp) space so that the distances we'd have to travel would be much shorter. We'd probably have to find and understand how gravitons work to be able to accomplish that. But it seems to be the most likely to work out as a mechanism for inter-stellar transportation of matter.