Check out the 2nd chart in the cost comparison. IBM plans to have a Blue Gene/L system 4 times as fast as their current number 1 system by May 2005. Not only have they sniped the lead, they're planning to completely out-class the competition.
That same joke occured to me as well. Of course, when I first read the subject line, I actually thought that the San Andreas Fault had leaked something. I thought they meant that something had either oozed up, or that the tension had been released in a "leaky" way instead of an "explosive" way.
Why would I want to spend $10/month and have to run it myself, when for less than $20/year I can have someone else do all the work for me? Since the article seems to be a case of free advertising, I'll point out that Slashmail will host your email for $13.95 a year. They allow unlimited email storage space, spam and virus filters, and secure access via various means (HTTPS webmail, IMAPS). Oh, and they use all Open Source.
Why the fsck doesn't anyone bother to tell people what things are? I have no clue what Blue and Red is from this post. Clicking on the link to RTFM, I'm still not told WTF it is. Clue to people writing articles -- you need to tell me why I should care. Assuming I already know everything about what you're talking about is stupid -- if I already knew everything, I wouldn't need to read what you wrote.
I'd also be interested to learn about the factual basis for the Sumerian religious aspects of the book, especially Enki. I've had some difficulty locating much information about Enki. Where did you learn about him, how much of what you wrote about him is factual, and how did you come about your interest in these aspects of religion?
Thank you -- that's exactly what I think of (most of) Stephenson's endings. Yes, they can be abrupt. But they don't try to wrap everything up cleanly for you so that you don't have to use your imagination and/or deductive skills. Personally, I hate the trend in modern movies to have happy endings with everything nicely wrapped up.
Already been done -- Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic. The book and the game were released simultaneously. (Note that the book was not written by Douglas Adams, but based on the game which he was primary designer of.) Unfortunately, the web site has pretty much deterioriated. (Although this is kind of neat in a weird sort of way -- keep clicking until the end.) And the company that DNA formed to build the game, The Digital Village, has been closed down.
Thanks for the mirrors. Now that I've seen the page in question, I think CNN has some legitimate claims. Sure the article is parody, but it's not clear until you start reading the text. Just looking at the rest of the page, it is a complete copy of CNN's site. I think the National Debate did copy a bit too much to be covered by the parody exception.
As for liberals having to decide whether this is good or bad, I think liberals are much more likely than conservatives to stand up for what they believe even when it helps their "enemies". I think this is part of the reason that the Democrats have lost some of their edge in recent years.
What do you think of the work Hans Reiser is doing with file systems? How does it differ from and/or improve upon Plan 9? What do you think of his theory that (nearly) all database functions should be done by the file system? What do you think about being able to treat files as directories in order to get to special (or not special) info? Is it useful to be able to treat a tarball as a file when you want to and as a directory when you want to? How about file metadata? Data forks? Do you think Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X will come up with the better database/search-enhanced file system?
I didn't think this book was all that great. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't cover much that Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman didn't cover better. I would highly recommend Zeldman's book over this one. Zeldman's writing style is reads more quickly, and actually makes it fun to read. I'd give WSS a 5.5, and Zeldman's book a 10.
In this case, the $1 donation idea has 2 other positive side-effects: 1) the person has to contribute to your cause, the one which he is against, and 2) you've got the user's personal information, which should cause him to behave, or at least you can track him down.
If you want to allow people to post without paying, convince the posters that their visit to the site is somehow being tracked. In the gay-bashing case, I'd take advantage of their naivite and fear. Tell them that they will be associated with your gay organization. Add some random pop-ups (even a JavaScript alert() will work) saying that they're being tracked. Better yet, send them some ads for gay-related items after they've left your site.
Yeah, not only was the thing Brit-oriented, but you were severely penalized for guessing almost correctly, but not being confident of your answer. For guessing within 7 years when England and Scotland merged, I got only 2 points, because I put +/- 250 years. It was more of a guessing game. Even the Eiffel tower height was a guestimate, not an estimate. To be an estimate, I'd have to actually see the thing in person, see it compared to other things, or have some other knowledge of it besides a picture. I was proud to get very close on the plastic bag question, especially given that I had no idea how many people live in Australia (which I also guestimated quite closely).
I'm very good at estimating those things myself. Definitely much better than most folks. I pride myself on such skills.
Once, I took a short job implementing an LDAP server (including developing a schema and integrating it with Cisco's DNS server). I had no experience with LDAP servers, and only knew about LDAP from working a little with it on the client side (and most of that was just using NetWare Admin). I estimated it would take 1 week if I had known what I was doing, and padded it with another 2 weeks to learn everything I needed to know about LDAP and their environment, and solve any issues I ran into. I was quite proud when I finished the implementation in 3 weeks.
(I just realized that LISP books *all* tend to be rather slender. McCarthy, Siklossy, and Steele all managed to say quite a lot in very little space. Hmmm.)
(Insert joke about parentheses (()) (here))
I suspect that the Lisp books are so small because the number of concepts in Lisp is rather small. It's just that each concept in Lisp goes a long way.
I suspect most people's answers will depend on whether they agree with Michael Moore or not. Which is a shame, because the same reasoning may well apply to the other side in a future election.
While I agree with Michael Moore that the Bush administration is corrupt and bad for the country, I think that his lobbying to play this on TV before immediately before the election smacks of electioneering. When Right-wing nut-jobs complained that commercials for Fahrenheit 9/11 should fall under FEC regulations, I thought that was ludicrous. But I think an obvious ploy such as this should be prohibited by the FEC (Federal Election Commission).
Bob Ross rocks! For some unknown reason, we had a Bob Ross kit of some sort in the tech shop when I worked at CompUSA. We joked about getting Bob Ross certifications.
Yes, women definitely know a lot more color names than men. Other examples include fuchsia, teal, cornflower (which is blue -- not yellow!), taupe, chartreuse, and mauve. Heck, I'm lucky if I can distinguish beige from white or tan -- much less subtle shades in between like cream, ivory, or eggshell.
My theory on this is that women had the box of 64 or 128 crayons when they were little, and men grew up with only the 8-pack box of crayons. Still doesn't explain why neither gender ever mentions the color "burnt sienna" after age 6.
1. Something like 90-95% of all development is for in-house projects. A lot of companies do spend a lot of resources developing software. Even if they don't want to spend their own resources, they have the option to, or to get someone else to help them with it. The Freedom that Free Software provides is more control of their own destiny.
2. I don't disagree with that at all. I thought I had stated as much in my initial post, or at least implied it by agreeing with Sun's statements.
3. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when a vendor goes out of business. New bugs and vulnerabilities may be found in the product. The company may want to use it in new ways. They may change the systems that the product interfaces with, and find incompatibilities. Patches, updates, or upgrades of the OS or underlying libraries/infrastructure/dependencies may cause the software to break. (XP SP2 anyone?)
His main premise is that Open Standards are more important than Open Source. On this point, I completely agree. Conforming to an open standard, which anyone is allowed to implement, is a great thing for customers. As long as they depend only upon the standard, they can choose whichever vendor they want. This is effectively a commoditization of the market.
What he fails to realize (or admit) is that Open Source has other advantages that build upon Open Standards. Even if an Open Source program doesn't conform to any well-recognized standard, the availability of the source can provide the same advantages. If you don't like the way Ximian is building their free Evolution mail reader, you can find another vendor who will take the existing mail reader and build you a custom version, fully compatible with the old. Also, Open Source programs typically embrace Open Standards with a passion. Look at Mozilla for a good example.
In addition, Open Source provides new advantages that Open Standards do not. The main advantage is control. If the company goes out of business, and you want to stick with their product, you can do that. If the vendor doesn't want to implement a feature that you want, you can do that. You get the advantages of commoditization, plus the ability to customize and modify things to fit your own needs.
I agree. And I have a story and an analogy to explain why it's not a good idea.
When MyDoom first came out, we had a few infected machines in our large Fortune 500 company. Not a big deal; we cleaned them up and moved on. When the "good virus" Nachi (AKA Welchia) came out, it propagated like crazy. So fast that it took out some of our network equipment, causing our production lines to stop. Production lines -- that's real money, not just IT guys who were already on the clock having to delete some files.
How can we explain why this "good virus" did more damage than the "bad" virus? Think of a virus like a missile -- it has two parts: the delivery mechanism and the payload. (In fact, the same terminology is used with both missiles and computer viruses.) With MyDoom, the delivery mechanism wasn't too bad -- it put a small hole in the side of your house and then blew up your kitchen table. With Welchia, the delivery mechanism knocked the whole house down, but the payload made sure no other missiles would break the kitchen table.
Now maybe if the "White Knight" virus developers were more careful with the delivery mechanism, it would have actually been beneficial. But it's hard to predict what a virus will do in the wild. A small bug in your virus can mean the difference between slow propagation and lightning-fast propagation. Plus, if the "good virus" propagates too slowly, it won't be effective.
So in the end, it's unlikely that "good viruses" will ever work well. I like the post about needing a "immune system" for computer networks. Those already exist in the initial stages; IBM and Cisco have done a lot of research and have some products out there. But even more than that, ISPs need to do (better) ingress and egress filtering.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the 2nd chart in the cost comparison. IBM plans to have a Blue Gene/L system 4 times as fast as their current number 1 system by May 2005. Not only have they sniped the lead, they're planning to completely out-class the competition.
Apparently the poster has not tried this method. There's no such word as "improval". How about "improvement"?
That same joke occured to me as well. Of course, when I first read the subject line, I actually thought that the San Andreas Fault had leaked something. I thought they meant that something had either oozed up, or that the tension had been released in a "leaky" way instead of an "explosive" way.
Why would I want to spend $10/month and have to run it myself, when for less than $20/year I can have someone else do all the work for me? Since the article seems to be a case of free advertising, I'll point out that Slashmail will host your email for $13.95 a year. They allow unlimited email storage space, spam and virus filters, and secure access via various means (HTTPS webmail, IMAPS). Oh, and they use all Open Source.
Why the fsck doesn't anyone bother to tell people what things are? I have no clue what Blue and Red is from this post. Clicking on the link to RTFM, I'm still not told WTF it is. Clue to people writing articles -- you need to tell me why I should care. Assuming I already know everything about what you're talking about is stupid -- if I already knew everything, I wouldn't need to read what you wrote.
I'd also be interested to learn about the factual basis for the Sumerian religious aspects of the book, especially Enki. I've had some difficulty locating much information about Enki. Where did you learn about him, how much of what you wrote about him is factual, and how did you come about your interest in these aspects of religion?
Thank you -- that's exactly what I think of (most of) Stephenson's endings. Yes, they can be abrupt. But they don't try to wrap everything up cleanly for you so that you don't have to use your imagination and/or deductive skills. Personally, I hate the trend in modern movies to have happy endings with everything nicely wrapped up.
Already been done -- Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic. The book and the game were released simultaneously. (Note that the book was not written by Douglas Adams, but based on the game which he was primary designer of.) Unfortunately, the web site has pretty much deterioriated. (Although this is kind of neat in a weird sort of way -- keep clicking until the end.) And the company that DNA formed to build the game, The Digital Village, has been closed down.
Not every train and airplane trip is interstate. The federal government has no jusrisdiction over intrastate transportation.
Thanks for the mirrors. Now that I've seen the page in question, I think CNN has some legitimate claims. Sure the article is parody, but it's not clear until you start reading the text. Just looking at the rest of the page, it is a complete copy of CNN's site. I think the National Debate did copy a bit too much to be covered by the parody exception.
As for liberals having to decide whether this is good or bad, I think liberals are much more likely than conservatives to stand up for what they believe even when it helps their "enemies". I think this is part of the reason that the Democrats have lost some of their edge in recent years.
Why not?
What do you think of the work Hans Reiser is doing with file systems? How does it differ from and/or improve upon Plan 9? What do you think of his theory that (nearly) all database functions should be done by the file system? What do you think about being able to treat files as directories in order to get to special (or not special) info? Is it useful to be able to treat a tarball as a file when you want to and as a directory when you want to? How about file metadata? Data forks? Do you think Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X will come up with the better database/search-enhanced file system?
I didn't think this book was all that great. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't cover much that Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman didn't cover better. I would highly recommend Zeldman's book over this one. Zeldman's writing style is reads more quickly, and actually makes it fun to read. I'd give WSS a 5.5, and Zeldman's book a 10.
In this case, the $1 donation idea has 2 other positive side-effects: 1) the person has to contribute to your cause, the one which he is against, and 2) you've got the user's personal information, which should cause him to behave, or at least you can track him down.
If you want to allow people to post without paying, convince the posters that their visit to the site is somehow being tracked. In the gay-bashing case, I'd take advantage of their naivite and fear. Tell them that they will be associated with your gay organization. Add some random pop-ups (even a JavaScript alert() will work) saying that they're being tracked. Better yet, send them some ads for gay-related items after they've left your site.
Geez, there's a name I haven't heard for a long time. Definitely an awesome math teacher.
Yeah, not only was the thing Brit-oriented, but you were severely penalized for guessing almost correctly, but not being confident of your answer. For guessing within 7 years when England and Scotland merged, I got only 2 points, because I put +/- 250 years. It was more of a guessing game. Even the Eiffel tower height was a guestimate, not an estimate. To be an estimate, I'd have to actually see the thing in person, see it compared to other things, or have some other knowledge of it besides a picture. I was proud to get very close on the plastic bag question, especially given that I had no idea how many people live in Australia (which I also guestimated quite closely).
I'm very good at estimating those things myself. Definitely much better than most folks. I pride myself on such skills.
Once, I took a short job implementing an LDAP server (including developing a schema and integrating it with Cisco's DNS server). I had no experience with LDAP servers, and only knew about LDAP from working a little with it on the client side (and most of that was just using NetWare Admin). I estimated it would take 1 week if I had known what I was doing, and padded it with another 2 weeks to learn everything I needed to know about LDAP and their environment, and solve any issues I ran into. I was quite proud when I finished the implementation in 3 weeks.
(Insert joke about parentheses (()) (here))
I suspect that the Lisp books are so small because the number of concepts in Lisp is rather small. It's just that each concept in Lisp goes a long way.
I suspect most people's answers will depend on whether they agree with Michael Moore or not. Which is a shame, because the same reasoning may well apply to the other side in a future election.
While I agree with Michael Moore that the Bush administration is corrupt and bad for the country, I think that his lobbying to play this on TV before immediately before the election smacks of electioneering. When Right-wing nut-jobs complained that commercials for Fahrenheit 9/11 should fall under FEC regulations, I thought that was ludicrous. But I think an obvious ploy such as this should be prohibited by the FEC (Federal Election Commission).
Bob Ross rocks! For some unknown reason, we had a Bob Ross kit of some sort in the tech shop when I worked at CompUSA. We joked about getting Bob Ross certifications.
Yes, women definitely know a lot more color names than men. Other examples include fuchsia, teal, cornflower (which is blue -- not yellow!), taupe, chartreuse, and mauve. Heck, I'm lucky if I can distinguish beige from white or tan -- much less subtle shades in between like cream, ivory, or eggshell.
My theory on this is that women had the box of 64 or 128 crayons when they were little, and men grew up with only the 8-pack box of crayons. Still doesn't explain why neither gender ever mentions the color "burnt sienna" after age 6.
1. Something like 90-95% of all development is for in-house projects. A lot of companies do spend a lot of resources developing software. Even if they don't want to spend their own resources, they have the option to, or to get someone else to help them with it. The Freedom that Free Software provides is more control of their own destiny.
2. I don't disagree with that at all. I thought I had stated as much in my initial post, or at least implied it by agreeing with Sun's statements.
3. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when a vendor goes out of business. New bugs and vulnerabilities may be found in the product. The company may want to use it in new ways. They may change the systems that the product interfaces with, and find incompatibilities. Patches, updates, or upgrades of the OS or underlying libraries/infrastructure/dependencies may cause the software to break. (XP SP2 anyone?)
His main premise is that Open Standards are more important than Open Source. On this point, I completely agree. Conforming to an open standard, which anyone is allowed to implement, is a great thing for customers. As long as they depend only upon the standard, they can choose whichever vendor they want. This is effectively a commoditization of the market.
What he fails to realize (or admit) is that Open Source has other advantages that build upon Open Standards. Even if an Open Source program doesn't conform to any well-recognized standard, the availability of the source can provide the same advantages. If you don't like the way Ximian is building their free Evolution mail reader, you can find another vendor who will take the existing mail reader and build you a custom version, fully compatible with the old. Also, Open Source programs typically embrace Open Standards with a passion. Look at Mozilla for a good example.
In addition, Open Source provides new advantages that Open Standards do not. The main advantage is control. If the company goes out of business, and you want to stick with their product, you can do that. If the vendor doesn't want to implement a feature that you want, you can do that. You get the advantages of commoditization, plus the ability to customize and modify things to fit your own needs.
I agree. And I have a story and an analogy to explain why it's not a good idea.
When MyDoom first came out, we had a few infected machines in our large Fortune 500 company. Not a big deal; we cleaned them up and moved on. When the "good virus" Nachi (AKA Welchia) came out, it propagated like crazy. So fast that it took out some of our network equipment, causing our production lines to stop. Production lines -- that's real money, not just IT guys who were already on the clock having to delete some files.
How can we explain why this "good virus" did more damage than the "bad" virus? Think of a virus like a missile -- it has two parts: the delivery mechanism and the payload. (In fact, the same terminology is used with both missiles and computer viruses.) With MyDoom, the delivery mechanism wasn't too bad -- it put a small hole in the side of your house and then blew up your kitchen table. With Welchia, the delivery mechanism knocked the whole house down, but the payload made sure no other missiles would break the kitchen table.
Now maybe if the "White Knight" virus developers were more careful with the delivery mechanism, it would have actually been beneficial. But it's hard to predict what a virus will do in the wild. A small bug in your virus can mean the difference between slow propagation and lightning-fast propagation. Plus, if the "good virus" propagates too slowly, it won't be effective.
So in the end, it's unlikely that "good viruses" will ever work well. I like the post about needing a "immune system" for computer networks. Those already exist in the initial stages; IBM and Cisco have done a lot of research and have some products out there. But even more than that, ISPs need to do (better) ingress and egress filtering.
No tea! ;)
I don't know if it was included in the list of contents, but I'm pretty sure that they did in fact include no tea in the box.