Amazon only exists today because too many stupid investment bankers dumped billions of retierment funds into Amazon.com. The result is they had enough cash to keep wasting money for years. That had a bad effect on many other book stores (how can you compete with someone giving stuff away). Now matter how you cut it, Amazon was a very bad investment.
Google would go through the roof. Then anyone with any clue on how to buy stock would sell out. A few large holders selling out and then the price would drop based on the selling. The result is google would go from a $20/share price to about $600 in the 1st week and end up under $1 by the end of the quarter. I figure will mirror Yahoo but in a very compressed way. Far more people world wide know about google than knew about Yahoo or even Netscape when they IPOed.
Google can only keep doing what its doing if its in private hands. If it goes public, someone else will come along and out do them. Kind of like what happened with Altavisa. Many people know how to duplicate a great deal of what Google is now doing. It took Google about 20 people to out do Altavisa. I suspect it would take less to build a very good search engine. Right now that won't work because google works well but once they have to keep their new investors happy, they might get sidetracked.
Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.
Will this be like the Internet phones I've got? They were such a smashing success when they cost nearly $1000 each! I know so because I saw the press release. Some people I know decided to get in this great business and ordered some of these things. They sold so well I've got nearly 200 left sitting in the warehouse and I would be happy to let them go $100 each. I think the initial order was for about 210 of the things:-)
Im my day we had to walk to work in the snow and up hill both ways. We didn't have any fancy USB data keys or buffer overflows to use and had to enter boot loaders through the computers key pad by hand in Octal!
Before you go bashing sendmail, why not go through all the sendmail patches (say post V5) and see what they fixed. Then find out if your MTA might have that issue and if so, was it fixed. You may find that many sendmail bug fixes are to workaround bugs in things like the local delivery agents.
Most sendmail patches are to work around bugs in the OS or libraries. Some of the race conditions patches that were patched long ago also exist today in other MTAs. If you look closely, you will see that some of the sendmail patches for race conditions also appear in things like INN and Apache.
The biggest security problem on deamons is they need root to bind to a low port. In most OS's its trival to patch them to allow programs to open low ports if they are a memeber of a group that equals the port id. A trival fix and the many of the problems would go away forever but it breaks an old "security" hack.
ARIN is the reason there are no more IP addresses. Their polices don't allow small compaines any way to dual home and their stupidity results in lots of compaines getting far more addresses than they need. Did you need more than a/24? I know you got more because they can't dish out any less than/22 or so now.
I think that ARIN should start a policy that for any new allocation, 1/16 must be dual homeable. These addresses would be dual allocated to two ISPs at the same time and that any large ISP that needs more address space must set up agreements with other ISPs. This would force them to change from the model they use now to one with more cooperation.
Right now I need 16 address that can be routed via either NTT or Telstra but to get 16 with ARINs model, I have to pay then too much and then they give me far more addresses that I will ever use.
BSD was Sun's mistress till they hopped in bed with AT&T and produced the vile offsprig known as SVR4.
You see, Sun left the sleek sexy liberal BSD for the rich conservative AT&T and the relationship just didn't work out but it was too late to get back together with BSD. Many of us saw what was going on when Sun started seeing AT&T and knew it would never work out but I don't think Sun knew what was going on till AT&T asked "Do I look fat in this Sparc?" and Sun made the mistake of saying "Yes dear."
Now that you know the story, you'll see why Sun is hostile towards BSD but its clearly Sun's own fault.
They bought RAQ to get their market share. The have a line of sparc based machines that they sell at a lower prices that fits in with the RAQ line as well as better solutions for ISPs that run racks full of web hosting servers.
I don't think they are getting out of the entry level market but I'm sure they are looking at moving all the RAQ stuff to solaris which is their aim since it locks people into their solutions.
Where Sun is having a problem is the high end stuff in the Intel platforms are getting very cheap. How many cheap x86 motherboards support RAID now? How many sun boxes under $10,000 do? They have some nice lights out managment features but I can't read the SMART values off the IDE drives under solaris so I've got to put something else on their boxes just so I can monitor the thing most likly to die in the box.
This makes it illegal to use a device that allows you to run two TV's off one cable service without telling your cable company. That is exactly what NAT does.
I don't know about most of you, but my cable internet provider charges extra for each computer that is hooked up to the internetnet but will give me dhcp addresses for anything on the net for free.
Is this a case of more laws to cover existing crimes? Fraud is a crime already. We don't need more laws describing fraud. If your into ripping off your cable company, It seems that right now the you can get more time depending on how its done. If the crime is ripping off the cable company, then the fines should be the same no matter how its done if physical damage to the company is non-exsitant.
Older laws had these concepts. For example burglary is entering a place your not suppoed to be in (no its not stealing stuff), while breaking and entering is a different crime. Many people are charged with burglary that aren't chared with theft because its easier to prove. So if you break into someones house, steal their TV and get caught with the TV, you will find your self charged with at least 1) Breaking and Entering, 2) Burglary and 3) Theft.
Re:XML is Verbose...compresses beautifully-- NOT!!
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
·
· Score: 1
XML doesn't compress well for most smaller things either.
For example, take a current netscape history file and run it through gzip and do the same with an old format one with the same info.
The reason for this is simple. The compression used in gzip (and mot everything else that is common) starts at the begining of the file and starts looking for common bits. When it finds as many as it can cope with, it builds its compression dictionary and then starts streaming the data. At some point when the table no longer seems to fit, then it rebuilds the table.
Years ago when people sent usenet via uucp, I found that it was much better to break the articles into headers and bodies, and compress them separately.
Maybe we need another XML tag to say "The compressor should considering dumping its dictionary at this point"
With the exception of XML (which I think fits well into the "it sucks" category), no one has ever paid attention to the W3C. Look at their html specs. They were all written after the fact and their new proposed spec has been totally ignored by all the major players except where some bit of it suits them. W3C is a committee for the sake of being a committee.
You buy that story? They want that port for is to bring in more military supplies, the "humanitarian" aspect of its is to hope some guy will show up with a map of the mines so he can feed his family.
Remember you can get 80 tanks in a ship and 2 on a plane C5 (except they tend to only fly one at a time). The US built about 8000 M1 tanks and only about 10% of them are in Iraq right now.
I was talking to a Sr NASA engineer a few years ago and he told me about how parts of the space suits are still classified. He claims that the offical reason for that was that Russians hadn't figured out how to use peilter effect devices for space suit cooling and still use a compressed gas cycle. Until they publish a design using pielter effect devices, the US system will stay top secret and the offical reasons for the space suit temperature system will remain the false statement of keeping the astronauts warm. Maybe someone will review this and stamp it unclassifed. One advantage is that since this info is still classified, the data hasn't been trashed like most of the documents about Apollo. Now when it gets released, many people will store it for a very long time.
The "president's analyist" (that got one google hit) has some interesting concepts about who controls the info. It was made in the 1970's and has a scene where a Russsian spy in NYC is talking to an American spy and uses words along the lines of "Every year you become more like up and we become more like you. There won't be any differences in a few decades"
It also shows the best reason not to trust "The Phone Company" I have ever seen. It is a very good geek movie (along with "The Dish"). A good book about about these topics is the now back in print "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It has concepts like sharing files over an IRC like network. Not bad for a book written decades ago. Its also much shorter than most of his books. I find it ironic that it talks about not being able to stop the information flow and google shows serveral pdfs that appear to be the full book.
Right now if you get the bad news that you have cancer, they may deside the best option is to treat it with a radiation treatment. This involves using a high energy beam to bore a hole completley through you that should contain the offending cells. What needs to be researched is a way of using holography to just radiate the bad cells. Maybe this tech may allow that conecpt to be considered.
There are many areas in the world that are having problems with GPS but its not due to jaming, its due to the fact that there isn't a full constilation up. PRN 22 went dead a while back and hasn't been replaced. The current plan is to spread out the sats in that orbital ring (the B plane) to help fill up the gap but that will result in more outages in more places for short times compared to the current 1/2 hour outages seen directly in the flight path. The NavCen are recomending that you change your mask angle to 5 degrees if its set higher (many people use 15 degrees).
Right now you can see the problems on this map(mirrored here). The black areas are where GPS isn't going to give a 3d position and the red areas are where it wont get a 4d (3d+time) fix. The dark blue will have issues if any part of the sky is blocked. I don't think I've seen the GPS status this bad for a long time. Maybe its time to launch a few new navstar sats.
Many credit cards will offer buyer protection for upto 5 years. Check out the details on your card since it may be a better than than the extended Warranties.
It's 59% of all CCM level 4 compaines are overseas. CCM level 4 is more importaint for overseas companines because they use it to try to win business.
I work for a company that went through the ISO-9002 process. It was good for the company and the audit showed where some of the processses were weak. It turns out that not one of our customers cared that we were iso-9002 certifed and it costs a fortune for a small company so it dumped.
Whenever possible, go for java instead of C#. Go for PHP instead of ASP.
If your at the level where this advice makes sense to you, go the local university and enroll in something that isn't programming realted.
All the best coders I know started with assembly language and not one of them started in a high level language. Real coders can work in machine code if needed because they understand whats going on at the low level.
What in a game will go faster with 64 bits than 32? I can't think of anything that wouldn't be much better off with a very long data word (like 1024 bits). I contend that there is almost nothing that is faster in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. It seems the the coders who wrote all the code for my Nintendo 64 didn't see the need to use it in 64 bit mode and my 64 bits sparcs are about 10% faster running most of their apps in 32 bit mode. I don't need to double the junk put on the stack everytime a new frame is needed just to get a massive increase on a few sector calculations.
If we collect enough info on a language, we can find out odd thigns about it. For example there are many old english poems that rhyme which allows us to understand how some words were pronoucned a very long time ago. Words such as oregano have vastly different pronunciations in the US than in Australia but the word is very old having started in North Africa with a few changes in greek and then into Spanish. Potato and tomato also started in South America as first Aztec and then Inca names before the word (and the plants) where taken to Span where the word found its way into English.
And how many people here know that the rules that are used to do basic arithmetic are based on a writing style of right to left. When the Europeans stole the ideas from the Arabs, they didn't know how to reverse the rules for a left to right writing style. Thats why when your taught to add and multiply its "Start on the right and work backwards". If you were to see a prhase like "one hundred twenty three plus twelve equals 135" in an old script it would look like "135 *$%*$%*$ 12 *!@#* 123". (I used the modern symbols, for the acient ones...1->1, and the 2->7, 5->0 and there isn't anything close to the old 3 unless I could get a 7 with an umlaut) It turns out its much easier to add numbers in your head if you change the endianness (even though I hate reading hex dumps in little endian)
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon only exists today because too many stupid investment bankers dumped billions of retierment funds into Amazon.com. The result is they had enough cash to keep wasting money for years. That had a bad effect on many other book stores (how can you compete with someone giving stuff away). Now matter how you cut it, Amazon was a very bad investment.
Google would go through the roof. Then anyone with any clue on how to buy stock would sell out. A few large holders selling out and then the price would drop based on the selling. The result is google would go from a $20/share price to about $600 in the 1st week and end up under $1 by the end of the quarter. I figure will mirror Yahoo but in a very compressed way. Far more people world wide know about google than knew about Yahoo or even Netscape when they IPOed.
Google can only keep doing what its doing if its in private hands. If it goes public, someone else will come along and out do them. Kind of like what happened with Altavisa. Many people know how to duplicate a great deal of what Google is now doing. It took Google about 20 people to out do Altavisa. I suspect it would take less to build a very good search engine. Right now that won't work because google works well but once they have to keep their new investors happy, they might get sidetracked.
Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.
Here's a picture
Will this be like the Internet phones I've got? They were such a smashing success when they cost nearly $1000 each! I know so because I saw the press release. Some people I know decided to get in this great business and ordered some of these things. They sold so well I've got nearly 200 left sitting in the warehouse and I would be happy to let them go $100 each. I think the initial order was for about 210 of the things :-)
Im my day we had to walk to work in the snow and up hill both ways. We didn't have any fancy USB data keys or buffer overflows to use and had to enter boot loaders through the computers key pad by hand in Octal!
Before you go bashing sendmail, why not go through all the sendmail patches (say post V5) and see what they fixed. Then find out if your MTA might have that issue and if so, was it fixed. You may find that many sendmail bug fixes are to workaround bugs in things like the local delivery agents.
Most sendmail patches are to work around bugs in the OS or libraries. Some of the race conditions patches that were patched long ago also exist today in other MTAs. If you look closely, you will see that some of the sendmail patches for race conditions also appear in things like INN and Apache.
The biggest security problem on deamons is they need root to bind to a low port. In most OS's its trival to patch them to allow programs to open low ports if they are a memeber of a group that equals the port id. A trival fix and the many of the problems would go away forever but it breaks an old "security" hack.
ARIN is the reason there are no more IP addresses. Their polices don't allow small compaines any way to dual home and their stupidity results in lots of compaines getting far more addresses than they need. Did you need more than a /24? I know you got more because they can't dish out any less than /22 or so now.
I think that ARIN should start a policy that for any new allocation, 1/16 must be dual homeable. These addresses would be dual allocated to two ISPs at the same time and that any large ISP that needs more address space must set up agreements with other ISPs. This would force them to change from the model they use now to one with more cooperation.
Right now I need 16 address that can be routed via either NTT or Telstra but to get 16 with ARINs model, I have to pay then too much and then they give me far more addresses that I will ever use.
BSD was Sun's mistress till they hopped in bed with AT&T and produced the vile offsprig known as SVR4.
You see, Sun left the sleek sexy liberal BSD for the rich conservative AT&T and the relationship just didn't work out but it was too late to get back together with BSD. Many of us saw what was going on when Sun started seeing AT&T and knew it would never work out but I don't think Sun knew what was going on till AT&T asked "Do I look fat in this Sparc?" and Sun made the mistake of saying "Yes dear."
Now that you know the story, you'll see why Sun is hostile towards BSD but its clearly Sun's own fault.
They bought RAQ to get their market share. The have a line of sparc based machines that they sell at a lower prices that fits in with the RAQ line as well as better solutions for ISPs that run racks full of web hosting servers.
I don't think they are getting out of the entry level market but I'm sure they are looking at moving all the RAQ stuff to solaris which is their aim since it locks people into their solutions.
Where Sun is having a problem is the high end stuff in the Intel platforms are getting very cheap. How many cheap x86 motherboards support RAID now? How many sun boxes under $10,000 do? They have some nice lights out managment features but I can't read the SMART values off the IDE drives under solaris so I've got to put something else on their boxes just so I can monitor the thing most likly to die in the box.
This makes it illegal to use a device that allows you to run two TV's off one cable service without telling your cable company. That is exactly what NAT does.
I don't know about most of you, but my cable internet provider charges extra for each computer that is hooked up to the internetnet but will give me dhcp addresses for anything on the net for free.
Is this a case of more laws to cover existing crimes? Fraud is a crime already. We don't need more laws describing fraud. If your into ripping off your cable company, It seems that right now the you can get more time depending on how its done. If the crime is ripping off the cable company, then the fines should be the same no matter how its done if physical damage to the company is non-exsitant.
Older laws had these concepts. For example burglary is entering a place your not suppoed to be in (no its not stealing stuff), while breaking and entering is a different crime. Many people are charged with burglary that aren't chared with theft because its easier to prove. So if you break into someones house, steal their TV and get caught with the TV, you will find your self charged with at least 1) Breaking and Entering, 2) Burglary and 3) Theft.
XML doesn't compress well for most smaller things either.
For example, take a current netscape history file and run it through gzip and do the same with an old format one with the same info.
The reason for this is simple. The compression used in gzip (and mot everything else that is common) starts at the begining of the file and starts looking for common bits. When it finds as many as it can cope with, it builds its compression dictionary and then starts streaming the data. At some point when the table no longer seems to fit, then it rebuilds the table.
Years ago when people sent usenet via uucp, I found that it was much better to break the articles into headers and bodies, and compress them separately.
Maybe we need another XML tag to say "The compressor should considering dumping its dictionary at this point"
With the exception of XML (which I think fits well into the "it sucks" category), no one has ever paid attention to the W3C. Look at their html specs. They were all written after the fact and their new proposed spec has been totally ignored by all the major players except where some bit of it suits them. W3C is a committee for the sake of being a committee.
You buy that story? They want that port for is to bring in more military supplies, the "humanitarian" aspect of its is to hope some guy will show up with a map of the mines so he can feed his family.
Remember you can get 80 tanks in a ship and 2 on a plane C5 (except they tend to only fly one at a time). The US built about 8000 M1 tanks and only about 10% of them are in Iraq right now.
I was talking to a Sr NASA engineer a few years ago and he told me about how parts of the space suits are still classified. He claims that the offical reason for that was that Russians hadn't figured out how to use peilter effect devices for space suit cooling and still use a compressed gas cycle. Until they publish a design using pielter effect devices, the US system will stay top secret and the offical reasons for the space suit temperature system will remain the false statement of keeping the astronauts warm. Maybe someone will review this and stamp it unclassifed. One advantage is that since this info is still classified, the data hasn't been trashed like most of the documents about Apollo. Now when it gets released, many people will store it for a very long time.
I haven't Titanic, can you tell me how it ends?
The "president's analyist" (that got one google hit) has some interesting concepts about who controls the info. It was made in the 1970's and has a scene where a Russsian spy in NYC is talking to an American spy and uses words along the lines of "Every year you become more like up and we become more like you. There won't be any differences in a few decades"
It also shows the best reason not to trust "The Phone Company" I have ever seen. It is a very good geek movie (along with "The Dish"). A good book about about these topics is the now back in print "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It has concepts like sharing files over an IRC like network. Not bad for a book written decades ago. Its also much shorter than most of his books. I find it ironic that it talks about not being able to stop the information flow and google shows serveral pdfs that appear to be the full book.
Right now if you get the bad news that you have cancer, they may deside the best option is to treat it with a radiation treatment. This involves using a high energy beam to bore a hole completley through you that should contain the offending cells. What needs to be researched is a way of using holography to just radiate the bad cells. Maybe this tech may allow that conecpt to be considered.
There are many areas in the world that are having problems with GPS but its not due to jaming, its due to the fact that there isn't a full constilation up. PRN 22 went dead a while back and hasn't been replaced. The current plan is to spread out the sats in that orbital ring (the B plane) to help fill up the gap but that will result in more outages in more places for short times compared to the current 1/2 hour outages seen directly in the flight path. The NavCen are recomending that you change your mask angle to 5 degrees if its set higher (many people use 15 degrees).
Right now you can see the problems on this map (mirrored here). The black areas are where GPS isn't going to give a 3d position and the red areas are where it wont get a 4d (3d+time) fix. The dark blue will have issues if any part of the sky is blocked. I don't think I've seen the GPS status this bad for a long time. Maybe its time to launch a few new navstar sats.
Many credit cards will offer buyer protection for upto 5 years. Check out the details on your card since it may be a better than than the extended Warranties.
It's 59% of all CCM level 4 compaines are overseas. CCM level 4 is more importaint for overseas companines because they use it to try to win business.
I work for a company that went through the ISO-9002 process. It was good for the company and the audit showed where some of the processses were weak. It turns out that not one of our customers cared that we were iso-9002 certifed and it costs a fortune for a small company so it dumped.
Whenever possible, go for java instead of C#. Go for PHP instead of ASP.
If your at the level where this advice makes sense to you, go the local university and enroll in something that isn't programming realted.
All the best coders I know started with assembly language and not one of them started in a high level language. Real coders can work in machine code if needed because they understand whats going on at the low level.
What in a game will go faster with 64 bits than 32? I can't think of anything that wouldn't be much better off with a very long data word (like 1024 bits). I contend that there is almost nothing that is faster in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. It seems the the coders who wrote all the code for my Nintendo 64 didn't see the need to use it in 64 bit mode and my 64 bits sparcs are about 10% faster running most of their apps in 32 bit mode. I don't need to double the junk put on the stack everytime a new frame is needed just to get a massive increase on a few sector calculations.
If we collect enough info on a language, we can find out odd thigns about it. For example there are many old english poems that rhyme which allows us to understand how some words were pronoucned a very long time ago. Words such as oregano have vastly different pronunciations in the US than in Australia but the word is very old having started in North Africa with a few changes in greek and then into Spanish. Potato and tomato also started in South America as first Aztec and then Inca names before the word (and the plants) where taken to Span where the word found its way into English.
And how many people here know that the rules that are used to do basic arithmetic are based on a writing style of right to left. When the Europeans stole the ideas from the Arabs, they didn't know how to reverse the rules for a left to right writing style. Thats why when your taught to add and multiply its "Start on the right and work backwards". If you were to see a prhase like "one hundred twenty three plus twelve equals 135" in an old script it would look like "135 *$%*$%*$ 12 *!@#* 123". (I used the modern symbols, for the acient ones ...1->1, and the 2->7, 5->0 and there isn't anything close to the old 3 unless I could get a 7 with an umlaut) It turns out its much easier to add numbers in your head if you change the endianness (even though I hate reading hex dumps in little endian)