Well, that's an easy question. Microsoft has largely ignored piracy for as long as it benefitted them. Now that they have already established monopoly in OS and Office, and the PC market is not growing at the pace it used to, Microsoft needs to find some way to squeeze more revenues, and it does so by going after casual copying. But I am interested in how the MS guy will spin it. ___
Regardless of what you think, you can not solve a NP or NP-Complete problem in P time.
Once again we have someone who misunderstands the complexity theory but decides to post anyway. So, let's present some definitions.
P is a class of problems that can be decided by a deterministic turing machine in polynomial time.
NP is a class of problems that can be decided by a non-deterministic turing machine in polynomial time. NP stands for nondeterministic polynomial(*)
So, by definition, NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time. You just need to implement a non-deterministic turing machine to do that. The big question in computer science is whether NP-complete problems can also be solved in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine (i.e. does P = NP?). The answer at this point is "probably not". Here is the most informative post on the subject I've seen so far, btw.
Anyway, back to the story: it looks (well, to me at least) like quantum computer is an implementation of NTM, but as others have pointed out, some researchers have doubts about that. If it is indeed an NTM, then presto -- you have poly-time solutions to all NP-complete problems. Assuming you can ever build one of these suckers, of course;-)
(*) One other (and more commonly used) way to define class NP is as a class of all problems that can be verified by a deterministic turing machine in polynomial time. That is really only a subset of the definition. ___
I was with you until this point. Sure Linux has much more stable UI if you are talking about the command line. But when it comes to GUI, well... let's just not even go there. It would have made a lot more sense if you compared it to MacOS, which has had consistent GUI for a looooong time. But I'm sure Mac fans will be happy to point that out. ___
Or, in other words:
if you invest $100 in the $100 stock, your investment will be worth $110 in a year.
if you invest $100 in the $5 stock, your investment will be worth $300 in a year.
But I'm sure you knew that and it was a simple mistake. ___
that's right but 192.168 gives you 16 bits of freedom. That's up to 65K nodes. You definitely don't need any more. In fact I'd be surprised to see a school with more than 2-300 computers ___
The Navy just doesn't give up. Just two or three years ago they had a battleship stuck in the water because NT crashed. And now they want NT to run on a carrier? ___
You should have read the article about this. Microsoft is not releasing *all* code. A "small portion" of it will still be closed. So I guess you can't just get the source from MS and compile it yourself. You still need to get the binaries from them... ___
2)The microsoft issue was covered under fair use and thus Microsoft could ask slashdot to pull it,
and threaten lawyers, but Slashdot was virtually guaranteed a victory in the courtroom. Not so
here.
I don't get this. Why is posting Micro$oft's bastardized Kerberos spec a fair use, while posting $cientology's ridiculous crap about Xenu a copyright violation?
___
The only flaw in this logic, that makes the conclusion completely invalid, is that Sony doesn't make money off the sales of the playstation. All the money is made off of the (overpriced) games. Consoles are always sold at a loss or break-even. Thus, the emulator is actually good for Sony because it makes their games available to a much wider audience. The only reason Sony went after Connectix is that they want to have complete control of the platform. ___
3) OTOH, if the patch is applied, PDF creators may be incensed enough to ask Adobe to "fix it,
Mommy". Adobe could then change the format such that xpdf can no longer read it or, worse, put the
arm on xpdf somehow.
I doubt they'd be able to do anything. The whole advantage of PDF is that it's a universal format available on all platforms and it has a huge installed base. If Adobe suddenly comes up with a new format, all the old Acrobats will not be able to read it. Do you think Joe Average is going to upgrade? I wouldn't count on it. Even if Joe did upgrade, that's a dangerous proposition for Adobe since Joe would be just as likely to switch to a competitor's product while he's at it. ___
I wanted to post the same thing but you were ahead of me. The clergy was either viciously excuted or sent to labour camps in Siberia. I have heard accounts of priests being fed to rats. Alive! Churches were ruined. Icons were destroyed. Books were burned.
Of course, one can argue that in the Soviet Union, communism became the official religion and all other religions had to be exterminated because they conflicted with what the communists preached. Stalin became the official god or messia or what have you. In 1953, when Stalin died, Khruschev came to power. For a while, sanity prevailed. Khruschev criticized "the cult of Stalin"!! But it didn't last long and Lenin, once again, became the official god. Did you hear about the Mausoleum? (pardon my spelling) Did you know that Lenin's body is still preserved there and is still available for all the faithful to see? (That was done contrary to Lenin's wishes -- he specifically said that he wanted to be buried but that didn't prevent the rabid communists from turning communism into an organized religion).
Anyway, back to the point -- atheism *can* become an organized religion. And it still is happenning in China.
Oh, and just to let you know that I'm not talking out of my ass -- I was born and in the Soviet Union and lived there for 15 years before I came to Canada. ___
Still, sites that use these databases are still prone to problems, just look at EBay!
I read the story about what happened at Ebay. Apparently their sysadmin(s) are absolutely incompetent. Their database got corrupted due to a known Solaris bug for which a fix had been available for 6 months (!) prior to the incident. Also, they did not have redundant servers for their production database or a cluster of any kind. Ironically, they were just weeks (or days?) away from putting a second DB box in production for load balancing and failover... ___
It is pointless to even compare something like Access or MySQL to something like Oracle or DB2. If you are even asking this question, it means that the above two words are foreign to you. ___
Try not to view this from an ANSI-C-bigot point of view, but from a poor-guy-trying-to-learn-C or poor-guy-assigned-to-port-stuff-to-linux view. There's plenty of bad code out there, and you know it:)
This has nothing to do with ANSI C. This is how floating point numbers work. It depends on the FPU (i.e. the *hardware*) you are running on. Floating point numbers are not exact and you must never assume that 10.0 == 10.0 no matter what language you are using. For some simple cases it just may happen to work, but in general this assumption is a grave programming error.
___
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's an easy question. Microsoft has largely ignored piracy for as long as it benefitted them. Now that they have already established monopoly in OS and Office, and the PC market is not growing at the pace it used to, Microsoft needs to find some way to squeeze more revenues, and it does so by going after casual copying. But I am interested in how the MS guy will spin it.
___
Just make sure your votes are not counted in Palm Beach!
___
Once again we have someone who misunderstands the complexity theory but decides to post anyway. So, let's present some definitions.
P is a class of problems that can be decided by a deterministic turing machine in polynomial time.
NP is a class of problems that can be decided by a non-deterministic turing machine in polynomial time. NP stands for nondeterministic polynomial(*)
So, by definition, NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time. You just need to implement a non-deterministic turing machine to do that. The big question in computer science is whether NP-complete problems can also be solved in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine (i.e. does P = NP?). The answer at this point is "probably not". Here is the most informative post on the subject I've seen so far, btw.
Anyway, back to the story: it looks (well, to me at least) like quantum computer is an implementation of NTM, but as others have pointed out, some researchers have doubts about that. If it is indeed an NTM, then presto -- you have poly-time solutions to all NP-complete problems. Assuming you can ever build one of these suckers, of course ;-)
(*) One other (and more commonly used) way to define class NP is as a class of all problems that can be verified by a deterministic turing machine in polynomial time. That is really only a subset of the definition.
___
I was with you until this point. Sure Linux has much more stable UI if you are talking about the command line. But when it comes to GUI, well... let's just not even go there. It would have made a lot more sense if you compared it to MacOS, which has had consistent GUI for a looooong time. But I'm sure Mac fans will be happy to point that out.
___
(110 - 100) / 100 = 10% increase
(15 - 5) / 5 = 200% increase
Or, in other words:
if you invest $100 in the $100 stock, your investment will be worth $110 in a year.
if you invest $100 in the $5 stock, your investment will be worth $300 in a year.
But I'm sure you knew that and it was a simple mistake.
___
that's right but 192.168 gives you 16 bits of freedom. That's up to 65K nodes. You definitely don't need any more. In fact I'd be surprised to see a school with more than 2-300 computers
___
The Navy just doesn't give up. Just two or three years ago they had a battleship stuck in the water because NT crashed. And now they want NT to run on a carrier?
___
You should have read the article about this. Microsoft is not releasing *all* code. A "small portion" of it will still be closed. So I guess you can't just get the source from MS and compile it yourself. You still need to get the binaries from them...
___
Nope. The whole thing was posted
___
I don't get this. Why is posting Micro$oft's bastardized Kerberos spec a fair use, while posting $cientology's ridiculous crap about Xenu a copyright violation?
___
The only flaw in this logic, that makes the conclusion completely invalid, is that Sony doesn't make money off the sales of the playstation. All the money is made off of the (overpriced) games. Consoles are always sold at a loss or break-even. Thus, the emulator is actually good for Sony because it makes their games available to a much wider audience. The only reason Sony went after Connectix is that they want to have complete control of the platform.
___
Considering that DDR is faster and cheaper than Rambus, there is really no competition. It's just a matter of availability.
___
Your expectations are too high.
___
I doubt they'd be able to do anything. The whole advantage of PDF is that it's a universal format available on all platforms and it has a huge installed base. If Adobe suddenly comes up with a new format, all the old Acrobats will not be able to read it. Do you think Joe Average is going to upgrade? I wouldn't count on it. Even if Joe did upgrade, that's a dangerous proposition for Adobe since Joe would be just as likely to switch to a competitor's product while he's at it.
___
Uhhm, the Sun rays are X terminals. There is really nothing new to them except this smart card, which in and of itself is a dubious innovation.
___
That's because this law is bananas.
___
Who were the congressmen who did this? Were they the same people responcible for DMCA and UCITA?
___
I wanted to post the same thing but you were ahead of me. The clergy was either viciously excuted or sent to labour camps in Siberia. I have heard accounts of priests being fed to rats. Alive! Churches were ruined. Icons were destroyed. Books were burned.
Of course, one can argue that in the Soviet Union, communism became the official religion and all other religions had to be exterminated because they conflicted with what the communists preached. Stalin became the official god or messia or what have you. In 1953, when Stalin died, Khruschev came to power. For a while, sanity prevailed. Khruschev criticized "the cult of Stalin"!! But it didn't last long and Lenin, once again, became the official god. Did you hear about the Mausoleum? (pardon my spelling) Did you know that Lenin's body is still preserved there and is still available for all the faithful to see? (That was done contrary to Lenin's wishes -- he specifically said that he wanted to be buried but that didn't prevent the rabid communists from turning communism into an organized religion).
Anyway, back to the point -- atheism *can* become an organized religion. And it still is happenning in China.
Oh, and just to let you know that I'm not talking out of my ass -- I was born and in the Soviet Union and lived there for 15 years before I came to Canada.
___
But mormon "religion" is also a cult. It is true that is was based on Christianity but is certainly is far from it.
___
I read the story about what happened at Ebay. Apparently their sysadmin(s) are absolutely incompetent. Their database got corrupted due to a known Solaris bug for which a fix had been available for 6 months (!) prior to the incident. Also, they did not have redundant servers for their production database or a cluster of any kind. Ironically, they were just weeks (or days?) away from putting a second DB box in production for load balancing and failover...
___
Reliability and scalability.
It is pointless to even compare something like Access or MySQL to something like Oracle or DB2. If you are even asking this question, it means that the above two words are foreign to you.
___
Since when has Sun started selling mainframes?
___
I never heard anything. ??
___
I know just the methodology they need: get more people to do the code audit.
___
This has nothing to do with ANSI C. This is how floating point numbers work. It depends on the FPU (i.e. the *hardware*) you are running on. Floating point numbers are not exact and you must never assume that 10.0 == 10.0 no matter what language you are using. For some simple cases it just may happen to work, but in general this assumption is a grave programming error.
___