those who took out short positions at $5 or $10 got screwed
Or at least they didn't do the math. SCO was a marginally good short at $10, but the ROI wasn't that great (after all, it ties up captial to hold a short position, and that money could be doing something else). At $15 it looks much more tempting, and at $20 it's a sweet deal to short if you can find the shares.
The problem isn't so much taking advice from slashdot per se (which in this case will likely turn out to have been good), but in taking advice from anyone without running the numbers yourself.
because those positions don't last forever
I think you may have shorts confused with puts. Shorts last until you cover them (which, admitedly, you may be forced to do by market conditions if you aren't careful; hence the point about doing the math).
On the other hand, if you had gone against Slashdot and put your life savings into SCO back in May when the story broke, you would be laughing now.
If they sold at $20+, sure. But if they're holding, and plan to keep holding? I'd say they should get ready to cry in their beer about life-savings-lost. SCO can't keep this up indefinetly. I say again, do the math.
But not only is the SCO share price rising, but there are a lot of shares being traded too. The markets back SCO at the moment and not us.
"The market" isn't a single entity, any more than slashdot is. What you are seeing is stock manipulation, plain and simple. At least, here's what I see:
Someone buys up a large fraction of the float in SCO, until the price just starts to rise.
SCO or a friend issues some sort of noise maker / press release
The price shoots up
Our anonomous friend sells into the rise until the price drops back down
Profit!
"The market" isn't backing anyone here.
What you are seeing is wolves taking money from sheep by not-too-subtle trickery.
The Bottom Line: My HD sandwich works well. It quiets the HD substantially, keeps it much cooler, and cost me just US$12 to implement.
If you don't count the roughly $11,368.43 of his time spent on implementing, testing, and documenting the solution. I suspect he's an engineer. A programmer would wrap a towel around the drive, pause for a moment, and then say "Yeah, that's quieter." (Note: this is not speculation. I've have seen this.)
It takes an engineer to cook up something like this and then spend 10x the effort to figure out how many dB reduction there was.
Exponential up, logarithmic down. They are opposites, like plus and minus. If a progression is exponential, it is logarithmic, and vice versa.
No, they are inverses. If the mapping from a the range to domain is exponential, the mapping from the domain to the range is logarithmic. This does not mean that there is some value A' for every value A such that A^B is the same as log-base-A'(B) for all B. The functions are not the same.
We test first. In general, we respond to a vulnerability by first checking to see if it effects us (for example, ssh has had some recent problems that did not effect us because we did not use the features that were compromised). If it is some thing that we need to worry about, we make do some testing to make sure it doesn't break anything. Then we determine the best way to patch the effected systems on a case by case (or class by class) basis; in general, we try for minimal disruption (only patch what needs to be patched).
For everything else, we do rolling full-upgrades, on a as-much-time-as-it-takes-to-get-it-right schedule, again testing as we go.
The bad guys(tm) can hurt you, but they're nothing compared to what you can do to yourself if you make a habit of pulling the trigger first and aiming later.
glass is a silicon dioxide molten superfluid (it's below 'freezing' temperature but not crystalized)
This is an urban legend. Glass is not a molten superfluid, supercooled liquid, etc. It is an amorphous solid. Old windows do not flow. Soda is used to reduce the melting point of sand in making new glass; it works the same way as putting salt on ice does. Adding old glass reduces the melting point the same way puting frozen saltwater on ice would, but that doesn't buy you anything--you can just as well uses some of the glass you just made, and you won't have to haul it for miles.
My favorite is glass recycling. It would be hard to come up with a more pointless waste of time and effort. That isn't to say some people don't try (e.g. cutting the loops in the plastic that holds six-packs together so that dolphins don't get them stuck on their snouts and drown, or buying products from people you disaprove of in order to publicly burn them).
Glass is essentially sand that has been cleaned and melted. The main cost is the energy to melt & form it; the second most significant cost is the energy to transport it. The actual cost (both in dollars and environmental factors) of the sand and the cleaning are negligable compaired to these. If glass containers can be reused in the same process (the way you used to refill milk bottles), great. But to collect all sorts of assorted glass containers and transport them a great distance to someplace where they can be ground up to make sand is plain silly.
I don't believe Penrouse doesn't understand what Godel theorem is. Ergo either he must be lying or you are misinterpreting his arguments.
There is a third possibility: he may be so commited to his conclussion (mind is not algorithmic / finite / mechanical / whatever) that he is willing to accept the additional assumption than man (perhaps because he is created in the image of $DEITY) can transend Godel's limits, since this gives him what he wants.
I'm not asking to take my word for this. Get a copy of his books, and read for yourself. But get them from the library--I wouldn't recommend wasting money buying them.
he has sought out and rationally rebutted many common objections to his arguments
Last I saw, he was still dodging the killer though. The linch-pin of his argument is an implicit belief in human (his?) infailability. His argument boils down to:
Godel has proved that no formal system can prove all true statements expressable in that system unless it can also prove things that are clearly false.
Human mathematicians can prove anything if they set their minds to it.
Therefore humans are not formal systems.
Of course, if you accept the first two the correct conclusion should be "human mathematicians may someday think they've proved something that isn't really true." For all his seeking out straw men to defend against, this one still takes down his whole house of cards.
I can read, thank you. What I can't do is find anywhere in the EULA for RH or RHN that says what you are saying it does. Could you please quote the section you are refering to, and tell me where you found it? (I promise, I'll make the effort to read it, even if I have to sound out some of the big words).
Red Hat has per-server licensing now. If you buy a copy, you are allowed to install it on one server only, unless you buy more support seats.
No, if you buy support for one machine you can't "install" that support on multiple machines, any more than you can buy insurance for one car and "install" it on multiple cars. This isn't a GPL issue, you just didn't understand what they were saying.
Wait...wouldn't null-byte attack anti-evasion code be code that prevented evasion of null-byte attacks? Or should I go for that second cup of coffee and try parsing it again?
The most optomistic conculsion I've been able to draw from this and similar facts (note: not speculation, facts) about the corrupt state of US politics is that most people who pay attention to the news enough to notice things like this are also cynical enough to realize that there isn't enough difference between the major parties at this point to warrent getting as upset as they would if there was a "good team" and a "bad team."
Is a lack of liquor for a few days really a crisis? If so, maybe there is a bigger problem than the state's computer woes.
This is hardly flamebait. Who is it going to tempt into flaming? All the alcoholics who don't care about computers yet still for some inexplicable reason read/.?
That would be his attributing a Bush win in 2004 to any reason other than the obvious (if it were to happen): that he was elected under the rules set forth for elections.
Since the 2004 election hasn't happened yet, I don't see how you can say that attributing any particular outcome to any particular cause is either true or false. If I say a team called the Walla Walla Wubel Woos might win the 2108 World Series because of the changes in the plastic bat rules, you might say I was being silly but you would be hard pressed to prove it was a falsehood.
Now, why would my post be a falsehood?
I never said that it was, and I explicitly stated that I was assuming that you were not saying that it was.
...people complain about the majority vote issue but nothing has been done.
I didn't interpret the original post this way; I took it that he was saying the vote was close last time and thus Bush would have a reason to be worried this time. In that I agree, to some extent. I fear that Bush may be in the process of pulling a Nixon, which would not be good for him, or for the party, or for the nation.
Always easier to comfort yourself with some falsehood
Assuming you weren't refering to your own post, you seem to be claiming that something the original poster said was factually incorrect. Could you please tell the rest of us what it is you caught that we didn't?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For what it's worth, I'm a registered Republican (as I gather are you), but the truth is worth far more to me than any party affiliation.
A friend of mine work on a number of "deeply embedded, hard realtime" applications, where he was able to clarify that "deeply embedded" meant there was absolutely no user-interface or even user-access to the device, and "hard realtime" in this case meant that any operations not completed in their alloted time window would be aborted due to the hardware they were running on no longer existing.
He was also able to name his employer (a known defense contractor).
While he couldn't tell people the nature of the product, he could tell them what his duties on the project included, as the parent poster suggested. Overall, he was able to drill down enough on the non-classified details to satisfy any interviewer that he knew what he was talking about without breaking any rules.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Some interviewers also look for the ability to respect previous NDAs as a major hireing criterion, so handling this issue properly (respect the NDAs without acting freaked by them) could be a strong point in your favour.
The raw throughput of sftp isn't much less than ftp, given that you have enough CPU on both ends of the link for the encryption/decryption.
You speak as though the slowdown of sftp is very large compared to ftp - not the few percent the protocol itself would add. This would lead me to beleive that you are running slow due to the encryption itself.
So, first of all I would check the CPUs of the machines involved - unless you are running an old junque P75 you should not have a big problem filling most pipes.
I didn't dig into it at the time (had other things to worry about), but about a month ago I had to transfer data between a half dozen identically configured 1.7 GHz RH9 boxes. In this environment sftp was about 1/8th the speed of ftp on large files over an issolated 100Mbs network.
I'd thought as you do until I saw what was happening, at which point I switched to ftp for the rest of the transfers.
"You automatically lose the argument if you use an unrealistic extreme to prove me wrong." -- NJG.
You may want to read up on
Reductio ad absurdum. Whatever your personal distaste for it, it has fine credentials as a valid and useful form of argument.
The story "Linux's Hit Men" by Daniel Lyons is so full of errors that it's hard to know where to begin. For example:
1. SCO is not "owner of the Unix operating system"; if you notice, even in their press releases they correctly state that Unix is a trademark of the Open Systems Group. The IBM case is not about Unix but about code contributed to Linux by IBM. Both sides aadmit the code in question was written by IBM; the dispute is over IBM's right (or lack thereof) to distribute it as they see fit. While there has been a lot of wild rhetoric on all sides, the SCO/IBM fight is a contract disute.
2. The FSF's insistance that vendors (including Linksys) abide by the terms of the licences under which they obtain the right to distribute code to which the FSF holds the copyright is hardly secret, nor is it particularly threatening. This particular "secret" negotiation has been goin on for months and has been reported on so frequently that even someone such as myself (who is not in that industry, and has no dealings with Linksys or the FSF other than occasional use of their products) was well aware of it.
Skipping ahead a bit...
3. Setting the $65,000 FSF/OpenTV case against the (claimed) $3,000,000,000 SCO/IBM case, especially when the a priori strength of the former case was so much stronger is odd enough that I began to wonder if the author is being used by Canopy Group as a shill in their SCOX pump-and-dump scheme.
At the very least, you ought to do a little more homework before publicly taking sides in a legal dispute between puclicly traded companies.
Slashdot Mirror
those who took out short positions at $5 or $10 got screwed
Or at least they didn't do the math. SCO was a marginally good short at $10, but the ROI wasn't that great (after all, it ties up captial to hold a short position, and that money could be doing something else). At $15 it looks much more tempting, and at $20 it's a sweet deal to short if you can find the shares.
The problem isn't so much taking advice from slashdot per se (which in this case will likely turn out to have been good), but in taking advice from anyone without running the numbers yourself.
because those positions don't last forever
I think you may have shorts confused with puts. Shorts last until you cover them (which, admitedly, you may be forced to do by market conditions if you aren't careful; hence the point about doing the math).
On the other hand, if you had gone against Slashdot and put your life savings into SCO back in May when the story broke, you would be laughing now.
If they sold at $20+, sure. But if they're holding, and plan to keep holding? I'd say they should get ready to cry in their beer about life-savings-lost. SCO can't keep this up indefinetly. I say again, do the math.
-- MarkusQ
But not only is the SCO share price rising, but there are a lot of shares being traded too. The markets back SCO at the moment and not us.
"The market" isn't a single entity, any more than slashdot is. What you are seeing is stock manipulation, plain and simple. At least, here's what I see:
- Someone buys up a large fraction of the float in SCO, until the price just starts to rise.
- SCO or a friend issues some sort of noise maker / press release
- The price shoots up
- Our anonomous friend sells into the rise until the price drops back down
- Profit!
"The market" isn't backing anyone here.What you are seeing is wolves taking money from sheep by not-too-subtle trickery.
-- MarkusQ
Just a guess.
-- MarkusQ
The Bottom Line: My HD sandwich works well. It quiets the HD substantially, keeps it much cooler, and cost me just US$12 to implement.
If you don't count the roughly $11,368.43 of his time spent on implementing, testing, and documenting the solution. I suspect he's an engineer. A programmer would wrap a towel around the drive, pause for a moment, and then say "Yeah, that's quieter." (Note: this is not speculation. I've have seen this.)
It takes an engineer to cook up something like this and then spend 10x the effort to figure out how many dB reduction there was.
-- MarkusQ
Exponential up, logarithmic down. They are opposites, like plus and minus. If a progression is exponential, it is logarithmic, and vice versa.
No, they are inverses. If the mapping from a the range to domain is exponential, the mapping from the domain to the range is logarithmic. This does not mean that there is some value A' for every value A such that A^B is the same as log-base-A'(B) for all B. The functions are not the same.
-- MarkusQ
Logarithmic progressions are exponential.
No, they aren't. Think about it. For any n > 0, base > 1, log(n+1)-log(n) < log(n)-log(n-1), whereas exp(n+1)-exp(n) > exp(n)-exp(n-1).
The parent was correct; the examples were 10^n for n=0,1,2... This is exponential, not logrithmic.
-- MarkusQ
We test first. In general, we respond to a vulnerability by first checking to see if it effects us (for example, ssh has had some recent problems that did not effect us because we did not use the features that were compromised). If it is some thing that we need to worry about, we make do some testing to make sure it doesn't break anything. Then we determine the best way to patch the effected systems on a case by case (or class by class) basis; in general, we try for minimal disruption (only patch what needs to be patched).
For everything else, we do rolling full-upgrades, on a as-much-time-as-it-takes-to-get-it-right schedule, again testing as we go.
The bad guys(tm) can hurt you, but they're nothing compared to what you can do to yourself if you make a habit of pulling the trigger first and aiming later.
-- MarkusQ
glass is a silicon dioxide molten superfluid (it's below 'freezing' temperature but not crystalized)
This is an urban legend. Glass is not a molten superfluid, supercooled liquid, etc. It is an amorphous solid. Old windows do not flow. Soda is used to reduce the melting point of sand in making new glass; it works the same way as putting salt on ice does. Adding old glass reduces the melting point the same way puting frozen saltwater on ice would, but that doesn't buy you anything--you can just as well uses some of the glass you just made, and you won't have to haul it for miles.
-- MarkusQ
Your sig is going to get funnier and funnier if SCO keeps falling.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Or is it intended to apply to itself?
My favorite is glass recycling. It would be hard to come up with a more pointless waste of time and effort. That isn't to say some people don't try (e.g. cutting the loops in the plastic that holds six-packs together so that dolphins don't get them stuck on their snouts and drown, or buying products from people you disaprove of in order to publicly burn them).
Glass is essentially sand that has been cleaned and melted. The main cost is the energy to melt & form it; the second most significant cost is the energy to transport it. The actual cost (both in dollars and environmental factors) of the sand and the cleaning are negligable compaired to these. If glass containers can be reused in the same process (the way you used to refill milk bottles), great. But to collect all sorts of assorted glass containers and transport them a great distance to someplace where they can be ground up to make sand is plain silly.
IMHO.
-- MarkusQ
I don't believe Penrouse doesn't understand what Godel theorem is. Ergo either he must be lying or you are misinterpreting his arguments.
There is a third possibility: he may be so commited to his conclussion (mind is not algorithmic / finite / mechanical / whatever) that he is willing to accept the additional assumption than man (perhaps because he is created in the image of $DEITY) can transend Godel's limits, since this gives him what he wants.
I'm not asking to take my word for this. Get a copy of his books, and read for yourself. But get them from the library--I wouldn't recommend wasting money buying them.
-- MarkusQ
he has sought out and rationally rebutted many common objections to his arguments
Last I saw, he was still dodging the killer though. The linch-pin of his argument is an implicit belief in human (his?) infailability. His argument boils down to:
- Godel has proved that no formal system can prove all true statements expressable in that system unless it can also prove things that are clearly false.
- Human mathematicians can prove anything if they set their minds to it.
- Therefore humans are not formal systems.
Of course, if you accept the first two the correct conclusion should be "human mathematicians may someday think they've proved something that isn't really true." For all his seeking out straw men to defend against, this one still takes down his whole house of cards.-- MarkusQ
Well I'll be darned. I took it to be for the service contract, but the way that's written your interpretation seems at least as plausible.
-- MarkusQ
Maybe you should learn to read.
I can read, thank you. What I can't do is find anywhere in the EULA for RH or RHN that says what you are saying it does. Could you please quote the section you are refering to, and tell me where you found it? (I promise, I'll make the effort to read it, even if I have to sound out some of the big words).
-- MarkusQ
Red Hat has per-server licensing now. If you buy a copy, you are allowed to install it on one server only, unless you buy more support seats.
No, if you buy support for one machine you can't "install" that support on multiple machines, any more than you can buy insurance for one car and "install" it on multiple cars. This isn't a GPL issue, you just didn't understand what they were saying.
-- MarkusQ
new null-byte attack anti-evasion code
Wait...wouldn't null-byte attack anti-evasion code be code that prevented evasion of null-byte attacks? Or should I go for that second cup of coffee and try parsing it again?
-- MarkusQ
The most optomistic conculsion I've been able to draw from this and similar facts (note: not speculation, facts) about the corrupt state of US politics is that most people who pay attention to the news enough to notice things like this are also cynical enough to realize that there isn't enough difference between the major parties at this point to warrent getting as upset as they would if there was a "good team" and a "bad team."
Sucks, when that's the optimistic interpretation.
-- MarkusQ
Is a lack of liquor for a few days really a crisis? If so, maybe there is a bigger problem than the state's computer woes.
This is hardly flamebait. Who is it going to tempt into flaming? All the alcoholics who don't care about computers yet still for some inexplicable reason read /.?
-- MaruksQ
That would be his attributing a Bush win in 2004 to any reason other than the obvious (if it were to happen): that he was elected under the rules set forth for elections.
Since the 2004 election hasn't happened yet, I don't see how you can say that attributing any particular outcome to any particular cause is either true or false. If I say a team called the Walla Walla Wubel Woos might win the 2108 World Series because of the changes in the plastic bat rules, you might say I was being silly but you would be hard pressed to prove it was a falsehood.
Now, why would my post be a falsehood?
I never said that it was, and I explicitly stated that I was assuming that you were not saying that it was.
I didn't interpret the original post this way; I took it that he was saying the vote was close last time and thus Bush would have a reason to be worried this time. In that I agree, to some extent. I fear that Bush may be in the process of pulling a Nixon, which would not be good for him, or for the party, or for the nation.
-- MarkusQ
Always easier to comfort yourself with some falsehood
Assuming you weren't refering to your own post, you seem to be claiming that something the original poster said was factually incorrect. Could you please tell the rest of us what it is you caught that we didn't?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For what it's worth, I'm a registered Republican (as I gather are you), but the truth is worth far more to me than any party affiliation.
A friend of mine work on a number of "deeply embedded, hard realtime" applications, where he was able to clarify that "deeply embedded" meant there was absolutely no user-interface or even user-access to the device, and "hard realtime" in this case meant that any operations not completed in their alloted time window would be aborted due to the hardware they were running on no longer existing. He was also able to name his employer (a known defense contractor).
While he couldn't tell people the nature of the product, he could tell them what his duties on the project included, as the parent poster suggested. Overall, he was able to drill down enough on the non-classified details to satisfy any interviewer that he knew what he was talking about without breaking any rules.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Some interviewers also look for the ability to respect previous NDAs as a major hireing criterion, so handling this issue properly (respect the NDAs without acting freaked by them) could be a strong point in your favour.
I didn't dig into it at the time (had other things to worry about), but about a month ago I had to transfer data between a half dozen identically configured 1.7 GHz RH9 boxes. In this environment sftp was about 1/8th the speed of ftp on large files over an issolated 100Mbs network.
I'd thought as you do until I saw what was happening, at which point I switched to ftp for the rest of the transfers.
-- MarkusQ
"You automatically lose the argument if you use an unrealistic extreme to prove me wrong." -- NJG.
You may want to read up on Reductio ad absurdum. Whatever your personal distaste for it, it has fine credentials as a valid and useful form of argument.
-- MarkusQ
Mine was: -- MarkusQ
It's still waiting for Linus Torvalds to claim registration #1, which has been reserved for him for the last ten years.
Heck, if he doesn't want it, I'll take it.
-- MarkusQ