Is there anything being done to keep the efficiency of software moving along just as fast as the hardware? You'd think that 300 MHz should really mean something. I remember having a 25MHz machine and thinking that there'd NEVER be a 200MHz computer made for years, but when it was, it'd be amazing. I was sorely disapointed, not because it didn't show up, but when it did, it the software for that day and age didn't run any better than the software for my old 386.
It depends on whose software you're running. I remember kernel compiles taking the better part of an hour when I was running a 386SX-25 with 4MB RAM and 120MB of 3600-rpm disk, and that was for pre-1.0 kernels with just the QIC-02 driver added in. The system on which I run Linux now is a K6-III-450 with 256MB RAM and 10GB of 5400-rpm disk, and kernel compiles take just a few minutes with support for multi-protocol networking (NFS, SMB, and AppleTalk), sound, SCSI, and other stuff. If I ran it on the 1.0GHz Athlon I built a couple of weeks ago (with 256MB DDR and 45GB of 7200-rpm disk), it'd be faster still. Win98 is more responsive on the faster hardware, at least. Still, I don't doubt that there is less attention paid to efficiency and more attention paid to piling on features in today's software that most people will never use.
I've said it before, I'll say it again -- we need the equivalent of a "public defender's office" for civil suits. If someone files a frivolous lawsuit against you you should be able to defend yourself without going bankrupt.
A better reform would be the "English rule," where the loser pays both parties' legal fees. If you know that your "fishing expedition" has a good chance of blowing up in your face and leaving you on the hook for big $$$, you would be less likely to bring a frivolous case. Ending the practice of lawyers taking cases on contingency would also put a dent in frivolous suits, though it is admittedly more questionable if such a reform could be implemented.
Is it really true, or just an urban legend, that it's those $1k junkers commiting the top 70% of the pollution right now?
I suspect it's urban legend. I've seen much newer rice grinders spewing forth more pollution than my '77 Cutlass. Then again, it's been reasonably well-kept for the past 24 years. It's old, but it's definitely not a junker. (It passed its last smog check pretty easily, too.)
It only cost me $2000, too. It does tend to suck down a bit more gas than newer cars (gas costs for my commuting are about $30-$35 per week), but that's about the only bad thing that can be said for it. (I have entertained some thoughts of picking up something small and cheap for the daily commute, but that's held back by a lack of funds and a lack of cars locally that I'd consider buying...it must be American (preferably GM), and rear-wheel drive and manual transmission are greatly preferred, the former for simplicity and reliability and the latter for economy and performance. For vehicles built in the past 20 years, that'd be an S-10, a Fiero, or a Chevette (had one of those as my first car).)
One more consideration: there aren't that many older cars still on the road anymore in most parts of the country. (They last a little longer here in the desert, but we're the exception to the rule.) Whatever extra pollution a few hundred or thousand cars are kicking in, compared to the hundreds of thousands or millions of cars on the road, is minimal. (The places that have clunker laws on the books are likely to see little (if any) improvement in their conditions.)
Although I do notice both VA and TX are republican states also....
I probably ought not respond to this troll, but Maryland has also passed UCITA. Quoting from AFFECT's history-of-UCITA page:
Maryland's law went into effect in October 2000. The Information Technology Board's UCITA Committee is evaluating the need for further legislation. None is planned in 2001.
Virginia is refining its law to go into effect July 1, 2001.
Last time I checked, Maryland is a Democrat-controlled state, and it was the first state to pass UCITA and have it take effect. So much for that idiotic notion that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad...
I tried this about a week ago using access 2000 and it froze the program. I think I remember reading somewhere that Access '97 will work though.
What was it you tried? If it was gaining access to MySQL databases from Access 2000, it's worked fine for me. I have Apache set up to log to MySQL. I can then use Access (among other methods) to browse the logs, see what pages are getting accessed, who's sending page hits my way, etc. Setting up MyODBC to access (no pun intended) particular databases and pulling them up in Access to run queries was trivially easy.
(Next time you post, remember: <blockquote> is your friend.:-) )
If you aren't good at Math, get a CSc degree, a CEng degree is four years of math.
There's a fair amount of math behind a CS degree as well...maybe not to the extent of a CE degree (no differential equations, for example), but if calculus, discrete math, and statistics elude you, you could be in for a rough time in a computer-science program.
Of course don't forget that the RIAA gets a share of all profits made from selling blank CDs and blank tapes!
Doesn't that only apply to the (expen$ive) "audio CD-Rs" that are the only type that work in audio CD-burner decks? The (much cheaper) regular CD-Rs that you use with your computer have no "RIAA tax" associated with them as they have other, unrelated uses.
I don't think you have it right. The article means traditional vacuum tubes - which are found in old radios and old TV's (pre-transistor electronics). They have not been common for a long time.
They're not common, but they're not too hard to find either. Dozens of businesses cater to the antique/vintage-radio, musical-instrument, and "audiophile" (quite often "audiophoole" would be more appropriate) crowd that would have a use for tubes, either new-old-stock tubes that were last made 30-40 years ago (or even further back) or brand-new tubes produced today in Russia, China, and similar countries. Antique Electronic Supply is one that comes to mind. They usually have specials on slow-moving types that you can snarf up dirt-cheap. Hell, even Radio Shack can still get tubes on a special-order basis, though I suspect their prices run a bit higher for it.
Keep in mind that the quoted article is over 40 years old, so its assumptions about what you're likely to find in the average household are more than likely dated somewhat. (I have a few old radios myself, and a small stash of tubes and related equipment...but I suspect I'm atypical in that regard.:-) )
Maybe it's time to do like many other country are doing and ban political commercials on TV or in the press. That would force candidate to gain votes on their real merit (gasp!) and would drastically cut their need for money, hence boosting their independance.
Maybe, but there's this little piece of paper called the Constitution that prohibits what you describe. What's really needed is for voters to not be so ignorant and unthinking, and to examine what the politicians are really saying. Yes, it's probably a tall order to think everybody will see through the guff spewed by the likes of Dick Gephardt and Ted Kennedy, but trashing the Constitution is definitely not the way to go.
It would be interesting to see someone print a book including the DeCSS code, aside from any ramifications it might have for the case (although those would be a good side benefit). Isn't it an interesting enough topic in itself? Intellectual property rights, fair use, cryptography, open source--what more subject areas would you want?
This seems like something that would be perfect to put together through a book-on-demand publisher such as Xlibris. For the most basic level of service, they don't charge anything to print a book that can then be bought directly from them or ordered through any bookstore. Funnel the royalties to EFF or whoever and it could end up serving two purposes: (1) getting DeCSS into dead-tree format and (2) put some money in the coffers of a worthy cause.
Through a home firewall? I realize you can pass on some ports to a specific machine, but it doesn't work for Netmeeting.
Back when I was experimenting with cheap/free overseas phone calls through some form of VoIP, I had NetMeeting running through my firewall with an H.323 (?) proxy called PhonePatch. I got it to go out through the firewall and cable modem to another computer that was using a dial-up connection. I wasn't as successful at getting it to work with services such as Dialpad.
Can't help you with Napster or ICQ...I get my MP3s off of Usenet and I don't use AOHell sh*t. (Hell, probably the last time I used IRC was no later than '91 or '92...)
For example, the Fibannaci (sp?) series alone requires over 3000 billion calculations, using the recursive method, to find Fib(100). And that's one of the easier functions.
Algorithms whose runtime grows exponentially aren't really the best justification for faster hardware, as even huge jumps in processor performance yield only marginal improvements in what is practical to compute. Consider an algorithm involving some computation that takes 1 s to do an iteration. An algorithm of time complexity O(2^n) takes over 6.5 months to complete a calculation for n=44. If you reduce your computing time per iteration from 1 s to 1 ns (a 3-order-of-magnitude reduction), you only get to increase n to 54 before you're talking about half a year again to do a computation.
(Besides, if you had some application that needed to use the Fibonacci sequence, you would find it iteratively, not recursively. Instead of O(2^n), your runtime is O(n). Not only is it much faster, but future increases in hardware performance translate to bigger, more worthwhile gains in the performance of your product.)
I really can't see that a human is only half again as complex as a roundworm!
But with each additional gene, the number of interactions between its expression and the expressions of other genes rises exponentially, doesn't it? If I'm surprised by anything, it's that people actually thought there might be a "gene for foo".
IANAGeneticist, but 30000 combinations of the four possible base pairs works out to 4^30000 possible combinations. Not only is that much greater than the number of people who have ever lived, it's also greater than the estimated number of atoms in the universe (which I've seen estimated as less than 2^65536).
But I don't see what the problem here really is at the top end: just generate your pages from a database and stick the content into a template for the browser/platform in question. What's the big deal?
I know of a good system to do this: the Everything engine (which powers the world's largest online encyclopedia). But what about people whose content is hosted on Freeservers, GeoCities, and XOOM, hosts whose security policies do not permit server-side dynamic page generation?
If your site has only static content, you can generate the pages in advance and use client-side browser detection to direct people to the appropriate set of pages. It's somewhat wasteful of space, but it gets the job done if you don't have the necessary control over your hosting service to do things on-the-fly on the server.
As an example, this site is one that I've set up this way. It has two sets of pages--one for IE, Mozilla, Lynx, and other standards-compliant browsers, and one that's "lobotomized for Netscrape." Both are put together from some templates that are mashed together with make, sed, awk, and some other stuff I don't recall off the top of my head. It works well enough for hosting it on a third party's IIS box. If we operated our own webserver, though, it'd run Apache and I would more than likely use server-side includes to generate pages on-the-fly. (It'd mean I could get rid of the only bit of JavaScript the site uses--the client-side browser detector. JavaScript is evil, but with Netscrape not playing nicely with HTML and CSS, it's a necessary evil.)
After this one, Intel will probably announce their DDR chipset very soon! Who wouldn't, after finding out that the Rambus RIMMs were all part of one huge orchestrated lie?
They've already advanced the release date for Brookdale, their DDR SDRAM chipset for the P4. It was originally due in 1Q 2002, but now it's been changed to this October. They don't want to see AMD continue grabbing their market share, and P4s won't sell as long as the Rambus millstone is around their necks. (Personally, even without Rambus, I doubt that the P4 is all that, given the benchmarks that have been released to date. I plan on replacing the K6-III in my main computer with an Athlon sometime in the near future.)
You must not read comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips much. This issue has been hashed to death over there, and on most of the review sites, and in the vast majority of applications RDRAM has come up short in performance. About the only situation where it delivers clearly superior performance is in video encoding on the P4, and that's with encoding software optimized for that processor (good luck finding any). In nearly every other test, a 1.2-GHz Athlon with SDR SDRAM (not even DDR) kept pace with or outran a 1.5-GHz P4 with RDRAM. In a few benchmarks, even a 1-GHz P!!! with SDRAM beat the P4.
The technology must be pretty pathetic for it to be bitchslapped so badly by equipment that costs maybe a third as much.
(Either that, or you're John Corse, the RMBS Stock Shill, under a pseudonym. Then again, you're not coming across as shrill and strident as he does.)
Floppies suck...they're unreliable. Besides, if you don't have a net connection with which to grab PuTTY, you don't have a net connection with which to log into your computer.
It's the trademark analogy of the GIF trick: releasing a supposedly "open" file format and then patenting the only known algorithm that can generate it.
Compu$erve didn't patent the compression algorithm used by GIF. Unisys did. IIRC, Compu$erve mainly sought acknowledgment from people referring to GIFs that the name was a trademark of theirs. The other problems with GIF were the result of actions by Unisys, a company that was already on a downward spiral toward irrelevancy that must've seen patenting LZW as a means of prolonging the inevitable.
PuTTy.. It rocks. Free, GPL, SSH1 and SSH2. Great product
It's also small enough that you can throw the binary (no DLLs or other crud needed) on a webserver so you can run it on any Win32 box with a net connection. It's nice to be able to hit Start, Run, and then punch in http://www.foo.bar/putty.exe, wait a few seconds, and then log into your computer.
...by the idea of taking an open-source project and forking it into a commercial product? That, as much as anything else, is a good reason to switch to OpenSSH. (I have one machine left that's still running SSH. It was set up a year ago as a mail server and doesn't see much in the way of logins. It's getting OpenSSH today.)
As for the possibility that OpenSSH will need a new name, do you suppose SSH would bitch about a name such as OASSH (OASSH Ain't SSH)? (Yes, it's somewhat lame, but at least it's recursive.:-) )
Also, what is the most unreliable component in your system? The hard drive... The monitor... The processor or memory... No. The numerous fans throughout your system.
Indeed. I maintain about three or four dozen machines at this company, and the most frequent problem we have is with processor and power-supply fans crapping out. A fair number of our machines are PII-350s or thereabouts, and you can't even get replacement heatsink/fan combos for those anymore. (I usually get some other type of heatsink/fan, throw out the heatsink, and attach the new fan to the old heatsink...a few minutes' work which will be good for another year or two, at which time the fan will probably need to be replaced again.) Power supplies are cheap enough that it's usually cheaper (parts cost vs. downtime) to replace the whole thing than to replace just the fan within, though I've done that with some of my home systems. A few hard drives and a motherboard or two have gone bad over the past couple of years, but it's rare that a month goes by without a fan conking out.
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It depends on whose software you're running. I remember kernel compiles taking the better part of an hour when I was running a 386SX-25 with 4MB RAM and 120MB of 3600-rpm disk, and that was for pre-1.0 kernels with just the QIC-02 driver added in. The system on which I run Linux now is a K6-III-450 with 256MB RAM and 10GB of 5400-rpm disk, and kernel compiles take just a few minutes with support for multi-protocol networking (NFS, SMB, and AppleTalk), sound, SCSI, and other stuff. If I ran it on the 1.0GHz Athlon I built a couple of weeks ago (with 256MB DDR and 45GB of 7200-rpm disk), it'd be faster still. Win98 is more responsive on the faster hardware, at least. Still, I don't doubt that there is less attention paid to efficiency and more attention paid to piling on features in today's software that most people will never use.
You could key in Alt-0174...still, it'd be a PITA.
A better reform would be the "English rule," where the loser pays both parties' legal fees. If you know that your "fishing expedition" has a good chance of blowing up in your face and leaving you on the hook for big $$$, you would be less likely to bring a frivolous case. Ending the practice of lawyers taking cases on contingency would also put a dent in frivolous suits, though it is admittedly more questionable if such a reform could be implemented.
I suspect it's urban legend. I've seen much newer rice grinders spewing forth more pollution than my '77 Cutlass. Then again, it's been reasonably well-kept for the past 24 years. It's old, but it's definitely not a junker. (It passed its last smog check pretty easily, too.)
It only cost me $2000, too. It does tend to suck down a bit more gas than newer cars (gas costs for my commuting are about $30-$35 per week), but that's about the only bad thing that can be said for it. (I have entertained some thoughts of picking up something small and cheap for the daily commute, but that's held back by a lack of funds and a lack of cars locally that I'd consider buying...it must be American (preferably GM), and rear-wheel drive and manual transmission are greatly preferred, the former for simplicity and reliability and the latter for economy and performance. For vehicles built in the past 20 years, that'd be an S-10, a Fiero, or a Chevette (had one of those as my first car).)
One more consideration: there aren't that many older cars still on the road anymore in most parts of the country. (They last a little longer here in the desert, but we're the exception to the rule.) Whatever extra pollution a few hundred or thousand cars are kicking in, compared to the hundreds of thousands or millions of cars on the road, is minimal. (The places that have clunker laws on the books are likely to see little (if any) improvement in their conditions.)
Neither...at the current exchange rate (available here, £1=$1.47), 25 is about 17p.
I probably ought not respond to this troll, but Maryland has also passed UCITA. Quoting from AFFECT's history-of-UCITA page:
Last time I checked, Maryland is a Democrat-controlled state, and it was the first state to pass UCITA and have it take effect. So much for that idiotic notion that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad...
What was it you tried? If it was gaining access to MySQL databases from Access 2000, it's worked fine for me. I have Apache set up to log to MySQL. I can then use Access (among other methods) to browse the logs, see what pages are getting accessed, who's sending page hits my way, etc. Setting up MyODBC to access (no pun intended) particular databases and pulling them up in Access to run queries was trivially easy.
(Next time you post, remember: <blockquote> is your friend. :-) )
There's a fair amount of math behind a CS degree as well...maybe not to the extent of a CE degree (no differential equations, for example), but if calculus, discrete math, and statistics elude you, you could be in for a rough time in a computer-science program.
Doesn't that only apply to the (expen$ive) "audio CD-Rs" that are the only type that work in audio CD-burner decks? The (much cheaper) regular CD-Rs that you use with your computer have no "RIAA tax" associated with them as they have other, unrelated uses.
They're not common, but they're not too hard to find either. Dozens of businesses cater to the antique/vintage-radio, musical-instrument, and "audiophile" (quite often "audiophoole" would be more appropriate) crowd that would have a use for tubes, either new-old-stock tubes that were last made 30-40 years ago (or even further back) or brand-new tubes produced today in Russia, China, and similar countries. Antique Electronic Supply is one that comes to mind. They usually have specials on slow-moving types that you can snarf up dirt-cheap. Hell, even Radio Shack can still get tubes on a special-order basis, though I suspect their prices run a bit higher for it.
Keep in mind that the quoted article is over 40 years old, so its assumptions about what you're likely to find in the average household are more than likely dated somewhat. (I have a few old radios myself, and a small stash of tubes and related equipment...but I suspect I'm atypical in that regard. :-) )
Maybe, but there's this little piece of paper called the Constitution that prohibits what you describe. What's really needed is for voters to not be so ignorant and unthinking, and to examine what the politicians are really saying. Yes, it's probably a tall order to think everybody will see through the guff spewed by the likes of Dick Gephardt and Ted Kennedy, but trashing the Constitution is definitely not the way to go.
This seems like something that would be perfect to put together through a book-on-demand publisher such as Xlibris. For the most basic level of service, they don't charge anything to print a book that can then be bought directly from them or ordered through any bookstore. Funnel the royalties to EFF or whoever and it could end up serving two purposes: (1) getting DeCSS into dead-tree format and (2) put some money in the coffers of a worthy cause.
Back when I was experimenting with cheap/free overseas phone calls through some form of VoIP, I had NetMeeting running through my firewall with an H.323 (?) proxy called PhonePatch. I got it to go out through the firewall and cable modem to another computer that was using a dial-up connection. I wasn't as successful at getting it to work with services such as Dialpad.
Can't help you with Napster or ICQ...I get my MP3s off of Usenet and I don't use AOHell sh*t. (Hell, probably the last time I used IRC was no later than '91 or '92...)
Algorithms whose runtime grows exponentially aren't really the best justification for faster hardware, as even huge jumps in processor performance yield only marginal improvements in what is practical to compute. Consider an algorithm involving some computation that takes 1 s to do an iteration. An algorithm of time complexity O(2^n) takes over 6.5 months to complete a calculation for n=44. If you reduce your computing time per iteration from 1 s to 1 ns (a 3-order-of-magnitude reduction), you only get to increase n to 54 before you're talking about half a year again to do a computation.
(Besides, if you had some application that needed to use the Fibonacci sequence, you would find it iteratively, not recursively. Instead of O(2^n), your runtime is O(n). Not only is it much faster, but future increases in hardware performance translate to bigger, more worthwhile gains in the performance of your product.)
IANAGeneticist, but 30000 combinations of the four possible base pairs works out to 4^30000 possible combinations. Not only is that much greater than the number of people who have ever lived, it's also greater than the estimated number of atoms in the universe (which I've seen estimated as less than 2^65536).
If your site has only static content, you can generate the pages in advance and use client-side browser detection to direct people to the appropriate set of pages. It's somewhat wasteful of space, but it gets the job done if you don't have the necessary control over your hosting service to do things on-the-fly on the server.
As an example, this site is one that I've set up this way. It has two sets of pages--one for IE, Mozilla, Lynx, and other standards-compliant browsers, and one that's "lobotomized for Netscrape." Both are put together from some templates that are mashed together with make, sed, awk, and some other stuff I don't recall off the top of my head. It works well enough for hosting it on a third party's IIS box. If we operated our own webserver, though, it'd run Apache and I would more than likely use server-side includes to generate pages on-the-fly. (It'd mean I could get rid of the only bit of JavaScript the site uses--the client-side browser detector. JavaScript is evil, but with Netscrape not playing nicely with HTML and CSS, it's a necessary evil.)
The technology must be pretty pathetic for it to be bitchslapped so badly by equipment that costs maybe a third as much.
(Either that, or you're John Corse, the RMBS Stock Shill, under a pseudonym. Then again, you're not coming across as shrill and strident as he does.)
Floppies suck...they're unreliable. Besides, if you don't have a net connection with which to grab PuTTY, you don't have a net connection with which to log into your computer.
the reaction in Redmond: priceless.
(I suppose "reaction" could be read two different ways. :-) )
Compu$erve didn't patent the compression algorithm used by GIF. Unisys did. IIRC, Compu$erve mainly sought acknowledgment from people referring to GIFs that the name was a trademark of theirs. The other problems with GIF were the result of actions by Unisys, a company that was already on a downward spiral toward irrelevancy that must've seen patenting LZW as a means of prolonging the inevitable.
It's also small enough that you can throw the binary (no DLLs or other crud needed) on a webserver so you can run it on any Win32 box with a net connection. It's nice to be able to hit Start, Run, and then punch in http://www.foo.bar/putty.exe, wait a few seconds, and then log into your computer.
Naah...
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s kwijybo ssh
Of course, then it'd be you that's in hot water and not the OpenSSH guys (but only if you're discovered to be using a link named ssh)...
As for the possibility that OpenSSH will need a new name, do you suppose SSH would bitch about a name such as OASSH (OASSH Ain't SSH)? (Yes, it's somewhat lame, but at least it's recursive. :-) )
Indeed. I maintain about three or four dozen machines at this company, and the most frequent problem we have is with processor and power-supply fans crapping out. A fair number of our machines are PII-350s or thereabouts, and you can't even get replacement heatsink/fan combos for those anymore. (I usually get some other type of heatsink/fan, throw out the heatsink, and attach the new fan to the old heatsink...a few minutes' work which will be good for another year or two, at which time the fan will probably need to be replaced again.) Power supplies are cheap enough that it's usually cheaper (parts cost vs. downtime) to replace the whole thing than to replace just the fan within, though I've done that with some of my home systems. A few hard drives and a motherboard or two have gone bad over the past couple of years, but it's rare that a month goes by without a fan conking out.