'The open-source implementation of TCP/IP in the Linux kernel clearly exhibits a higher code quality than commercial implementations in general-purpose operating systems,
Well of course it does! The Linux and BSD IP stacks are benchmarks. This is where practically all protocol research happens - how would anyone be able to verify your results otherwise? Furthermore, only the free stacks are useful for compatibility testing because they are so configurable.
So obviously it stands to reason that this code is much more complete and bug-free than any commercial implementation. THOUSANDS of people are studying every single line of this code on an ongoing basis.
I've worked on a number of commercial IP stacks - some from scratch, and some based on Linux. Any IP stack written from scratch is understandably simpler, but it's not that hard to implement the essential RFC requirements (i.e. the "MUST"s) and make it stable. Now, making it FAST and making it use all of the bleeding-edge TCP stuff... that's another story. Only Linux/BSD are there (and of course any other OSes which use their stacks).
I had to reboot my fscking XP machine TWICE today. Just crashed for no apparent reason. Meanwhile all my Macs, Linux, and FreeBSd systems didn't miss a beat and are sporting an average of a couple months uptime.
Minor bugs my ass.
Why do I run 2000/XP, you ask? Because a couple of our clueless app vendors only support it, and believe me, I bitch like hell at them but we don't have an alternative yet. The sooner I can ditch this MSFT shit the better.
Re:This would be sweet if they hacked the slimp3..
on
Hacking the Streamium
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Granted, I'm not too sure how much the slimdevices folks would appreciate this, but the two projects seem ripe for marriage.
I've had a few beers so I'm a litle reluctant to reply, but what the hell. Our company is BUILT ON open source. We give you the source, you give us your improvements, together we make a better product for you.
Selling hardware pays our bills, so obviously we're not in this so that people can use our free software in place of the shit that Philips ships. Sorry but we bought a Streamium to evaluate (as well as the Onkyo, Turtle Beach, and Motorola offerings), and all I can say is BIG CONSUMER ELECTRONICS COMPANIES CAN'T DO SOFTWARE FOR BEANS. That's putting it lightly.
So our software is GPL. Anyone can use it. Heck, you don't even have to buy our hardware, you can download the server and try it out using Winamp as a client.
But our software is just part of the experience. When you buy the SLIMP3 you get a high quality client that works great, looks great, and isn't encumbered by any DRM or internet radio restrictions. We listened to our customers and nobody is asking for that. What they are asking for is: a great UI, great performance, support for 500GB mp3 collections, cross-platform support, an awesome web interface, etc etc, and that's what we deliver.
So yes, it's GPL, and we like it that way. How exactly our products are "ripe for marriage" I don't know. Have you seen a Streamium in person?
For a start: chip designers everywhere use FPGA:s to prototype their designs.
Xilinx/Altera would not be in business if this were the only thing people used FPGAs for. There are some things you can do in an FPGA exceptionally well, eg pumping lots of data very quickly, and doing repetitive things like encryption, compression, and DSP functions. Generally speaking, the simpler the algorithm and the more it can be parallelized, the better it will work in hardware as compared to a CPU (yes, even a 4GHz pentium might be slower per $).
As for the reprogramming component part of this design: translating from low-level code to actual chip surface (which it still is very much about) is largely a manual even for very simple circuits, largely because the available chip-compiler technologies simply aren't up to the job.
I think it's a language problem more than a limitation of the synthethis/fitting tools. VHDL and Verilog are horrific. They are designed for coding circuits, not algorithms.
Besides, have any of you thought about the context-switch penalty of a computer that will have to reprogram its' logic for every process
With today's FPGAs this is a real problem. They're designed to be loaded once, when the system starts up. What we neeed is an FPGA that can store several "pages" of configurations, and switch between them rapidly. The config would need to be writeable over a very fast interface of course.
And this is why MTBF is utterly meaningless for hard drives. Imagine if tire tread wear were rated in MTBF. "Well, we drove 5000 sets of firestones aroudn the block one time each, and not one of them went bald!"
the problem with credit cards today is that people under 18 cannot have their own.
You can get a debit card from your bank. The reason it's illegal to give you credit (not that anyone would anyway) is that it's illegal for a minor to enter *any* kind of contract. You could maybe get one if your folks cosigned.
Being a teenager sucks, especially if you're ready to be independent. It gets better though. Just try to enjoy being 18 while you can!
They said that the sensors went out starting at the back of the wing and worked their way forward. The life-off damage happened to the front of the wing, so to start at the opposite side of the wing and to head forwards was wierd.
They also said that the order of the sensors failing was no indication that the wing was destroyed from back to front. Keep in mind, the sensors were reading "off-scale low", ie no connection. If the temp sensors went offline due to destruction of the sensors themselves, one might expect them to read abnormally high values just before dropping offline. Most likely, the damage was happening at a wiring harness elsewhere.
They have a *lot* of data here, compared to Challenger. I think we'll have answers very soon.
Can someone please burn a mod point and change that to "insightful"?
Did you expect a medal or something?
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I see my ideas brought to market by other people all the time. I also get lots of email from people who see my work, which start with "I've been thinking about doing exactly this for several years...."
Boo hoo. There are only so many hours in a day. An idea isn't valuable per se. The only thing that's impressive is an idea, plus the willpower and dedication to bring it to reality.
I don't buy this for a second... nearly all of the people I've done business with on eBay have had perfect feedback. Not because I look for people with perfect feedback, but because in general, anyone who's serious about eBay will not have more than one or two of the kind of comments you were getting.
If you RTFA, you'll see that ebay advises that they don't moderate feedback, and any feedback you leave is your own responsibility. That's the beauty of it... everyone needs to understand that USER feedback is left by USERS. Each is responsible for their own words. To hold the medium accountable is just plain stupid. I wouldn't trust eBay if it were otherwise.
BTW if you are buying/selling thousands of items on ebay, then you ARE a business. Ask the IRS...
You're still broke; the only difference is that you didn't pay tax on the money you "took out" while the stock was up.
All of the brokers severely tightened their margin allowances during those last few months when the market was getting out of hand. The bubble could burst, and they had to mitigate the potential damage.... then investors had to sell their stocks to get in line with the new margin rules, and thus began the dot-bomb.
(In America) Profits from the sale of stock are already taxed by the capital gains tax.
That's only if you've held the stocks for 2 years or more... otherwise it's regular income, taxed at the full (roughly) 50%.
One of the things that was common during the boom is that people were drawing their profits not by selling, but by taking out cash on margin. You're taking a risk to avoid paying tax on your gains. However, if the stocks go down, you can sell without making any money, so you don't pay any tax. Just pay back the margin debt and you're back where you started. I think that might be what the parent was referring to.
It's amazing how hard people will work... if you let them keep the proceeds. I had a web designer friend who would work until about half-way through October, and then take the rest of the year off FOR NO OTHER REASON than to avoid being put in a higher tax bracket.
Our tax code is fscking horrific. Let's just have a flat sales tax or a flat income tax, and quit the bullshit. Our country would return to incredible prosperity if we could just do that.
Now money is in the hands of a privilaged few, and they don't want to risk losing it.
Are you fscking kidding me? Are you referring to the last two years, or the last two centuries?
From 1997 - 1999, anyone with an idea and the balls to walk into a VC's office could walk out with a pile of cash. Privilidged few, my ass. We're in a recession right now, but even so, the opportunities available for low-to-middle class Americans are absolutely staggering compared to what they were two centuries ago.
But I'm sure you've personally spent your entire adult lifetime toiling in a 19th century factory, so what do I know.
Anybody who ever worked an honest day in their life would certainly blanch at the thought of blowing $5,000 on a toy that makes you look like a clueless dork, and turns you into a threat to 90-year-old grandmothers on their way to buy groceries.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but I'm sure people said precisely the same thing when the "horseless carriage" was introduced....
I'm not sure whether you've actually noticed but the airline market is very tight at the moment with major economic problems.
All the more reason for them to offer services which cost them virtually nothing, but vastly improve their customer's experience.
they're giving it away on a trial at the moment to figure the best way to pay for it (may be include it in the ticket price).
Again, do you think this really costs them anything significant? They should keep their ticket prices competitive, and ALSO throw in some goodies. I sincerely doubt whether those pay-per-minute access points are profitable, with all the overhead it takes to run them - setting up the kiosks, marketing them, collecting payments, etc. But if you just order a DSL line and stick an open access point in the airport, everyone's happy, it costs you practically nothing to operate, and MORE PEOPLE will fly your airline. K.I.S.S.
As much as I'd like it, you must remember "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - especially in business.
Thanks for the lesson in economics. Here's a tip for you: listen to your customers. I hate flying. If the experience were less painful (maybe like that machine they had on southpark) I'd fly more. I won't submit to being nickel-and-dimed for something as piddly as checking my email.
Eventually the Internet will become an essential service in any business that's open to the public: malls, airports, schools, bus stops... just like drinking fountains, walkways, and bathrooms.
For the near future though, everyone is going to be trying to figure out how they can charge a few bucks a minute to let people with important business acces their $50/mo DSL line. I hope people just decide not to pay for these services. There's no reason why an airport/airplane/whatever can't afford to give access to a wireless AP just as a courtesy.I would definitely enjoy flying a lot more, and they'd get way more business from me by throwing stuff like this in for free.
A rendezvous enabled wireless device that ties into my music collection (yes, iTunes).
Slim Devices probably has what you're looking for. It doesn't use Rendezvous (yet) but does have all the things that Rendezvous has been promising (auto-discovery of server, integration with iTunes). A lot of companies are hawking auto-disocvery like it's some revoultionary technology... ummmmm it's a couple tiny UDP packets in each direction. That's it. We were doing this long before anyone had heard of Rendezvous.
But Rendezvous is evoving into more than that... we recently showed the product at Macworld in San Francisco, and received a very enthusiastic response from the iTunes developers at Apple. They're opening up more of their system to us, so expect to see even better integration with MacOS iApps in our next software updates for the SLIMP3.
BTW, the HomePod is about where we were two years ago. Seriously, they're good guys, and geeks like us, but don't expect them to ship anything for a few more months.
Is it that important to my life to spend time typing out inconsiquential facts for random people over the internet? I need a life...
I don't know if it's autopr0n that pays your bills, or if you just have too much time on your hands... but either way, you're doing a great job promoting the site. I'm not so much into pr0n myself (g/f is hot) but it's a great site nonetheless.:)
Slashdot Mirror
'The open-source implementation of TCP/IP in the Linux kernel clearly exhibits a higher code quality than commercial implementations in general-purpose operating systems,
Well of course it does! The Linux and BSD IP stacks are benchmarks. This is where practically all protocol research happens - how would anyone be able to verify your results otherwise? Furthermore, only the free stacks are useful for compatibility testing because they are so configurable.
So obviously it stands to reason that this code is much more complete and bug-free than any commercial implementation. THOUSANDS of people are studying every single line of this code on an ongoing basis.
I've worked on a number of commercial IP stacks - some from scratch, and some based on Linux. Any IP stack written from scratch is understandably simpler, but it's not that hard to implement the essential RFC requirements (i.e. the "MUST"s) and make it stable. Now, making it FAST and making it use all of the bleeding-edge TCP stuff... that's another story. Only Linux/BSD are there (and of course any other OSes which use their stacks).
I had to reboot my fscking XP machine TWICE today. Just crashed for no apparent reason. Meanwhile all my Macs, Linux, and FreeBSd systems didn't miss a beat and are sporting an average of a couple months uptime.
Minor bugs my ass.
Why do I run 2000/XP, you ask? Because a couple of our clueless app vendors only support it, and believe me, I bitch like hell at them but we don't have an alternative yet. The sooner I can ditch this MSFT shit the better.
Granted, I'm not too sure how much the slimdevices folks would appreciate this, but the two projects seem ripe for marriage.
I've had a few beers so I'm a litle reluctant to reply, but what the hell. Our company is BUILT ON open source. We give you the source, you give us your improvements, together we make a better product for you.
Selling hardware pays our bills, so obviously we're not in this so that people can use our free software in place of the shit that Philips ships. Sorry but we bought a Streamium to evaluate (as well as the Onkyo, Turtle Beach, and Motorola offerings), and all I can say is BIG CONSUMER ELECTRONICS COMPANIES CAN'T DO SOFTWARE FOR BEANS. That's putting it lightly.
So our software is GPL. Anyone can use it. Heck, you don't even have to buy our hardware, you can download the server and try it out using Winamp as a client.
But our software is just part of the experience. When you buy the SLIMP3 you get a high quality client that works great, looks great, and isn't encumbered by any DRM or internet radio restrictions. We listened to our customers and nobody is asking for that. What they are asking for is: a great UI, great performance, support for 500GB mp3 collections, cross-platform support, an awesome web interface, etc etc, and that's what we deliver.
So yes, it's GPL, and we like it that way. How exactly our products are "ripe for marriage" I don't know. Have you seen a Streamium in person?
Sorry, you just reminded me a dumb joke:
Two girls are riding their bicycles down a narrow side street, and one says to the other "I've never come this way before".
The other replies "it's the cobblestones".
For a start: chip designers everywhere use FPGA:s to prototype their designs.
Xilinx/Altera would not be in business if this were the only thing people used FPGAs for. There are some things you can do in an FPGA exceptionally well, eg pumping lots of data very quickly, and doing repetitive things like encryption, compression, and DSP functions. Generally speaking, the simpler the algorithm and the more it can be parallelized, the better it will work in hardware as compared to a CPU (yes, even a 4GHz pentium might be slower per $).
As for the reprogramming component part of this design: translating from low-level code to actual chip surface (which it still is very much about) is largely a manual even for very simple circuits, largely because the available chip-compiler technologies simply aren't up to the job.
I think it's a language problem more than a limitation of the synthethis/fitting tools. VHDL and Verilog are horrific. They are designed for coding circuits, not algorithms.
Besides, have any of you thought about the context-switch penalty of a computer that will have to reprogram its' logic for every process
With today's FPGAs this is a real problem. They're designed to be loaded once, when the system starts up. What we neeed is an FPGA that can store several "pages" of configurations, and switch between them rapidly. The config would need to be writeable over a very fast interface of course.
And this is why MTBF is utterly meaningless for hard drives. Imagine if tire tread wear were rated in MTBF. "Well, we drove 5000 sets of firestones aroudn the block one time each, and not one of them went bald!"
the problem with credit cards today is that people under 18 cannot have their own.
You can get a debit card from your bank. The reason it's illegal to give you credit (not that anyone would anyway) is that it's illegal for a minor to enter *any* kind of contract. You could maybe get one if your folks cosigned.
Being a teenager sucks, especially if you're ready to be independent. It gets better though. Just try to enjoy being 18 while you can!
No big surprise... every one of the PCBs in there has already been fed through an oven once, WHEN IT WAS SOLDERED!!!
each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each.
Rather, they've only **FOUND** one error per 420,000 lines SO FAR.
I don't meant to disparage NASA, but that figure is completely unimpressive without context.
They said that the sensors went out starting at the back of the wing and worked their way forward. The life-off damage happened to the front of the wing, so to start at the opposite side of the wing and to head forwards was wierd.
They also said that the order of the sensors failing was no indication that the wing was destroyed from back to front. Keep in mind, the sensors were reading "off-scale low", ie no connection. If the temp sensors went offline due to destruction of the sensors themselves, one might expect them to read abnormally high values just before dropping offline. Most likely, the damage was happening at a wiring harness elsewhere.
They have a *lot* of data here, compared to Challenger. I think we'll have answers very soon.
I flipped through the first three pages before giving up. Can someone point me to the hysterical ones?
Worst story ever.
Can someone please burn a mod point and change that to "insightful"?
I see my ideas brought to market by other people all the time. I also get lots of email from people who see my work, which start with "I've been thinking about doing exactly this for several years...."
Boo hoo. There are only so many hours in a day. An idea isn't valuable per se. The only thing that's impressive is an idea, plus the willpower and dedication to bring it to reality.
I don't buy this for a second... nearly all of the people I've done business with on eBay have had perfect feedback. Not because I look for people with perfect feedback, but because in general, anyone who's serious about eBay will not have more than one or two of the kind of comments you were getting.
If you RTFA, you'll see that ebay advises that they don't moderate feedback, and any feedback you leave is your own responsibility. That's the beauty of it... everyone needs to understand that USER feedback is left by USERS. Each is responsible for their own words. To hold the medium accountable is just plain stupid. I wouldn't trust eBay if it were otherwise.
BTW if you are buying/selling thousands of items on ebay, then you ARE a business. Ask the IRS...
I didn't get any spam today... can you guys do this DDOS thing more often? :)
we will not be writing programs bigger than about 10 million lines of code no matter how fast our processors become.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are. -- Colonel Adolphus Busch
There really is a hard limit to just about everything...
You're still broke; the only difference is that you didn't pay tax on the money you "took out" while the stock was up.
:)
All of the brokers severely tightened their margin allowances during those last few months when the market was getting out of hand. The bubble could burst, and they had to mitigate the potential damage.... then investors had to sell their stocks to get in line with the new margin rules, and thus began the dot-bomb.
Fun times...
(In America) Profits from the sale of stock are already taxed by the capital gains tax.
That's only if you've held the stocks for 2 years or more... otherwise it's regular income, taxed at the full (roughly) 50%.
One of the things that was common during the boom is that people were drawing their profits not by selling, but by taking out cash on margin. You're taking a risk to avoid paying tax on your gains. However, if the stocks go down, you can sell without making any money, so you don't pay any tax. Just pay back the margin debt and you're back where you started. I think that might be what the parent was referring to.
It's amazing how hard people will work... if you let them keep the proceeds. I had a web designer friend who would work until about half-way through October, and then take the rest of the year off FOR NO OTHER REASON than to avoid being put in a higher tax bracket.
Our tax code is fscking horrific. Let's just have a flat sales tax or a flat income tax, and quit the bullshit. Our country would return to incredible prosperity if we could just do that.
Now money is in the hands of a privilaged few, and they don't want to risk losing it.
Are you fscking kidding me? Are you referring to the last two years, or the last two centuries?
From 1997 - 1999, anyone with an idea and the balls to walk into a VC's office could walk out with a pile of cash. Privilidged few, my ass. We're in a recession right now, but even so, the opportunities available for low-to-middle class Americans are absolutely staggering compared to what they were two centuries ago.
But I'm sure you've personally spent your entire adult lifetime toiling in a 19th century factory, so what do I know.
Anybody who ever worked an honest day in their life would certainly blanch at the thought of blowing $5,000 on a toy that makes you look like a clueless dork, and turns you into a threat to 90-year-old grandmothers on their way to buy groceries.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but I'm sure people said precisely the same thing when the "horseless carriage" was introduced....
I'm not sure whether you've actually noticed but the airline market is very tight at the moment with major economic problems.
All the more reason for them to offer services which cost them virtually nothing, but vastly improve their customer's experience.
they're giving it away on a trial at the moment to figure the best way to pay for it (may be include it in the ticket price).
Again, do you think this really costs them anything significant? They should keep their ticket prices competitive, and ALSO throw in some goodies. I sincerely doubt whether those pay-per-minute access points are profitable, with all the overhead it takes to run them - setting up the kiosks, marketing them, collecting payments, etc. But if you just order a DSL line and stick an open access point in the airport, everyone's happy, it costs you practically nothing to operate, and MORE PEOPLE will fly your airline. K.I.S.S.
As much as I'd like it, you must remember "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - especially in business.
Thanks for the lesson in economics. Here's a tip for you: listen to your customers. I hate flying. If the experience were less painful (maybe like that machine they had on southpark) I'd fly more. I won't submit to being nickel-and-dimed for something as piddly as checking my email.
Eventually the Internet will become an essential service in any business that's open to the public: malls, airports, schools, bus stops... just like drinking fountains, walkways, and bathrooms.
For the near future though, everyone is going to be trying to figure out how they can charge a few bucks a minute to let people with important business acces their $50/mo DSL line. I hope people just decide not to pay for these services. There's no reason why an airport/airplane/whatever can't afford to give access to a wireless AP just as a courtesy.I would definitely enjoy flying a lot more, and they'd get way more business from me by throwing stuff like this in for free.
A rendezvous enabled wireless device that ties into my music collection (yes, iTunes).
Slim Devices probably has what you're looking for. It doesn't use Rendezvous (yet) but does have all the things that Rendezvous has been promising (auto-discovery of server, integration with iTunes). A lot of companies are hawking auto-disocvery like it's some revoultionary technology... ummmmm it's a couple tiny UDP packets in each direction. That's it. We were doing this long before anyone had heard of Rendezvous.
But Rendezvous is evoving into more than that... we recently showed the product at Macworld in San Francisco, and received a very enthusiastic response from the iTunes developers at Apple. They're opening up more of their system to us, so expect to see even better integration with MacOS iApps in our next software updates for the SLIMP3.
BTW, the HomePod is about where we were two years ago. Seriously, they're good guys, and geeks like us, but don't expect them to ship anything for a few more months.
Is it that important to my life to spend time typing out inconsiquential facts for random people over the internet? I need a life...
:)
I don't know if it's autopr0n that pays your bills, or if you just have too much time on your hands... but either way, you're doing a great job promoting the site. I'm not so much into pr0n myself (g/f is hot) but it's a great site nonetheless.