>> apparently every single Slashdotter is smarter than every person at Microsoft and can single-handedly solve all problems that MS has ever had in their software. <<
I can't speak for "every single slashdotter" only for myself, but my issues with microsoft actually have very little to do with problems with their software.
I'm much more troubled by their monopolistic business practices, restrictive EULAs, pandering to media companies with DRM schemes, outright lies about how invasive and useless Passport was going to be, embrace/extend/extinguish, H1-B abuse, very large donations to political parties, filing for a zillion patents on obvious extentions to existing technology, underhanded support of the BSA and probably SCO, FUDmongering, outright declaration of war on GNU/linux/FOSS, and probably 14 other things I can't think of right now.
I really don't care if IE or XP is buggy. I never use either one of them. I get zombies attacking my firewall and tons of email about my "account violations suspended please see attachment for deatails" but that's just annoying, not immoral.
>> 2) provide converters that are suitable for >> "embedded" TVs like those in older RVs and vans
Is it even possible to receive 8VSB in a moving vehicle? (leaving aside parked vehicles of course)
I recall two problems: the first is that demodulation is extraordinarily sensitive to phase differences so the speeding up/slowing down/turning activities of a vehicle constantly confuse the receiver.
Second that even in a vehicle moving in at a constant speed and direction relative to the transmitter, there is a continuously varying stream of multipath and signal strength changes from buildings, terrain, and nearby highly reflective metal vehicles that confound the receiver.
On an analog TV you might drop a few frames or see speckles or color shifts. On a digital TV the picture goes mosaic or just completely dark until the mpeg decoder can resync.
I googled a bit but didn't find anything definitive. I'd love to hear more details on this issue.
My guess is that if you tried to do this safely (welding goggles or eclipse glasses) the off-center darkness would probably disrupt the optical illusion to some degree.
>> After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to >> look at the code handling other image formats >> for similar problems? Guess not.
I remember when it used to be common practice to not just fix a bug, but to fix the entire class of bugs to which it belonged.
Something weird happened with project management and bug-tracking software somewhere down the line that removed the incentive to fix more than one bug at a time. I suspect that this is the root of a lot of software quality problems.
The thing is, the multi-core chips that we're talking about are designed to run multiple independent streams of instructions. If the cores are all working on the same stream, the overhead of co-ordinating access to cache and registers utterly destroys any parallelism gains.
The last couple of generations of chips and compilers are actually pretty smart about instruction re-ordering and making full use of the available registers and ALU/FPU's.
Does she wake up at 4:00AM and scribble down a bunch of indented words and punctuation on some graph paper she keeps by the bedside?
In the middle of some other activity, like watching TV or eating lunch, does she say in an uncomfortably loud voice "A HA!" and if you ask about it she mutters something about combining hashing with tree sorting?
Does she have strong feelings about vi vs. emacs? If not, did she at least write her own text editor at some point?
Does she type so fast and bursty that the keyclicks seem to be forming musical passages?
Does she just stare at leafless trees in the autumn, kind of tilting her head trying to get a good view of it, or position herself so that part of one tree overlaps another?
Does she organize things in a counter-intuitive manner, i.e. clothes closets and drawers are not arranged by color or fabric, but the order in which the items are put on?
Does she have musical talent, like to draw weird abstract drawings, or some other intracate skill?
Did she ever surprise you with a deep grasp of knowledge on a technical subject like physics or genetics?
Does she have a collection of computers from the 1980's or some assembly code printed out with tractor holes still attached and the smear from a chain printer dragging across the page?
Does she read a lot of newsgroups that start with comp.lang.something?
Does she want to do this badly enough that she would be willing post her own "Ask Slashdot" all by herself w/o your help?
It sounds like you are not so much interested in the effect on the schedule, but in finding a way to prove something to your superiors.
If they are like other managers, the reality of the situation is irrelevant. They will make unreasonable demands and you will be held responsible when the demands are not met. To them, all the graphs, charts, timelines and other stuff is just part of your whining.
In fact, it is in their interest to make you fail so that they look good in comparison and then they are more likely to get a raise/promotion/whatever.
Of course if IE7 does run with a less-priv user, there's the risk that all of us in the well-oiled IT shops, already running as less-priv users, will have more and more spyware developed to target us, rather than all the truckloads of spyware that just assume they have full access to the system once they start executing.
This is the most intelligent comment I've read in a long time.
Cute idea, but it'll only work against bored human email sniffers.
A lot of snooping is based on automated filtering. Words like "stock", "deal", "price", and "layoffs" would probably contribute to a score that would flag the message for careful review.
Would whoever modded this a troll please explain themselves to me. If you post anonymously it won't undo the mod point.
Other estimates from other threads were in the same ballbark, with less than an order of magnitude difference.
Hmmm, I used a four letter word, but I didn't use that word to describe open source or windows or anything, it was just part of an exclamation.
I'm sorry I used uppercase to make my final point, but to me $250,000 is a lot of money and worth emphasizing. Maybe some people have big budgets and aren't afraid of license costs. For comparison, here is my yearly IT budget: $0.
Rolling out windows isn't an option on 350MHz machinery. You'd have to buy some new boxes. Assuming you just get some cheapo dells...
250 desktops * $400 = $100,000.
Oh, they wanted to run Office apps while they're at it? Assuming you can get some volume discounts that could be another $50,000.
Now you have a bunch of windows boxes but no active directory or shared file servers? You probably have some decent spec servers you could use for these, but you still have to pay for the software and CALs. I don't even know, but let's say another 10,000.
Hmmm, why are there so many smtp packets floating around my network? Oh shit I forgot anti-virus software for everyone. That's gotta be $50/user so there goes something like $12,500. Stuff still gets through because 5% of the time people click OK in IE, so you have to hire a guy that does nothing but disinfect machines all day for $25/hour + benefits. There goes $75,000 per year.
Okay, whew now great we can use this industry specific app...all it cost was a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS.
Not just bugs, but I've found it's a huge help to see the compiler warnings from multiple platforms, even if you don't specifically support all the platforms. Compiler warnings almost always indicate a source-level problem that transcends the platform.
Sure a lot of warnings are stupid and should be ignored. What I like to do is pick a nice set of compiler warning options that are slightly too picky, and then use a grep/sed script to filter out the warning messages that are just useless or nitpicky and try to get a clean cross-platform compile.
Slashdot Mirror
>> apparently every single Slashdotter is smarter than every person at Microsoft and can single-handedly solve all problems that MS has ever had in their software. <<
I can't speak for "every single slashdotter" only for myself, but my issues with microsoft actually have very little to do with problems with their software.
I'm much more troubled by their monopolistic business practices, restrictive EULAs, pandering to media companies with DRM schemes, outright lies about how invasive and useless Passport was going to be, embrace/extend/extinguish, H1-B abuse, very large donations to political parties, filing for a zillion patents on obvious extentions to existing technology, underhanded support of the BSA and probably SCO, FUDmongering, outright declaration of war on GNU/linux/FOSS, and probably 14 other things I can't think of right now.
I really don't care if IE or XP is buggy. I never use either one of them. I get zombies attacking my firewall and tons of email about my "account violations suspended please see attachment for deatails" but that's just annoying, not immoral.
Thank you, scientology makes sense now!
"Caveat creditor."
It's about friggin time.
>> 2) provide converters that are suitable for
>> "embedded" TVs like those in older RVs and vans
Is it even possible to receive 8VSB in a moving vehicle? (leaving aside parked vehicles of course)
I recall two problems: the first is that demodulation is extraordinarily sensitive to phase differences so the speeding up/slowing down/turning activities of a vehicle constantly confuse the receiver.
Second that even in a vehicle moving in at a constant speed and direction relative to the transmitter, there is a continuously varying stream of multipath and signal strength changes from buildings, terrain, and nearby highly reflective metal vehicles that confound the receiver.
On an analog TV you might drop a few frames or see speckles or color shifts. On a digital TV the picture goes mosaic or just completely dark until the mpeg decoder can resync.
I googled a bit but didn't find anything definitive. I'd love to hear more details on this issue.
The inlining issue is critical. Last time I profiled a sort function there was a solid 20-30% gain.
In the process of achieving that goal, there is a very high chance the sun will not be completely blocked at all times.
This is extremely risky. Don't do it.
Please only do this with the moon, not the sun.
My guess is that if you tried to do this safely (welding goggles or eclipse glasses) the off-center darkness would probably disrupt the optical illusion to some degree.
(a) they probably had names and address of everyone who showed up. any weird post-demo problems -> send FBI.
(b) you don't need to be on-site to attack a wifi installation. a top-quality directional antenna will work from a few miles away.
(c) what's wrong with you, don't you *want* microsoft to fail?!?
Sometimes all in the same person!
>> After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to
>> look at the code handling other image formats
>> for similar problems? Guess not.
I remember when it used to be common practice to not just fix a bug, but to fix the entire class of bugs to which it belonged.
Something weird happened with project management and bug-tracking software somewhere down the line that removed the incentive to fix more than one bug at a time. I suspect that this is the root of a lot of software quality problems.
The thing is, the multi-core chips that we're talking about are designed to run multiple independent streams of instructions. If the cores are all working on the same stream, the overhead of co-ordinating access to cache and registers utterly destroys any parallelism gains.
The last couple of generations of chips and compilers are actually pretty smart about instruction re-ordering and making full use of the available registers and ALU/FPU's.
>> makes multiple streams of sound riding
>> on the same speaker...
Yamaha YSP-1
Okay forget all the rhetorical questions.
Is computer science her passion? yes/no
Life is too short to waste studying something that you're only mildly interested in.
Is computer science her passion? Seriously.
Does she wake up at 4:00AM and scribble down a bunch of indented words and punctuation on some graph paper she keeps by the bedside?
In the middle of some other activity, like watching TV or eating lunch, does she say in an uncomfortably loud voice "A HA!" and if you ask about it she mutters something about combining hashing with tree sorting?
Does she have strong feelings about vi vs. emacs? If not, did she at least write her own text editor at some point?
Does she type so fast and bursty that the keyclicks seem to be forming musical passages?
Does she just stare at leafless trees in the autumn, kind of tilting her head trying to get a good view of it, or position herself so that part of one tree overlaps another?
Does she organize things in a counter-intuitive manner, i.e. clothes closets and drawers are not arranged by color or fabric, but the order in which the items are put on?
Does she have musical talent, like to draw weird abstract drawings, or some other intracate skill?
Did she ever surprise you with a deep grasp of knowledge on a technical subject like physics or genetics?
Does she have a collection of computers from the 1980's or some assembly code printed out with tractor holes still attached and the smear from a chain printer dragging across the page?
Does she read a lot of newsgroups that start with comp.lang.something?
Does she want to do this badly enough that she would be willing post her own "Ask Slashdot" all by herself w/o your help?
Gawd, I remember PL/I being broken the same way 30 years ago.
It sounds like you are not so much interested in the effect on the schedule, but in finding a way to prove something to your superiors.
If they are like other managers, the reality of the situation is irrelevant. They will make unreasonable demands and you will be held responsible when the demands are not met. To them, all the graphs, charts, timelines and other stuff is just part of your whining.
In fact, it is in their interest to make you fail so that they look good in comparison and then they are more likely to get a raise/promotion/whatever.
This is the most intelligent comment I've read in a long time.
Cute idea, but it'll only work against bored human email sniffers.
A lot of snooping is based on automated filtering. Words like "stock", "deal", "price", and "layoffs" would probably contribute to a score that would flag the message for careful review.
Data point: my next door neighbor was offered $1000/month for cell antennas on an existing tower. He declined.
Next 50 times he asks me for a favor, I'm saying yes.
Your emails account have been suspended for improper activity. Please see the enclose attachment for instruct.
Would whoever modded this a troll please explain themselves to me. If you post anonymously it won't undo the mod point.
Other estimates from other threads were in the same ballbark, with less than an order of magnitude difference.
Hmmm, I used a four letter word, but I didn't use that word to describe open source or windows or anything, it was just part of an exclamation.
I'm sorry I used uppercase to make my final point, but to me $250,000 is a lot of money and worth emphasizing. Maybe some people have big budgets and aren't afraid of license costs. For comparison, here is my yearly IT budget: $0.
Rolling out windows isn't an option on 350MHz machinery. You'd have to buy some new boxes.
Assuming you just get some cheapo dells...
250 desktops * $400 = $100,000.
Oh, they wanted to run Office apps while they're at it? Assuming you can get some volume discounts that could be another $50,000.
Now you have a bunch of windows boxes but no active directory or shared file servers? You probably have some decent spec servers you could use for these, but you still have to pay for the software and CALs. I don't even know, but let's say another 10,000.
Hmmm, why are there so many smtp packets floating around my network? Oh shit I forgot anti-virus software for everyone. That's gotta be $50/user so there goes something like $12,500. Stuff still gets through because 5% of the time people click OK in IE, so you have to hire a guy that does nothing but disinfect machines all day for $25/hour + benefits. There goes $75,000 per year.
Okay, whew now great we can use this industry specific app...all it cost was a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS.
Terabyte
Not just bugs, but I've found it's a huge help to see the compiler warnings from multiple platforms, even if you don't specifically support all the platforms. Compiler warnings almost always indicate a source-level problem that transcends the platform.
Sure a lot of warnings are stupid and should be ignored. What I like to do is pick a nice set of compiler warning options that are slightly too picky, and then use a grep/sed script to filter out the warning messages that are just useless or nitpicky and try to get a clean cross-platform compile.
Want a challenge?
Try getting women to sleep with you.