Hmmm, curious, I thought you could tunnel IP over SSH. It doesn't matter what what NTP uses as transport for it. It should tunnel. Now, it might screw up the protocol. However, the protocol should just treat the tunnel as a UDP connection with fairly odd properties.
Google's search was absolutely revolutionary. It was literally cutting edge technology released to the public.
Google conceptually figured out how to let humans do what they are good and, and let computers do what they are good at and use that as to generate search results.
Yahoo at the time, had hordes of people who browsed the web literally and categorized things by hand. A completely unscalable, and insanely expensive proposition.
Alta Vista was the king of meta-tag spamming. Sure it was all automated, but it sucked to use them for searching.
Now, you also fundamentally don't understand what makes google an innovator. First off, look at Ajax and how interactive and user friendly their websites are. Take their maps for instance. They are the first (as far as I know the only people) with whom I can scroll the map using a mouse. I don't have to use preset jumps. I don't remember ever seeing anyone who let me jump to intersections and show them to me. I don't know of anyone else who provides satallite and drawn maps both as seamlessly or for free. They make online applications that work nearly as well, and are almost as flexible as desktop application.
Plus it's innovative that they turned the entire business model on it's head. They are quality. Everything they do is based on quality. (That's a lot like Apple). They refuse to compromise quality to make an easy buck. It'd be easy for them to let people purchase "bonus pagerank". They haven't, and they won't. They ensure that everything that is paid for is clearly marked that way. Unlike any other search before it.
They don't have to make any money from the people who use their software. They make all their money from people who are interested in presenting information related to the information google is presenting.
Next, at the time of it's IPO, it was speculated that Google's SA scalability and parallel programming technology was worth more then the company as an advertising company ever was. The problem with that analysis is that Google's knowledge is buried in people's head, if they left the company it that value would flee the building with it.
Finally, how many companies do you know of who encourage (require?) you to spend 20% of your time being creative to work on personal ideas that could become conceptual products.
Apple isn't an innovator in terms of the iPod or digitial music. I've been listening to MP3's on a computer since 1995, and several people I know have had portable MP3 players since late 2000, or early 2001 at least. Apple was very late to the game. They just happen to own it now. What Apple did was change the business model to one that people are happier about. Remarkably like Google has with search.
As to Oracle, I'm not sure about their history. I'm fairly confident the concept of an RDBM's was widely known prior to Oracle's existance. (Conceptually I believe they have been around since the late 1970's, I though Ellison started on it in 1982 or so). Ellison surely wasn't the innovator, I believe that honor would go to Micheal Stonebreaker (Standard researcher who was the world's leading expert on RDMS for all of thei early stages).
Hmmm, I'm curious about the legality of the "fines". You can get into a lot of trouble for taking money out of someone's pay check. A *LOT*. I know we couldn't garnish the last check of a person who used a company credit card to buy personal items. She got sacked for it. We didn't reverse the charges to avoid a bunch of problems with the banks. However, the HR person couldn't just take it out of their last check. That's illegal. We ended up selling the debt to a collection agency for pennies on the dollar.
As to the firing you for working purchasing a from competitor, or smoking. That's fairly standard in certain industries (selling beverages it's really standard). The ironic part, is that you claim it's part of a "work contract". Very, very few people I know have a contract. I live in NE, and it's an at will state. They can fire me, because they were in a bad mood. I've had a dozen jobs, and never had a contract. I had an offer letter which was written evidence as to the terms of my employment. Generally it specified the pay amount, the benefits and perks I was entitled to. It spelled out what I was expected of me as an employee. It wasn't a binding contract, I never signed it. I got to keep a copy in case of a future dispute over what was expected of me, or what my compensation was to be.
It's a wonderful thing to work in an "at will". It means it's fairly easy to terminate someone who isn't getting work done. So hiring isn't a huge risk. Generally, you sign an NDA and a non-compete in a this area if you work with computers. The only guy I know who has a regular job that has a contract teaches at the local university. It's essentially so we can't quit in the middle of a semester and walk. At that point, they have the legal muscle to threaten him enough to get him to stay. He also has a guaranteed job for a year. Even if they fire him, he still gets the contract paid out.
The flip side of working in an "at will" state, is that it is incredibly hard for my employer to enforce an NDA or non-compete. I have a right to make a living. They can't have a non-compete that is so broad I can't make a living. I can sign a contract in this state that says roughly, "I'll never work on a computer again", and the state will void the contract, because I have a right to use my current skill set to earn a living. I have to work for something that is a direct competitor before the state will even consider saying that the non-compete is valid. Even then, it's my understanding, if I can show I'll be working for my new company in a capacity which won't give the new company insider knowledge of my former employers, the state will generally uphold my right to take the job.
You clearly have no concept of public domain. If you put something into the public domain, you lose all rights and control of it.
The only reason you could possibly want to be explicit about having put it into the public domain, so that someone doesn't take your work and then attempt to copyright it later, and possibly come after you or others for using the works you have created. I believe that is why the BSD license requires that you leave in their copyright notice, so it's blantantly obvious when you have taken something someone else wrong and attempted to then copyright it as if you had created it.
I always find Disney's take on this odd. They take things out of the public domain, and then generate copyrighted works. They'll go after lots of people for then using the same original source materials they did. Try publishing anything vaguely related to "Aladdin", or "Snow White", and see how far you get before Disney sends a legal notice to you.
Creative Commons doesn't give you any bonus rights that copyright doesn't.
Who is "you" in that sentence? "A content producer", yes, that is true. The reason you choose to use a CC license, is precisely because you want to give up rights to the consumers so they can use your works in specific ways with explicit permission. They don't have to ask you personally, they have a very good idea of exactly what is allowed because of the CC license without having to contact you. A lot of the goal of the CC licenses are because who a copyright holder is legally, and what they will allow can be lost to the sands of time. 30 years from now, it'll be really hard to find me or the inheritors of my copyrights. So if you find something clever I create today, you'll have to wait until 75 years after I die to publish it. First you'll have to find me, then prove I died. Then prove when I wrote something. Then you'll have to wait a really long time. If I have no problem with non-commerical use of it during my lifetime a CC license makes a lot of sense.
If "You" is the content consumer, you now have lots of rights you didn't have if they put them under "All Rights Reserved". There you would have only fair use. You still have that under a CC license. Fair use, is when copyright rules essentially can be ignored, you can do things that copyright specifically prohibits if you fall under fair use provisions.
The "Creative Commons Licenses", are nothing more then pre-canned license that accomplish common desires of content creators.
Just like the GPL doesn't accomplish anything that copyright doesn't. Both the GPL and the Creative Commons Licenses are there to allow a content creator to give rights to the "consumers" of their works, that marking something "(C) 2005 All rights Reserved" would disallow them from doing.
They also do this using a common license. There is power in using common licenses. First it helps to establish legal precendence that on exactly the same licensing terms. So legally, I don't have to be an expert, if I forget to cross a 'T', or dot my 'i', I'm screwed. I'd much rather use one that has been reviewed by lots of legal experts, and used by lots of other people. Those people are likely to come to my aid, if my case ever would set bad legal precedent for protections they want.
I can put anything I want under a CC license, and everyone still has all of the same fair use rights as if I used "All Rights Reserved" as my copyright license.
The only thing Dvorak said that made any sense at all, is that "CC: Public Domain" is silly. However, it's consistant, so I why they list it as one of their licenses. Even if it is silly, there's still no harm in it legally that I'm aware of.
You're just not very creative. I'm confident, you can pistol whip someone to death, without pulling the trigger...
I've know of people who have had relative die by accidential discharge without anyone pulling the trigger. I'm not it's not unheard of while climbing over a fence to have some idiot lean a shotgun over. He'll jostle the fence, or the shotgun will get enough force applied to discharge the weapon without anyone pulling a trigger. It's one of the reasons you should always crack a shotgun open when you climb over a fence. I'm fairly sure, it's a good safty precaution to have it cracked all execpt when shooting if it's the style of shotgun you can do that with (breach loading, not a pump if I understand shotguns enough).
Oh, for the record, I'm a big believer in an armed society is a polite society. Guns have their place, and having them be common in society isn't such a bad thing.
I use similar stuff, from Radio Shack. It's black cable wrap. It's like $5 for 10ft. It's easy to use in short strips every 3-4 feet on multiple cables. Everything starting in on place, and ending in the same place will end up acting just like one cable.
I've never been a big fan of the long tubing ones. I use this technique on all of my KVM cables. So the three cables act like one. It's pretty slick.
For cables that are more like to change, I use velcro wraps available at any Office Depot or Office Max. ~$3.00 for a dozen.
Here is a quick link to a Wikipedia article about them. I have no idea why I should care, but it does explain what it is. It's used to run a couple of sites I do use (kerneltrap being the most memorable). It sounds like a blog/content publishing program writting in PHP.
The first several google links all appear to point to the site that is down. Even the cached links I read didn't get to the part that actually described what it was. Hope that helps.
That sort of attitude would end up with the world under the thumb of anyone willing to hide behind people you deem innocents... I mean, your are just begging someone to force you to be ruled by a ruthless person with that sort of attitude.
War is a horrific thing, but lots of incredibly innocent people died during WWII, and in the end a lot of really bad things were ended because of it. If being militant about not killing a single innocent were a prerequesite, the world would currently be under fascism Nazi style. There would have been nothing would could have done to stop the bad folks, if collateral damage was completely unacceptable.
I'm not saying that the War in Iraq is a good thing. To be blantantly honest, I'm not sure. In the 50-100 year view, I think it will be good, but I think we are doing it for all the wrong reasons. I think the American public was mislead in order to drum up support. I think both of those really undercut any potential goodwill I can summon for the Iraqi effort.
So while I won't argue with you if about if you feel what we did is immoral, and that we attacked a soverign nation with very little legimate need to. I feel that your attitude about "innocents" is more then a bit naive. It's downright stupid in terms of national policy.
For those who need that explained, it's easier to express when all of the kids don't have the same birthday and subtract from one:
The number of ways a set of kids can have different birthdays is:
(365 * 364 *... 336 ) / (365)^30
You want the opposite of that, which is roughly: 1 -.29368 = ~70.6%.
Notice that if you go to 366 kids, you'll end up with 0.
For the anal retentive among us, that is assuming that the day you are born on is uniformly random (which it isn't), and this doesn't account for Feb 29th.
I'd always been told that the speed limit increase to 65MPH was about truckers. That for big diesels doing the long hauls ~63MPH was the optimal speed interms of fuel efficiency.
Finally, I'm fairly sure you'll have to cite a statistic to show that 55MPH is better speed for fuel efficiency. It's my understanding that most any vehicle and be tuned/geared to make optimal fuel efficiency to be at nearly any speed they want.
I know my Ford F150 gets about 18Mi/Gal doing whatever speeds gets me into fifth gear and then up about the 1500-1800RPM range. On a flat road, that's about 67MPH. I get about 15 if I do 75MPH.
I've never tried 55MPH for a sustained streach. However, I'm fairly sure that it's not at an ideal place in the gearing on my vehicle. I know for a lot of vehicles built pre-speed change, 55MPH was optimal. However, my guess is that it's moved fairly significantly.
Hmmm, I guess my point is that MOST people don't matter in a lot of situations. There is a set of technical people who provide the support and infrastructure for the people in the set "MOST people". In that group of people (and I'm one of them), a lot of them do value having the source code. If you'd read my entire post, you'll note that I said I wasn't the complete set of all data. That what I was discussing was anecdotal.
There's at least 60 people where I work, who use OpenSource because of a series of decisions I helped to make 5 years ago. I made them specifically because I value having the source for the product.
Most of the people I know that use Open Source software do in fact understand what it is, and why they should value having the source. Even if they will never write a line of code in their lives. Most people want to take the path of least resistance. Sometimes that involves "free as in beer". Sometimes that involves "free as in freedom". Sometimes that is finding the best piece of software and using it. A lot of the time, that's Open Source. Most of the people I know who use Open Source is flat out it's more reliable or has a better set of features.
Most of the Linux heads run it because Linux is a pretty decent OS. Most of the people who run Firefox or Mozilla, it's because it's got lots of good features (tabbed browsing, easy font size changes, popup blocking, good privacy controls). That's normally replacing a free program in IE. Apache whoops up on IIS because it's more reliable, easier to configure, and has a lot more features. Ain't got dick to do with any kind of free. Now, a lot of those programs got to be so good, and fill the needs of so many of us, precisely because the software source is available to us. People said you know what, I hate having to dicker with font sizes in IE (that and tabbed browsing are the features I show people and generally they never go back to IE afterwards). It takes too long to change font sizes, and if my screen size doesn't match what the web designer expected it is unreadable. I'll go find a browser I can add using shift and the scroll wheel to do that. You know, I think that Apache should have a really cool URL re-write Engine. I could use it to solve a couple of problems. Yep it got done.
Most people adopt it because it's got the features and reliability they want. It has those, because it's people like me can play with it, can fix it up, can add features we really want. They want it, just like most people want money. I've met very few people who like money for it's intrinsic value, but for underlying value it has because people readily accept it in bartering for goods and services. Even if it isn't a factor they are aware of, most people do in the end use Open Source because of the value it aquired specifically because the source was available to them.
Sure, I forget they actually released the source to Solaris. We made the decision 5 years ago that we were Linux and nothing else.
I've never seen the full on apptrace, Dtrace, or mdb. However, color me doubtful that you can find a bug that is an inverted condition with them. Been there done that. I've done that with various applications, found the SRPM added the patch, rebuilt it, tested it, send the fix upstream.
The linux kernel source was used to prove that a printf statement printed something it couldn't have. Logically it could not have gotten to where it did. In the end, I showed it was a memory error on the machine.
I've written and installed a kernel patch. However, I did track down exactly why the RHEL 2.4.9 series of kernels would errantly stop rebuilding a mirror at 50% (the divisor was computed in sectors the dividend was computed in 1K blocks). If you monitored/proc/mdstat you'd notice it. If that happened is a closed source product, if they didn't feel like answering why, or resolving it, I'm stuck. I've had that happen to me with Oracle, Microsoft, various networking routing equipment vendors. I've had all sorts of problems that I can't answer. I've had vendors go out of business. I've had vendors drop a product line. I've had vendors EOL a product I was happily using. If I have the source, it really doesn't matter much. I can track it down if it is critical enough to my company.
I've heard about the wonders of the Solaris patches that once applied can never be backed out. The process you used to have to go thru to ensure patch compatibility. I've known several professional SA's who dealt with Solaris. I've worked for several large organizations that dealt with it regularly. When you got stuck, you were at the mercy of your support. If they weren't doing enough, you're just stuck. I've never had Sun Microsystems do that to me, probably by virtue of the fact that I've never run Solaris stuff professionally.
I've purchased IBM equipment for 1/10th the price of similar Sun kit and run on it for 3 years. I've found IBM to be fairly reasonable in their support (generally, other then some flaky ServRAID cards I haven't needed it). Only by virtue of having it only 3 years, I'm fairly confident that hardware will run 2-3 more (It'll be way under powered by the so we'll replace it, or it'll get migrated). We've got plenty of high end equipment from IBM that's on year 2 with no downtime. We run either RedHat where it's required for Oracle support or CentOS or Whitebox. Why on earth would I pay Sun a premium for their equipment and software? Especially until about 3 weeks ago, I couldn't even get source.
In terms of stability, I'm fairly confident the application I developed could be deployed on a Linux kernel circa 1.2 thru 2.6 (I've run it on 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels). I'm confident it would have run on 2.0. Not having to recompile my application is of no value to me. Remember, I have the source to every single piece except the Oracle DB. It's no big deal to recompile. Oracle's API is extremely stable (at least the OCI parts I use). So there is little to no enticement there.
About the only real problem I would have had was getting an Oracle client installed on one of those kernels. What I actually write, wouldn't have been a problem at all. We've run almost exactly the same source base from RH 6.2-RH9 and RHEL2.1 and RHEL3.0 (we compiled and developed on all those versions, I believe we only production deployed on RH6.2, RH7.1 and WBEL 3). We are only on year 4.5 of that, but modulo changing the default compiler, there have been no sigificant changes. Since I write in C++, I was thrilled not to have to use g++2.91 to deploy on RH6.2.
Curious, that's precisely why we use it. We run pretty much all RedHat derivative stuff (either a version we purchased, or a one of the rebuilds). I use the source fairly frequently to track down bugs. I apply small bug fixes to problems I run into. I know we have a machine we have patched: xpdf, ghostscript and apache on.
I have patched various machines with little kernel fixes (adding PCI_ID's to support the i810 chipset).
I've used the source when someone posted error messages to various mailings lists to see what section of the kernel was generating certain errors to troubleshoot the problem.
I've added lines of code to e2fsck and mount to support new functionality I wanted to simplify my problems.
I could run Solaris, but when I have a problem, I can't track it down. I can't read the source to see how critical an area the bug is or if there is a way to work around it. I can't ask the author's of the code if they can fix it by e-mailing them directly.
I know that the plural of annecdote isn't data. However, a lot of technical people I know feel the same way. We aren't the majority of people. However most sysadmin's I know would much prefer to have the source, even if they are never going to edit, or re-compile it. A lot of the people who support the users would much prefer they used open source. I'm a developer not an SA, but I play an SA from time to time.
I'm happier as a user if I am using free software, if only because I'm not beholden to the keeper of the secret source to provide me with a fix. If I feel like it, I can pay someone else to do it, or I can investigate the problem myself. If it is important enough, I'll fix it.
Oddly, I just started reading, unsure of which story the response was. It took me a second to realize what was going on.
Still not too bad. I got the concept of the sentence in one pass when read fairly slowly. I did not parse a couple of words until a second read. I think "binars" screwed me the the worst, because it's too close to "binary" (as a programmer, that's inside my daily vocabulary). "aloutocalamity" screwed me up, as I kept reading it as "a loud calamity". The odd part is the further they are form recognizable words, the easier it is for me to parse. "cishernpremoon", my brain keeps wanting to insert spaces to turn that into "cishern" "pre moon". Not sure what cishern unscrambles to, but "pre moon" makes sense to my brain. The spaces was the shortest path to fixing the misspelling, not re-arranging the letters. Not sure if that makes any sense.
I think a bit of how much it would screw me up depends a bit upon where I'm reading it. In an editted book, I'd agree with you. On slashdot, or in an e-mail. Probably not. I expect to have to read screwy language there.
This
clearly supports you in it's first sets of definitions. However, if you read further down in the usage section, you'll find that it's been slowly evolving. It notes the usage of "gender" as a social and culture grouping, and sex as a strictly biological term is becoming more and more common. You'll notice that even in the dictionary that clearly labels it primarily as a grammatically term, still lists secondary usages that clearly match up with the usage above (3b being the easiest to identify).
This might all be the fear of being politically incorrect, and using the word sex. However, it'll probably end up being coming the wrong usage to use sex there instead of "gender" as some point in the future. Just like it's now considered improper to use gender netural pronouns in the singlular case. This link discusses it better. "They" was used as singluar pronoun in the ambigous gender cases. From reading the above link, it appears that "you" went through the same transitions.
Hmmm, "A Doctor has admitted the... of a teenage cancer patient who died after a hospital drug...", I only missed two words in my initial reading at about half speed.
I think the first one is "manslaughter", but I still can't figure out the second one. Hmmm, after 30 seconds, that's "blunder". I kept turning it into "blender". I knew the word was "make a mistake", I just didn't come up with blunder quickly. I understood the exact meaning of the sentence in one read, even if I didn't know the other two words.
I think a lot of the problem is you are using relatively uncommon words (manslaughter, and blunder are well outside my common every day usage). Doctor, cancer, and hospital aren't words I see every day. Most of the rest I probably see at least 5 days a week in my reading. I bet you'd get better at it, the longer you read someone. Especially if you were familiar with that author's way of writting.
You are also saying it in a way that wasn't the way I would. The original poster was saying, was something I'd heard before, and is said almost exactly the way I would have said it.
I would have said that "A doctor has admitted [fault|responsibility] after drug mix up killed a teenage cancer patient." Which I feel I would have gotten everything but probably "responsibility" out of that if you screwed with the spelling.
I want to second this. We do this, and we also pay the alarm people to monitor the temp and humidity as a backup (about are only problem is that, they didn't call use during business hours because they assumed we knew the room was 15F over the agreed upon high temp). Yes, it's a server room, no one works in there, no one goes in there unless there's a problem or to rotate tapes. Ding bats...
Nagios is wonderful. Everytime we have a new type of error, we write a little script to monitor how fast we are approaching that situation and alert, or we write a script to at least alert when it happens, so Nagios will diagnose the problem nearly immediatly if it's not something you can get early warning on (software mirrors breaking for example).
Monitoring for when crond dies, running out of file descriptors, mirrors breaking, and various other problems we've had over time have been scripted up because there wasn't a plugin for it.
This
is a FireWire/USB 40GB drive. I believe they have larger ones, but they get fairly pricy. With this you should be able to carry just one drive. It does have dimensons listed. The picture appears misleading (something just looks wrong about the perspective, I can't tell if it's just my brain misfiring, or the picture).
A computer is certainly capable of playing games fine, but as I pointed out, not all games. While I can run Civilization II just fine on a Pentium III, I dare you to try playing Doom (if it will let you) or any other newer game.
<grandpa simpson voice>
You whiny whippersnapper, back in my day we played DOOM on 386's, and if we wanted to do multiplayer, we had to use a serial cable, or IPX if you we rich enough to have a LAN in your house (at $200-$400 a network card, it wasn't cheap). This new fangled "Internet" or TCP/IP has made everything so much easier, you wouldn't know bad frame rates if they jumped up and bit you on the ass...
</grandpa simpson voice>
I'm fairly sure you meant Doom III, but I read what you wrote, and said, shit the only problem with running DOOM on a PIII would be if it didn't use a real clock to throttle down moving. I'm sure it did, as I played the original on a machines from a 16Mhz 386 up to a PIII-500 at least. Several games of about that vintage, including Wing Commander I/II had no concept of being able to run too fast. I was a God at a lot of them on a fast 386, but on a Pentium 60/66, I couldn't keep up, the computers just ran circles around my ability to run a joystick. It took me a while to realize that you had to have meant Doom III.
Toe-mato, Tha-mato (that works better when spoken). It is in fact a compression scheme, and an indexing scheme.
I can easily thing of it as a compression scheme. If they wanted to have it communicate all of that information they could have devised "Morse Code", and actually spelled it out. This is obviously much shorter. The code they specially designed for this single use was exactly as described.
You can think of it as an indexing scheme if you feel like it, but that doesn't mean it's any less legitimate as a compression scheme. If I were to send you files where every time you saw "1", you should replace it with "By Land", and "2" with "By Sea", it's a compression scheme. We'd have to come up with an escape sequence for "1" and "2", but that's not a big deal. This only makes sense if we are using "By Land" and "By Sea" a lot.
Yes, I have indexes that are larger then the dataset (actually, as a general rule, I don't I have several indexes on a single table which total more then the dataset, but I don't believe any single index is larger then the dataset). With Oracle if you have only one index, and it encompasses all the fields (probably the only easy way to have it take more space the the original), you can just create an IOT (Index Organzied Table). Then the data is the index, and the index is the data. I'd do it, but the version of Oracle we run is fairly buggy with respect to IOT (it's a legacy Oracle8i DB).
Did you just take 2 sentences, to say you feel more comfortable when the software doesn't bother to alert you when there are security flaws in the software you are running, and it lacks an easy way to upgrade it? From what I remember of slack (back in the 3.X days), it did have package management in some limit sense. The backed database seemed to be nothing more the an unindexed list files mapping to a list of packages. There was a "pkgadd" command (I forget the name of the command to remove packages).
That was back in the day, when you had to read the Makefiles and add and remove the appropriate "-D" options to get all sorts of fun stuff. Slack was lots of fun. I'm really happy I cut my teeth on it, but goodness, I don't have the time to track security flaws any more. I'll happily let RedHat, Fedora Foundation, or Debian tell me when there is a patch I need to be worried about. I still hand hack all my config files. Sometimes, I hand hack the RedHat specific config files, but I still read all the scripts and know all the commands to boot strap a machine from scratch if I really need to.
The problem with your glib answer, is that "1" being the Holy Bible as compressed, is completely legitimate. It's be incredibly useful assuming the entire contents of the bible occurs often in whatever it is you are compressing. It's essentially the concept behind huffman encoding (it's not exactly the same, but picking the most common letters from your symbol set and encoding them as very short binary strings is the basic princepal).
Depending on how specialized your data is, it might be a net win to do exactly that. However, compressing arbitrary sets of data that obviously won't work. For most general compression methods the amount of randomness (which I'm more used to being referred to as entropy), what you are saying is accurate (that's true of gzip and bzip2 for example).
Read up on history of the American Revolution (I'm from the US, I have no idea if you are). Sometimes, 1 means "They are attacking by land", and 2 means "They are attacking by sea". Seems like a fine compression algorithm given the dataset they had to compress.
The answer to the posters original question, is that assuming all combinations of the alphabet symbols are equally likely, or that all valid input possibilities are equally likely, you can't compress the data at all. Compression depends upon non-uniform nature of the input (which is really what entropy means). However, your concept that it depends upon a singular input is wrong headed (there are lots of compression methods for which that is true, however, he's speaking strictly in the theoretical, not in the practical). It depends on the nature of all inputs and arranging that the most common inputs get re-encoded as shorter outputs. For lots of generic compression methods, that has a lot to do with entropy. I know you can compress english text much more then either gzip or bzip2 can. It's the basis of Andrew Tridgell's Ph.d thesis, I believe you can download it off his site. I believe this is a link to it.
You can't commit a felony by breaking a contract. You can be found in breach of contract in a civil court for breaking a contract. You go to court to have a them help figure out what the restitution for failure to comply with the contract. A lot of the times, the penalites are spelled out in the contract.
So, being charged with a felony has absolutely nothing to do with any type of paperwork you or your parents signed. In order to be charged with a crime, you have to violate a criminal law.
There are so many silly laws about computers, that I won't be shocked to find out that there is some law that could be used against someone who isn't supposed to gains administrative access to a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Kirby
Google conceptually figured out how to let humans do what they are good and, and let computers do what they are good at and use that as to generate search results.
Yahoo at the time, had hordes of people who browsed the web literally and categorized things by hand. A completely unscalable, and insanely expensive proposition.
Alta Vista was the king of meta-tag spamming. Sure it was all automated, but it sucked to use them for searching.
Now, you also fundamentally don't understand what makes google an innovator. First off, look at Ajax and how interactive and user friendly their websites are. Take their maps for instance. They are the first (as far as I know the only people) with whom I can scroll the map using a mouse. I don't have to use preset jumps. I don't remember ever seeing anyone who let me jump to intersections and show them to me. I don't know of anyone else who provides satallite and drawn maps both as seamlessly or for free. They make online applications that work nearly as well, and are almost as flexible as desktop application.
Plus it's innovative that they turned the entire business model on it's head. They are quality. Everything they do is based on quality. (That's a lot like Apple). They refuse to compromise quality to make an easy buck. It'd be easy for them to let people purchase "bonus pagerank". They haven't, and they won't. They ensure that everything that is paid for is clearly marked that way. Unlike any other search before it.
They don't have to make any money from the people who use their software. They make all their money from people who are interested in presenting information related to the information google is presenting.
Next, at the time of it's IPO, it was speculated that Google's SA scalability and parallel programming technology was worth more then the company as an advertising company ever was. The problem with that analysis is that Google's knowledge is buried in people's head, if they left the company it that value would flee the building with it.
Finally, how many companies do you know of who encourage (require?) you to spend 20% of your time being creative to work on personal ideas that could become conceptual products.
Apple isn't an innovator in terms of the iPod or digitial music. I've been listening to MP3's on a computer since 1995, and several people I know have had portable MP3 players since late 2000, or early 2001 at least. Apple was very late to the game. They just happen to own it now. What Apple did was change the business model to one that people are happier about. Remarkably like Google has with search.
As to Oracle, I'm not sure about their history. I'm fairly confident the concept of an RDBM's was widely known prior to Oracle's existance. (Conceptually I believe they have been around since the late 1970's, I though Ellison started on it in 1982 or so). Ellison surely wasn't the innovator, I believe that honor would go to Micheal Stonebreaker (Standard researcher who was the world's leading expert on RDMS for all of thei early stages).
Kirby
As to the firing you for working purchasing a from competitor, or smoking. That's fairly standard in certain industries (selling beverages it's really standard). The ironic part, is that you claim it's part of a "work contract". Very, very few people I know have a contract. I live in NE, and it's an at will state. They can fire me, because they were in a bad mood. I've had a dozen jobs, and never had a contract. I had an offer letter which was written evidence as to the terms of my employment. Generally it specified the pay amount, the benefits and perks I was entitled to. It spelled out what I was expected of me as an employee. It wasn't a binding contract, I never signed it. I got to keep a copy in case of a future dispute over what was expected of me, or what my compensation was to be.
It's a wonderful thing to work in an "at will". It means it's fairly easy to terminate someone who isn't getting work done. So hiring isn't a huge risk. Generally, you sign an NDA and a non-compete in a this area if you work with computers. The only guy I know who has a regular job that has a contract teaches at the local university. It's essentially so we can't quit in the middle of a semester and walk. At that point, they have the legal muscle to threaten him enough to get him to stay. He also has a guaranteed job for a year. Even if they fire him, he still gets the contract paid out.
The flip side of working in an "at will" state, is that it is incredibly hard for my employer to enforce an NDA or non-compete. I have a right to make a living. They can't have a non-compete that is so broad I can't make a living. I can sign a contract in this state that says roughly, "I'll never work on a computer again", and the state will void the contract, because I have a right to use my current skill set to earn a living. I have to work for something that is a direct competitor before the state will even consider saying that the non-compete is valid. Even then, it's my understanding, if I can show I'll be working for my new company in a capacity which won't give the new company insider knowledge of my former employers, the state will generally uphold my right to take the job.
Kirby
The only reason you could possibly want to be explicit about having put it into the public domain, so that someone doesn't take your work and then attempt to copyright it later, and possibly come after you or others for using the works you have created. I believe that is why the BSD license requires that you leave in their copyright notice, so it's blantantly obvious when you have taken something someone else wrong and attempted to then copyright it as if you had created it.
I always find Disney's take on this odd. They take things out of the public domain, and then generate copyrighted works. They'll go after lots of people for then using the same original source materials they did. Try publishing anything vaguely related to "Aladdin", or "Snow White", and see how far you get before Disney sends a legal notice to you.
Kirby
Who is "you" in that sentence? "A content producer", yes, that is true. The reason you choose to use a CC license, is precisely because you want to give up rights to the consumers so they can use your works in specific ways with explicit permission. They don't have to ask you personally, they have a very good idea of exactly what is allowed because of the CC license without having to contact you. A lot of the goal of the CC licenses are because who a copyright holder is legally, and what they will allow can be lost to the sands of time. 30 years from now, it'll be really hard to find me or the inheritors of my copyrights. So if you find something clever I create today, you'll have to wait until 75 years after I die to publish it. First you'll have to find me, then prove I died. Then prove when I wrote something. Then you'll have to wait a really long time. If I have no problem with non-commerical use of it during my lifetime a CC license makes a lot of sense.
If "You" is the content consumer, you now have lots of rights you didn't have if they put them under "All Rights Reserved". There you would have only fair use. You still have that under a CC license. Fair use, is when copyright rules essentially can be ignored, you can do things that copyright specifically prohibits if you fall under fair use provisions.
The "Creative Commons Licenses", are nothing more then pre-canned license that accomplish common desires of content creators.
Just like the GPL doesn't accomplish anything that copyright doesn't. Both the GPL and the Creative Commons Licenses are there to allow a content creator to give rights to the "consumers" of their works, that marking something "(C) 2005 All rights Reserved" would disallow them from doing.
They also do this using a common license. There is power in using common licenses. First it helps to establish legal precendence that on exactly the same licensing terms. So legally, I don't have to be an expert, if I forget to cross a 'T', or dot my 'i', I'm screwed. I'd much rather use one that has been reviewed by lots of legal experts, and used by lots of other people. Those people are likely to come to my aid, if my case ever would set bad legal precedent for protections they want.
I can put anything I want under a CC license, and everyone still has all of the same fair use rights as if I used "All Rights Reserved" as my copyright license.
The only thing Dvorak said that made any sense at all, is that "CC: Public Domain" is silly. However, it's consistant, so I why they list it as one of their licenses. Even if it is silly, there's still no harm in it legally that I'm aware of.
Kirby
I've know of people who have had relative die by accidential discharge without anyone pulling the trigger. I'm not it's not unheard of while climbing over a fence to have some idiot lean a shotgun over. He'll jostle the fence, or the shotgun will get enough force applied to discharge the weapon without anyone pulling a trigger. It's one of the reasons you should always crack a shotgun open when you climb over a fence. I'm fairly sure, it's a good safty precaution to have it cracked all execpt when shooting if it's the style of shotgun you can do that with (breach loading, not a pump if I understand shotguns enough).
Oh, for the record, I'm a big believer in an armed society is a polite society. Guns have their place, and having them be common in society isn't such a bad thing.
Kirby
I've never been a big fan of the long tubing ones. I use this technique on all of my KVM cables. So the three cables act like one. It's pretty slick.
For cables that are more like to change, I use velcro wraps available at any Office Depot or Office Max. ~$3.00 for a dozen.
Kirby
The first several google links all appear to point to the site that is down. Even the cached links I read didn't get to the part that actually described what it was. Hope that helps.
Kirby
GPL is what I'm want when, I'm looking for software I plan to use internally.
BSD is what I want, when I'm looking for components I want to incorporate into our products.
No source, is what I want when I give out what I've developed.
(This isn't what I really believe, but it's the way I'd state a set of coherent believes).
Kirby
That sort of attitude would end up with the world under the thumb of anyone willing to hide behind people you deem innocents... I mean, your are just begging someone to force you to be ruled by a ruthless person with that sort of attitude.
War is a horrific thing, but lots of incredibly innocent people died during WWII, and in the end a lot of really bad things were ended because of it. If being militant about not killing a single innocent were a prerequesite, the world would currently be under fascism Nazi style. There would have been nothing would could have done to stop the bad folks, if collateral damage was completely unacceptable.
I'm not saying that the War in Iraq is a good thing. To be blantantly honest, I'm not sure. In the 50-100 year view, I think it will be good, but I think we are doing it for all the wrong reasons. I think the American public was mislead in order to drum up support. I think both of those really undercut any potential goodwill I can summon for the Iraqi effort.
So while I won't argue with you if about if you feel what we did is immoral, and that we attacked a soverign nation with very little legimate need to. I feel that your attitude about "innocents" is more then a bit naive. It's downright stupid in terms of national policy.
Kirby
The number of ways a set of kids can have different birthdays is: (365 * 364 * ... 336 ) / (365)^30
You want the opposite of that, which is roughly: 1 - .29368 = ~70.6%.
Notice that if you go to 366 kids, you'll end up with 0.
For the anal retentive among us, that is assuming that the day you are born on is uniformly random (which it isn't), and this doesn't account for Feb 29th.
Kirby
Finally, I'm fairly sure you'll have to cite a statistic to show that 55MPH is better speed for fuel efficiency. It's my understanding that most any vehicle and be tuned/geared to make optimal fuel efficiency to be at nearly any speed they want.
I know my Ford F150 gets about 18Mi/Gal doing whatever speeds gets me into fifth gear and then up about the 1500-1800RPM range. On a flat road, that's about 67MPH. I get about 15 if I do 75MPH.
I've never tried 55MPH for a sustained streach. However, I'm fairly sure that it's not at an ideal place in the gearing on my vehicle. I know for a lot of vehicles built pre-speed change, 55MPH was optimal. However, my guess is that it's moved fairly significantly.
Kirby
There's at least 60 people where I work, who use OpenSource because of a series of decisions I helped to make 5 years ago. I made them specifically because I value having the source for the product.
Most of the people I know that use Open Source software do in fact understand what it is, and why they should value having the source. Even if they will never write a line of code in their lives. Most people want to take the path of least resistance. Sometimes that involves "free as in beer". Sometimes that involves "free as in freedom". Sometimes that is finding the best piece of software and using it. A lot of the time, that's Open Source. Most of the people I know who use Open Source is flat out it's more reliable or has a better set of features.
Most of the Linux heads run it because Linux is a pretty decent OS. Most of the people who run Firefox or Mozilla, it's because it's got lots of good features (tabbed browsing, easy font size changes, popup blocking, good privacy controls). That's normally replacing a free program in IE. Apache whoops up on IIS because it's more reliable, easier to configure, and has a lot more features. Ain't got dick to do with any kind of free. Now, a lot of those programs got to be so good, and fill the needs of so many of us, precisely because the software source is available to us. People said you know what, I hate having to dicker with font sizes in IE (that and tabbed browsing are the features I show people and generally they never go back to IE afterwards). It takes too long to change font sizes, and if my screen size doesn't match what the web designer expected it is unreadable. I'll go find a browser I can add using shift and the scroll wheel to do that. You know, I think that Apache should have a really cool URL re-write Engine. I could use it to solve a couple of problems. Yep it got done.
Most people adopt it because it's got the features and reliability they want. It has those, because it's people like me can play with it, can fix it up, can add features we really want. They want it, just like most people want money. I've met very few people who like money for it's intrinsic value, but for underlying value it has because people readily accept it in bartering for goods and services. Even if it isn't a factor they are aware of, most people do in the end use Open Source because of the value it aquired specifically because the source was available to them.
Kirby
I've never seen the full on apptrace, Dtrace, or mdb. However, color me doubtful that you can find a bug that is an inverted condition with them. Been there done that. I've done that with various applications, found the SRPM added the patch, rebuilt it, tested it, send the fix upstream.
The linux kernel source was used to prove that a printf statement printed something it couldn't have. Logically it could not have gotten to where it did. In the end, I showed it was a memory error on the machine.
I've written and installed a kernel patch. However, I did track down exactly why the RHEL 2.4.9 series of kernels would errantly stop rebuilding a mirror at 50% (the divisor was computed in sectors the dividend was computed in 1K blocks). If you monitored /proc/mdstat you'd notice it. If that happened is a closed source product, if they didn't feel like answering why, or resolving it, I'm stuck. I've had that happen to me with Oracle, Microsoft, various networking routing equipment vendors. I've had all sorts of problems that I can't answer. I've had vendors go out of business. I've had vendors drop a product line. I've had vendors EOL a product I was happily using. If I have the source, it really doesn't matter much. I can track it down if it is critical enough to my company.
I've heard about the wonders of the Solaris patches that once applied can never be backed out. The process you used to have to go thru to ensure patch compatibility. I've known several professional SA's who dealt with Solaris. I've worked for several large organizations that dealt with it regularly. When you got stuck, you were at the mercy of your support. If they weren't doing enough, you're just stuck. I've never had Sun Microsystems do that to me, probably by virtue of the fact that I've never run Solaris stuff professionally.
I've purchased IBM equipment for 1/10th the price of similar Sun kit and run on it for 3 years. I've found IBM to be fairly reasonable in their support (generally, other then some flaky ServRAID cards I haven't needed it). Only by virtue of having it only 3 years, I'm fairly confident that hardware will run 2-3 more (It'll be way under powered by the so we'll replace it, or it'll get migrated). We've got plenty of high end equipment from IBM that's on year 2 with no downtime. We run either RedHat where it's required for Oracle support or CentOS or Whitebox. Why on earth would I pay Sun a premium for their equipment and software? Especially until about 3 weeks ago, I couldn't even get source.
In terms of stability, I'm fairly confident the application I developed could be deployed on a Linux kernel circa 1.2 thru 2.6 (I've run it on 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels). I'm confident it would have run on 2.0. Not having to recompile my application is of no value to me. Remember, I have the source to every single piece except the Oracle DB. It's no big deal to recompile. Oracle's API is extremely stable (at least the OCI parts I use). So there is little to no enticement there.
About the only real problem I would have had was getting an Oracle client installed on one of those kernels. What I actually write, wouldn't have been a problem at all. We've run almost exactly the same source base from RH 6.2-RH9 and RHEL2.1 and RHEL3.0 (we compiled and developed on all those versions, I believe we only production deployed on RH6.2, RH7.1 and WBEL 3). We are only on year 4.5 of that, but modulo changing the default compiler, there have been no sigificant changes. Since I write in C++, I was thrilled not to have to use g++2.91 to deploy on RH6.2.
Kirby
I have patched various machines with little kernel fixes (adding PCI_ID's to support the i810 chipset).
I've used the source when someone posted error messages to various mailings lists to see what section of the kernel was generating certain errors to troubleshoot the problem.
I've added lines of code to e2fsck and mount to support new functionality I wanted to simplify my problems.
I could run Solaris, but when I have a problem, I can't track it down. I can't read the source to see how critical an area the bug is or if there is a way to work around it. I can't ask the author's of the code if they can fix it by e-mailing them directly.
I know that the plural of annecdote isn't data. However, a lot of technical people I know feel the same way. We aren't the majority of people. However most sysadmin's I know would much prefer to have the source, even if they are never going to edit, or re-compile it. A lot of the people who support the users would much prefer they used open source. I'm a developer not an SA, but I play an SA from time to time.
I'm happier as a user if I am using free software, if only because I'm not beholden to the keeper of the secret source to provide me with a fix. If I feel like it, I can pay someone else to do it, or I can investigate the problem myself. If it is important enough, I'll fix it.
Kirby
Still not too bad. I got the concept of the sentence in one pass when read fairly slowly. I did not parse a couple of words until a second read. I think "binars" screwed me the the worst, because it's too close to "binary" (as a programmer, that's inside my daily vocabulary). "aloutocalamity" screwed me up, as I kept reading it as "a loud calamity". The odd part is the further they are form recognizable words, the easier it is for me to parse. "cishernpremoon", my brain keeps wanting to insert spaces to turn that into "cishern" "pre moon". Not sure what cishern unscrambles to, but "pre moon" makes sense to my brain. The spaces was the shortest path to fixing the misspelling, not re-arranging the letters. Not sure if that makes any sense.
I think a bit of how much it would screw me up depends a bit upon where I'm reading it. In an editted book, I'd agree with you. On slashdot, or in an e-mail. Probably not. I expect to have to read screwy language there.
Kirby
This clearly supports you in it's first sets of definitions. However, if you read further down in the usage section, you'll find that it's been slowly evolving. It notes the usage of "gender" as a social and culture grouping, and sex as a strictly biological term is becoming more and more common. You'll notice that even in the dictionary that clearly labels it primarily as a grammatically term, still lists secondary usages that clearly match up with the usage above (3b being the easiest to identify).
This might all be the fear of being politically incorrect, and using the word sex. However, it'll probably end up being coming the wrong usage to use sex there instead of "gender" as some point in the future. Just like it's now considered improper to use gender netural pronouns in the singlular case. This link discusses it better. "They" was used as singluar pronoun in the ambigous gender cases. From reading the above link, it appears that "you" went through the same transitions.
Kirby
I think the first one is "manslaughter", but I still can't figure out the second one. Hmmm, after 30 seconds, that's "blunder". I kept turning it into "blender". I knew the word was "make a mistake", I just didn't come up with blunder quickly. I understood the exact meaning of the sentence in one read, even if I didn't know the other two words.
I think a lot of the problem is you are using relatively uncommon words (manslaughter, and blunder are well outside my common every day usage). Doctor, cancer, and hospital aren't words I see every day. Most of the rest I probably see at least 5 days a week in my reading. I bet you'd get better at it, the longer you read someone. Especially if you were familiar with that author's way of writting.
You are also saying it in a way that wasn't the way I would. The original poster was saying, was something I'd heard before, and is said almost exactly the way I would have said it.
I would have said that "A doctor has admitted [fault|responsibility] after drug mix up killed a teenage cancer patient." Which I feel I would have gotten everything but probably "responsibility" out of that if you screwed with the spelling.
Kirby
Nagios is wonderful. Everytime we have a new type of error, we write a little script to monitor how fast we are approaching that situation and alert, or we write a script to at least alert when it happens, so Nagios will diagnose the problem nearly immediatly if it's not something you can get early warning on (software mirrors breaking for example).
Monitoring for when crond dies, running out of file descriptors, mirrors breaking, and various other problems we've had over time have been scripted up because there wasn't a plugin for it.
Kirby
Kirby
<grandpa simpson voice> You whiny whippersnapper, back in my day we played DOOM on 386's, and if we wanted to do multiplayer, we had to use a serial cable, or IPX if you we rich enough to have a LAN in your house (at $200-$400 a network card, it wasn't cheap). This new fangled "Internet" or TCP/IP has made everything so much easier, you wouldn't know bad frame rates if they jumped up and bit you on the ass... </grandpa simpson voice>
I'm fairly sure you meant Doom III, but I read what you wrote, and said, shit the only problem with running DOOM on a PIII would be if it didn't use a real clock to throttle down moving. I'm sure it did, as I played the original on a machines from a 16Mhz 386 up to a PIII-500 at least. Several games of about that vintage, including Wing Commander I/II had no concept of being able to run too fast. I was a God at a lot of them on a fast 386, but on a Pentium 60/66, I couldn't keep up, the computers just ran circles around my ability to run a joystick. It took me a while to realize that you had to have meant Doom III.
Kirby
I can easily thing of it as a compression scheme. If they wanted to have it communicate all of that information they could have devised "Morse Code", and actually spelled it out. This is obviously much shorter. The code they specially designed for this single use was exactly as described.
You can think of it as an indexing scheme if you feel like it, but that doesn't mean it's any less legitimate as a compression scheme. If I were to send you files where every time you saw "1", you should replace it with "By Land", and "2" with "By Sea", it's a compression scheme. We'd have to come up with an escape sequence for "1" and "2", but that's not a big deal. This only makes sense if we are using "By Land" and "By Sea" a lot.
Yes, I have indexes that are larger then the dataset (actually, as a general rule, I don't I have several indexes on a single table which total more then the dataset, but I don't believe any single index is larger then the dataset). With Oracle if you have only one index, and it encompasses all the fields (probably the only easy way to have it take more space the the original), you can just create an IOT (Index Organzied Table). Then the data is the index, and the index is the data. I'd do it, but the version of Oracle we run is fairly buggy with respect to IOT (it's a legacy Oracle8i DB).
Kirby
That was back in the day, when you had to read the Makefiles and add and remove the appropriate "-D" options to get all sorts of fun stuff. Slack was lots of fun. I'm really happy I cut my teeth on it, but goodness, I don't have the time to track security flaws any more. I'll happily let RedHat, Fedora Foundation, or Debian tell me when there is a patch I need to be worried about. I still hand hack all my config files. Sometimes, I hand hack the RedHat specific config files, but I still read all the scripts and know all the commands to boot strap a machine from scratch if I really need to.
Kirby
Depending on how specialized your data is, it might be a net win to do exactly that. However, compressing arbitrary sets of data that obviously won't work. For most general compression methods the amount of randomness (which I'm more used to being referred to as entropy), what you are saying is accurate (that's true of gzip and bzip2 for example).
Read up on history of the American Revolution (I'm from the US, I have no idea if you are). Sometimes, 1 means "They are attacking by land", and 2 means "They are attacking by sea". Seems like a fine compression algorithm given the dataset they had to compress.
The answer to the posters original question, is that assuming all combinations of the alphabet symbols are equally likely, or that all valid input possibilities are equally likely, you can't compress the data at all. Compression depends upon non-uniform nature of the input (which is really what entropy means). However, your concept that it depends upon a singular input is wrong headed (there are lots of compression methods for which that is true, however, he's speaking strictly in the theoretical, not in the practical). It depends on the nature of all inputs and arranging that the most common inputs get re-encoded as shorter outputs. For lots of generic compression methods, that has a lot to do with entropy. I know you can compress english text much more then either gzip or bzip2 can. It's the basis of Andrew Tridgell's Ph.d thesis, I believe you can download it off his site. I believe this is a link to it.
Kirby
You can't commit a felony by breaking a contract. You can be found in breach of contract in a civil court for breaking a contract. You go to court to have a them help figure out what the restitution for failure to comply with the contract. A lot of the times, the penalites are spelled out in the contract.
So, being charged with a felony has absolutely nothing to do with any type of paperwork you or your parents signed. In order to be charged with a crime, you have to violate a criminal law.
There are so many silly laws about computers, that I won't be shocked to find out that there is some law that could be used against someone who isn't supposed to gains administrative access to a computer.
Kirby