kill -9? Try taskkill/F/PID [pid] sometime. And if you don't know your WinXP processes by PID, try tasklist for a list of 'em. Oh, right... this is only in XP Pro. Remember that, in case you're running XP Home -- you have to get third party tools for the "little" Windows.
Actually, there is *some* power in the Windows commandline, it's just poorly documented, and more poorly understood. Too bad it's still missing grep, sed, and awk (though there is "find" for some grep-like tasks).
So what... you think there was a board meeting where they decided to cut out a bunch of countries because they didn't want "those people" to get the money?
No, my guess is that there are legal issues. Google is probably limiting the field because of numerous problems that only the lawyers really understand. I'm sure they're not intentionally excluding countries that produce great coders. Besides, if you come from an ineligible country, you can still play -- but your prize goes to charity. You might still get a job offer though =).
Moreover, they said, paper ballots can be tampered with more easily than electronic ones, and they're harder to tabulate.
Sorry, don't believe that. A few locations in memory are easier to change than thousands of paper ballots. Hanging chads notwithstanding...
Interestingly enough, I was challenged on the idea of electronic cash when I was making a very similar argument. After researching some of the various cryptographic schemes for electronic cash, I came to the conclusion that if some of them were implemented in a fashion that remained true to the mathematics, it would actually be impossible to undetectably alter all those cute little bits.
The idea is this: sure, someone could change bits, but the system would know if those bits were changed. The protocol can be designed in such a way as to reliably detect any tampering, and even preserve anonymity. It is possible, for example, to determine that one person voted twice with mathematical certainty, discount the earliest vote, and yet keep the identity of the illegal voter secret.
Pick up a copy of Bruce Scheiner's "Applied Cryptography" and read through the sections on cryptographically secure voting protocols. They exist and are in use in different arenas. The cool part is that, even if you *could* alter bits in some machine somewhere, depending on which protocol is chosen, it wouldn't help you any.
If you're going to try to be informative, at least be accurate. There's no such thing as a "gigaflop". That would mean "Billions of Floating point Operations Per..." without the unit of time.
It's a gigaflops (singular). The 's' is very important. It's how we know how long it takes to perform a billion floating point operations.
It's like when people say "I had my engine up to 6000 rpms". What's an rpms? Is it a plural rpm? If so, what is pluralized? The acronym expansion yields "revolutions per minute", so would it be "revolutionses per minute", "revolutions per minutes", or "revolutions per minutes"s? None of 'em make sense. Technically, anything that revolves revolves at 6000 revolutions per some number of minutes... oi.
The Earth rotates at 6000rpms... if the unit of time is in blocks of 8640000 minutes... This type of confusion is why the time unit in our units of speed is usually unity.
Okay, I recognize the value of doing this (as a hobbyist myself). The fortitude required to accomplish such a feat is noteworthy. However, I have noticed a strange trend in these kinds of posts on Slashdot. Why do so many people respond with comments like, "I didn't know it could be done!"?.
Technically, all of these languages are mathematically reducible to Turing machines. Thus, they are all *technically* able to perform the same tasks (ok, sure, you might have to extend your interpreter/compiler to handle things like syscalls, but hey, it's within the scope of reasonability). We could effectively use any programming language to produce any program. If the first web server is written in C, then by mathematical extension, we know that it could also be written in Perl, Forth, Fortran, and even BASIC. The difference is just that it might be a royal pain.
I don't mean to denigrate the work this guy did -- in fact I'm amazed that he did it. But I'm not amazed *that it's possible*.
What should elicit such responses? If the guy wrote a web server in HTML (a markup language). That is theoretically impossible. There are all kinds of languages that are not reducible to Turing machines -- make a web server using nothing but regular expressions and *I'll* say "Wow, I didn't know that was possible!"
-Josh O-
Re:"Standard language is just a dialect with an ar
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Ok, gotta' quote this:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
My Compaq 2105US (vintage 2003) came with an actual Windows XP Home disc. I can, for example, use it to install Windows XP Home and stuff. It says "OS Disc" on it. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to see it, as I was expecting a disc or two with an image and an autopilot "dd" equivalent.
Technically, viruses and trojans will never prompt OS vendors to produce "better" products. This is because a virus or trojan does not necessarily take advantage of OS flaws. This trojan, for example, looks for existing backdoors and takes advantage of them. BAT.mumu and W32.deborm, of recent fame, attacked weak passwords (not weak OSs).
The *concept* of a trojan or virus implies that an idiot user invokes it. If it's the idiot user that introduces the malicious code to the system, then how is that an OS flaw? Is it a flawed OS that lets you run a program?
Viruses and trojans attack social weaknesses -- idiot users that execute attachments in Email, have weak passwords, or download programs from arbitrary web sites.
A year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes (365.2424 Universal days)*.
Ok, so this is slightly off-topic, but if we're going to be nitpicky about these sorts of things, we should remember what we don't know.
Actually, the year is not precisely 365.2424 days long. In point of fact, even the most noble attempt at implementing the Gregorian calendar (Finland, apparently), is successful enough to *round* a year to 365.2424 years. However, the avowed purpose of the Gregorian calendar was focused around the necessity of ensuring that Easter comes at the same time each year. The most rigorous Gregorian calendar in the world still only manages to keep Easter within a 24-hour period. The more "typical" "Gregorian" calendar (which is technically referred to as the "Western" calendar), seen outside of the Catholic church of Finland is only able to guarantee consistency within a 53-hour range.
The point of the matter is that our calendars assume that 365.2424 is the correct number of days for a year, but that number was chosen in order to keep the equinoxes in their proper places. The true solar year can be measured elsewise as 365.2422 days (known as the "mean solar year"). This second measurement apparently (I don't know all the details) takes into account what is often referred to as the "anomalistic" year.
The calendar by which we live is wholly a solar-adjusted calendar, as we are concerned with keeping our equinoxes in line. The *true* Gregorian calendar (as implemented by the Catholic Church of Finland) is technically a luni-solar-adjusted calendar, in which there are additional adjustments on the "Metonic" cycle of 19 years. This (again, "apparently") keeps our moon cycles in tune with our calendar as well as the equinoxes.
As one might imagine, there is not a great deal of published literature on this topic on the web. Most of it is contained in musty books that may not have been checked out of your local library since the years started with an 18. However, for one available online reference, check out http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce030499.html
I'm guessing you were somewhat computer literate when you downloaded those 50 floppies too, eh? For those of us who have computed so long that our brains work like stack-machines, sure, a 'pop-the-hood and tweak' distribution is just fine for learning. But for someone who's just tired of Windows locking up and wants to surf and check their email, should they have to delve into the arcane mysteries of a (admit it) complex operating system? I don't think so.
I am not convinced, unlike many others, that Linux obligates someone to become an incredible super-ultra-uber-geek. I am astounded at the lack of computer literacy some people are willing to live with but -- read that carefully -- they are willing to live with it! For those for whom the computer is a utility and not a lifestyle, let's let them use it it that way. There is no "proper" way to learn Linux.
Maybe she's a princess because her father runs (ran) Aldaraan... Remember in the VIth episode (Roman numerals rock) she doesn't even remember her mother except that she was beautiful... She's grown up in a royal family all her life thinking she was the daughter of the ruler of Aldaraan.
-Josh O-
A Beowulf cluster implies commodity hardware (otherwise, it's a cluster-o'-workstations or a supercomputer). I don't think that this new technology comes anywhere close to your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
kill -9? Try taskkill /F /PID [pid] sometime. And if you don't know your WinXP processes by PID, try tasklist for a list of 'em. Oh, right... this is only in XP Pro. Remember that, in case you're running XP Home -- you have to get third party tools for the "little" Windows.
Actually, there is *some* power in the Windows commandline, it's just poorly documented, and more poorly understood. Too bad it's still missing grep, sed, and awk (though there is "find" for some grep-like tasks).
Just my $0.02.
-Josh O-
So what... you think there was a board meeting where they decided to cut out a bunch of countries because they didn't want "those people" to get the money?
No, my guess is that there are legal issues. Google is probably limiting the field because of numerous problems that only the lawyers really understand. I'm sure they're not intentionally excluding countries that produce great coders. Besides, if you come from an ineligible country, you can still play -- but your prize goes to charity. You might still get a job offer though =).
-Josh O-
Moreover, they said, paper ballots can be tampered with more easily than electronic ones, and they're harder to tabulate.
Sorry, don't believe that. A few locations in memory are easier to change than thousands of paper ballots. Hanging chads notwithstanding...
Interestingly enough, I was challenged on the idea of electronic cash when I was making a very similar argument. After researching some of the various cryptographic schemes for electronic cash, I came to the conclusion that if some of them were implemented in a fashion that remained true to the mathematics, it would actually be impossible to undetectably alter all those cute little bits.
The idea is this: sure, someone could change bits, but the system would know if those bits were changed. The protocol can be designed in such a way as to reliably detect any tampering, and even preserve anonymity. It is possible, for example, to determine that one person voted twice with mathematical certainty, discount the earliest vote, and yet keep the identity of the illegal voter secret.
Pick up a copy of Bruce Scheiner's "Applied Cryptography" and read through the sections on cryptographically secure voting protocols. They exist and are in use in different arenas. The cool part is that, even if you *could* alter bits in some machine somewhere, depending on which protocol is chosen, it wouldn't help you any.
-Josh O-
If you're going to try to be informative, at least be accurate. There's no such thing as a "gigaflop". That would mean "Billions of Floating point Operations Per..." without the unit of time.
It's a gigaflops (singular). The 's' is very important. It's how we know how long it takes to perform a billion floating point operations.
It's like when people say "I had my engine up to 6000 rpms". What's an rpms? Is it a plural rpm? If so, what is pluralized? The acronym expansion yields "revolutions per minute", so would it be "revolutionses per minute", "revolutions per minutes", or "revolutions per minutes"s? None of 'em make sense. Technically, anything that revolves revolves at 6000 revolutions per some number of minutes... oi.
The Earth rotates at 6000rpms... if the unit of time is in blocks of 8640000 minutes... This type of confusion is why the time unit in our units of speed is usually unity.
-Josh O-
Okay, I recognize the value of doing this (as a hobbyist myself). The fortitude required to accomplish such a feat is noteworthy. However, I have noticed a strange trend in these kinds of posts on Slashdot. Why do so many people respond with comments like, "I didn't know it could be done!"?.
Technically, all of these languages are mathematically reducible to Turing machines. Thus, they are all *technically* able to perform the same tasks (ok, sure, you might have to extend your interpreter/compiler to handle things like syscalls, but hey, it's within the scope of reasonability). We could effectively use any programming language to produce any program. If the first web server is written in C, then by mathematical extension, we know that it could also be written in Perl, Forth, Fortran, and even BASIC. The difference is just that it might be a royal pain.
I don't mean to denigrate the work this guy did -- in fact I'm amazed that he did it. But I'm not amazed *that it's possible*.
What should elicit such responses? If the guy wrote a web server in HTML (a markup language). That is theoretically impossible. There are all kinds of languages that are not reducible to Turing machines -- make a web server using nothing but regular expressions and *I'll* say "Wow, I didn't know that was possible!"
-Josh O-
Ok, gotta' quote this:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spellingby Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Umm...
My Compaq 2105US (vintage 2003) came with an actual Windows XP Home disc. I can, for example, use it to install Windows XP Home and stuff. It says "OS Disc" on it. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to see it, as I was expecting a disc or two with an image and an autopilot "dd" equivalent.
-Josh O-
Dude,
Technically, viruses and trojans will never prompt OS vendors to produce "better" products. This is because a virus or trojan does not necessarily take advantage of OS flaws. This trojan, for example, looks for existing backdoors and takes advantage of them. BAT.mumu and W32.deborm, of recent fame, attacked weak passwords (not weak OSs).
The *concept* of a trojan or virus implies that an idiot user invokes it. If it's the idiot user that introduces the malicious code to the system, then how is that an OS flaw? Is it a flawed OS that lets you run a program?
Viruses and trojans attack social weaknesses -- idiot users that execute attachments in Email, have weak passwords, or download programs from arbitrary web sites.
-Josh O-
A year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes (365.2424 Universal days)*.
Ok, so this is slightly off-topic, but if we're going to be nitpicky about these sorts of things, we should remember what we don't know.
Actually, the year is not precisely 365.2424 days long. In point of fact, even the most noble attempt at implementing the Gregorian calendar (Finland, apparently), is successful enough to *round* a year to 365.2424 years. However, the avowed purpose of the Gregorian calendar was focused around the necessity of ensuring that Easter comes at the same time each year. The most rigorous Gregorian calendar in the world still only manages to keep Easter within a 24-hour period. The more "typical" "Gregorian" calendar (which is technically referred to as the "Western" calendar), seen outside of the Catholic church of Finland is only able to guarantee consistency within a 53-hour range.
The point of the matter is that our calendars assume that 365.2424 is the correct number of days for a year, but that number was chosen in order to keep the equinoxes in their proper places. The true solar year can be measured elsewise as 365.2422 days (known as the "mean solar year"). This second measurement apparently (I don't know all the details) takes into account what is often referred to as the "anomalistic" year.
The calendar by which we live is wholly a solar-adjusted calendar, as we are concerned with keeping our equinoxes in line. The *true* Gregorian calendar (as implemented by the Catholic Church of Finland) is technically a luni-solar-adjusted calendar, in which there are additional adjustments on the "Metonic" cycle of 19 years. This (again, "apparently") keeps our moon cycles in tune with our calendar as well as the equinoxes.
As one might imagine, there is not a great deal of published literature on this topic on the web. Most of it is contained in musty books that may not have been checked out of your local library since the years started with an 18. However, for one available online reference, check out http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce030499.html
Just FYI.
Josh O
Try the -w flag... "disable word-wrap".
There's mouse support too (kind of a hack though), try -m.
-Josh O-
I'm guessing you were somewhat computer literate when you downloaded those 50 floppies too, eh? For those of us who have computed so long that our brains work like stack-machines, sure, a 'pop-the-hood and tweak' distribution is just fine for learning. But for someone who's just tired of Windows locking up and wants to surf and check their email, should they have to delve into the arcane mysteries of a (admit it) complex operating system? I don't think so.
I am not convinced, unlike many others, that Linux obligates someone to become an incredible super-ultra-uber-geek. I am astounded at the lack of computer literacy some people are willing to live with but -- read that carefully -- they are willing to live with it! For those for whom the computer is a utility and not a lifestyle, let's let them use it it that way. There is no "proper" way to learn Linux.
-Josh O-
Maybe she's a princess because her father runs (ran) Aldaraan... Remember in the VIth episode (Roman numerals rock) she doesn't even remember her mother except that she was beautiful... She's grown up in a royal family all her life thinking she was the daughter of the ruler of Aldaraan. -Josh O-
A Beowulf cluster implies commodity hardware (otherwise, it's a cluster-o'-workstations or a supercomputer). I don't think that this new technology comes anywhere close to your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart shelf.
-Josh O-