Well, all things considered (that this was his return trip, that he gave prior notice, that he is one of the foremost researchers in his field), they should have taken his word for it. What's your argument to the contrary?
and there's no reason why airport security should take your word for what you're concealing.
Huh? So airport security is to behave like everybody is a criminal or a terrorist? The airport is not Gaza is it? If it comes to that the terrorists really will have won.
The reason why you cannot put liability on a piece of software is the same why you cannot use a single benchmark to predict the performance of a whole system.
Code has to be run before any bugs in the code can manifest themselves. The bugs only turn into damage when the code is deployed. In addition, the same code in another deployment might not cause any damage. Therefore, you cannot hold a programmer responsible for bugs. You can only hold him liable for damages done through bugs.
When software bugs cause damage, that implies the software was being run, probably doing something useful, perhaps operating on valuable data. The software breaks *because* it is part of a workflow, part of a system.
This is when you can hold liable the person that sold you the *system*. Some people, notably IBM, will do this.
HOWEVER, if you download and install applications willy-nilly, and play games, and don't reboot properly, and thus proceed to *construct your own system*, then *you* are liable.
What people do not realize, is that by dragging icons and windows across the screen, they are picking the fruits of over 40 years of work by other programmers, who made programming a computer as easy as dragging icons and windows across the screen.
Nice post. The demise of personal aviation is a nice example because flying has so many connotations with freedom. It will be interesting to see how well the computer, as one of the more recent inventions to bring great freedom to the people, can withstand the assault.
No, it doesn't hold for authentication purposes either. Because if you end up logged in, that means that somebody else won't be able to log in using the designated key for that transaction, which means you can't snoop that transaction. The one time pad is one time.
Oh christ, deja-vu all over again. For those of you who don't know, the above is a classical Mac user post. Mac people always hope for a "magic bullet".
The "Altivec promise" is an old hag. When the G4 first arrived Mac people speculated for months about the ways in which Altivec would magically cure their performance ailments. The mantra then was, "Everything will become much faster once Altivec became integrated into the system libraries!". Of course the expected huge performance improvements never materialized, remaining isolated to a few miracle cases. Then the hubbub died down a bit after Intel hit 1GHz.
Now we're a few years down the road and the Altivec rabbit pops out of the hat again. Let's examine why it won't fly this time around either.
In order to get better performance for any particular task using Altivec, you need to change the program that performs the task or the system libraries that help perform the task. Because I'm sure RedHat doesn't care to maintain Altivec patches for xmms, mpg123, xanim, mplayer, SDL, etcetera, they would want to start optimizing the kernel and the system libraries. Now one task that Altivec performs well, that most users care about, is audio/video processing. What Apple did, for example, was optimize parts of the QuickTime library, and indeed, this gives a huge speedup for some operations. The problem? You don't have a library like QuickTime on Linux. Sure, you have libpng, and libimlib, and libaudiofile, and a thousand variants, but nothing unified and comprehensive like QuickTime. So unless RedHat maintains lots of very specialized patches to a large number of audio/video related libraries and applications, the average user won't see much of a speedup.
What remains are some relatively minor optimizations in the standard C library and a few kernel optimizations. Those will help; but the huge performance improvements that will unleash the "full power of the PPC chips" will generally have to wait until very specific routines in specific applications are rewritten.
The bottom line being of course that the "full power of the PPC chips" is just not that impressive.
On what planet do home users hirer programs to fix their apps?
They don't, and that's part of the problem. Just like you can get people to look at your car you can have people to look at your software.
The fact that you cannot even imagine how this might work shows how successfull the past two decades of Intel/Microsoft duopoly have been in establishing total control. Free software is about taking it back.
Write your own Perl script to extract the data you need. "Unmaintainable! Dangerous!"? Well, maybe. In principle. But look at it. How many data sources do you really need? How often do these data sources change their layout? Remember, changing their layout costs them too. How many people could you potentially help with your service? How many of them would be willing to pay you a small fee? Would all of that warrant maybe a few days of work every three months or so?
Even if you only keep it running for a few years it'll still have been good value.
I never liked Star Wars. I don't even remember the movies, except for the ugly outfits (the stormtrooper tenue is passable).
Now there are lots of people here who like Star Wars. So I don't want to start a Star Wars is good/bad type of thing. The point is, I don't like the series, I ignore it, to each his own, yadda yadda. Then on the other hand you have the people who like it, who watch it, and (figuring from the comments), for the most part are disappointed with it. Especially with Jar Jar Binks. People really hate Jar Jar Binks, and will go to great lengths detailing the precise nature of their discontent with Jar Jar Binks.
Now the funny thing is that all this hubbub is fast making Jar Jar Binks into the most memorable character in the second Star Wars series. In fifteen years time, we'll all be going "Remember Jar Jar?" - "Yeah, he was horrible.". I mean I could care less about Star Wars and Death Stars, but I do know that Jar Jar Binks is a character to loathe. Jar Jar may have been a creative mistake, a creative disaster even, but you have to respect commercial genius.
Re:Why does style have to be masculine?
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iMac LCD Impostors
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· Score: 1
Please. It's a computer. It's asexual.
Everything is sexual. Maybe you're asexual. I mean with you not recognizing these things.
Yuch. Different strokes for different folks indeed.
Re:Low end laptops are tough...
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Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 1
40 megs of RAM? That might cut it.
Re:Low end laptops are tough...
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Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 1
Only, none of this is true. Linux doesn't run very well at all on modest hardware. Try it. Try running GNOME and Galeon on a 233MHz laptop. Then try Windows 95. You'll find that the Linux installation is much slower than the Windows installation.
I'm not sure where the myth that Linux runs well on low-end hardware came from. Even if this may have been the case in the past, it is not true anymore. Really. Try it.
So then conduct your search queries using Google. And not using Netscape. Which is what you do, when you use Netscape's search facilities. What the fuck is the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
- Why would he be a hijacker?
- That's true, there is not much information on that.
- Presumably he told them. They might have believed him. It's not like they didn't know. They just didn't care.
- I think I'll find your 99.99999% figure is out of thin air.
That said, I suppose it is inevitable that these things happen.Well, all things considered (that this was his return trip, that he gave prior notice, that he is one of the foremost researchers in his field), they should have taken his word for it. What's your argument to the contrary?
They don't build 'em like that anymore.
Code has to be run before any bugs in the code can manifest themselves. The bugs only turn into damage when the code is deployed. In addition, the same code in another deployment might not cause any damage. Therefore, you cannot hold a programmer responsible for bugs. You can only hold him liable for damages done through bugs.
When software bugs cause damage, that implies the software was being run, probably doing something useful, perhaps operating on valuable data. The software breaks *because* it is part of a workflow, part of a system.
This is when you can hold liable the person that sold you the *system*. Some people, notably IBM, will do this.
HOWEVER, if you download and install applications willy-nilly, and play games, and don't reboot properly, and thus proceed to *construct your own system*, then *you* are liable.
What people do not realize, is that by dragging icons and windows across the screen, they are picking the fruits of over 40 years of work by other programmers, who made programming a computer as easy as dragging icons and windows across the screen.
Nice post. The demise of personal aviation is a nice example because flying has so many connotations with freedom. It will be interesting to see how well the computer, as one of the more recent inventions to bring great freedom to the people, can withstand the assault.
No, it doesn't hold for authentication purposes either. Because if you end up logged in, that means that somebody else won't be able to log in using the designated key for that transaction, which means you can't snoop that transaction. The one time pad is one time.
Vivendi will die for sure.
+10 Delivery
But then how will they intimidate us?
And in a while, it will be subdermal.
The whole idea of the state tagging its citizens like cattle is revolting.
The "Altivec promise" is an old hag. When the G4 first arrived Mac people speculated for months about the ways in which Altivec would magically cure their performance ailments. The mantra then was, "Everything will become much faster once Altivec became integrated into the system libraries!". Of course the expected huge performance improvements never materialized, remaining isolated to a few miracle cases. Then the hubbub died down a bit after Intel hit 1GHz.
Now we're a few years down the road and the Altivec rabbit pops out of the hat again. Let's examine why it won't fly this time around either.
In order to get better performance for any particular task using Altivec, you need to change the program that performs the task or the system libraries that help perform the task. Because I'm sure RedHat doesn't care to maintain Altivec patches for xmms, mpg123, xanim, mplayer, SDL, etcetera, they would want to start optimizing the kernel and the system libraries. Now one task that Altivec performs well, that most users care about, is audio/video processing. What Apple did, for example, was optimize parts of the QuickTime library, and indeed, this gives a huge speedup for some operations. The problem? You don't have a library like QuickTime on Linux. Sure, you have libpng, and libimlib, and libaudiofile, and a thousand variants, but nothing unified and comprehensive like QuickTime. So unless RedHat maintains lots of very specialized patches to a large number of audio/video related libraries and applications, the average user won't see much of a speedup.
What remains are some relatively minor optimizations in the standard C library and a few kernel optimizations. Those will help; but the huge performance improvements that will unleash the "full power of the PPC chips" will generally have to wait until very specific routines in specific applications are rewritten.
The bottom line being of course that the "full power of the PPC chips" is just not that impressive.
The fact that you cannot even imagine how this might work shows how successfull the past two decades of Intel/Microsoft duopoly have been in establishing total control. Free software is about taking it back.
Use Galeon, it has fullscreen mode and it's based on Mozilla.
Even if you only keep it running for a few years it'll still have been good value.
The point is, would you shake hands with a man who frequents alt.sex.deep-fisting?
Now there are lots of people here who like Star Wars. So I don't want to start a Star Wars is good/bad type of thing. The point is, I don't like the series, I ignore it, to each his own, yadda yadda. Then on the other hand you have the people who like it, who watch it, and (figuring from the comments), for the most part are disappointed with it. Especially with Jar Jar Binks. People really hate Jar Jar Binks, and will go to great lengths detailing the precise nature of their discontent with Jar Jar Binks.
Now the funny thing is that all this hubbub is fast making Jar Jar Binks into the most memorable character in the second Star Wars series. In fifteen years time, we'll all be going "Remember Jar Jar?" - "Yeah, he was horrible.". I mean I could care less about Star Wars and Death Stars, but I do know that Jar Jar Binks is a character to loathe. Jar Jar may have been a creative mistake, a creative disaster even, but you have to respect commercial genius.
Everything is sexual. Maybe you're asexual. I mean with you not recognizing these things.
... for a change.
Yuch. Different strokes for different folks indeed.
40 megs of RAM? That might cut it.
I'm not sure where the myth that Linux runs well on low-end hardware came from. Even if this may have been the case in the past, it is not true anymore. Really. Try it.
So then conduct your search queries using Google. And not using Netscape. Which is what you do, when you use Netscape's search facilities. What the fuck is the problem.