I love the sweet smell of desperation. From the letter in question (strong tag mine):
Bob worked on the project for (I think) 4 to 6 months during which time he looked at the Linux kernel, and a large number of libraries and utilities and compared them with several different vesrions of AT&T UNIX source code. (Most of this work was automated using tools which were designed to to fuzzy matching and ignore trivial differences in formatting and spelling)
At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.
What's different is that Windows has a "delete" function while Unix has an "unlink" function. In Unix, a file doesn't get truly deleted until all references to it are gone, including open file handles. Try creating a 2GB file in/tmp, writing a simple program to open it and sleep forever, then deleting it with rm. You won't get your space back until the sleeping process exits.
You can also usually crash a running process pretty easily by scribbling over its executable, proving that it's memory-mapped.
To me this makes much more sense than the Microsoft B&D method, which as you mentioned leads to a ton of "Please reboot because I couldn't touch this file" messages. If it worked like Unix, you could simply unlink the old file and (optionally) put a new one in its place without affecting currently running processes. When those processes restarted, they would use the new files.
Of course, spyware and virus authors must love the way MS does it.
10-14 [levels of nesting] isn't too bad, once you learn to balance parens in your sleep (eventually it happens, trust me).
Ever lisper I know, myself included, just looks at the indentation after hitting the "slime-reindent-defun" key in Emacs. The parens are largely there for the language and the editor, not me.
(I also use the balanced sexp editing functions in Emacs, so there are rarely unmatched parens lying about.)
On Lisp is certainly a good book about one particular feature of Common Lisp (macros), but it's not a good introduction to the language.
Frankly, I find both Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming to be much better books on Common Lisp than anything Graham has written. Seibel has excellent practical examples dealing with current technologies, and Norvig's examples cover a very interesting subject matter not usually used when teaching a language.
If you'd bother to actually browse through the book this review is about, you'd find out that all of your points are sadly incorrect.
Or don't, if you'd prefer - nobody's got a gun to your head forcing you to learn anything new.
I have a Sanyo 8200 with Sprint, and have their Vision "Unlimited" data plan.
It's my understanding that this setup will work under Linux. The 8200 is effectively the same as an 8100 for data access purposes.
Note that this plan is not really "unlimited". If you use too much bandwidth they will come down on you. Also, using it with a computer is "not allowed", they want you to buy a real data plan for that. However, it works anyway!
This setup has worked well for my needs (mostly voice service with occasional Internet access both from the phone and on a laptop). YMMV.
www.sprintusers.com are very active user forums where issues like this are discussed.
100 feet is an insanely small amount of space in the vertical. A thunderstorm can produce insane updrafts and downdrafts that a small plane cannot overcome:
Updrafts at the base vary from 400 to 1200 fpm and reach up to 4000 fpm at the equilibrium level. Vertical gusts of more than 10,000 fpm have been reported. Downdrafts are usually around half the updraft speeds, and extreme downdrafts of 5000 fpm have been reported.
Current FAA regulations put VFR pilots (those flying visually) at headings from 0-179 magnetic at {3500,5500,7500,..} feet, and those from 180-359 at {4500,6500,8500,...} feet. The even thousands are used for ATC-controlled IFR (instrument) flight.
It's unlikely tighter tolerances than that would ever be safe even with the most advanced computer control, simply because you will not be able to outclimb microburts and such.
Not all things involving computers and bits have been measured in binary multiples.
Network speeds have always been done in decimal. 10base{5,2,T} = 10 Mb = 10,000,000 bits per second. And Ethernet (in its 10base5 Thicknet variant) is old, dating from 1972. It's not just greedy hard disk manyfacturers.
I don't have a problem with disambiguating them. I just wish the names weren't as stupid. (MiB is okay, but mebibyte?!)
House rules?
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And for the record - flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me. Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races.
If they irritate you, change the rules. One of the things a good GM needs to do is to keep the game from becoming too cheezy. If they players are abusing the rules, nerf them! The 3rd Edition Harm spell is a perfect example of something that desperately needs it.
In my opinion, rules like flanking and attacks of opportunity add a whole lot more tactical depth to the combat without slowing it down much. It's certainly more fun than combat in old D&D.
I'm kind of surprised the Google calculator doesn't use the SI prefixes - they seem pretty interested in correctness elsewhere. (I realize that using SI prefixes for data storage is a pretty recent and controversial definition of "correctness." Still, google has mebibytes and gibibytes in the calculator, so you'd think a megabyte would be different.)
As long as you're running in a virtual machine (or even on real hardware) you might as well crank the timer interrupts up by a factor of, well, as much as you can, without telling the OS about it. That combined with forcing the process to take 100% CPU somehow should work quite well for getting the hours up fast. Combine with clever transparent proxying to send all mail to a local bit bucket (that looks suspiciously like an SMTP server) except for its time reporting.
Of course it's probably easier to just reverse engineer how it reports its hours and simply lie.
This is all completely theoretical of course.:)
Yeah, right.
on
Paid To Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Since
They're paying by CPU time
Sending mail is by nature completely I/O bound
Computers are really really fast these days
They're not paying anyone until they build up $50
It's almost a certainty that they will never have to pay anyone anything before they are put out of business. It would take months if not years to build up fifty hours of CPU time sending mail over a cable modem. And if they actually manage to hook someone with a rediculously large pipe, they're getting their money's worth in spades.
This is a brilliant scam for people who don't know what CPU time means.
Well, a locomotive's air horn has the "peculiar quality" of being many times louder than a car's horn, so that's probably why you don't hear far away car horns at night.:)
(Train geekiness follows: Trains haven't normally had "whistles" since the age of steam locomotives. They were quite loud, and could range from pleasant to shrill. Some of the later steam locomotives actually had an air horn as well to use in populated areas. Steam whistles make a little bit of noise when used with normal compressed air pressure, but they don't really work, which is why they switched to horns.)
I think it's quite imprecise writing for the article to state (several times, for POWER4 and the PowerPC 970) that they "can process 200 instructions at once at speeds of up to 2 GHz." That makes it sound like they can finish 200 instructions at once, which is silly. I imagine what they really mean is that there can be up to 200 instructions in flight in the pipeline at a time.
(Which is great until you mispredict a branch, of course.:-)
Generally, it's the law that it is a car. It's not pretending. It's also generally illegal to ride on the sidewalk - that's really dangerous to pedestrians.
The bicyclists on the road who are putting themselves in danger are the ones who don't follow all of the traffic signals like a car, or ride at night without a headlight and taillight.
Even more fun and games can be had when trying to ride your bicycle where there are car-and-button activated lights. Since you're riding your bicycle on the street like you should, and not the sidewalk, you can't hit the pedestrian button to make the lights change. But since you're on the side of the street you're not in the right place to set off the car sensing loop, and your bike doesn't have enough metal to make it go anyway.
So you wind up having to get off the bike, walk to the pedestrian button, hit it, get back on, and wait. Given this, I wish everything worked like New York in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
08048000-080b8000 r-xp 00000000 03:0a 171032
080b8000-080be000 rw-p 0006f000 03:0a 171032
What's different is that Windows has a "delete" function while Unix has an "unlink" function. In Unix, a file doesn't get truly deleted until all references to it are gone, including open file handles. Try creating a 2GB file in /tmp, writing a simple program to open it and sleep forever, then deleting it with rm. You won't get your space back until the sleeping process exits.
You can also usually crash a running process pretty easily by scribbling over its executable, proving that it's memory-mapped.
To me this makes much more sense than the Microsoft B&D method, which as you mentioned leads to a ton of "Please reboot because I couldn't touch this file" messages. If it worked like Unix, you could simply unlink the old file and (optionally) put a new one in its place without affecting currently running processes. When those processes restarted, they would use the new files.
Of course, spyware and virus authors must love the way MS does it.
I think they're just filled with dirt, as can be seen in the test article here.
Ever lisper I know, myself included, just looks at the indentation after hitting the "slime-reindent-defun" key in Emacs. The parens are largely there for the language and the editor, not me.
(I also use the balanced sexp editing functions in Emacs, so there are rarely unmatched parens lying about.)
Frankly, I find both Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming to be much better books on Common Lisp than anything Graham has written. Seibel has excellent practical examples dealing with current technologies, and Norvig's examples cover a very interesting subject matter not usually used when teaching a language.
If you'd bother to actually browse through the book this review is about, you'd find out that all of your points are sadly incorrect. Or don't, if you'd prefer - nobody's got a gun to your head forcing you to learn anything new.
The usual abbreviation is "PP-ASEL", meaning "Private Pilot, Airplane, Single-Engine, Land".
Close only counts in horseshoes and really big fast rocks... okay, only horseshoes.
It seems to be gone now, sadly, but the Bungie "Mac Action Pack" had all three Marathons, amongst other things, for $10 when I got it.
Let's say you had to preload a gigabyte of data. At the default LVM chunksize of 32MB, that's 33 seeks, assuming an unaligned start.
On an typical hard disk (10ms average seek) that's an average of 0.33 seconds of wasted time. You still win big.
It's my understanding that this setup will work under Linux. The 8200 is effectively the same as an 8100 for data access purposes.
Note that this plan is not really "unlimited". If you use too much bandwidth they will come down on you. Also, using it with a computer is "not allowed", they want you to buy a real data plan for that. However, it works anyway!
This setup has worked well for my needs (mostly voice service with occasional Internet access both from the phone and on a laptop). YMMV.
www.sprintusers.com are very active user forums where issues like this are discussed.
Current FAA regulations put VFR pilots (those flying visually) at headings from 0-179 magnetic at {3500,5500,7500,..} feet, and those from 180-359 at {4500,6500,8500,...} feet. The even thousands are used for ATC-controlled IFR (instrument) flight.
It's unlikely tighter tolerances than that would ever be safe even with the most advanced computer control, simply because you will not be able to outclimb microburts and such.
Network speeds have always been done in decimal. 10base{5,2,T} = 10 Mb = 10,000,000 bits per second. And Ethernet (in its 10base5 Thicknet variant) is old, dating from 1972. It's not just greedy hard disk manyfacturers.
I don't have a problem with disambiguating them. I just wish the names weren't as stupid. (MiB is okay, but mebibyte?!)
If they irritate you, change the rules. One of the things a good GM needs to do is to keep the game from becoming too cheezy. If they players are abusing the rules, nerf them! The 3rd Edition Harm spell is a perfect example of something that desperately needs it.
In my opinion, rules like flanking and attacks of opportunity add a whole lot more tactical depth to the combat without slowing it down much. It's certainly more fun than combat in old D&D.
It's the same, that's my point.
I'm kind of surprised the Google calculator doesn't use the SI prefixes - they seem pretty interested in correctness elsewhere. (I realize that using SI prefixes for data storage is a pretty recent and controversial definition of "correctness." Still, google has mebibytes and gibibytes in the calculator, so you'd think a megabyte would be different.)
Actually, the concept of fork(2) really just requires a simple system call. Copy-on-write pages help a lot too, though.
Of course it's probably easier to just reverse engineer how it reports its hours and simply lie.
This is all completely theoretical of course. :)
- They're paying by CPU time
- Sending mail is by nature completely I/O bound
- Computers are really really fast these days
- They're not paying anyone until they build up $50
It's almost a certainty that they will never have to pay anyone anything before they are put out of business. It would take months if not years to build up fifty hours of CPU time sending mail over a cable modem. And if they actually manage to hook someone with a rediculously large pipe, they're getting their money's worth in spades.This is a brilliant scam for people who don't know what CPU time means.
(Smoke Emitting Diode.)
(Train geekiness follows: Trains haven't normally had "whistles" since the age of steam locomotives. They were quite loud, and could range from pleasant to shrill. Some of the later steam locomotives actually had an air horn as well to use in populated areas. Steam whistles make a little bit of noise when used with normal compressed air pressure, but they don't really work, which is why they switched to horns.)
(Which is great until you mispredict a branch, of course. :-)
Generally, it's the law that it is a car. It's not pretending. It's also generally illegal to ride on the sidewalk - that's really dangerous to pedestrians.
See the Chicago Municipal Bicycle Code if you don't believe me.
The bicyclists on the road who are putting themselves in danger are the ones who don't follow all of the traffic signals like a car, or ride at night without a headlight and taillight.
So you wind up having to get off the bike, walk to the pedestrian button, hit it, get back on, and wait. Given this, I wish everything worked like New York in this regard.