You'd have to be pretty good at OSS to avoid overspill on that 4.5 minutes / day that his compassion is allowing. This is marketing, nothing more, it's like "hey, look at us, we're good guys. Sure we make heaps of money but we give an insignificant amount of it back to the community".
My mum lives in Australia on a pension which is, not to put too fine a point on it, very little. She also sponsers a Worldvision child in China for ~$35AUS / month. That's about 7.7% of her monthly pension. This company needs to up the ante by over %700 if it wants to break even with the efforts of a pensioner who is definitely not eating at fine restaurants each night and sleeping on satin sheets.
The cynic in me is going to take notice of the fact that this is still 99% capitolism. No danger of swinging the balance in favour of karma with this sort of contribution. That's like shooting 99 puppies and letting the 100th go free for compassionate reasons.
They probably caught the stupid bugger by checking his MAC Address, which is embedded into the GUIDs which you create using that machine. If he used any COM stuff in his code then he would likely need GUIDs. The GUID creation routines use the MAC Address to prevent collisions from different machines. The rule has always been, they will create a GUID, but will only guarantee it's uniqueness if you have a network card installed.
Once they know the MAC address they can find him by asking all the ISPs to co-operate. The MAC address is used in ARP routing for networking and is how each card is uniqely identified. His ISP would know his MAC address, then all they have to do is turn up and arrest him. Of course, he could have just shot his big mouth off on IRC too e.g. "m3 l337 H4x0r br1ng d0wN teh ev1l M$ c0rp0rat1on...pr41s3 b3 to m3!"
I should have qualified my statement a little better, and I suspect qsort vs bubblesort is not the best illustration possible. Each sort algorithm has strengths and weaknesses e.g. easy to implement but slow to run, ruthlessly difficult to code but fast as hell, good at sorting random data but worst case scenerio on near sorted data. If qsort were always faster than every other algorithm then we wouldn't still be talking about them. QSort is generally faster than most other sorts, and the O(n log n) is an average sort cost, not a gaurantee.
When I was in uni our lecturer gave us an example from the QU campus where he used to lecture. There was a computer (remember, this is back in the eighties) that needed to sort rather a lot of data and it took three days to do it with the qsort algorithm. The main problem was, I believe, due to memory restrictions i.e. all the data could not fit into memory at once. It was recoded to use a different algorithm, one that could work from disk and in small chunks, and ran orders of magnitude faster. The recoded algorithm was theoretically slower, but faster in actuality due to the nature of the data and the machine it had to run on.
The only problem is if we encounter life. Will our machines just assimilate it? Are the ones out there programmed to preserve us? Have they already done so?
My charge out rate at my last company was 1000/day (about $1500USD) so I'm going to say yes to the optimisation in this case, because it is cheaper. If it were going to take me 3-4 days I'd say get the better hardware and try to keep the code as lean and as fast as possible without wasting too much time trying to wring it for performance.
The short answer is maybe. Most of the time when I ask a client if they want me to spend more of their money making a fast routine a little bit faster they say they'd rather more features or to have it delivered on time:-)
The exception however is one quite large client with a single (but beefy) webserver and several SQL Servers attached to it. Time after time the cheapskates refused to upgrade the poor ailing servers so I had three successive rounds of wringing more performance from the beasts. Each time I was able to at least double performance in some area, and usually quadruple or more. This allowed them to keep using the hardware for the full five year expected life, whilst nearly tripling the number of users to their site. As far as I know they still haven't replaced that hardware:-)
When coding anything, msot of the code should be done to be fast
This may be true when you are producing libraries of math routines and similar stuff like you are doing. It doesn't hold an ounce of water when you do the sort of work I do. My projects are generally medium sized, mixed languages, developers of all different skill levels. Code clarity is far more important for 98% of the stuff we do. I need my juniors to be able to follow the code the seniors write, even if they can't write it themselves. The other 2% of the time it's fine to sacrifice clarity for speed to get the performance to an acceptable level on the target platform.
I have generally found that clear code is usually good code, so long as you are aware of the cost implications of your design decisions. For instance, I seem to recall the bubble sort (mentioned earlier) was actually faster than a qsort under some circumstances. Deep data knowledge would help you to make the decision as to which would need to be used...don't just reach for that qsort, it may be the fastest under most cases, but not all.
So does that make them "trusted partners" now, and does that therefore allow them access to your personal data in at least an aggregated form? I'm not and never will be a hotmail user, so I don't know the contents of their license agreement with the users, but I'm not beyond suspecting that MS will soon be selling your data to these spammers so they can target you even better.
MSN does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties. MSN may, from time to time, contact you on behalf of external business partners about a particular offering that may be of interest to you. In those cases, your personal information (e-mail, name, address, telephone number) is not transferred to the third party.
We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. We will only provide those companies the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of your information and are prohibited from using that information for any other purpose.
Yup, I guess it does give them the right to do that.
We will start to see the same sorts of problems I suspect, but the damage will be more limited, most likely only to the user(s) who fell for the hack if it's a social engineering attack. To help mitigate teh problem we need distros to be careful in how they provide the default setup. i.e. use Mozilla instead of IE, built in firewall on each machine using IPTABLES but with a nice interface like Zonealarm or similar. Then, as long as the mail client (I like KMail, but most are pretty damn good) is *not* script enabled it will be done to good old buffer overflows to work their magic. Oh yeh, not installing services unless requested would also be smart, and then perhaps using IPTABLES or hosts.allow to keep the consumers of the services just down to the local private subnet should do the trick for most stuff.
Finally, make sure they use apt-get or similar to automatically update their machine. This could be configured at install or afterwards as the user grows to know their machine. A default install might be to download all security patches and install with only a confirmation from the end user. A power install would just get the patches, but not install until instructed.
Oooh, oooh, just like those moongates in that game...Ultima. Or it could just be an accurate calendar for determining when it's time to plant your crops and harvest them. Modern farming techniques in ancient times? Before you dismiss this bear in mind the Maori people of New Zealand have a fishing calendar which Dad and I used to use to determine when to fish and what fish to try and catch at that time. Lot's of info on google about it or click here if you're lazy.
You can smell Roturua long before you get near a muddy boiling steam vent:-) For those who haven't visited, it smells strongly of sulphur which can be unpleasant when you first arrive but the smell becomes less noticeable after a short while.
Today, most people are satisfied that the sun is a large clump of hydrogen undergoing fusion.
So what, I'm choosing to worship the Sun anyway now that I know the choosen shape of God is a burning mass of hydrogen just strengthens my pagan faith;-)
, we can tell that the harvest is bad on that land not due to a curse, but due to a lack of say nitrogen-compounds and so on.
Damn those cunning witches, they leached the nitrogen from my lands. Burn them!
And it marks a first step from mystism to rationality.
Such a pity the Christians haven't made one yet, since they could do with some rationality;->
I have to agree though, religion has no place in the constitution of Europe. Let the State worry about State matters and the churches worry about spiritual matters.
I was extremely disappointed in RedHat after they killed RH 9.0, leaving me with nothing for the money I paid them. I paid a years subscription to RedHat and recevied only 6 months of updates before being end of lifed. If Microsoft had done this then the outcry on Slashdot would have shaken the heavens. An evaluation copy of an OS that I would then have to pay over $1000 USD to use is no compensation.
I have therefore switched to Debian, which is both more ethical, and IMHO a better distribution. With apt-get to maintain the security and up-to-date-ness of my box, and a long term commitment to the freedom, community and Open Source this is the distribution I should have used from the start. Debian has an undeserved reputation for being difficult to use, but what do RedHat and SuSE really give us on top of Debian? In my experience it was just a slick install and some very crappy admin tools. That's right, I called them crappy. The tools were clunky, prone to error, and not as effective as the text based files they were haphazardly trying to replace. Worse still, all they taught me was how to admin the "RedHat/SuSE" way and I needed to relearn that as I changed from RedHat to Mandrake to SuSE.
I refuse to spend any more time learning a fractured piece of Linux. It's the command line and text based config for me now:-)
Christ man, you were meant to keep the co-ordinates a secret. Now some "scientist" is going to go wake the old ones and unleash their fury upon us. I for one welcome our new Cyclopian masters!
Yep, no question about it, this is how easy it needs to get to work for Joe Average. Of course, Joe Average isn't running a 486 with 64MB of RAM, so he can just ignore my advice to roll his own or use a lighter distro. In fact, I'd be surprised if Joe Average (in the USA at least) isn't working with Pentium III or above and 128MB RAM and above. Linux works just fine on this hardware. I run a full desktop of Debian on a PIII 700 and it flies along happilly, even when I am VNCing to it. If Debian could make itself a little more accessible then I suspect it *could* be good for Joe Average. It has the right basics in place, just needs the spit and polish now.
This is the sort of stuff you should know to interview for a position writing compilers but is definitely over the top for putting together web pages and the like. Out of interest, what position were you interviewing for?
Why not roll your own Linux using the help from the guys at Linux from Scratch. The guide is fantastic and easy to follow. Additionally, you could try rolling a cut down version that fits on a floppy or a mini-cd using the cut down glibc libraries. Linux will still run on very humble hardware, but maybe you shouldn't be expecting a generic desktop install which is meant to be easy for end users to also be ultra lightweight.
They will seem less confusing and incoherent once you watch a few more. If you've been raised on western cinema, especially Hollywood offerings, then you are used to being spoon fed the story with characters actively speaking out the exposition lines e.g. "So this will make the bomb explode in 2 hours instead of three?", "That's right Max, we better drive to this place over there and stop the criminal so we can hear him reveal his master plan after the second curtain.".
The Japanese cinema I've seen requires a bit more work on the part of the viewer but is almost always worth it.
The government has been secretly putting it in our water supply for years in the form of Coca Cola, Mountain Dew, and Jolt. Damn those cunning government agents!
Slashdot Mirror
My mum lives in Australia on a pension which is, not to put too fine a point on it, very little. She also sponsers a Worldvision child in China for ~$35AUS / month. That's about 7.7% of her monthly pension. This company needs to up the ante by over %700 if it wants to break even with the efforts of a pensioner who is definitely not eating at fine restaurants each night and sleeping on satin sheets.
The cynic in me is going to take notice of the fact that this is still 99% capitolism. No danger of swinging the balance in favour of karma with this sort of contribution. That's like shooting 99 puppies and letting the 100th go free for compassionate reasons.
Once they know the MAC address they can find him by asking all the ISPs to co-operate. The MAC address is used in ARP routing for networking and is how each card is uniqely identified. His ISP would know his MAC address, then all they have to do is turn up and arrest him. Of course, he could have just shot his big mouth off on IRC too e.g. "m3 l337 H4x0r br1ng d0wN teh ev1l M$ c0rp0rat1on...pr41s3 b3 to m3!"
When I was in uni our lecturer gave us an example from the QU campus where he used to lecture. There was a computer (remember, this is back in the eighties) that needed to sort rather a lot of data and it took three days to do it with the qsort algorithm. The main problem was, I believe, due to memory restrictions i.e. all the data could not fit into memory at once. It was recoded to use a different algorithm, one that could work from disk and in small chunks, and ran orders of magnitude faster. The recoded algorithm was theoretically slower, but faster in actuality due to the nature of the data and the machine it had to run on.
What do you think happened to the dinosaurs?
Perhaps Michaelson and Morley can give them a hand with this experiment, after all, their ether search went so well.
My charge out rate at my last company was 1000/day (about $1500USD) so I'm going to say yes to the optimisation in this case, because it is cheaper. If it were going to take me 3-4 days I'd say get the better hardware and try to keep the code as lean and as fast as possible without wasting too much time trying to wring it for performance.
The exception however is one quite large client with a single (but beefy) webserver and several SQL Servers attached to it. Time after time the cheapskates refused to upgrade the poor ailing servers so I had three successive rounds of wringing more performance from the beasts. Each time I was able to at least double performance in some area, and usually quadruple or more. This allowed them to keep using the hardware for the full five year expected life, whilst nearly tripling the number of users to their site. As far as I know they still haven't replaced that hardware :-)
This may be true when you are producing libraries of math routines and similar stuff like you are doing. It doesn't hold an ounce of water when you do the sort of work I do. My projects are generally medium sized, mixed languages, developers of all different skill levels. Code clarity is far more important for 98% of the stuff we do. I need my juniors to be able to follow the code the seniors write, even if they can't write it themselves. The other 2% of the time it's fine to sacrifice clarity for speed to get the performance to an acceptable level on the target platform.
I have generally found that clear code is usually good code, so long as you are aware of the cost implications of your design decisions. For instance, I seem to recall the bubble sort (mentioned earlier) was actually faster than a qsort under some circumstances. Deep data knowledge would help you to make the decision as to which would need to be used...don't just reach for that qsort, it may be the fastest under most cases, but not all.
Yup, I guess it does give them the right to do that.
Finally, make sure they use apt-get or similar to automatically update their machine. This could be configured at install or afterwards as the user grows to know their machine. A default install might be to download all security patches and install with only a confirmation from the end user. A power install would just get the patches, but not install until instructed.
Oh stupid me for typing the wrong slashes...try here instead. Oh well, a dose of humiliation before your peers is good for the humility gland.
Can be found here.
Oooh, oooh, just like those moongates in that game...Ultima. Or it could just be an accurate calendar for determining when it's time to plant your crops and harvest them. Modern farming techniques in ancient times? Before you dismiss this bear in mind the Maori people of New Zealand have a fishing calendar which Dad and I used to use to determine when to fish and what fish to try and catch at that time. Lot's of info on google about it or click here if you're lazy.
And in true American fashion you don't even have to get out of your car to view it. Ahh, now that's convenience.
You can smell Roturua long before you get near a muddy boiling steam vent :-) For those who haven't visited, it smells strongly of sulphur which can be unpleasant when you first arrive but the smell becomes less noticeable after a short while.
Today, most people are satisfied that the sun is a large clump of hydrogen undergoing fusion.
So what, I'm choosing to worship the Sun anyway now that I know the choosen shape of God is a burning mass of hydrogen just strengthens my pagan faith ;-)
, we can tell that the harvest is bad on that land not due to a curse, but due to a lack of say nitrogen-compounds and so on.
Damn those cunning witches, they leached the nitrogen from my lands. Burn them!
And it marks a first step from mystism to rationality.
Such a pity the Christians haven't made one yet, since they could do with some rationalityI have to agree though, religion has no place in the constitution of Europe. Let the State worry about State matters and the churches worry about spiritual matters.
I have therefore switched to Debian, which is both more ethical, and IMHO a better distribution. With apt-get to maintain the security and up-to-date-ness of my box, and a long term commitment to the freedom, community and Open Source this is the distribution I should have used from the start. Debian has an undeserved reputation for being difficult to use, but what do RedHat and SuSE really give us on top of Debian? In my experience it was just a slick install and some very crappy admin tools. That's right, I called them crappy. The tools were clunky, prone to error, and not as effective as the text based files they were haphazardly trying to replace. Worse still, all they taught me was how to admin the "RedHat/SuSE" way and I needed to relearn that as I changed from RedHat to Mandrake to SuSE.
I refuse to spend any more time learning a fractured piece of Linux. It's the command line and text based config for me now :-)
Christ man, you were meant to keep the co-ordinates a secret. Now some "scientist" is going to go wake the old ones and unleash their fury upon us. I for one welcome our new Cyclopian masters!
Yep, no question about it, this is how easy it needs to get to work for Joe Average. Of course, Joe Average isn't running a 486 with 64MB of RAM, so he can just ignore my advice to roll his own or use a lighter distro. In fact, I'd be surprised if Joe Average (in the USA at least) isn't working with Pentium III or above and 128MB RAM and above. Linux works just fine on this hardware. I run a full desktop of Debian on a PIII 700 and it flies along happilly, even when I am VNCing to it. If Debian could make itself a little more accessible then I suspect it *could* be good for Joe Average. It has the right basics in place, just needs the spit and polish now.
This is the sort of stuff you should know to interview for a position writing compilers but is definitely over the top for putting together web pages and the like. Out of interest, what position were you interviewing for?
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
return printf("Jorkapp is a \"Programmer\"");
}
Why not roll your own Linux using the help from the guys at Linux from Scratch. The guide is fantastic and easy to follow. Additionally, you could try rolling a cut down version that fits on a floppy or a mini-cd using the cut down glibc libraries. Linux will still run on very humble hardware, but maybe you shouldn't be expecting a generic desktop install which is meant to be easy for end users to also be ultra lightweight.
The Japanese cinema I've seen requires a bit more work on the part of the viewer but is almost always worth it.
The government has been secretly putting it in our water supply for years in the form of Coca Cola, Mountain Dew, and Jolt. Damn those cunning government agents!