In other words, PDFs are not designed for wanton modification. Some of them can be modified, but others cannot. This means that you cannot build a reliable method for converting suspect PDFs into safe PDFs.
I believe the entire point of the original submission was likely to troll this fact; as soon as he/she said that they wanted to do it while transitting a mail gateway, it was either a request for PDF encryption cracking or a troll against Adobe locking down documents in this fashion.
I've personally railed against government agencies being in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act for putting up PDF forms that have to be filled in by loading them into Adobe products, but until someone who has been spearfished for lack of a product capable of doing this without violating the DMCA, nothing's going to change. With the ADA, there are clear, litigious interests groups, with large fat government agency targets. Not so when all you are talking about is companies like Barracuda being essentially frozen out of a market which Adobe is free to compete in on a software basis. But again, you have to be the wronged party.
The ordinary person doesn't give enough of a damn about this sort of thing for public pressure to work, and never will, since they have no idea what constitutes "enough" and would rather watch TV than be lectured to by nerds like us.
Antivirus software sniffs the butt of ever filesystem write operation, as well as sniffing the but of every executable image load, as well as every browser plugin load; it also scans the contents of inbound network data, since it could have a known payload using an unknown zero day in the program requesting the data from the Internet.
Most of the code could be made significantly less overhead, but we are talking reducing it from elephant sized to water buffalo sized, rather than reducing it to mouse size. For example, if instead of checking the whole file when every write occurs, it could prevent the file being opened again until a scan-on-close occurred. Both Outlook and IE would hate that, and any browser that didn't operate "stage then interpret" would still have to be byte-stream interposed. As another example, it could decide to not react to every FS event; MacOS has this capability, since it integrates a mandator access controls (MAC) capability, but many OSs do not. And even on MacOS, most AV vendors don't take advantage of this, since it messes with their ability to use the same event streaming model as on their other platforms.
So: no such animal exists, if you want it to also be effective.
For those who think I'm wrong and that these should be mandatory, why don't you go lobby the government (at any level from local to federal) and have some of these technologies mandated for LEO fire arms use. Report back with your results.
A remote kill switch on firearms used by rogue law enforcement or rogue military types would be interesting:
Then set up a registrar that instead of putting domains in.uk, put them in.kids.uk, and be done with it.
Force all "kid safe" browsers to ALWAYS appeand.kids.uk, and police the subdelegation registrar.
Damn problem solved already, with dumbass legislation that mandates industry to develop technology that it's impossible to make foolproof -- and which most technologists capable of implementing it, think is a stupid idea that shouldn't be implemented in the first place (like DRM, which is why DRM is never implemented in a foolproof way).
The main concern incluse using internal gTLDs for internal use. In the article, they call this a "split brain DNS". When I wrote the IETF Draft, we called it "split horizon DNS". Implementing it requires specific modifications to a DNS server so that it can be both a forwarding server and an authoritative server at the "." level, and there is practically no DNS server out there which implements it. Certainly, the top 4 don't. In addition, browser completion into ".com" by default means that any typo will take you outside the company, so it's an idiotic example anyway.
The real issue is that if there are 1000 TLDs, all the companies that stupidly equate the DNS namespace with the trademark namespace will, in order to "defend their trademarks" feel they have to register their trademarks as domain names with 1000's of registrars. The don't like this.
As a pointed example, we used to maintain the top level DNS servers for free; it was a volunteer thing, and Paul Vixie did most of the work. Then the idiots at Dupont went off and registered over 400 domains in a single day, and that was it; that was too much work to expect the volunteers to do for free, and so they decided not to do so. Thereafter you paid for registration. Then people decided they could make a good profit at it, and instead of paying for a change to the TLD subdelegation record. And the whole "let's rent domain subdelegations of TLDs instead of selling them was born".
So back to Dupont... 400 domains * 1000 registrars * $30 average per year = $12M
Expect legislation protecting trademarks across all TLDs to follow shortly on this whole fiasco.
...you know, as a pissy attempt to get the steam turbine manufacturer to come down on price, it was a pretty stupid negotiating tactic, but I have to agree it's their right to shut it down...
...you know: as long as the rolling blackouts hit San Diego first.
Plus, as Chevron has demonstrated, even if you have plenty of fuel, controlling the rate at which you turn that fuel usable is a great way of getting more money by jacking up prices, while simultaneously reducing your costs.
No... but you really can't expect normative social behavior from an aspie, particularly after he's been the effective king of a feudal society for about 22 years now. Lieutenants who are effectively feudal lords who have sworn fealty to the king, it's a classic mutual security game.
The biggest problem this arrangement has is... it works. It doesn't work as well as other mutual security arrangements, such as globocop, but it can be successful, particularly for volunteer organizations.
One property of the arrangement, however, is that feudal lords build walls between their fiefdoms. This makes it very hard to change anything that requires crossing multiple fiefdom boundaries, so if you want to change an API, a globocop arrangement is more conducive to negotiating API contracts (think of it as agreeing on diverting the location of a stream crossing between neighbors). Linux demonstrates similar problems.
Either way, unless there is someone elected to filter the comments (a majordomo), the king is going to say whatever the king wants to say.
Your first paragraph directlt contradicts your second.
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants because he didn't have to pay some mob of rent-seekers for the priviledge.
He also didn't publish his calculus, and kept them as his personal trade secret, until Halley approached him about the shape of the orbit of comets.
Similarly, Richard Feynman didn't reveal that he was using Clifford Algebras to solve systems of Feynman-Dyson diagrams; it made him look like he was skipping intermediate steps and leaving them as "an exercise for the student", and made him look vastly more intelligent than hist students.
Both men kept their methods secret to have an advantage. A patent is a trade for disclosing these trade secrets in exchange for a time limited monopoly - so the original author is being disingenuous with their perpetual rent argument.
Unfortunately too many people believe the lie "Voting for a 3rd party harms you".
This would be true if the election were by direct popular vote; it's not. It's by the electoral college, which was the 1789 solution communications latency and people engaged in subsistence survival: with slow communications, you aggregated your vote and sent it by proxy.
One of the emergent properties of the electoral college system is a two power block arrangement; this has been codified into law in 35 U.S. states, where it is illegal for electors to split the states votes (Utah has a law making it a felony - otherwise, Ross Perot would have gotten one elector from Utah in the 1992 presidential election).
Of course, we no longer have the communication latencies that make an electoral college necessary, and we are far past subsistence survival, but it not in the self interest of the people currently in power to change the existing setup, since the emergent properties are to their benefit.
This whole conversation should have been retitled "Why web apps are slow on mobile", and not about JavaScript at all.
The comparison between Objective C and Java is totally ridiculous and beside the point; it's the only thing which ties this article to actual mobile Apps instead of web apps, and fails to address the original articles comments on JavaScript.
In principle, Objective C the language can be used for dynamic binding; in practice, the Objective C runtime, as represented in crt1.o, and in the dyld and later dyle dynamic linkers, it can't be. This was an intentional decision by Apple to prevent a dynamic binding override from changing aspects of the UI, and to prevent malicious code being injected into your program - this is a position Apple strengthened by adding code signing.
Comparison to Java of Objective C as a proxy for comparing iOS applications to Android applications is also ridiculous: there are Android native apps, they are just more difficult to write than the Dalvik Apps. Angry Birds, and most media applications, are not run under the Dalvik VM, but are instead run on the native instruction set.
The whole argument made by the article author is not a rebuttal; it's an attempt to twist the conversation in an attempt to beat on his personal hobby horse.
It is a potential habitat. It is a gateway to the stars.
...and here you reveal your true colours.
Ceres is not a potential habitat.
Assume you can develop a shelter with adequate shielding from cosmic rays and solar storms, adequate insulation, pressure containment, etc. (Despite the fact that we don't know what "adequate" is, or exactly what's in "etc".) And assume you can transport inhabitants there, all the while keeeping them healthy. Fine.
See, he's a hard core gamer, which is also why he buys the faster red ethernet cables instead of the slower blue ones! This causes lots of friction, since he can have a higher packet load through the router, and the poor electronics just get worn out, since he plays about nine hours a day.
He also mounts his routers in the back top shelf of the closets, so that the packets get a gravity assist getting to his computer. Apparently it takes about 1.8ms off his ping time, which is why he consistently beats his friend Charlie in Unreal Tournament.
PS: We all know friction has to be the true answer, since they charge for GB instead of charging for the pipe size; everyone knows this is because routers with packets transiting them have more wear and tear than those same routers using the same amount of power, but not transiting as many packets. It's just common sense!
property rights in many places extend underground and would still require a lot of above ground infrastructure and access ways for maintenance purposes.
Eminent Domain works wonders, particularly for establishing public rights of way, but also for taking your property, which isn't making me mone, so that I can build a mall or hotel or some other business or a roadway there.
It's related to the earlier story where an IT guy was fired by the AG office because he called them on not revealing exculpatory evidence during the discovery process. They also photoshopped Zimmerman's image into black and white to make his nose look less severe than it was.
For HID devices like mice and keyboards, they will save up the information and transmit it on the next poll. Ie, one poll to a keyboard can return more than one character. A mouse will coalesce the movement into a single position but as I remember it you should still get multiple button events returned on a single poll.
You will get multiple button events on a poll when they are different buttons.
The microcontroller firmware that all the companies in China tend to steal back and forth between them tends to only allow one key eventfrom a polling interval, and the controllers are generally clocked slower.
Now a laptop matrix decoder that synthesizes a fake 8042 keyboard controller and mixes Synaptics PS/2 touchpad events with a faked up PS/2 interface from the matrix decode can go a bit faster, depending. For example, we set the debounce down to 6ms on the Chromebook because we had a fast typer, and we gave preference to keyboard events over touchpad events.
Surely 50 ms is just human response time. I highly doubt a "low-latency keyboard" (even if such a thing exists) could improve your gaming performance...
The worlds fastest typist, Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago, clocked in at 216 WPM, which is 1080 CPM, which is 18 CPS, which is in that ballpark.
However, burst rates can go much higher, and if you are doing something like playing a twitch shooter, which is kind of like being a meth-head, then adjacent keystrokes on the same key can be much faster, particularly if you hare hitting the key multiple times within the debounce window, and want to do that because you haven't set your auto repeat rate low enough, so that was the game playing style you trained yourself into as a result.
When working on the Samsung Chromebooks, we had a Director who would consistently outpace the keyboard controller, and we had to reverse engineer what he was doing that caused this, and then we had to have Samsung do firmware changes. His issue was that he was dropping the next key down before releasing the previous key, which tended to result in doubled characters for the first key. He was a very fast burst rate typist.
Personally, optimizing keyboards for twitch shooter doesn't strike me as a terrifically productive use of time, whereas optimizing them for a multiple keys down simultaneously has real world utility for non-meth-heads.
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company.
Yes, Bill is a fun person to have a nerdy conversation with, particularly if you can get him talking about Microsoft BASIC, and the Easter Eggs they put in it to keep people from ripping it off.
People (shareholders) blame Balmer because he fails to increase shareholder value. Shareholders elect the board, and the board hired Balmer.
But Microsoft isn't in "slow and steady growth" mode; they've pretty much had a flat stock price since the.bomb in 2001. In the same period, IBM (which is another Blue Chip) went from just under 100 following the.bomb and are now trading at 192, as of today. That's nearly double. Apple did even better (also NOT a Blue Chip) going from ~$12 post-split price to $427 -- although Tim Cook was unable to sustain a $705 high at the end of September of last year, so perhaps his board should be looking at his leadership as well.
Even in a hex losing 2 adjacent struts would cause failure, because the rockets only fire downwards.
Yeah, you're right. To allow for loss of adjacent struts, you'd need an octagon so that the CM was still within the bounding area of the surviving struts. I think quadrupling the gear weight would be a problem.
Something to consider might be a vertical column into which a damaged craft could descent and remain (mostly) upright. 5 is barely enough struts to stay within the CM for a single failure; six seems about right.
The failure of the DC-X vehicle resulting in its destruction was the failure of a single hydraulic line not having been connected properly.
Perhaps we could learn from this, and use 6 struts instead of 4 struts in designs like the grasshopper, so that if we lose a strut, or even up to 2 adjacent or 3 non-adjacent struts, the vehicle can still land safely?
Oracle clearly has the legal right to do what they are doing, and there is no morality in business, so that is the only right that matters.
Do they actually have the legal right? I contributed patches to BDB 1.0; I don't remember being asked for an assignment of rights so that they could legally change the license. The SleepyCat license only applied to the newer code added by Margo, which, if you wanted to use the newer code, you accepted the license on the aggregate work, and if not, you could excise the new work from the code by using an older version.
It's not clear to me from TFA exactly what the license change means, or if this is merely hand-wringing, since so far it has not changed the tar ball contents, and therefore the license declaration within the tar ball. However, if their intent is to relicense *all* the code, not just the SleepyCat portion of the new code, then that's a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, PDFs are not designed for wanton modification. Some of them can be modified, but others cannot. This means that you cannot build a reliable method for converting suspect PDFs into safe PDFs.
I believe the entire point of the original submission was likely to troll this fact; as soon as he/she said that they wanted to do it while transitting a mail gateway, it was either a request for PDF encryption cracking or a troll against Adobe locking down documents in this fashion.
I've personally railed against government agencies being in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act for putting up PDF forms that have to be filled in by loading them into Adobe products, but until someone who has been spearfished for lack of a product capable of doing this without violating the DMCA, nothing's going to change. With the ADA, there are clear, litigious interests groups, with large fat government agency targets. Not so when all you are talking about is companies like Barracuda being essentially frozen out of a market which Adobe is free to compete in on a software basis. But again, you have to be the wronged party.
The ordinary person doesn't give enough of a damn about this sort of thing for public pressure to work, and never will, since they have no idea what constitutes "enough" and would rather watch TV than be lectured to by nerds like us.
"I want an elephant the size of a mouse, please"
Antivirus software sniffs the butt of ever filesystem write operation, as well as sniffing the but of every executable image load, as well as every browser plugin load; it also scans the contents of inbound network data, since it could have a known payload using an unknown zero day in the program requesting the data from the Internet.
Most of the code could be made significantly less overhead, but we are talking reducing it from elephant sized to water buffalo sized, rather than reducing it to mouse size. For example, if instead of checking the whole file when every write occurs, it could prevent the file being opened again until a scan-on-close occurred. Both Outlook and IE would hate that, and any browser that didn't operate "stage then interpret" would still have to be byte-stream interposed. As another example, it could decide to not react to every FS event; MacOS has this capability, since it integrates a mandator access controls (MAC) capability, but many OSs do not. And even on MacOS, most AV vendors don't take advantage of this, since it messes with their ability to use the same event streaming model as on their other platforms.
So: no such animal exists, if you want it to also be effective.
For those who think I'm wrong and that these should be mandatory, why don't you go lobby the government (at any level from local to federal) and have some of these technologies mandated for LEO fire arms use. Report back with your results.
A remote kill switch on firearms used by rogue law enforcement or rogue military types would be interesting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/12/rogue-cop-manhunt-ends-in-shootout.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/fort-hood.html
Maybe they could make a "smart gun" that couldn't fire on unarmed target instead?
So set up a TLD for kids.uk already!
Then set up a registrar that instead of putting domains in .uk, put them in .kids.uk, and be done with it.
Force all "kid safe" browsers to ALWAYS appeand .kids.uk, and police the subdelegation registrar.
Damn problem solved already, with dumbass legislation that mandates industry to develop technology that it's impossible to make foolproof -- and which most technologists capable of implementing it, think is a stupid idea that shouldn't be implemented in the first place (like DRM, which is why DRM is never implemented in a foolproof way).
This is a BS article.
The main concern incluse using internal gTLDs for internal use. In the article, they call this a "split brain DNS". When I wrote the IETF Draft, we called it "split horizon DNS". Implementing it requires specific modifications to a DNS server so that it can be both a forwarding server and an authoritative server at the "." level, and there is practically no DNS server out there which implements it. Certainly, the top 4 don't. In addition, browser completion into ".com" by default means that any typo will take you outside the company, so it's an idiotic example anyway.
The real issue is that if there are 1000 TLDs, all the companies that stupidly equate the DNS namespace with the trademark namespace will, in order to "defend their trademarks" feel they have to register their trademarks as domain names with 1000's of registrars. The don't like this.
As a pointed example, we used to maintain the top level DNS servers for free; it was a volunteer thing, and Paul Vixie did most of the work. Then the idiots at Dupont went off and registered over 400 domains in a single day, and that was it; that was too much work to expect the volunteers to do for free, and so they decided not to do so. Thereafter you paid for registration. Then people decided they could make a good profit at it, and instead of paying for a change to the TLD subdelegation record. And the whole "let's rent domain subdelegations of TLDs instead of selling them was born".
So back to Dupont... 400 domains * 1000 registrars * $30 average per year = $12M
Expect legislation protecting trademarks across all TLDs to follow shortly on this whole fiasco.
I all for shutting it down...
...you know, as a pissy attempt to get the steam turbine manufacturer to come down on price, it was a pretty stupid negotiating tactic, but I have to agree it's their right to shut it down...
...you know: as long as the rolling blackouts hit San Diego first.
Plus, as Chevron has demonstrated, even if you have plenty of fuel, controlling the rate at which you turn that fuel usable is a great way of getting more money by jacking up prices, while simultaneously reducing your costs.
Not being a dick != political correctness
No... but you really can't expect normative social behavior from an aspie, particularly after he's been the effective king of a feudal society for about 22 years now. Lieutenants who are effectively feudal lords who have sworn fealty to the king, it's a classic mutual security game.
The biggest problem this arrangement has is ... it works. It doesn't work as well as other mutual security arrangements, such as globocop, but it can be successful, particularly for volunteer organizations.
One property of the arrangement, however, is that feudal lords build walls between their fiefdoms. This makes it very hard to change anything that requires crossing multiple fiefdom boundaries, so if you want to change an API, a globocop arrangement is more conducive to negotiating API contracts (think of it as agreeing on diverting the location of a stream crossing between neighbors). Linux demonstrates similar problems.
Either way, unless there is someone elected to filter the comments (a majordomo), the king is going to say whatever the king wants to say.
Amazingly confused.
Your first paragraph directlt contradicts your second.
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants because he didn't have to pay some mob of rent-seekers for the priviledge.
He also didn't publish his calculus, and kept them as his personal trade secret, until Halley approached him about the shape of the orbit of comets.
Similarly, Richard Feynman didn't reveal that he was using Clifford Algebras to solve systems of Feynman-Dyson diagrams; it made him look like he was skipping intermediate steps and leaving them as "an exercise for the student", and made him look vastly more intelligent than hist students.
Both men kept their methods secret to have an advantage. A patent is a trade for disclosing these trade secrets in exchange for a time limited monopoly - so the original author is being disingenuous with their perpetual rent argument.
Unfortunately too many people believe the lie "Voting for a 3rd party harms you".
This would be true if the election were by direct popular vote; it's not. It's by the electoral college, which was the 1789 solution communications latency and people engaged in subsistence survival: with slow communications, you aggregated your vote and sent it by proxy.
One of the emergent properties of the electoral college system is a two power block arrangement; this has been codified into law in 35 U.S. states, where it is illegal for electors to split the states votes (Utah has a law making it a felony - otherwise, Ross Perot would have gotten one elector from Utah in the 1992 presidential election).
Of course, we no longer have the communication latencies that make an electoral college necessary, and we are far past subsistence survival, but it not in the self interest of the people currently in power to change the existing setup, since the emergent properties are to their benefit.
This whole conversation should have been retitled "Why web apps are slow on mobile", and not about JavaScript at all.
The comparison between Objective C and Java is totally ridiculous and beside the point; it's the only thing which ties this article to actual mobile Apps instead of web apps, and fails to address the original articles comments on JavaScript.
In principle, Objective C the language can be used for dynamic binding; in practice, the Objective C runtime, as represented in crt1.o, and in the dyld and later dyle dynamic linkers, it can't be. This was an intentional decision by Apple to prevent a dynamic binding override from changing aspects of the UI, and to prevent malicious code being injected into your program - this is a position Apple strengthened by adding code signing.
Comparison to Java of Objective C as a proxy for comparing iOS applications to Android applications is also ridiculous: there are Android native apps, they are just more difficult to write than the Dalvik Apps. Angry Birds, and most media applications, are not run under the Dalvik VM, but are instead run on the native instruction set.
The whole argument made by the article author is not a rebuttal; it's an attempt to twist the conversation in an attempt to beat on his personal hobby horse.
It is a potential habitat. It is a gateway to the stars.
...and here you reveal your true colours.
Ceres is not a potential habitat.
Assume you can develop a shelter with adequate shielding from cosmic rays and solar storms, adequate insulation, pressure containment, etc. (Despite the fact that we don't know what "adequate" is, or exactly what's in "etc".) And assume you can transport inhabitants there, all the while keeeping them healthy. Fine.
You mean like a buttload of water? Or this? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/11/04/171242/experimental-magnetic-shield-against-cosmic-rays
What's killing them? FRICTION!
See, he's a hard core gamer, which is also why he buys the faster red ethernet cables instead of the slower blue ones! This causes lots of friction, since he can have a higher packet load through the router, and the poor electronics just get worn out, since he plays about nine hours a day.
He also mounts his routers in the back top shelf of the closets, so that the packets get a gravity assist getting to his computer. Apparently it takes about 1.8ms off his ping time, which is why he consistently beats his friend Charlie in Unreal Tournament.
PS: We all know friction has to be the true answer, since they charge for GB instead of charging for the pipe size; everyone knows this is because routers with packets transiting them have more wear and tear than those same routers using the same amount of power, but not transiting as many packets. It's just common sense!
The toll roads are usually better quality than the non toll roads
What exactly is the problem with paying for good infrastructure?
Nothing. I just don't want to rent it, and then be denied access when I don't choose to continue paying rent.
I prefer the German model: the contractor who offers the best overall cost and warranty for N years of road gets the contract.
property rights in many places extend underground and would still require a lot of above ground infrastructure and access ways for maintenance purposes.
Eminent Domain works wonders, particularly for establishing public rights of way, but also for taking your property, which isn't making me mone, so that I can build a mall or hotel or some other business or a roadway there.
Wouldn't the east coast make more sense?
Why would you build this in a terrorism zone?
Has Slashdot become a politics/crime board now?
It's related to the earlier story where an IT guy was fired by the AG office because he called them on not revealing exculpatory evidence during the discovery process. They also photoshopped Zimmerman's image into black and white to make his nose look less severe than it was.
Here's the story on the IT director who was fired from earlier today:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/13/238229/whistleblowing-it-director-fired-by-fl-state-attorney
For HID devices like mice and keyboards, they will save up the information and transmit it on the next poll. Ie, one poll to a keyboard can return more than one character. A mouse will coalesce the movement into a single position but as I remember it you should still get multiple button events returned on a single poll.
You will get multiple button events on a poll when they are different buttons.
The microcontroller firmware that all the companies in China tend to steal back and forth between them tends to only allow one key eventfrom a polling interval, and the controllers are generally clocked slower.
Now a laptop matrix decoder that synthesizes a fake 8042 keyboard controller and mixes Synaptics PS/2 touchpad events with a faked up PS/2 interface from the matrix decode can go a bit faster, depending. For example, we set the debounce down to 6ms on the Chromebook because we had a fast typer, and we gave preference to keyboard events over touchpad events.
Surely 50 ms is just human response time. I highly doubt a "low-latency keyboard" (even if such a thing exists) could improve your gaming performance...
The worlds fastest typist, Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago, clocked in at 216 WPM, which is 1080 CPM, which is 18 CPS, which is in that ballpark.
However, burst rates can go much higher, and if you are doing something like playing a twitch shooter, which is kind of like being a meth-head, then adjacent keystrokes on the same key can be much faster, particularly if you hare hitting the key multiple times within the debounce window, and want to do that because you haven't set your auto repeat rate low enough, so that was the game playing style you trained yourself into as a result.
When working on the Samsung Chromebooks, we had a Director who would consistently outpace the keyboard controller, and we had to reverse engineer what he was doing that caused this, and then we had to have Samsung do firmware changes. His issue was that he was dropping the next key down before releasing the previous key, which tended to result in doubled characters for the first key. He was a very fast burst rate typist.
Personally, optimizing keyboards for twitch shooter doesn't strike me as a terrifically productive use of time, whereas optimizing them for a multiple keys down simultaneously has real world utility for non-meth-heads.
Scott McNealy was well known for this.... at Sun, "put all our wood behind 1 arrow" was one of his favorite phrases.
Microsoft's market cap is 299B; Oracle's is 144B, so at least they aren't destined to be purchased by Oracle yet...
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company.
Yes, Bill is a fun person to have a nerdy conversation with, particularly if you can get him talking about Microsoft BASIC, and the Easter Eggs they put in it to keep people from ripping it off.
People (shareholders) blame Balmer because he fails to increase shareholder value. Shareholders elect the board, and the board hired Balmer.
But Microsoft isn't in "slow and steady growth" mode; they've pretty much had a flat stock price since the .bomb in 2001. In the same period, IBM (which is another Blue Chip) went from just under 100 following the .bomb and are now trading at 192, as of today. That's nearly double. Apple did even better (also NOT a Blue Chip) going from ~$12 post-split price to $427 -- although Tim Cook was unable to sustain a $705 high at the end of September of last year, so perhaps his board should be looking at his leadership as well.
Write what you actually mean the first time, then stfu.
Right, ask people to write perfect the very first time. It is perfectly realistic. What could be wrong with that? /sarcasm
I bet you are the type of idiot who designs software without dead-man switches and other such fail safe mechanisms.
I kind of do. But I am the type of person who includes consequences in the designs.
edit function please
What a brilliant idea! Then we could moderate you up to 5, and you could switch out the content for a goatse link instead!
Even in a hex losing 2 adjacent struts would cause failure, because the rockets only fire downwards.
Yeah, you're right. To allow for loss of adjacent struts, you'd need an octagon so that the CM was still within the bounding area of the surviving struts. I think quadrupling the gear weight would be a problem.
Something to consider might be a vertical column into which a damaged craft could descent and remain (mostly) upright. 5 is barely enough struts to stay within the CM for a single failure; six seems about right.
Grasshopper/DC-X design issue
The failure of the DC-X vehicle resulting in its destruction was the failure of a single hydraulic line not having been connected properly.
Perhaps we could learn from this, and use 6 struts instead of 4 struts in designs like the grasshopper, so that if we lose a strut, or even up to 2 adjacent or 3 non-adjacent struts, the vehicle can still land safely?
Oracle clearly has the legal right to do what they are doing, and there is no morality in business, so that is the only right that matters.
Do they actually have the legal right? I contributed patches to BDB 1.0; I don't remember being asked for an assignment of rights so that they could legally change the license. The SleepyCat license only applied to the newer code added by Margo, which, if you wanted to use the newer code, you accepted the license on the aggregate work, and if not, you could excise the new work from the code by using an older version.
It's not clear to me from TFA exactly what the license change means, or if this is merely hand-wringing, since so far it has not changed the tar ball contents, and therefore the license declaration within the tar ball. However, if their intent is to relicense *all* the code, not just the SleepyCat portion of the new code, then that's a problem.