Incredibly, Mozilla 1.2 is going to have built-in, enabled-by-default prefetching. The amount of bandwidth this will waste blows the mind. Imagine every single Joe on the Net suddenly using up 20 times as much bandwidth downloading stuff that he will *never see*. The intermitent activity on lines turning into constant load -- and ISPs rely on being able to oversell their lines.
Back in the day when the now-unpopular "web accelerators" were getting big, I always brushed them off as used by network abusers who didn't know what they were doing. Now this abuse has been legitimized.
The people who are going to be the real losers in all this are the techies, the ones who tend to have several browser windows loading at once, or a n ssh connection, or a server running. Up until now, they've been somewhat subsidized by the fact that ISPs can charge cheap prices because the other 98% of users only use their line 10% of the time. Now that everyone's lines are going to be under continuous load...goodbye Quake.
The entire idea of single window browsing is simply awful. It places extremely tight constraints on bandwidth and latency. When the user clicks a link, they want the new page there, now, and damn anything that has to be done to get it there. If you work with several windows downloading at once, so that you're reading one while another is coming in, you never run into this problem, since even a modem is easily enough to comfortably handle web browsing of nearly any site...as long as you're not waiting around staring at a progress bar while the image loads. Prefetching simply feeds this flawed single-window user-behavior model.
For once, a Microsoft program (IE) is actually less of a network abuser than its competitors. Awful.
Much as I hate to say it, PGP is not a good choice if you're (a) a company with deep pockets doing business-related stuff, and (b) have lots of people that aren't interested in understanding what's going on.
The good parts of PGP are anonymity and zero cost. Both of these points are much less valueable in a business setting.
The bad: the only good UI I've seen for PGP is mutt+gpg, where unknown keys are automatically fetched, defaults are set, the password is cached for a short period of time, verification is automatically done... Outlook's PGP interface is lame. Also, a lot of users seem to not get the whole "web of trust" concept, and tend to break it by trusting everyone.
The number of people I've seen griping about lameness filters is ridiculous.
I wanted to break up stuff into a bulletized list to make it easier to read. The lameness filters wanted more characters per line.
I wanted to include a snippit of source. The lameness filters didn't like it (too many "nonstandard" characters).
Now this person wants to post a tiny patch, and the filters freak out.
I *hate* Slashdot "behavior modification" limits. The "two minutes between posts" rule. The "twenty seconds at least to write a post" rule. The "fifty posts per day rule". I've hit them all, and they're a bloody PITA.
Kind of funny...Samsung isn't really a name you normally hear pimped as "really excellent", but I've had good experiences with their monitors, which are cheap and have better reliability than the Viewsonics that I also use (which tend to get unhappy when you put them in unpleasantly hot rooms). Just bought another Samsung monitor last month.
You'd have a valid point if engineers received millions of dollars in stock options like CEOs do.
You'll note that I even left out severance packages, which would have made an even more ridiculously tilted compenstation ratio.
And you call someone criticizing the amount of pay a CEO makes (when they have much more influcence over their own salary than an engineer does over his) a Marxist? Hell, it's an issue to any die-hard capitalist -- it means that the system is producing inefficiencies and misallocation of resources, which capitalism is supposed to avoid in the ideal.
I didn't download the file, and didn't realize that "PS" was referring to the file at all. I thought that "pure PS" meant "pure Princeton Shit" or something. I was expecting "BS".
This is mindblowingly unimportant. Can *anyone* think of *any* company that has a perfect ABI? No, because processors evolve, and the ABI has to stay the same. When I write an x86 program on my Linux box, it pushes *all* the arguments onto the stack. Is that the best way to do things? No. Is it done anyway? Yup. Does anyone go into a tizzy about it? No.
Seriously, the x86 Linux ABI is probably worse off...different (worse) byte alignment from Windows, the abovementioned everything-goes-on-the-stack....
...would it be illegal? I'm not aware of any laws that say "If you write a search engine your algorithm design must be done in such a way that you rank your competitors equally highly."
Google's always pimped the integrity of their searches pretty highly. I don't buy into these guys.
You could do every single one of the things you mentioned with DGA in XFree86 4.0 already.
Of course, you can't run in a windowed mode, but if you're running a game, it's a fair bet that you aren't running windowed.
Re:something more flexible
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Because DNS is hierarchical.
You don't like it, for the love of God, don't try to make everyone else unhappy with DNS. Set up your own "keyword" server, add a patch to Moz and IE, and let people use *that* naming system.
If that's what people really want, people will use it.
Quit bashing DNS. It's your friend.
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, brother.
This isn't just *DNS*, it's the standardized ISO country code system. It's always hard to change, it doesn't change easily, etc.
You want some good reasons to use the current system? Okay, let's go.
A) Politics. Not just a joke any more. A lot of "countries" want legitimacy (or to remove legitimacy) by getting a TLD, and political pressure has been placed on ICANN before. ICANN solved this by passing the buck onto ISO, and saying that they don't deal with political problems -- that they use only ISO country codes for regions. Unless you want Israel or Palestine bombing ICANN members, this is worth considering.
B) Stability. A naming system that fluxes constantly is *much* less useful. The idea is that IPs can change, the underlying network can move around, but names stay the same. If you move to *anything* that's easier to change, you reduce the usefulness of the naming system to end users.
C) Inherent data within the naming system. With a few annoying exceptions, you can tell where something is based just by glancing at its domain name. Now, before people start on the usual 'Net dogma "the Internet erases all boundaries and obsoletes nationalities", let me point out that we still happen to exist in the real world as well, for the time being. There's a fairly useful correlation between country name and physical distance (esp. since most educated people can tell roughly how far it is from their country to another). Unless network technology gets drastically different, this has a pretty major relationship to latency, bandwidth, *and* network cost (i.e. you're supposed to use mirrors within your own country, and it's pretty easy to tell where they are if you just glance at the TLD on the mirrors). Second, like it or not, different countries have different laws and censorship rules as relate to the Internet. If I can easily tell that a site is in China, I can figure out whether the government's likely to have sanitized the information on it.
D) It's *a* clear solution. The good thing about the current system is that there aren't quibbles. "Well, *maybe* ISO really meant *this* when they assigned the country codes" doesn't come up. If people start trying to build a.xxx TLD and then make international agreements to force porn to be in.xxx, there's going to be more classification arguments than we can possibly imagine.
E) Trademark issues. There's a fairly clear (and, I think, reasonable) advantage to Microsoft in not letting Apple grab "microsoft.com" and redirect it to a fake site that gives people a bad impression of Microsoft. Countries already have their own trademark rules and registries set up, with a legal system in place to avoid conflicts. If you register things in.co.uk, you don't have to worry about trademark conflicts, because the country already has an excellent, dispute-resolved database to work from, and simply applies that system to their name granting system.
F) Potential for an alternative. DNS isn't bound into the Internet at an architectural level, though it is quite popular. It's quite replaceable by people that want to set up their own system. If you want a non-hierarchical system, without domains (i.e. keywords), *go* for it. Set up a couple of servers, a registrar, hand out patches for Mozilla and IE, and you're good to go. Just don't try to turn the *Domain* Name System into your *Keyword* Name System. If someone wanted to set up a naming system based on GPS coordinates, they could do it if they wanted to.
Because DNS actually has some meaning to its syntax. It's not just a slightly different looking set of "AOL keywords" with periods inconveniently placed in it.
Now, I'd be all for another naming system if people really want another one (and I'm *sure* nothing would make MS happier than controlling their own naming system...like a global Active Directory or something), but can people stop trying to mangle DNS? It's been a nice, (relatively) straightforward system for years.
The "infected" error makes sense. The AV software could wipe the virus, but couldn't restore the original executable to a virgin state, and is warning you that you might run into problems.
Eudora is a very nice piece of software. The developers had quite a sense of humor -- I distinctly remember a checkbox for "waste CPU cycles drawing trendy 3d junk".
Eudora was also very good at actually *describing* what an option did (unlike MS software, which usually says something like "The website could not be contacted", which does the end user no good and gives the troubleshooter headaches. Error messages also contained relevant information, and the whole piece of software was fast and stable.
Definitely one of the better written apps I've ever used, and one where it seems that the engineer/techie types had more leeway.
Why would the CIA World Factbook offend anyone? it's a tremendously good resource.
One thing the US government is really good about is putting out lots of free data archives that it's spent money building. There are *excellent* resources available to the world:
The USGS puts out really great maps and elevation maps for free. Not something you can produce on your own easily.
NASA puts out some of my favorite stuff -- images, huge quantities of data.
I've always wondered about this. For a long time Korea has had extremely high amounts of online time spent per-user. Presumably, that means lots of experienced techies from dicking around with computers so much.
Yet I hear surprisingly few Korean names among major open-source developers. Korea has a name for pirated software, and that's about it.
Why no *good* benefits coming from all that online time?
The author concludes, 'every single byte in this executable file can be accounted for and justified. How many executables have you created lately that you can say that about?'
Heck, Microsoft fits that profile. Every byte accounted for? "One enormous pile of garbage."
I suspect almost all engineer salaries range between 50k and 100k. This link (first in a Google search for "CEO salary") lists 62M as an average pay for CEOs in examined companies. These *are* major corporations, mind you.
That's about 1000x times.
And yes, the CEO is earning that money. That is simple economics.
Well...yes, I didn't argue with that.
I'm not sure that it's in the company's best interests to pay so much, though.
The problem is that high-level execs are in a position to have significant influence over their own paychecks and bennies, which is just stupid.
Re:This has nothing to do with making money...
on
Expose on Insider Loans
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The only thing he said was "unethical". There was no express mention of "fraud".
And consider your own words. Just as the "it's bad because it's rich" dogma has a lot of issues, so too does the "it's good because it's rich", which you've gone at least as far in emphasizing.
On top of that, it seems that you guys skipped economics in college and can't tell that those rich people do far more for the opportunities available to poor people than any government program ever has
Sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I don't necessarily buy into it anyway.
Unless you were an investor in or employee of Enron, Worldcom etc, you have no right to complain because their fraud has not affected you.
You make this bold statement a few sentences after telling the original poster that he skipped economics? The ripple effects of an organization as large as either of the above two going under is *enormous*, affecting almost everyone.
Heck, with Worldcom *alone* and ignoring indirect effects, a hell of a lot of my packets get routed through UUNET.
There have been major changes to law, a lot of "earnings revisions" from companies that have been claiming bullshit (which drives down the market more). There have been companies going out of business that are vendors to the companies in trouble.
Again: pure socialist systems tend to have issues. That doesn't mean that pure capitalist (i.e. without government regulation) systems are useful. For example, in the real world you can end up with monopolies...
It's hard to say why someone "deserves" money, so I'm not going to make claims in that area. I, personally, think that companies that give their top officers that much money are *stupid*, though. Does a CEO *really* have skills that are 1000 times harder to obtain than an engineer, justifying a 1000x pay ratio to the engineer? (Okay, maybe a bit less, since we can factor in a lack of job security.)
And Stephenson was really negative about Zodiac, which I really enjoyed. The plot is very similar to Snow Crash, though with a different setting.
If you're a Snow Crash fan, reading Zodiac is a blast.
Cryptonomicon is very good in places, but a fair number of those 900 pages went into very slow material (building venture capital and doing oceanographic surveying is about as entertaining as it sounds).
I just want a Snow Crash II. Gritty, full of hyperbole and ridiculously badass characters, cynical as hell, and glorifying tech. And the sentences...NS must have rolled them around in his mouth for quite some time before committing them to paper. They read like film noir dialog.
Slashdot Mirror
Incredibly, Mozilla 1.2 is going to have built-in, enabled-by-default prefetching. The amount of bandwidth this will waste blows the mind. Imagine every single Joe on the Net suddenly using up 20 times as much bandwidth downloading stuff that he will *never see*. The intermitent activity on lines turning into constant load -- and ISPs rely on being able to oversell their lines.
Back in the day when the now-unpopular "web accelerators" were getting big, I always brushed them off as used by network abusers who didn't know what they were doing. Now this abuse has been legitimized.
The people who are going to be the real losers in all this are the techies, the ones who tend to have several browser windows loading at once, or a n ssh connection, or a server running. Up until now, they've been somewhat subsidized by the fact that ISPs can charge cheap prices because the other 98% of users only use their line 10% of the time. Now that everyone's lines are going to be under continuous load...goodbye Quake.
The entire idea of single window browsing is simply awful. It places extremely tight constraints on bandwidth and latency. When the user clicks a link, they want the new page there, now, and damn anything that has to be done to get it there. If you work with several windows downloading at once, so that you're reading one while another is coming in, you never run into this problem, since even a modem is easily enough to comfortably handle web browsing of nearly any site...as long as you're not waiting around staring at a progress bar while the image loads. Prefetching simply feeds this flawed single-window user-behavior model.
For once, a Microsoft program (IE) is actually less of a network abuser than its competitors. Awful.
Much as I hate to say it, PGP is not a good choice if you're (a) a company with deep pockets doing business-related stuff, and (b) have lots of people that aren't interested in understanding what's going on.
The good parts of PGP are anonymity and zero cost. Both of these points are much less valueable in a business setting.
The bad: the only good UI I've seen for PGP is mutt+gpg, where unknown keys are automatically fetched, defaults are set, the password is cached for a short period of time, verification is automatically done... Outlook's PGP interface is lame. Also, a lot of users seem to not get the whole "web of trust" concept, and tend to break it by trusting everyone.
The number of people I've seen griping about lameness filters is ridiculous.
I wanted to break up stuff into a bulletized list to make it easier to read. The lameness filters wanted more characters per line.
I wanted to include a snippit of source. The lameness filters didn't like it (too many "nonstandard" characters).
Now this person wants to post a tiny patch, and the filters freak out.
I *hate* Slashdot "behavior modification" limits. The "two minutes between posts" rule. The "twenty seconds at least to write a post" rule. The "fifty posts per day rule". I've hit them all, and they're a bloody PITA.
Kind of funny...Samsung isn't really a name you normally hear pimped as "really excellent", but I've had good experiences with their monitors, which are cheap and have better reliability than the Viewsonics that I also use (which tend to get unhappy when you put them in unpleasantly hot rooms). Just bought another Samsung monitor last month.
You'd have a valid point if engineers received millions of dollars in stock options like CEOs do.
You'll note that I even left out severance packages, which would have made an even more ridiculously tilted compenstation ratio.
And you call someone criticizing the amount of pay a CEO makes (when they have much more influcence over their own salary than an engineer does over his) a Marxist? Hell, it's an issue to any die-hard capitalist -- it means that the system is producing inefficiencies and misallocation of resources, which capitalism is supposed to avoid in the ideal.
I didn't download the file, and didn't realize that "PS" was referring to the file at all. I thought that "pure PS" meant "pure Princeton Shit" or something. I was expecting "BS".
Of course, then we get into the Timex Sinclair and friends...
I think he means that saying "20x quieter" is nonsensical.
:-)
You should never say that something is "20x smaller" or "20x quieter". You can say "20x larger" or "20x louder".
You can say that something is only "one twentieth as loud", though.
Otherwise, you'd have -19 loudness units.
This is mindblowingly unimportant. Can *anyone* think of *any* company that has a perfect ABI? No, because processors evolve, and the ABI has to stay the same. When I write an x86 program on my Linux box, it pushes *all* the arguments onto the stack. Is that the best way to do things? No. Is it done anyway? Yup. Does anyone go into a tizzy about it? No.
Seriously, the x86 Linux ABI is probably worse off...different (worse) byte alignment from Windows, the abovementioned everything-goes-on-the-stack....
...would it be illegal? I'm not aware of any laws that say "If you write a search engine your algorithm design must be done in such a way that you rank your competitors equally highly."
Google's always pimped the integrity of their searches pretty highly. I don't buy into these guys.
You could do every single one of the things you mentioned with DGA in XFree86 4.0 already.
Of course, you can't run in a windowed mode, but if you're running a game, it's a fair bet that you aren't running windowed.
Because DNS is hierarchical.
You don't like it, for the love of God, don't try to make everyone else unhappy with DNS. Set up your own "keyword" server, add a patch to Moz and IE, and let people use *that* naming system.
If that's what people really want, people will use it.
Oh, brother.
.xxx TLD and then make international agreements to force porn to be in .xxx, there's going to be more classification arguments than we can possibly imagine.
.co.uk, you don't have to worry about trademark conflicts, because the country already has an excellent, dispute-resolved database to work from, and simply applies that system to their name granting system.
This isn't just *DNS*, it's the standardized ISO country code system. It's always hard to change, it doesn't change easily, etc.
You want some good reasons to use the current system? Okay, let's go.
A) Politics. Not just a joke any more. A lot of "countries" want legitimacy (or to remove legitimacy) by getting a TLD, and political pressure has been placed on ICANN before. ICANN solved this by passing the buck onto ISO, and saying that they don't deal with political problems -- that they use only ISO country codes for regions. Unless you want Israel or Palestine bombing ICANN members, this is worth considering.
B) Stability. A naming system that fluxes constantly is *much* less useful. The idea is that IPs can change, the underlying network can move around, but names stay the same. If you move to *anything* that's easier to change, you reduce the usefulness of the naming system to end users.
C) Inherent data within the naming system. With a few annoying exceptions, you can tell where something is based just by glancing at its domain name. Now, before people start on the usual 'Net dogma "the Internet erases all boundaries and obsoletes nationalities", let me point out that we still happen to exist in the real world as well, for the time being. There's a fairly useful correlation between country name and physical distance (esp. since most educated people can tell roughly how far it is from their country to another). Unless network technology gets drastically different, this has a pretty major relationship to latency, bandwidth, *and* network cost (i.e. you're supposed to use mirrors within your own country, and it's pretty easy to tell where they are if you just glance at the TLD on the mirrors). Second, like it or not, different countries have different laws and censorship rules as relate to the Internet. If I can easily tell that a site is in China, I can figure out whether the government's likely to have sanitized the information on it.
D) It's *a* clear solution. The good thing about the current system is that there aren't quibbles. "Well, *maybe* ISO really meant *this* when they assigned the country codes" doesn't come up. If people start trying to build a
E) Trademark issues. There's a fairly clear (and, I think, reasonable) advantage to Microsoft in not letting Apple grab "microsoft.com" and redirect it to a fake site that gives people a bad impression of Microsoft. Countries already have their own trademark rules and registries set up, with a legal system in place to avoid conflicts. If you register things in
F) Potential for an alternative. DNS isn't bound into the Internet at an architectural level, though it is quite popular. It's quite replaceable by people that want to set up their own system. If you want a non-hierarchical system, without domains (i.e. keywords), *go* for it. Set up a couple of servers, a registrar, hand out patches for Mozilla and IE, and you're good to go. Just don't try to turn the *Domain* Name System into your *Keyword* Name System. If someone wanted to set up a naming system based on GPS coordinates, they could do it if they wanted to.
Because DNS actually has some meaning to its syntax. It's not just a slightly different looking set of "AOL keywords" with periods inconveniently placed in it.
Now, I'd be all for another naming system if people really want another one (and I'm *sure* nothing would make MS happier than controlling their own naming system...like a global Active Directory or something), but can people stop trying to mangle DNS? It's been a nice, (relatively) straightforward system for years.
".biz". Argh. Fucking registrars.
There's a lightweight library designed for very small programs called owfat.
The switch to link against this library was thus -lowfat
Seems that if it's trying to avoid sprintf(), it could just use snprintf() instead of doing this...
The "infected" error makes sense. The AV software could wipe the virus, but couldn't restore the original executable to a virgin state, and is warning you that you might run into problems.
Eudora is a very nice piece of software. The developers had quite a sense of humor -- I distinctly remember a checkbox for "waste CPU cycles drawing trendy 3d junk".
Eudora was also very good at actually *describing* what an option did (unlike MS software, which usually says something like "The website could not be contacted", which does the end user no good and gives the troubleshooter headaches. Error messages also contained relevant information, and the whole piece of software was fast and stable.
Definitely one of the better written apps I've ever used, and one where it seems that the engineer/techie types had more leeway.
Which is why you install the free and excellent MacsBug, which provides a much more informative and useful debugging environment than the BSOD.
Why would the CIA World Factbook offend anyone? it's a tremendously good resource.
One thing the US government is really good about is putting out lots of free data archives that it's spent money building. There are *excellent* resources available to the world:
The USGS puts out really great maps and elevation maps for free. Not something you can produce on your own easily.
NASA puts out some of my favorite stuff -- images, huge quantities of data.
The Farm Security Administration has some really nice old photographs.
The Library of Congress has tons of really nice stuff.
The Smithsonian is one of the greatest museums I can imagine.
The US government is one of the most steady and highest-quality provider of useful content (and ad-free!) available to the Internet.
I kind of wish there was some site that listed all the US government sites as a sort of tree...make it easier to browse through them.
I've always wondered about this. For a long time Korea has had extremely high amounts of online time spent per-user. Presumably, that means lots of experienced techies from dicking around with computers so much.
Yet I hear surprisingly few Korean names among major open-source developers. Korea has a name for pirated software, and that's about it.
Why no *good* benefits coming from all that online time?
The author concludes, 'every single byte in this executable file can be accounted for and justified. How many executables have you created lately that you can say that about?'
Heck, Microsoft fits that profile. Every byte accounted for? "One enormous pile of garbage."
A pointless question since CEOs are not paid 100 times what an engineer makes, let alone 1000
Oh, really?
I suspect almost all engineer salaries range between 50k and 100k. This link (first in a Google search for "CEO salary") lists 62M as an average pay for CEOs in examined companies. These *are* major corporations, mind you.
That's about 1000x times.
And yes, the CEO is earning that money. That is simple economics.
Well...yes, I didn't argue with that.
I'm not sure that it's in the company's best interests to pay so much, though.
The problem is that high-level execs are in a position to have significant influence over their own paychecks and bennies, which is just stupid.
The only thing he said was "unethical". There was no express mention of "fraud".
And consider your own words. Just as the "it's bad because it's rich" dogma has a lot of issues, so too does the "it's good because it's rich", which you've gone at least as far in emphasizing.
On top of that, it seems that you guys skipped economics in college and can't tell that those rich people do far more for the opportunities available to poor people than any government program ever has
Sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I don't necessarily buy into it anyway.
Unless you were an investor in or employee of Enron, Worldcom etc, you have no right to complain because their fraud has not affected you.
You make this bold statement a few sentences after telling the original poster that he skipped economics? The ripple effects of an organization as large as either of the above two going under is *enormous*, affecting almost everyone.
Heck, with Worldcom *alone* and ignoring indirect effects, a hell of a lot of my packets get routed through UUNET.
There have been major changes to law, a lot of "earnings revisions" from companies that have been claiming bullshit (which drives down the market more). There have been companies going out of business that are vendors to the companies in trouble.
Again: pure socialist systems tend to have issues. That doesn't mean that pure capitalist (i.e. without government regulation) systems are useful. For example, in the real world you can end up with monopolies...
It's hard to say why someone "deserves" money, so I'm not going to make claims in that area. I, personally, think that companies that give their top officers that much money are *stupid*, though. Does a CEO *really* have skills that are 1000 times harder to obtain than an engineer, justifying a 1000x pay ratio to the engineer? (Okay, maybe a bit less, since we can factor in a lack of job security.)
Bah. Diamond Age was a waste of time.
And Stephenson was really negative about Zodiac, which I really enjoyed. The plot is very similar to Snow Crash, though with a different setting.
If you're a Snow Crash fan, reading Zodiac is a blast.
Cryptonomicon is very good in places, but a fair number of those 900 pages went into very slow material (building venture capital and doing oceanographic surveying is about as entertaining as it sounds).
I just want a Snow Crash II. Gritty, full of hyperbole and ridiculously badass characters, cynical as hell, and glorifying tech. And the sentences...NS must have rolled them around in his mouth for quite some time before committing them to paper. They read like film noir dialog.