For instance, I personally suspect LOTR looked a hell of a lot better than it would have otherwise.
Star Wars is potentially a different story. I think a lot of the time they could have done better with more traditional techniques. But not always... For instance, a lot of people took Lucas to task for using a CG Yoda. Did Yoda look worse than he did in Empire? In many ways, yes. His skin was too shiny, there was not enough texture, he looked plastic. But there is also the issue of animation: forgetting the hokieness of him leaping around for a bit, one of the things that always bugged me when I would watch Empire was that I could tell that Yoda was a puppet because he couldn't be lip-synced very well. The CG Yoda had this much better. So yes, the new Yoda looked CG, but the old Yoda looked like a puppet. In a movie, I would say I found the newer one more believable, while in stills the older one was better. But as Star Wars is a movie...
(I can't comment on I Am Legend, but you're not the only one to say something like that.)
Even that isn't a perfect solution, and other things affected crime, such as land values. (At least this was true in, say, SC2K.) So one solution would be to drop another police station down, but you could also plop in a few parks and hope the land value increased enough to drop crime. If the area in question was already covered by a couple police stations, the latter probably had a higher chance of success.
I could probably name a dozen reasons without thinking much about it. Here are some:
- You know how most cities have horrible rush hours? A lot of that is caused by human reactions. In heavy traffic conditions, a fender bender or even a particularly aggressive driver that starts cutting between lanes and making people hit their brakes can cause substantial disruption in traffic flow. People around start breaking, so the people behind them start braking, and this moves backwards in traffic like a wave. But there is no obstruction, and no real reason for that to occur. If everyone had automatically driven cars, this problem would be greatly lessened.
- Increased safety. Computers have bugs, and cars have mechanical failures, and there are probably some conditions (read: snow) where driverless cars would have a difficult time. But computers have much faster reaction times than people, can organize into ad hoc networks so that different cars can communicate and organize themselves, they don't get tired, they don't get drunk, they don't try to put on makeup or read the newspaper or talk on the phone as they drive. They don't have blind spots, and they could know that there is construction ahead, traffic is bad, and maybe you should take another route.
- Because of computers' far increased reaction time over a human's, computers could be more "aggressive" than humans safely can. They could go faster and they could use less clearance between cars. This also helps with the rush hour thing.
- Because of several of the previous reasons, they also hold promise to improve gas efficiency. If they can smooth out your ride, avoiding as much acceleration as a human would do, that decreases fuel use.
- It is driving for you. I hate flying, buses are even worse, and the train system in the US sucks ass. But even if it takes more time and costs more, it's often less of a hassle to fly somewhere or take the train. Why? You can do something. I just got back from winter break. I spent 3 hours in the car going to the airport, an hour and a half in the Pittsburgh airport, an hour and a half in the plane, almost two hours in Chicago Midway, then 4 hours on a bus to my final destination. That's 12 hours. (Alternately I could have flew destination to destination, which would probably have shaved that down to about 5 hours. But it would have also increased transportation cost from about $100 to about $250, one-way.) Coincidentally, a car trip would also have taken about 12 hours plus stops. My trip was pretty tiring, but 12 hours driving is brutal, especially when you hit Chicago 9 hours into it. You have to pay absolute attention to what you are doing for 12 hours, but at the same time, it's mindnumbingly boring after a while. On a plane or train, you can read, use your laptop, whatever. Hey, you could do that with a driverless car too!
There are all sorts of problems with this vision, which may or may not be a pipe dream. But it's definitely a worthwhile goal to try to achieve.
Computers won't drive drunk, fall asleep, tailgate, scream at their boyfriends over their cellphones, or "zone-out." Actually, I think one of the big benefits is that they WILL be able to tailgate, at least by the standards of what is called tailgating today. Because of the increased reaction time, they'll be able to stay much closer to cars in front, be able to do merges and such that humans can't (read: shouldn't, or can't safely), and will probably travel faster.
(Of course, you could easily define tailgating as being too close to the car in front to stop in time, in which case computers still won't tailgate but the "too close" will be changed.)
There will be mistakes and deaths, but they will be far fewer than we have today.
And as another point: if there is a mistake and it's due to software, it can be fixed for little cost compared to today's recalls.
Anyway while the past wasn't perfect, from a numbers standpoint there were more trustworthy people then than now. You might want to ask your previous generation how things were back then, were one could leave one's door unlocked at night. Unless you were black, in which case you might face a lynching. And you might have trouble getting to work because there may not be space on the bus for you.
Each generation has its own problems; they just change from generation to generation. At least I'd like to think they are decreasing in severity even as they change, though I'm not entirely convinced of this fact.
Although Watson is well known for his alleged 1943 statement: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," there is no evidence he ever made it. The author Kevin Maney tried to find the origin of the quote, but has been unable to locate any speeches or documents of Watson's that contain this, nor are the words present in any contemporary articles about IBM. The earliest known citation is from 1986 on Usenet in the signature of a poster from Convex Computer Corporation as "I think there is a world market for about five computers" -- Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines), 1943.
And not much point in the summer. I guess you come from the North, where your heating bills are the main environmental cost, and not from the South, where A/C is your main environmental cost.;-)
Yes, so every time I want to do a project, I need to get the admins in on it? Great system. (Fortunately at this point I can just do it myself; my grad school uses AFS which provides the ability for users to manage ACLs. Actually undergrad supposedly provided ACLs, but I tried a little and couldn't get them to work.)
It would have been nice if they provided a good Subversion server we could use, but to my knowledge they didn't. Anyway I was simplifying the above discussion slightly; when doing such a project it was a filesystem-based SVN repository that was shared in the first place, not a working directory. (So you would do something like "svn co file:///home/evaned/subversionrepos/classes/498/project".)
This is standard practice in the industry; components replaced under warranty have to be replaced...
Except that this was replaced beyond the warranty; it cost him $160. At that price I would expect to actually be buying a drive, not trading in an old one. 80 GB laptop drives on Newegg range from $55 to $88, which means that, at $160, installation is between $72 and $105. That's already fairly high, but I'm willing to grant Apple that they have to worry about breaking more, and need to have a profit too. But that price plus the old drive? That's voluntary highway robbery!
It's his loss for signing the contract without reading it, but that doesn't mean that we can't sit back here and berate Apple for being stupid.
To get to the point though: Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much harder to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness For at least one setting -- a school setup -- they are almost vital.
Suppose I am working on a project with one other person from my class, and we need to share files. How can I do that without making them readable and writable by too many people? AFAIK, I can't. I don't think I can create a group without root privileges, so I can't make a group with just the two of us. The best I can do is use the class that this is for, make it readable and writable by everyone in that group, then put the files in some deep directory like ~/classes/cs392/project/project3/working or something. Security by obscurity FTW.
I guess I could write a setuid program to update the files.
Whereas if I have ACLs I can put an ACL on the directory that says he can read and write, but no one else can.
Which of those seems like the best solution to you?
"Home" is really more of a "Workstation lite", with a lot of the workstation features disabled
Alternately, you can think of "Home" as the successor to Windows ME, with an NT kernel. I'll try to do this schematically (WKS = Workstation, SVR = Server, and some other weird abbreviations used to make the alignment work):
Wind. 98 --> Wind. ME --> XP Home --> Vista Home NT 4 WKS --> 2000 WKS --> XP Prof --> Vista Ultimate NT 4 SVR --> 2000 SVR --> SVR 2K3 --> SVR 2008
In reality, things are a lot more complicated, because there are other editions, Win 2K Advanced Server, x64 editions, and God knows how many variants of Vista. (Maybe "Vista Business" is a better fit than "Ultimate" above too.) In addition, a lot of people who were or would have been in the 95/98 line moved to the "Pro" line for XP. But, for most people, things probably progressed as indicated.
He's a tard for using a "full featured word processor" for a "simple find and replace". That's like using a pneumatic jack hammer to put in my 2-man camping tent spikes...
At the same time, it would help if Windows came with a decent set of CLI programs. It's possible that he didn't have a better tool installed.
No, the pro version is more intended toward business users. Not servers, but the sort of thing workers have on their desktop. That's why it has tunings for corporate networks and ACLs and quotas and such.
You can debate the drawbacks and benefits of having so many versions, but XP was never intended to be a substantial server.
If the customer wants Linux, Sun will sell them Linux. If the customer wants Solaris, Sun will sell them Solaris. If the customer wants Intel or AMD or SPARC, Sun will sell them that. IBM will also sell you Linux or Aix or Intel or AMD or SPARC.
Yes, this is true. But I bet that if you asked them, they would prefer to be selling you Sparc and Solaris, and would prefer if Linux were not as big as it is.
Then I guess one area that open source hardware nerds can work on is to rework the FPU to be faster.
It's not so much that the FPU is slow as, at least on the T1 (Niagra 1), there was only one of them for the whole chip. The applications the Niagra targets don't really need FPU power (how much FP work does/.'s webserver do?), and Sun is fairly close to production of the Rock, a processor that in some sense is similar to the Niagra but will also have much heavier FP capabilities. (In a development that is pretty exciting for the architecture people down the hall, the Rock will be the first commercial system supporting transactional memory.)
Sun's in sort of a weird position. They have largely embraced OSS (witness the fact that they open sourced most notably SPARC, OpenSolaris, and Java), but I think are not entirely at ease with it. From at least one point of view, they have a lot to lose from Linux taking over for Solaris. OpenSolaris is also under the CDDL, which is not GPL-compatible. I wouldn't be surprised if the incompatibility is viewed as a benefit by a lot of Sun, rather than a bug.
So they may not be perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better than most companies.
If they were talking about sharing with random people on the Internet they would have a valid point.
Gee, I wonder if that was what they were doing:
Exhibit B to Plaintiffs' Complaint is a series of screen shots showing the sound recording and other files found in the KaZaA shared folder on Defendant's computer on January 30, 2006.... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recording into the compressed.mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs. Moreover, Defendant had no authorization to distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted recordings from his KaZaA shared folder.
Each of the 11 sound recordings on Exhibit A to Plaintiffs' Complaint were stored in the.mp3 format in the shared folder on Defendant's computer hard drive, and each of these eleven files were actually disseminated from Defendant's computer.... In addition, Defendant unlawfully distributed all 54 of Plaintiffs' Sound Recordings by making unauthorized copies of the recordings available to other KaZaA users for download.
Just because/. says it's true doesn't make it so... and this is just another instance of the submitter being either stupid, careless, or actively dishonest. The "shared folder" was Kazaa.
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In some ways, yes, in some ways, no.
For instance, I personally suspect LOTR looked a hell of a lot better than it would have otherwise.
Star Wars is potentially a different story. I think a lot of the time they could have done better with more traditional techniques. But not always... For instance, a lot of people took Lucas to task for using a CG Yoda. Did Yoda look worse than he did in Empire? In many ways, yes. His skin was too shiny, there was not enough texture, he looked plastic. But there is also the issue of animation: forgetting the hokieness of him leaping around for a bit, one of the things that always bugged me when I would watch Empire was that I could tell that Yoda was a puppet because he couldn't be lip-synced very well. The CG Yoda had this much better. So yes, the new Yoda looked CG, but the old Yoda looked like a puppet. In a movie, I would say I found the newer one more believable, while in stills the older one was better. But as Star Wars is a movie...
(I can't comment on I Am Legend, but you're not the only one to say something like that.)
Even that isn't a perfect solution, and other things affected crime, such as land values. (At least this was true in, say, SC2K.) So one solution would be to drop another police station down, but you could also plop in a few parks and hope the land value increased enough to drop crime. If the area in question was already covered by a couple police stations, the latter probably had a higher chance of success.
The other one isn't as blatant an advertisement for Coverity? ;-)
"You mean it is something other than disassemble pre, disassemble post, diff?"
There's a little bit of actually understanding the diff in there too. That's sort of the hard part.
I could probably name a dozen reasons without thinking much about it. Here are some:
- You know how most cities have horrible rush hours? A lot of that is caused by human reactions. In heavy traffic conditions, a fender bender or even a particularly aggressive driver that starts cutting between lanes and making people hit their brakes can cause substantial disruption in traffic flow. People around start breaking, so the people behind them start braking, and this moves backwards in traffic like a wave. But there is no obstruction, and no real reason for that to occur. If everyone had automatically driven cars, this problem would be greatly lessened.
- Increased safety. Computers have bugs, and cars have mechanical failures, and there are probably some conditions (read: snow) where driverless cars would have a difficult time. But computers have much faster reaction times than people, can organize into ad hoc networks so that different cars can communicate and organize themselves, they don't get tired, they don't get drunk, they don't try to put on makeup or read the newspaper or talk on the phone as they drive. They don't have blind spots, and they could know that there is construction ahead, traffic is bad, and maybe you should take another route.
- Because of computers' far increased reaction time over a human's, computers could be more "aggressive" than humans safely can. They could go faster and they could use less clearance between cars. This also helps with the rush hour thing.
- Because of several of the previous reasons, they also hold promise to improve gas efficiency. If they can smooth out your ride, avoiding as much acceleration as a human would do, that decreases fuel use.
- It is driving for you. I hate flying, buses are even worse, and the train system in the US sucks ass. But even if it takes more time and costs more, it's often less of a hassle to fly somewhere or take the train. Why? You can do something. I just got back from winter break. I spent 3 hours in the car going to the airport, an hour and a half in the Pittsburgh airport, an hour and a half in the plane, almost two hours in Chicago Midway, then 4 hours on a bus to my final destination. That's 12 hours. (Alternately I could have flew destination to destination, which would probably have shaved that down to about 5 hours. But it would have also increased transportation cost from about $100 to about $250, one-way.) Coincidentally, a car trip would also have taken about 12 hours plus stops. My trip was pretty tiring, but 12 hours driving is brutal, especially when you hit Chicago 9 hours into it. You have to pay absolute attention to what you are doing for 12 hours, but at the same time, it's mindnumbingly boring after a while. On a plane or train, you can read, use your laptop, whatever. Hey, you could do that with a driverless car too!
There are all sorts of problems with this vision, which may or may not be a pipe dream. But it's definitely a worthwhile goal to try to achieve.
Computers won't drive drunk, fall asleep, tailgate, scream at their boyfriends over their cellphones, or "zone-out."
Actually, I think one of the big benefits is that they WILL be able to tailgate, at least by the standards of what is called tailgating today. Because of the increased reaction time, they'll be able to stay much closer to cars in front, be able to do merges and such that humans can't (read: shouldn't, or can't safely), and will probably travel faster.
(Of course, you could easily define tailgating as being too close to the car in front to stop in time, in which case computers still won't tailgate but the "too close" will be changed.)
There will be mistakes and deaths, but they will be far fewer than we have today.
And as another point: if there is a mistake and it's due to software, it can be fixed for little cost compared to today's recalls.
Anyway while the past wasn't perfect, from a numbers standpoint there were more trustworthy people then than now. You might want to ask your previous generation how things were back then, were one could leave one's door unlocked at night.
Unless you were black, in which case you might face a lynching. And you might have trouble getting to work because there may not be space on the bus for you.
Each generation has its own problems; they just change from generation to generation. At least I'd like to think they are decreasing in severity even as they change, though I'm not entirely convinced of this fact.
Well of course. You always choose the technology you'll be using before you know what you're making.
And not much point in the summer. ;-)
I guess you come from the North, where your heating bills are the main environmental cost, and not from the South, where A/C is your main environmental cost.
Who's giving the report? You chowderheads, or Jeremy Erwin?
Yes, so every time I want to do a project, I need to get the admins in on it? Great system. (Fortunately at this point I can just do it myself; my grad school uses AFS which provides the ability for users to manage ACLs. Actually undergrad supposedly provided ACLs, but I tried a little and couldn't get them to work.)
It would have been nice if they provided a good Subversion server we could use, but to my knowledge they didn't. Anyway I was simplifying the above discussion slightly; when doing such a project it was a filesystem-based SVN repository that was shared in the first place, not a working directory. (So you would do something like "svn co file:///home/evaned/subversionrepos/classes/498/project".)
This is standard practice in the industry; components replaced under warranty have to be replaced...
Except that this was replaced beyond the warranty; it cost him $160. At that price I would expect to actually be buying a drive, not trading in an old one. 80 GB laptop drives on Newegg range from $55 to $88, which means that, at $160, installation is between $72 and $105. That's already fairly high, but I'm willing to grant Apple that they have to worry about breaking more, and need to have a profit too. But that price plus the old drive? That's voluntary highway robbery!
It's his loss for signing the contract without reading it, but that doesn't mean that we can't sit back here and berate Apple for being stupid.
To get to the point though: Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much harder to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness
For at least one setting -- a school setup -- they are almost vital.
Suppose I am working on a project with one other person from my class, and we need to share files. How can I do that without making them readable and writable by too many people? AFAIK, I can't. I don't think I can create a group without root privileges, so I can't make a group with just the two of us. The best I can do is use the class that this is for, make it readable and writable by everyone in that group, then put the files in some deep directory like ~/classes/cs392/project/project3/working or something. Security by obscurity FTW.
I guess I could write a setuid program to update the files.
Whereas if I have ACLs I can put an ACL on the directory that says he can read and write, but no one else can.
Which of those seems like the best solution to you?
I've entered a tag of "correctionavailable," but I have no clue how they actually show up.
Alternately, you can think of "Home" as the successor to Windows ME, with an NT kernel. I'll try to do this schematically (WKS = Workstation, SVR = Server, and some other weird abbreviations used to make the alignment work): In reality, things are a lot more complicated, because there are other editions, Win 2K Advanced Server, x64 editions, and God knows how many variants of Vista. (Maybe "Vista Business" is a better fit than "Ultimate" above too.) In addition, a lot of people who were or would have been in the 95/98 line moved to the "Pro" line for XP. But, for most people, things probably progressed as indicated.
He's a tard for using a "full featured word processor" for a "simple find and replace". That's like using a pneumatic jack hammer to put in my 2-man camping tent spikes...
At the same time, it would help if Windows came with a decent set of CLI programs. It's possible that he didn't have a better tool installed.
He also said "You realize that Win2k3 does turn off most services by default, and Win2k8 takes this even further by not installing them at all."
I suspect the moderation is more related to that.
No, the pro version is more intended toward business users. Not servers, but the sort of thing workers have on their desktop. That's why it has tunings for corporate networks and ACLs and quotas and such.
You can debate the drawbacks and benefits of having so many versions, but XP was never intended to be a substantial server.
Vista was never meant as a server. Same as XP isn't used as a server, it's Server 2003.
If the customer wants Linux, Sun will sell them Linux. If the customer wants Solaris, Sun will sell them Solaris. If the customer wants Intel or AMD or SPARC, Sun will sell them that. IBM will also sell you Linux or Aix or Intel or AMD or SPARC.
Yes, this is true. But I bet that if you asked them, they would prefer to be selling you Sparc and Solaris, and would prefer if Linux were not as big as it is.
Then I guess one area that open source hardware nerds can work on is to rework the FPU to be faster.
/.'s webserver do?), and Sun is fairly close to production of the Rock, a processor that in some sense is similar to the Niagra but will also have much heavier FP capabilities. (In a development that is pretty exciting for the architecture people down the hall, the Rock will be the first commercial system supporting transactional memory.)
It's not so much that the FPU is slow as, at least on the T1 (Niagra 1), there was only one of them for the whole chip. The applications the Niagra targets don't really need FPU power (how much FP work does
Sun's in sort of a weird position. They have largely embraced OSS (witness the fact that they open sourced most notably SPARC, OpenSolaris, and Java), but I think are not entirely at ease with it. From at least one point of view, they have a lot to lose from Linux taking over for Solaris. OpenSolaris is also under the CDDL, which is not GPL-compatible. I wouldn't be surprised if the incompatibility is viewed as a benefit by a lot of Sun, rather than a bug.
So they may not be perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better than most companies.
Reporting on any current event, even in bad faith is quite legal.
That depends. If you're reporting on someone, and say something false in bad faith, that could very easily be libel or slander.
Gee, I wonder if that was what they were doing:
Just because