Minor nit - they list the default compression for gzip as -5, but it's -6. From the man page:
-# --fast --best
Regulate the speed of compression using the specified digit #,
where -1 or --fast indicates the fastest compression method
(less compression) and -9 or --best indicates the slowest com-
pression method (best compression). The default compression
level is -6 (that is, biased towards high compression at expense
of speed).
Another problem is that gzip has compression levels ranging from -1 (fast, minimal) to -9 (slow, maximal), and I suspect he only tested the default, which is either -6 or -7.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the other compression tools have similar options.
The rarest machine in my collection is an Apple///+ - this was the model that supposedly addressed the overheating problems of the///. I picked it up for free from a Berkeley yard sale in the late 90s.
My other odd machine is an IBM PowerPC laptop, from the brief period in the mid-90s where Apple and IBM and I think Motorola were making CHRP (common hardware reference platform) machines. The laptop runs AIX, but I believe there was also a version of Windows NT for PowerPC for it.
Other machines:
TI 99 4/A, Atari 800, TRS-80 Model I, TRS-80 Color Computer, Timex Sinclair 1000 Apple ][, Powerbook 170, iBook clamshell, B/W G3, Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 and 2100 NeXTCube, NeXTStation
At one point I had a Symbolics Lispstation 3400? (the first dorm-fridge one that came after the massive 3600) and an ARS-33 teletype, but neither made the move out to the west coast.
TFA is a bit premature. Thunderbird's calendar has quite a way to go before it'll become a serious threat to anything. This is nothing against Thunderbird (it's been my mail client for years) or the calendar project, just an observation that they are pretty early along with calendars and the UI still doesn't fit really well with the application.
Provisioning by SBC sounds bad, but perhaps service is better when the ISP owns the issue and beats on the provisioning company when things go wrong.
One of the joys of Speakeasy was that they managed all the problems and owned a trouble ticked through resolution. My biggest frustration with SBC when I used them (in the early days of PacBell/SBC DSL) was that they had five different departments involved in any given trouble ticket, and each would pass the buck off to the other (ISP guys "it's your line!", line guys "it's the CO", CO guys "it's your modem.")
Sonic.net gets excellent ratings as a broadband ISP - maybe they have enough pull to tame SBC?
I've been looking for a useful device in this space. Each one I've seen obviously has to make tradeoffs around battery life, screen size, keyboard size, and processor speed, and it's hard to compare one device to another based on features when it's really a question of whether one device achieves a better balance of tradeoffs than another.
That said, anyone interested in this space might want to take a look at the following devices:
Short summary: the Mylo is possibly the best handheld Skype phone on the market and comes with Google Talk as well and has great UI and case design, but is expensive and has a poor keyboard. The Nokia N800 has fantastic battery life and a great browser that can handle nearly any website except Youtube, and also has a Nokia-supported very active open source development community - the device runs Debian, but lacks a keyboard and ships with apps that are too rough for non-geek end-users. The OQO 02 is a complete laptop with the best keyboard of the bunch and a lot of nice hardware UI touches, but isn't shipping until April, is expensive, and has fairly short battery life. The Vaio UX series has the best display and most processor power of the bunch, but is a little too large for comfort and has a terrible keyboard - the worst of the lot).
For my purposes, the OQO 02 has the best balance of features and tradeoffs, but I could have chosen the Nokia N800 if I wanted a maximally hackable portable computer.
I'm an admin on Wikipedia, and I have not seen an admin support another admin just because they're an admin. What I have seen is someone who has thousands of edits being given the benefit of the doubt, but then, I've seen that of users with only an IP address and a single edit as well. Why, because when a user screws up, the rule is to assume good faith. It's easier to convert a vandal or a newbie to a contributing user if you deal with them as reasonable people who made a mistake.
While it pains me that someone would make up false credentials, I would be very surprised if this affected other editor's views of the user's contributions. On Wikipedia, it is absolutely not about who you are (with one notable exception - Jimmy Wales) or about what your credentials are. Instead, it's about what you just contributed, whether it's written from a neutral point of view, and whether you can back it up with a cite.
This is one of the things that frustrates many new editors. They come to the Wikipedia with life experience - say they worked at Foo Co. in the early days - and they write an article about it. If their article is based on their personal experience, and there's no publicly citable work to back up the claims, it gets edited down or deleted.
The same would be true of an admin's edits. If I want to write something based on my personal knowledge, I'll do it on an article's Talk page, but I won't put it into the article itself. I've never run across Essjay's edits, but I believe the same would hold for his - if he were to make a claim about something and attempt to back it up by saying he is a domain expert with a degree, the degree would carry no weight.
Why? Because a contribution is about the content, not the contributor.
--Pat
P.S. Jimmy Wales is an exception, because he reserves final authority on whether someone should be banned or whether content is harmful to the project. That said, he usually edits without invoking this authority, and other editors, including admins, are free to and often do argue with him on controversial issues.
During my last meeting with Sandia management, a semicircle of management was positioned in chairs around me and Bruce Held [Sandia's chief of counterintelligence]. Mr. Held arrived about five minutes late to the meeting and positioned his chair inches directly in front of mine. Mr. Held is a retired CIA officer, who evidently ran paramilitary operations in Africa, according to his deposition testimony.
At one point, Mr. Held yelled, "You're lucky you have such understanding management... if you worked for me, I would decapitate you! There would at least be blood all over the office!" During the entire meeting, the other managers just sat there and watched.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Held said, "Your wife works here, doesn't she? I might need to talk to her." [Editor's note: In court testimony, Held admitted using the word "decapitated" and that he wouldn't contest using the word "blood" although he didn't recall saying it. He also apologized for using those terms.]
Indeed, my wife did work there -- in Sandia's International Programs section, working on nuclear counter-proliferation, port and border security issues. In the context of that meeting, it was a chilling comment. Shortly after the meeting, which management described at trial as "a fact-finding session with Mr. Carpenter," my director showed up at my office, escorted me to the gate and stripped me of my badge. That was the last time I was ever at Sandia. [Carpenter's wife resigned and is now a White House fellow working as a special assistant to top-ranking government officials.
Contact your hiring manager (the person who you're going to work for, not the HR drone) immediately and politely but directly describe the problem. Tell them that the HR person is giving you an offer that is different from what the hiring manager offered, and that you'll be unable to take the job unless the issue is resolved.
At the same time, tell your current employer that you may be available for contracting.
If the hiring manager doesn't fix it, or tells you that they can't, then look for work elsewhere. Getting a promise pulled out from you during the *offer* period is surely an indication that you'll get more of this once you're hired, and are less likely to leave. Life's too short to work for a place like that.
Good luck with this, and remember to be polite but firm, and start lining up other interviews now in case the offer isn't resolved.
I remember heading down to one of the mechanical rooms (possibly the same one you saw) that leads to the long steam tunnel and seeing an RJ-11 ethernet wall-jack back in the mid-90s. This was at a time when my entire campus was connected to the internet via a 56k microwave link that would go down every time it rained.
I carry around Knoppix and the Ultimate Boot CD on USB thumb drives.
I most recently booted a multi-terabyte server off the Knoppix thumb drive to run memtest overnight in an attempt to track down some hardware flakiness.
UBCD is a lifesaver for borked Windows machines.
Ubuntu is the best end-user live CD I've seen. It works well on my laptop, even getting wireless right.
Actually, diesel-electrics are said to be much quieter and harder to detect than nuclear submarines. I remember reading a few years ago that an Australian diesel-electric, in exercises, was took out the carrier in a carrier group.
In a 2003 joint naval exercise, three Collins-class submarines reportedly "sank" two American Los Angeles class attack submarines and a US aircraft carrier, supporting the claims of defect resolution and combat effectiveness
Also a spy process is executed simultaneously with the cipher and it continuously does the following:
continuously executes a number of branches, and
easures the overall execution time of all its branches
in such a way that all of these branches map to the same BTB set which also stores the specific conditional branch determined by the secret key bits of the crypto process. This requires that the number of branches in the spy process needs to be equal to the associativity of the underlying BTB, i.e., to its number of ways. Recall that it is easy to understand the properties of the BTB using simple benchmarks as explained in [MMK]. Let's analyze what's happening if the adversary starts the spy process before the cipher. It simply means that when the cipher starts the encryption (= signing), the CPU cannot find the target address of the target branch in the BTB and the prediction must be not-taken, cf. [She]. Furthermore, we can distinguish two cases depending on the currently processed secret key bit:
If the branch turns out to be taken, then a misprediction will occur and the target address of the branch needs to be stored in BTB. Then, one of the spy branches has to be evicted from the BTB so that the new target address can be stored in. When the spy-process re-executes its branches, it will encounter a misprediction on the branch that has just been evicted. As the spy-process also measures the execution time of all its branches, it can simply detect whenever the cipher modified the BTB, meaning that the execution time of these spy branches takes a little longer than usual.
If the branch turns out to be not taken, then no misprediction will occur and the BTB does not need to be updated. When the spy-process re-executes its branches, measures the execution time of all its branches, it can simply infer that the cipher had not modified the BTB, and the target branch was not taken by the crypto process.
Thus, the adversary can simply determine the complete execution flow of the cipher process by continuously performing the above very simple spy strategy, i.e., just executing spy branches and measuring their overall execution time. Therefore, the spy process will see the complete prediction/misprediction trace of the target branch, and is able to infer the secret key. Following [OST06], this kind of attack was named an asynchronous attack, as the adversary-process needs no synchronization at all with the simultaneous crypto process -- it is just following his own paradigm: continuously execute spy branches and measure their overall execution time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Visa (the corporate entity) also runs VisaNet, the network over which Visa transactions are sent, and charges a small fee per transaction.
Also, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Visa decribing Visa's complex corporate structure.
*
Legally, Visa comprises four non-stock, separately incorporated companies that employ 6000 people worldwide: Visa International Service Association ("VISA"), the worldwide parent entity; Visa U.S.A. Inc.; Visa Canada Association; and Visa Europe Ltd. The latter three separately incorporated regions have the status of group members of Visa International Service Association, whereas the unincorporated regions (Visa Latin America [LAC], Visa Asia Pacific and Visa Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa [CEMEA]) are divisions within VISA.
Around 1999 or 2000, I may have set a bandwidth record for the Honda Accord when I moved 1TB of Archive data from San Francisco to Palo Alto in the trunk of my car.
The Internet Archive has a related design that would allow them to ship functional copies of the archive anywhere in the world. It's called the Petabox and it's designed to operate in a shipping container, just add external power, bandwidth, and cooling.
The Internet Archive addressed a similar problem: can you build an Internet Archive in a storage container and ship it? They came up with a design for this around standard racks of low-power, low-heat, high-storage nodes.
Their answer is the Petabox. It's a server setup designed to be "shipping-contained friendly", meaning they can build out a container stuffed with these racks, and have it operational on site with connections for power, cooling, and bandwidth. With this design, they can deploy a mirror of the Internet Archive anywhere that's willing to host it, without having to build a machine room or individual racks on site.
Capricorn Tech of San Francisco builds these machines and their site has more info.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
Another problem is that gzip has compression levels ranging from -1 (fast, minimal) to -9 (slow, maximal), and I suspect he only tested the default, which is either -6 or -7.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the other compression tools have similar options.
--Pat
Oh boy, here we go.
///+ - this was the model that supposedly addressed the overheating problems of the ///. I picked it up for free from a Berkeley yard sale in the late 90s.
The rarest machine in my collection is an Apple
My other odd machine is an IBM PowerPC laptop, from the brief period in the mid-90s where Apple and IBM and I think Motorola were making CHRP (common hardware reference platform) machines. The laptop runs AIX, but I believe there was also a version of Windows NT for PowerPC for it.
Other machines:
TI 99 4/A, Atari 800, TRS-80 Model I, TRS-80 Color Computer, Timex Sinclair 1000
Apple ][, Powerbook 170, iBook clamshell, B/W G3, Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 and 2100
NeXTCube, NeXTStation
At one point I had a Symbolics Lispstation 3400? (the first dorm-fridge one that came after the massive 3600) and an ARS-33 teletype, but neither made the move out to the west coast.
TFA is a bit premature. Thunderbird's calendar has quite a way to go before it'll become a serious threat to anything. This is nothing against Thunderbird (it's been my mail client for years) or the calendar project, just an observation that they are pretty early along with calendars and the UI still doesn't fit really well with the application.
--Pat
Provisioning by SBC sounds bad, but perhaps service is better when the ISP owns the issue and beats on the provisioning company when things go wrong.
One of the joys of Speakeasy was that they managed all the problems and owned a trouble ticked through resolution. My biggest frustration with SBC when I used them (in the early days of PacBell/SBC DSL) was that they had five different departments involved in any given trouble ticket, and each would pass the buck off to the other (ISP guys "it's your line!", line guys "it's the CO", CO guys "it's your modem.")
Sonic.net gets excellent ratings as a broadband ISP - maybe they have enough pull to tame SBC?
--Pat
Please tell me this is an early April Fools.
Please?
I hope they hold it together, but if they don't, there's Sonic.net which is like Speakeasy without the marketing budget.
--Pat
I've been looking for a useful device in this space. Each one I've seen obviously has to make tradeoffs around battery life, screen size, keyboard size, and processor speed, and it's hard to compare one device to another based on features when it's really a question of whether one device achieves a better balance of tradeoffs than another.
That said, anyone interested in this space might want to take a look at the following devices:
- Sony Vaio UX series (official site w/ too much flash)
- Nokia N800 internet tablet (official site, user forums)
- OQO 02 (official site)
- Sony Mylo (my review, official site)
Short summary: the Mylo is possibly the best handheld Skype phone on the market and comes with Google Talk as well and has great UI and case design, but is expensive and has a poor keyboard. The Nokia N800 has fantastic battery life and a great browser that can handle nearly any website except Youtube, and also has a Nokia-supported very active open source development community - the device runs Debian, but lacks a keyboard and ships with apps that are too rough for non-geek end-users. The OQO 02 is a complete laptop with the best keyboard of the bunch and a lot of nice hardware UI touches, but isn't shipping until April, is expensive, and has fairly short battery life. The Vaio UX series has the best display and most processor power of the bunch, but is a little too large for comfort and has a terrible keyboard - the worst of the lot).
For my purposes, the OQO 02 has the best balance of features and tradeoffs, but I could have chosen the Nokia N800 if I wanted a maximally hackable portable computer.
--Pat
I'm an admin on Wikipedia, and I have not seen an admin support another admin just because they're an admin. What I have seen is someone who has thousands of edits being given the benefit of the doubt, but then, I've seen that of users with only an IP address and a single edit as well. Why, because when a user screws up, the rule is to assume good faith. It's easier to convert a vandal or a newbie to a contributing user if you deal with them as reasonable people who made a mistake.
While it pains me that someone would make up false credentials, I would be very surprised if this affected other editor's views of the user's contributions. On Wikipedia, it is absolutely not about who you are (with one notable exception - Jimmy Wales) or about what your credentials are. Instead, it's about what you just contributed, whether it's written from a neutral point of view, and whether you can back it up with a cite.
This is one of the things that frustrates many new editors. They come to the Wikipedia with life experience - say they worked at Foo Co. in the early days - and they write an article about it. If their article is based on their personal experience, and there's no publicly citable work to back up the claims, it gets edited down or deleted.
The same would be true of an admin's edits. If I want to write something based on my personal knowledge, I'll do it on an article's Talk page, but I won't put it into the article itself. I've never run across Essjay's edits, but I believe the same would hold for his - if he were to make a claim about something and attempt to back it up by saying he is a domain expert with a degree, the degree would carry no weight.
Why? Because a contribution is about the content, not the contributor.
--Pat
P.S. Jimmy Wales is an exception, because he reserves final authority on whether someone should be banned or whether content is harmful to the project. That said, he usually edits without invoking this authority, and other editors, including admins, are free to and often do argue with him on controversial issues.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
Contact your hiring manager (the person who you're going to work for, not the HR drone) immediately and politely but directly describe the problem. Tell them that the HR person is giving you an offer that is different from what the hiring manager offered, and that you'll be unable to take the job unless the issue is resolved.
At the same time, tell your current employer that you may be available for contracting.
If the hiring manager doesn't fix it, or tells you that they can't, then look for work elsewhere. Getting a promise pulled out from you during the *offer* period is surely an indication that you'll get more of this once you're hired, and are less likely to leave. Life's too short to work for a place like that.
Good luck with this, and remember to be polite but firm, and start lining up other interviews now in case the offer isn't resolved.
--Pat
I remember heading down to one of the mechanical rooms (possibly the same one you saw) that leads to the long steam tunnel and seeing an RJ-11 ethernet wall-jack back in the mid-90s. This was at a time when my entire campus was connected to the internet via a 56k microwave link that would go down every time it rained.
Was I envious? Just a bit.
The company that designed this engine has some history. They were Rudolph Diesel's employer in the late 1800s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulzer_Brothers_Ltd.
--Pat
I carry around Knoppix and the Ultimate Boot CD on USB thumb drives.
I most recently booted a multi-terabyte server off the Knoppix thumb drive to run memtest overnight in an attempt to track down some hardware flakiness.
UBCD is a lifesaver for borked Windows machines.
Ubuntu is the best end-user live CD I've seen. It works well on my laptop, even getting wireless right.
--Pat
Actually, diesel-electrics are said to be much quieter and harder to detect than nuclear submarines. I remember reading a few years ago that an Australian diesel-electric, in exercises, was took out the carrier in a carrier group.
i ne
0 82993693.html
Ah, here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collins_class_submar
In a 2003 joint naval exercise, three Collins-class submarines reportedly "sank" two American Los Angeles class attack submarines and a US aircraft carrier, supporting the claims of defect resolution and combat effectiveness
Here's a description of the US/Australian exercise: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/23/1064
--Pat
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Visa (the corporate entity) also runs VisaNet, the network over which Visa transactions are sent, and charges a small fee per transaction.
Also, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Visa decribing Visa's complex corporate structure.
*
Legally, Visa comprises four non-stock, separately incorporated companies that employ 6000 people worldwide: Visa International Service Association ("VISA"), the worldwide parent entity; Visa U.S.A. Inc.; Visa Canada Association; and Visa Europe Ltd. The latter three separately incorporated regions have the status of group members of Visa International Service Association, whereas the unincorporated regions (Visa Latin America [LAC], Visa Asia Pacific and Visa Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa [CEMEA]) are divisions within VISA.
--Pat
Around 1999 or 2000, I may have set a bandwidth record for the Honda Accord when I moved 1TB of Archive data from San Francisco to Palo Alto in the trunk of my car.
--Pat
--Pat
Actually, I can think of three services Google bought rather than built: Blogger, Google Earth, and Sketchup.
--Pat
--Pat
--Pat
Their answer is the Petabox. It's a server setup designed to be "shipping-contained friendly", meaning they can build out a container stuffed with these racks, and have it operational on site with connections for power, cooling, and bandwidth. With this design, they can deploy a mirror of the Internet Archive anywhere that's willing to host it, without having to build a machine room or individual racks on site.
Capricorn Tech of San Francisco builds these machines and their site has more info.
--Pat
"In this particular case I believe the term is pwned."
I think you mean pawned.
--Pat
The article was deleted for the reasons discussed here:
d eletion/Encyclopedia_Dramatica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_
--Pat