preemptive kernel, threads to handle system calls, real-time capabilities, thread based os, etc. Linux is nice and simple, and severely lacks performance and utility in some aspects that make Solaris great.
In a recent story, it said that KaZaA has 60 million members. Now that is a LOT (given that this many people would never have allowed such stupid law to pass had they had a chance to vote).
A more interesting thing is that assuming that each of those KaZaA members has at least downloaded anything, they're probably already guilty. Now, 60,000,000 * 250,000 = 15,000,000,000,000. Isn't this greater than the US Gross National Product?
Ok. Computers are bad. But how many CPUs and how much Memory does it take to equal the pollution lifecycle of a single SUV? There are worse things than computer parts out there (even gold mining is a horribly toxic process).
So what happens to people who are paranoid about backing up THEIR OWN videos that they made with their own digital cams??? Or backing up their HUGE family images in raw tiff format???
Or backup your own development projects? (mine needs at least one backup every week, and the dir is 600MB)
Or download and burn legitimate video/music? Like tuff licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 (like these few wonderful lectures?)
I happen to do all those things, and I go through a TON of CDs (MP3s really do use an insigfinicant number of CDs - Not enough for them to charge me ANYTHING extra).
Are they providing me with a service for me to pay them? Since the way that I see it, if they will be charging me for "their music", I might as well burn it AND distribute it (since, hey, you're paying for it anyway - they already factored in the cost into the price of a CD).
AND according to their logic, I'm a software developer, and I'm sure some percentage of disks is used to distributed warez, so I might as well get some money for EVERY CD sold... (it might be *my* programs that are copied, so...) we have a 3% tax on music, then we'll have a 5% on Videos, then we'll have a 10% on software (with money going to our good friends in Redmond), and what's next??? Don't think that the 3% or whatever it is will be the end of it.
...CD that is digitally encrypted, which plays through a special device that knows you have the license to play it, which encrypts it again and sends it through special wiring to your speakers which also know you have a license for it and allows the sound to pass through.
With an ending step of encrypting it and beaming it directly into your brain, which will only decrypt and remember the information if it 'knows' it paid for it.
Does that imply they'll actually have a place for me to plugin my laptop??? With these fast processors, batteries only last a little over an hour (if even that), and on a long 6-9 hour flight, well, you get the idea...
AND, unless you're first class, there is no way they'll let you plug it in anywhere; unless you go to the rest-room and sit there for an hour to charge the damn battery.
Of course. Well, usually. The article only mentions the test when creating an e-mail account. My idea says to use it every time you send e-mail AND the test comes from the destination (not the source).
Ie: if you want to send me e-mail, you send me e-mail, my e-mail software notices that you are not verified to be a human, so it sends you a challenge. You respond to the challenge (this part is similar to the one described in the article), and when my e-mail software gets the results of your challenge, your original e-mail is either shown in my in-box or not.
No way to fool it. You HAVE to answer it in person. Of course you can hire someone to sit there and mark up these answers, but they'll have to do it for EVERY e-mail they send (they have to reply to every challenge of the destination of their e-mails). So no more spammers sending 100000 e-mails every evening.
Every time you want to send an e-mail to someone, their ISP (or even their own mail server) quickly replies to you with a challenge (image for you to decipher), when you decipher the image, and reply ("as in confirm you're a human") your original message appears in the in-box of the person to whom you've sent it. Anyone can define their own tests if they're not happy with default ones, and you never see an e-mail which hasn't passed YOUR tests.
And since these tests are interactive (ie: you're asking the PERSON who e-mailed you a question, they can be quite hard to fool with a computer).
Non-challenging e-mail addresses (or mailings) can still exist, and will be clearly marked as haven't bee 'verified'... ie: streated as bulk e-mail.
That's the boat that I'm in right now (teaching at tech schools), but that's getting tougher too... there are less and less people who are going into IT, so one of my teaching jobs already went under (not enough people to make a class), and another only has 3 months worth of job security.
It's fun, but far from meeting even the basic financial needs.
A gun is such a simple contraption that it's unimaginable that someone won't make or modify an existing one that won't be protected. It might help in officers being hurt when their gun refuses to fire in an emergency, but it certainly won't stop the criminals from using guns.
Not to mention that there are so many guns out there right now.
A better strategy would be to somehow chemically taint the gun powder to make it identifiable. Whenever you buy bullets (or plain gun powder), that gun powder is forever linked to you. If it ever shows up anywhere, you're busted. Also make it 100 times more expensive than it is now. Crime problem solved. Nobody can afford the bullets (at say $100 a piece), and when they do use them, they're 100% traceable to the buyer. If all bullets sold implement this feature, then in 10-20 years, nobody will have "old" untraceable bullets.
Now, I seriously doubt anyone is nuts enough to make their own gun powder from scratch...
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
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You're saying that someone can learn C AND Java??? No way!
Actually, the specialization is mostly brought in by businesses (who do you want to get to admin your Oracle database? Obviously not someone who knows Sybase administration - else you're paying for extra skills you're not using) This type of thinking makes people learn and target niche markets.
In fact, knowing more than what is required is sometimes seen as bad. Management wants a person they can control and manipulate. Not someone who can spot problems, and realize the manager is an idiot, etc. This is more of the case for middle-management. (a semi-sorta-friend of mine who's at one of these positions once said that he'll never "ok" for hire someone whom he thinks is smarter than he is).
Most IT schools (the non-accredited few months ones, 18moth programs, etc.) do just that - they create 'specialists' in one area. If you're in a 6-18 month program to learn VB (a nice degree title "VB Professinal" or something just as grand), then that's all you'll learn. Most learning in such places is based on memorization and not understanding. If you ask that person what is an array or how to resolve a problem that they haven't been explicitly shown how to solve, they're lost.
I call it the if-while problem: You show a person how an if statement works, they understand it. You how that same person how a while statement works, they understand it. You give them a problem that requires them to use both (one inside the other), and they'll *never* be able to solve it.
How do you get that type of a person out of the specialization pigeonhole if that's what they explicitly got into?
They're only interested in the super-expensive custom made 7400 chips, that are supplied by their approved contractors.
I wouldn't be surprised if they spend a few millions on getting a few of those chips.
It's the deep-pocket-NASA, their contractors have subcontractors (and those have sub-sub-contractors). With them, nothing is plain and simple as going to Radio Shack and getting supplies.
But that will replace *working* and *tested* technology with something that *might* not work or have really minor unforeseen bugs that will screw up a few dozen launches.
Especially if the new-and-improved code/system is bigger and more complex than the original.
I think it's better to emulate 70's rock solid and robust code than to create a new buggy version that does the same thing - but has OOP and a few other IT acronyms in its description.
If they think they can improve quality and robustness of the system by implementing it in "new" languages, use OO techniques, make it 100x as large (and use 1000x the resources), and hire people off the street (html coders anyone?) to do it, they're obviously in for a disaster.
But that won't stop someone from changing their ring tones in the theater... or worse: talking to someone next to them!
Or lowdly chewing popcorn, or bringing in their newly born children (that cry through the whole film)... the list goes on and on...
I think the best solution is to dedicate a small movie theater (2-5 people) for each viewing. Most of the time you'll be alone (or with a significant other) in the "theater"; once each small theater is full, start pairing up.
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preemptive kernel, threads to handle system calls, real-time capabilities, thread based os, etc. Linux is nice and simple, and severely lacks performance and utility in some aspects that make Solaris great.
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson- sussman-lectures/
Tomaco :-)
In a recent story, it said that KaZaA has 60 million members. Now that is a LOT (given that this many people would never have allowed such stupid law to pass had they had a chance to vote).
A more interesting thing is that assuming that each of those KaZaA members has at least downloaded anything, they're probably already guilty. Now, 60,000,000 * 250,000 = 15,000,000,000,000. Isn't this greater than the US Gross National Product?
Where do they come up with figures like this?
Yay, teeny weeny ant spacesuits!
Custom designed and built for each ant, costing billions.
Ok. Computers are bad. But how many CPUs and how much Memory does it take to equal the pollution lifecycle of a single SUV? There are worse things than computer parts out there (even gold mining is a horribly toxic process).
So what happens to people who are paranoid about backing up THEIR OWN videos that they made with their own digital cams??? Or backing up their HUGE family images in raw tiff format???
Or backup your own development projects? (mine needs at least one backup every week, and the dir is 600MB)
Or download and burn legitimate video/music? Like tuff licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 (like these few wonderful lectures?)
I happen to do all those things, and I go through a TON of CDs (MP3s really do use an insigfinicant number of CDs - Not enough for them to charge me ANYTHING extra).
Are they providing me with a service for me to pay them? Since the way that I see it, if they will be charging me for "their music", I might as well burn it AND distribute it (since, hey, you're paying for it anyway - they already factored in the cost into the price of a CD).
AND according to their logic, I'm a software developer, and I'm sure some percentage of disks is used to distributed warez, so I might as well get some money for EVERY CD sold... (it might be *my* programs that are copied, so...) we have a 3% tax on music, then we'll have a 5% on Videos, then we'll have a 10% on software (with money going to our good friends in Redmond), and what's next??? Don't think that the 3% or whatever it is will be the end of it.
With an ending step of encrypting it and beaming it directly into your brain, which will only decrypt and remember the information if it 'knows' it paid for it.
Does that imply they'll actually have a place for me to plugin my laptop??? With these fast processors, batteries only last a little over an hour (if even that), and on a long 6-9 hour flight, well, you get the idea...
AND, unless you're first class, there is no way they'll let you plug it in anywhere; unless you go to the rest-room and sit there for an hour to charge the damn battery.
Yeah, but they might spend a million or two to stamp out the actual CD-ROMs :-)
Or the Knuth books where on the back Bill Gates is explicitly quoted that he'll hire you once you read'em.
And if they don't cave into our union demands, we won't reset that timebomb in the code :-)
Of course. Well, usually. The article only mentions the test when creating an e-mail account. My idea says to use it every time you send e-mail AND the test comes from the destination (not the source).
Ie: if you want to send me e-mail, you send me e-mail, my e-mail software notices that you are not verified to be a human, so it sends you a challenge. You respond to the challenge (this part is similar to the one described in the article), and when my e-mail software gets the results of your challenge, your original e-mail is either shown in my in-box or not.
No way to fool it. You HAVE to answer it in person. Of course you can hire someone to sit there and mark up these answers, but they'll have to do it for EVERY e-mail they send (they have to reply to every challenge of the destination of their e-mails). So no more spammers sending 100000 e-mails every evening.
Every time you want to send an e-mail to someone, their ISP (or even their own mail server) quickly replies to you with a challenge (image for you to decipher), when you decipher the image, and reply ("as in confirm you're a human") your original message appears in the in-box of the person to whom you've sent it. Anyone can define their own tests if they're not happy with default ones, and you never see an e-mail which hasn't passed YOUR tests.
And since these tests are interactive (ie: you're asking the PERSON who e-mailed you a question, they can be quite hard to fool with a computer).
Non-challenging e-mail addresses (or mailings) can still exist, and will be clearly marked as haven't bee 'verified'... ie: streated as bulk e-mail.
That's the boat that I'm in right now (teaching at tech schools), but that's getting tougher too... there are less and less people who are going into IT, so one of my teaching jobs already went under (not enough people to make a class), and another only has 3 months worth of job security.
It's fun, but far from meeting even the basic financial needs.
do you make your own gun powder?
as I've said, bullets are not important, gun powder is.
A gun is such a simple contraption that it's unimaginable that someone won't make or modify an existing one that won't be protected. It might help in officers being hurt when their gun refuses to fire in an emergency, but it certainly won't stop the criminals from using guns.
Not to mention that there are so many guns out there right now.
A better strategy would be to somehow chemically taint the gun powder to make it identifiable. Whenever you buy bullets (or plain gun powder), that gun powder is forever linked to you. If it ever shows up anywhere, you're busted. Also make it 100 times more expensive than it is now. Crime problem solved. Nobody can afford the bullets (at say $100 a piece), and when they do use them, they're 100% traceable to the buyer. If all bullets sold implement this feature, then in 10-20 years, nobody will have "old" untraceable bullets.
Now, I seriously doubt anyone is nuts enough to make their own gun powder from scratch...
You're saying that someone can learn C AND Java??? No way!
Actually, the specialization is mostly brought in by businesses (who do you want to get to admin your Oracle database? Obviously not someone who knows Sybase administration - else you're paying for extra skills you're not using) This type of thinking makes people learn and target niche markets.
In fact, knowing more than what is required is sometimes seen as bad. Management wants a person they can control and manipulate. Not someone who can spot problems, and realize the manager is an idiot, etc. This is more of the case for middle-management. (a semi-sorta-friend of mine who's at one of these positions once said that he'll never "ok" for hire someone whom he thinks is smarter than he is).
Most IT schools (the non-accredited few months ones, 18moth programs, etc.) do just that - they create 'specialists' in one area. If you're in a 6-18 month program to learn VB (a nice degree title "VB Professinal" or something just as grand), then that's all you'll learn. Most learning in such places is based on memorization and not understanding. If you ask that person what is an array or how to resolve a problem that they haven't been explicitly shown how to solve, they're lost.
I call it the if-while problem: You show a person how an if statement works, they understand it. You how that same person how a while statement works, they understand it. You give them a problem that requires them to use both (one inside the other), and they'll *never* be able to solve it.
How do you get that type of a person out of the specialization pigeonhole if that's what they explicitly got into?
In other words, what you're saying is that operating systems and other software needs to get slower for you to purchase new hardware.
Glow-in-the-dark watches have NUCLEAR material in them... (why do you think it "glows" at night?)
here's a link: http://www.oasisllc.com/abgx/environment.htm
But that's assuming like is particles. What if we treat light as a wave?
They're only interested in the super-expensive custom made 7400 chips, that are supplied by their approved contractors.
I wouldn't be surprised if they spend a few millions on getting a few of those chips.
It's the deep-pocket-NASA, their contractors have subcontractors (and those have sub-sub-contractors). With them, nothing is plain and simple as going to Radio Shack and getting supplies.
But that will replace *working* and *tested* technology with something that *might* not work or have really minor unforeseen bugs that will screw up a few dozen launches.
Especially if the new-and-improved code/system is bigger and more complex than the original.
I think it's better to emulate 70's rock solid and robust code than to create a new buggy version that does the same thing - but has OOP and a few other IT acronyms in its description.
If they think they can improve quality and robustness of the system by implementing it in "new" languages, use OO techniques, make it 100x as large (and use 1000x the resources), and hire people off the street (html coders anyone?) to do it, they're obviously in for a disaster.
But that won't stop someone from changing their ring tones in the theater... or worse: talking to someone next to them!
Or lowdly chewing popcorn, or bringing in their newly born children (that cry through the whole film)... the list goes on and on...
I think the best solution is to dedicate a small movie theater (2-5 people) for each viewing. Most of the time you'll be alone (or with a significant other) in the "theater"; once each small theater is full, start pairing up.