Comparing source files for plagarism is something professors at universities do regularly. The best way is to have a computer program compare the code representation that is generated by the compiler since comments and variable substitution is easy. Any potential matches are then compared manually for plagarism.
Basically a modern compiler is split into multiple parts. The first turns text into objects. The next puts those objects into a tree representation. A few more transformations later, and it is turned into machine code.
The tree representation is where comparisons should be made. Transform each function into a tree representation. Then compare the many trees. Output any potential matches and manually check for violations.
Of course wether the code was copied from one to the other or both from a separate source may be quite hard to prove, even assuming there are matches. IBM pays for better lawyers than SCO and they should win pretty easily with reasonable doubt and all.
Why not use publicly available code? Its a matter of opportunity costs. Basically, instead of looking and using the free code, you can be developing your own code. Which is better is really a comparison of the 2 costs, where the unknowns of free code can make it unviable. "Free" code is not really free. It has liscensing restrictions sure, but thats not what the big problem is. There are time costs associated with using "free" code. There is a cost to searching for code that may be of use. There is a cost to figuring out wether the code is appropriate or not. There is a cost to learning how to use the code. There is a potential cost to discovering after much work that the code was not appropriate or has bugs or has a liscensing problem you were unaware of. These costs are very hard to estimate up front. Doing the code yourself on the other hand is easy to estimate and in most cases is much lower than the potential costs of using even "free" code.
The project im working on at work is customizing a non-free web reporting package. If we run into a bug we can not fix, or an issue we cant work around, there is a chance of wasting years worth of development hours. Its a huge risk and one that there was much debate about. It remains to be seen if using the web reporting package was a good idea or not. The cost of the package is not the deciding factor in these decisions. Its the potential time costs and time to market costs that dominate the decision.
PS. I am not an economist. please forgive my 2 econ college course knowledge
Ive seen this type of arguement multiple times and everyone seems to forget that patents and copyrights are not the same thing! They are both defined by the same clause of the constitution (quoted below and in parent), I will give you that, but the terms of the 2 are separate and have been for a very long time. The correct reasoning is that all artistic works are derivitive of previous works and as such, enriching the public domain enriches the artistic base that society can use for new artisitic works. (Insert Ironic Ancedote of Disney Adaptations of Classic Works Here>)
Constitutional definition:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
Patents:
Covers new inventions as well as "non-obvious" improvements on current invention designs. Relevant terms in the constitution are useful Arts, Inventors, and Discoveries.
Patents can be challenged in court if there exists prior art. Fair use is very minimal
Patents are typically licenced out to all comers at a reasonable rate.
Patents exist for 20 years after the patent is filed, after which it is entered into the public domain.
Patents are tracked by the US Patent Office.
What can be patented has been expanded in the last 30 years to include computer programs and business practices
Copyright:
Copyright covers all artistic works. Relevant terms in the constitution are Science, Authors, and Writings.
Copyright can not be challenged in any court. Some fair use is allowed such as parody and political comentary
Copyrights are typically owned by a corporation who typically will make an exclusive license to use the work in a specific context (example would be only 1 toy maker would be allowed to make Matrix 2 blow up dolls)
Copyright exists for the life of the author plus 70 years. Life of a corporation is set at 20 years.
Copyright was made automatic in the 1970s and no formal documentation is required to copyright a work. Finding who owns the rights to a work can be nearly impossible
Copyright has been extended extremely agressively and retroactively in the 20th century through various "Mickey Mouse Acts" that are designed by corporate lobbyists to keep acts such as Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.
The english language is not static. It can, will and some would say, MUST change based on usage. Language is meant to communicate quickly and clearly. When a certain letter 'double you' is said outloud over and over, it will get abreviated.
The real question is wether the prounciation of the letter will change in common usage. As noted elsewhere, 'w' is the only 3 syllable letter in the english language, all others are single syllable. In fact all other letters are pronounced as vowel-consonent or consonent-vowel. Since 'you' is already a letter, and w's now look more like double v's than double u's, my guess is that 'dub' and eventually 'duh' will replace 'double you' in the long term. The advent of the 9 syllable 3 letter acronym as a catalyst for this change in pronunciation can bee seen already.
So my prediction for 10 years from now? The whole world changes to a environmentalist green paradise with no machines or computers or internet. The only lasting remains? The pronunciation of the letter 'w' in the english language has changed to 'duh'. This is to remind us all how stupid the dot-com boom was.
Actually, Dr. Pepper is bottled by either Coca-Cola Bottling Group or the Pepsi equivalent depending on which of the 2 gives it a better price in a specific region.
It is bottled by CCBG in the Southern California region for example.
Yes.. I do know too much about dr. pepper.. perhaps they would pay for me to advertise diet dr. pepper for them.. nectar of the gods!
You are entirely incorrect. The validity of a random statistical sampling is not related to the size of the entire group that is being sampled, only the size of the small sample that is used. In other words, a poll of X people out of any number total population will always have some Z percent sampling error that is directly related to X. Political polls, neilson ratings, and every other such figure you see reported is based on this statistical fact.
As for the actual math involved, I dont remember exactly.
Guess Im going to have to shoot for interesting instead of informative;)
Most device drivers can still fit onto one floppy disk, and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD.
Your comparison is extremely misleading. The price of a cd-r and a floppy are identical for all practical purposes.
From pricewatch.com:
$11 for 50 floppy disks including shipping or $.22 per disk, $.15 per MB
$11.99 for 50 cd-rs including shipping or $.24 per disk, $.0003 per MB
So for 10% more in price, you get nearly 500 times the storage capacity.
Price for the media is the reason for using cd-rs over floppy disks, not the other way around. Why would you pay the same price for 2/10ths of a percent of the storage capacity? And for rewriteable cd-rws, which are going for only twice the cost of cd-rs, the arguement is still the same. As for your other reasons for using a floppy disk, I wont comment as I was far too incensed by your misleading first arguement to bother thinking of reasons your others arent so valid.
...
ok ok.. fine.. a single cd recovery disk can hold the 4 floppys nortons uses for disaster recovery (try fitting a virus scanner with current definitions onto the already full floppy rescue disk).. bad microsoft tools has nothing to do with floppy vs. cd.. a cd rescue disk works fine on any new computer such as a new dell.. pictures (plurral) on a floppy? lol.. my cameras default settings are over 1MB per picture.. pre-pentium? havent seen one in years, in any case a cdrom drive is $20, a burner $30 a worthy investment compared to $7 you want every new computer to waste on an obsolete floppy drive. I went a year without a floppy drive until I needed a file from someone who could have just as easily emailed or burned the file. So I used an old computers floppy drive and ftped it over to my new computer. not a big deal
Its past time for the 3.5" floppy to go the way of the 5.25" floppy. The cd-rw has far surpassed it in value.
And no one ever may get the chance. In November 2001, the man who confessed to British authorities that he'd created the Leaves worm received a "formal caution," a legal warning usually reserved for juvenile crimes and minor drug offenses.
The lead officer on the case insists the agency has information about the hacker's motives that the FBI hasn't heard. But Scotland Yard refuses to divulge what it knows. Citing British law, officials refuse even to reveal the hacker's name.
His motives are obvious! He was being paid by british intelligence to investigate various worm propogation methods. It's very obvious that the British did not want the man punished in any way. A similar scenario would no doubt ensue if the NSA was working on a worm for "information warfare" purposes. The British would say, "Arrest this man!". We'd do a little bit for entertainment purposes and then let the man go.
In any case, this man is no James Bond. There were no sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. No dangling over a boiling pit of lava. Hollywood would do the story much better imo.
The biggest clue that the writer has no clue about computer programming is his statement that 50 hour weeks are typical and 60 hour weeks are his limit. If you are writing code for more than about 2 hours a day, you are writing bad code that is horrible and buggy. I always try to explain what I do to people as very complicated math homework. Noone can actually do math homework for 60 hours a week. It is far too draining.
The majority of most programmers days at work is spent processing ideas in the back of their heads while they do other things (like post on Slashdot). The 2 typical tasks in programming, adding a new small feature to an existing program and debugging a bug are about 100 lines of code and 2 lines of code respectively. These would take in theory half an hour and 2 minutes respectively. But as the old story goes, its knowing which $1 component to replace in the $1,000,000 machine that costs the $10,000. So it is in programming.
Knowing how to integrate the new features and bug fixes without horribly ruining the existing design is the mark of a good programmer. Actually coding the fix or feature once it has been designed (on paper or in your head) is trivial. Overworking yourself leads to bad design and more bugs, which take even more of your overworked self to fix. This escalating behavior leads to burnout as well as the human brain can not spend that much time working on difficult problems every single day.
Anyhow, now that my brain has figured out how it wants to implement the new feature Im working on, while writing this comment, its back to work to toss out my 100 lines of well designed code. If my writing seems confusing or poorly structured, its because my brain was working on code design, not paragragh design.
Its simple. AnandTech ran their benchmarks at 800x600 instead of 1600x1200. Why in the world you would test a notebook graphics card at 1600x1200 for a 3d game is beyond me.
You really have no idea what you are talking about do you? Brain damage you have........
Helmets were first issued to troops to prevent death from grazing shots to the head as they were among the most common, if not THE most common cause of death (I believe this was WWI but dont quote me on that). A truly bullet proof helmet would be a great achievement and quite useful in combat and riot police situations.
Majority decision(4 justices signing): Court of Appeals errored in deciding that the copyright law is immune from First Ammendment attack. Sent back to Court of Appeals for an actual trial
Minority supporting majority (2 justices signing): In addition to the majority statement, congress was incorrect in not considering the quid pro quo implied in the copyright section of the consitution. Giving to copyright holders, and not returning the favor to the public is inequitable and against the original intent of the signers.
Dissent (3 justices signing): What a bunch of quacks.. Congress can decide what limited means, what constitutes quid pro quo... Justices are writing the law... we love mickey mouse blah blah blah.
This is by far the most likely scenario. The copyright clause was written before the 1st ammendment, therefore ruling that it is immune from 1st ammendment analysis is quite wrong and getting 6 justices to agree on that should not be a problem. On the more general question of wether the law is invalid or not, the supreme court will not rule in general (although they will send very strong hints to lower courts), but sending it back to the lower court to reanalyze for first ammendment reasons is quite a good solution to the problem. In addition I suspect they will tell congress that they are being stupid and patents and copyrights were created under the same law, and giving 14 years to one, and 70 years + life of author to the other is rediculous.
If the Supreme court does say that the copyright laws are immune from first ammendment analysis it would contradict most of their previous rulings on the first ammendment. I feel this decision is basically open and shut on the 1st ammendment issue and a very long shot on the other 2 arguements.
Actually there is scientific evidence that volcanic activity was much higher in the distant past which would certainly affect the amount of light in the sky. The creation of an atmosphere and the weather cycle eventually helped get the soot out of the atmosphere, allowing for transition from primitive life forms to more complex.
A lot of the problems in Genesis from my devils advocate position, are vocabulary problems.. The vocabulary to accurately describe what truly happened was not available to write the story down.
Speaking of which, from http://www.genesis.net.au/~bible/kjv/genesis/ 1.1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 1.8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. Thats right, the heavens were created twice, in the beginning and on the 2nd day. Was the first sentence just a summary of the first few days? or does it descrive 2 separate heavens, 1 pre existing and 1 creation (space and atmosphere respectively)? Id put my vote for the second.
The whole post was devils advocate like in any case. Almost scientology like, with alien beings trying to teach a bunch of hairless monkeys the facts of life. If you had a time machine and could travel back in time 3500 years and explain our current knowledge to ancient peoples, how well do you think the information would propogate? Youd most certainly have an old, most likely dead religion with some sort of document much like the bible that tried to explain the things you taught in the vocabulary of the day. There would be many many mistakes and skeptics like yourself would doubt the existance of this "god".
Anyhow, if any angels want to pick me up for a space ride on their comet, I will be waiting with black nikes on.
P.S. Then again a devils advocate position on my devils advocate position would probably argue that Genesis and many of the books of the bible are a codification of the knowledge and customs of the elite priest class for use by the common populace who had no need or desire to examine such things. Besides, it kept everyone in check.
Ahh one of my favorite topics.. religion and science..
Unfortunately this forum is not going to have many bible thumpers so it wont be as much fun, but someone might actually understand where Im coming from.. so its a tradeoff.. I shall start off by saying I went to a Lutheran christian church until I was 15 or so and read quite a bit of both Genesis and Revelations as they are the most interesting from a philosophical standpoint.
The scene: 1500 BC - GOD talks to some some people in egypt, explaining everything from the history of the world to sanitation to philosophy. GOD describes the big bang, the formation of the stars, the planets, plate techtnoics, the creation of algae and evolution all the way through trees, dinosaurs, mammals, to how GOD did some nice genetic manipulation on monkeys to create humans (recent discovery implies very minimal mutation neccessary for humans oversided, folded brain). Oh.. and im going on vacation for a bit, you all need some time to learn stuff on your own. Dont you worry, when you all discover radio and atomic energy I'll know about it and head over to see whats up. The humans that are listening are way way over their heads so they write it down in chrnological order.. 1.1a heaven 1.1b earth 1.2 water 1.2-1.5 earth rotation 1.6-1.8 air 1.9-1.10 continents 1.11-1.13 plant life 1.14-1.19 moon and/or decrease in cloud cover 1.20-1.25 land, air and sea animals 1.26-1.31 human 2.1-2.2 vacation!
The ordering is amazingly correct for a 3500+ year document. The other advice in the bible can fall under such things as, dont have unprotected sex with multiple partners or you get venereal diseases (monagomy only safe sex at the time really), dont eat animals that eat other animals (see mad cow disease), wash the food before cooking, dont kill each other, dont steal from each other, dont work too hard or too little, etc.
Anyhow lunch time, just some food for thought:)
P.S. God is an elected representative of an alien race called angels.. thats why he changes his mind so much;).
Step 1: Find the best file server in the world owned by a very wealthy company
Step 2: Download, late at night, 10 parts of a very large file simultaneously
Step 3: Add up the sizes, divide by the time it takes to complete
Or more specifically.. download all 10 parts of Visual Studio 6 SP2 at 2am PST while you are blitzed on caffeine. Add the sizes (100 MB) divide by the time (3.5 minutes! Double check your math multiple times. Celebrate your cable modem speed with large amounts of liquor (no this is not optional!)
Now this gives you effective download bandwidth which will be less than theoretical bandwidth due to network overhead but for a T1 you should be getting in the 1.35-1.4 Mbps range (175KBps or so). The upload speeds can be tested a similar way but you need someone with better bandwidth (say the other companies that are trying to sell you a T1) to download a 120MB file in multiple pieces off of you. Of course they are going to lie to you about the speed the detect so this wont work but you get the idea. My cable modem at home at night (not the same one described above) will typically max out any T1 at 175 +-5 KBps, so this is a valid testing method as well (hey just send me a consultants fee and a URL to test and I will do it for ya;)).
The other part of the problem is that you are sharing the T1 with 2 other people through a hub. Unless you have a way of preventing them from using their bandwidth for the 20 minutes or so when the test would be performed, you will not get valid numbers. There are a few ways to go about this, from convincing them that you need to see if the company selling you the T1 is cheating you all, to "accidentally" unplugging their network cables.
In any case, I wouldnt trust DSLReports to give you valid numbers, but its a good first approximation plus or minus 50%.
There are many alternatives of course, but use the evil empires resources for good! Test your download speed at microsoft.com today!
P.S. Getting the math to show up somewhat legibly was such a pain.. why cant we just use the PRE html tag? *sigh*
We all know "piracy" is the killer app for broadband.
Verizon sells broadband services.
Therefore, Verizon supports piracy as it helps to sell its broadbad service. In addition, the number o subpeonas that they would have to handle if they allowed this to go through would cost a large ammount of money and possibly open them up to a lawsuit from their own users for giving out information to the RIAA.
First question you always have to ask yourself when you are listening to some lawyer or marketing droid or corporate executive speak is "Where's the money". Verizon supports "piracy" because A) it increases their money and B) preventing it will increase their costs.
Simple cost benefit analysis shows Verizon has nothing to gain from giving the RIAA what they want and something to lose. The fact that the computer hardware, internet service providers, and computer software sellers have bigger checkbooks than the RIAA means they wont be pushed around. Heck I wouldnt be surprised if Microsoft bought the entire recording industry...
Implications on solar power generation?
on
Solar Surgery
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· Score: 0
As I understand it, currently standard lenses are used to focus light onto solor cells to get more power out of them. If the current lenses were replaced by this 15000x focusing lens, would the extra power generation offset the more expensive lens? Even simply using it to heat water and spin a turbine might be useful. They mentioned the laser on the other end was measured at 8 watts which seems a bit too low to be useful for power generation.
Dont suppose solar panal manufacturers read slashdot and could answer my question?;)
Not like it's all that important, but reading "Unfortunately, the security inherent in VoIP solutions is equivalent to that of the early Internet: Non-existent." made me ponder: How can you be equivalent to something that's non-existent? Isn't it kinda akin to dividing by zero?
Hardly... Its not division by 0, its just checking for null...
if (Celandro.karma 0) {
throw new FatalException("Unsuported state!!!");
} } else {
throw new FatalException("Unsuported state!!!"); }
Kinda sucks when the one mod you have ever gotten was on a joke post that was modded as redundant which that puts you at the same status as an Anonymous Coward.. ACs are to be seen not heard.
No.. The article stated that the data supported 2 different hypothesis. One was that electrical charge was increasing over time, or that the speed of light was slowing down. The electrical charge hypothesis lead to a direct contradiction of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
2ndly, if you converted mass to energy, stuck it in a superconducting ring (or say a star) for billions of years and changed it back to mass, Id suppose you would end up with more mass (4 times as much for every halfing of the speed of light). As more mass was created, light would slow further down, causing the production of even more mass. A spiralling effect that would inevitabally lead to a universe collapse as the huge black holes merged and drew in the entire universe again before spewing it out once again in big bang #42.
IANAPBIPOOS (I am not a physicist but I play one on Slashdot)
Wow its amazing. An unbiased quote from the master of all things J2EE..
Ive been developing for J2EE since I graduated from college. While it may not be the best or least buggy thing, we have had only 1 problem in production related to a running out of memory (my bug.. I made something serializable that shouldnt have) which was easily fixed by changing the startup options for the java startup command line. This success over 2 years is directly attributable to running J2EE (on weblogic) on a sun solaris box.
We run apache stronghold as the proxy server which handles all the SSL and forwards the requests to the weblogic cluster running on our 2 monster boxes. The web applications processes requests and then sends information to a back end server through a JNI FIX Libary (fancy terms for a c based library to connect to a remote database for financial software). It all works perfectly and cpu utilization is very low, despite there being many different weblogic instances running simultaneously (for different projects.. you really think we would want to run our application under some other projects server? I dont think so!)
Anyhow J2EE is quite robust and reliable with clustering. There is no way to get guaranteed uptime without clustering as hardware can fail too even if you have a bug free application running on a bug free webserver on a bug free operating system *cough sure cough*. J2EE is not about user interfaces (excepting html/xml,etc of course which are just remote calls to a UI;)), its about robust, reliable, secure, remote communications on large scale projects with possibly multiple distinct development groups
P.S. Ive been trying to get my company to switch to an opensource application server but apparently saving $10K++ a year is not a big incentive.. of course we make $800K per employee (no I dont get paid nearly that much unfortunately;)) so I suppose I can see their point..
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing source files for plagarism is something professors at universities do regularly. The best way is to have a computer program compare the code representation that is generated by the compiler since comments and variable substitution is easy. Any potential matches are then compared manually for plagarism.
Basically a modern compiler is split into multiple parts. The first turns text into objects. The next puts those objects into a tree representation. A few more transformations later, and it is turned into machine code.
The tree representation is where comparisons should be made. Transform each function into a tree representation. Then compare the many trees. Output any potential matches and manually check for violations.
Of course wether the code was copied from one to the other or both from a separate source may be quite hard to prove, even assuming there are matches. IBM pays for better lawyers than SCO and they should win pretty easily with reasonable doubt and all.
Why not use publicly available code?
Its a matter of opportunity costs. Basically, instead of looking and using the free code, you can be developing your own code. Which is better is really a comparison of the 2 costs, where the unknowns of free code can make it unviable. "Free" code is not really free. It has liscensing restrictions sure, but thats not what the big problem is. There are time costs associated with using "free" code. There is a cost to searching for code that may be of use. There is a cost to figuring out wether the code is appropriate or not. There is a cost to learning how to use the code. There is a potential cost to discovering after much work that the code was not appropriate or has bugs or has a liscensing problem you were unaware of. These costs are very hard to estimate up front. Doing the code yourself on the other hand is easy to estimate and in most cases is much lower than the potential costs of using even "free" code.
The project im working on at work is customizing a non-free web reporting package. If we run into a bug we can not fix, or an issue we cant work around, there is a chance of wasting years worth of development hours. Its a huge risk and one that there was much debate about. It remains to be seen if using the web reporting package was a good idea or not. The cost of the package is not the deciding factor in these decisions. Its the potential time costs and time to market costs that dominate the decision.
PS. I am not an economist. please forgive my 2 econ college course knowledge
Constitutional definition:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
The english language is not static. It can, will and some would say, MUST change based on usage. Language is meant to communicate quickly and clearly. When a certain letter 'double you' is said outloud over and over, it will get abreviated.
The real question is wether the prounciation of the letter will change in common usage. As noted elsewhere, 'w' is the only 3 syllable letter in the english language, all others are single syllable. In fact all other letters are pronounced as vowel-consonent or consonent-vowel. Since 'you' is already a letter, and w's now look more like double v's than double u's, my guess is that 'dub' and eventually 'duh' will replace 'double you' in the long term. The advent of the 9 syllable 3 letter acronym as a catalyst for this change in pronunciation can bee seen already.
So my prediction for 10 years from now? The whole world changes to a environmentalist green paradise with no machines or computers or internet. The only lasting remains? The pronunciation of the letter 'w' in the english language has changed to 'duh'. This is to remind us all how stupid the dot-com boom was.
Actually, Dr. Pepper is bottled by either Coca-Cola Bottling Group or the Pepsi equivalent depending on which of the 2 gives it a better price in a specific region.
It is bottled by CCBG in the Southern California region for example.
Yes.. I do know too much about dr. pepper.. perhaps they would pay for me to advertise diet dr. pepper for them.. nectar of the gods!
You are entirely incorrect. The validity of a random statistical sampling is not related to the size of the entire group that is being sampled, only the size of the small sample that is used. In other words, a poll of X people out of any number total population will always have some Z percent sampling error that is directly related to X. Political polls, neilson ratings, and every other such figure you see reported is based on this statistical fact.
;)
As for the actual math involved, I dont remember exactly.
Guess Im going to have to shoot for interesting instead of informative
No wife sorry.. But I do have 52 different time share girlfriends.. Different girl every week!
The maintenance fees sure do add up though..
Your comparison is extremely misleading. The price of a cd-r and a floppy are identical for all practical purposes.
From pricewatch.com:
$11 for 50 floppy disks including shipping or $.22 per disk, $.15 per MB
$11.99 for 50 cd-rs including shipping or $.24 per disk, $.0003 per MB
So for 10% more in price, you get nearly 500 times the storage capacity.
Price for the media is the reason for using cd-rs over floppy disks, not the other way around. Why would you pay the same price for 2/10ths of a percent of the storage capacity? And for rewriteable cd-rws, which are going for only twice the cost of cd-rs, the arguement is still the same. As for your other reasons for using a floppy disk, I wont comment as I was far too incensed by your misleading first arguement to bother thinking of reasons your others arent so valid.
ok ok.. fine.. a single cd recovery disk can hold the 4 floppys nortons uses for disaster recovery (try fitting a virus scanner with current definitions onto the already full floppy rescue disk).. bad microsoft tools has nothing to do with floppy vs. cd.. a cd rescue disk works fine on any new computer such as a new dell.. pictures (plurral) on a floppy? lol.. my cameras default settings are over 1MB per picture.. pre-pentium? havent seen one in years, in any case a cdrom drive is $20, a burner $30 a worthy investment compared to $7 you want every new computer to waste on an obsolete floppy drive. I went a year without a floppy drive until I needed a file from someone who could have just as easily emailed or burned the file. So I used an old computers floppy drive and ftped it over to my new computer. not a big deal
Its past time for the 3.5" floppy to go the way of the 5.25" floppy. The cd-rw has far surpassed it in value.
His motives are obvious! He was being paid by british intelligence to investigate various worm propogation methods. It's very obvious that the British did not want the man punished in any way. A similar scenario would no doubt ensue if the NSA was working on a worm for "information warfare" purposes. The British would say, "Arrest this man!". We'd do a little bit for entertainment purposes and then let the man go.
In any case, this man is no James Bond. There were no sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. No dangling over a boiling pit of lava. Hollywood would do the story much better imo.
The biggest clue that the writer has no clue about computer programming is his statement that 50 hour weeks are typical and 60 hour weeks are his limit. If you are writing code for more than about 2 hours a day, you are writing bad code that is horrible and buggy. I always try to explain what I do to people as very complicated math homework. Noone can actually do math homework for 60 hours a week. It is far too draining.
The majority of most programmers days at work is spent processing ideas in the back of their heads while they do other things (like post on Slashdot). The 2 typical tasks in programming, adding a new small feature to an existing program and debugging a bug are about 100 lines of code and 2 lines of code respectively. These would take in theory half an hour and 2 minutes respectively. But as the old story goes, its knowing which $1 component to replace in the $1,000,000 machine that costs the $10,000. So it is in programming.
Knowing how to integrate the new features and bug fixes without horribly ruining the existing design is the mark of a good programmer. Actually coding the fix or feature once it has been designed (on paper or in your head) is trivial. Overworking yourself leads to bad design and more bugs, which take even more of your overworked self to fix. This escalating behavior leads to burnout as well as the human brain can not spend that much time working on difficult problems every single day.
Anyhow, now that my brain has figured out how it wants to implement the new feature Im working on, while writing this comment, its back to work to toss out my 100 lines of well designed code. If my writing seems confusing or poorly structured, its because my brain was working on code design, not paragragh design.
Como?
Some months back, Trident made much ado about its new DX9-class GPU that would take the mobile computing world by storm.
If this isnt the case than thats just another strike against the article.
Its simple. AnandTech ran their benchmarks at 800x600 instead of 1600x1200. Why in the world you would test a notebook graphics card at 1600x1200 for a 3d game is beyond me.
You really have no idea what you are talking about do you? Brain damage you have........
Helmets were first issued to troops to prevent death from grazing shots to the head as they were among the most common, if not THE most common cause of death (I believe this was WWI but dont quote me on that). A truly bullet proof helmet would be a great achievement and quite useful in combat and riot police situations.
Decision 6-3 for Eldrich
Majority decision(4 justices signing): Court of Appeals errored in deciding that the copyright law is immune from First Ammendment attack. Sent back to Court of Appeals for an actual trial
Minority supporting majority (2 justices signing): In addition to the majority statement, congress was incorrect in not considering the quid pro quo implied in the copyright section of the consitution. Giving to copyright holders, and not returning the favor to the public is inequitable and against the original intent of the signers.
Dissent (3 justices signing): What a bunch of quacks.. Congress can decide what limited means, what constitutes quid pro quo... Justices are writing the law... we love mickey mouse blah blah blah.
This is by far the most likely scenario. The copyright clause was written before the 1st ammendment, therefore ruling that it is immune from 1st ammendment analysis is quite wrong and getting 6 justices to agree on that should not be a problem. On the more general question of wether the law is invalid or not, the supreme court will not rule in general (although they will send very strong hints to lower courts), but sending it back to the lower court to reanalyze for first ammendment reasons is quite a good solution to the problem. In addition I suspect they will tell congress that they are being stupid and patents and copyrights were created under the same law, and giving 14 years to one, and 70 years + life of author to the other is rediculous.
If the Supreme court does say that the copyright laws are immune from first ammendment analysis it would contradict most of their previous rulings on the first ammendment. I feel this decision is basically open and shut on the 1st ammendment issue and a very long shot on the other 2 arguements.
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Actually there is scientific evidence that volcanic activity was much higher in the distant past which would certainly affect the amount of light in the sky. The creation of an atmosphere and the weather cycle eventually helped get the soot out of the atmosphere, allowing for transition from primitive life forms to more complex.
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
A lot of the problems in Genesis from my devils advocate position, are vocabulary problems.. The vocabulary to accurately describe what truly happened was not available to write the story down.
Speaking of which, from http://www.genesis.net.au/~bible/kjv/genesis/
1.
1.8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Thats right, the heavens were created twice, in the beginning and on the 2nd day. Was the first sentence just a summary of the first few days? or does it descrive 2 separate heavens, 1 pre existing and 1 creation (space and atmosphere respectively)? Id put my vote for the second.
The whole post was devils advocate like in any case. Almost scientology like, with alien beings trying to teach a bunch of hairless monkeys the facts of life. If you had a time machine and could travel back in time 3500 years and explain our current knowledge to ancient peoples, how well do you think the information would propogate? Youd most certainly have an old, most likely dead religion with some sort of document much like the bible that tried to explain the things you taught in the vocabulary of the day. There would be many many mistakes and skeptics like yourself would doubt the existance of this "god".
Anyhow, if any angels want to pick me up for a space ride on their comet, I will be waiting with black nikes on.
P.S. Then again a devils advocate position on my devils advocate position would probably argue that Genesis and many of the books of the bible are a codification of the knowledge and customs of the elite priest class for use by the common populace who had no need or desire to examine such things. Besides, it kept everyone in check.
Ahh one of my favorite topics.. religion and science..
:)
;).
Unfortunately this forum is not going to have many bible thumpers so it wont be as much fun, but someone might actually understand where Im coming from.. so its a tradeoff.. I shall start off by saying I went to a Lutheran christian church until I was 15 or so and read quite a bit of both Genesis and Revelations as they are the most interesting from a philosophical standpoint.
The scene:
1500 BC - GOD talks to some some people in egypt, explaining everything from the history of the world to sanitation to philosophy. GOD describes the big bang, the formation of the stars, the planets, plate techtnoics, the creation of algae and evolution all the way through trees, dinosaurs, mammals, to how GOD did some nice genetic manipulation on monkeys to create humans (recent discovery implies very minimal mutation neccessary for humans oversided, folded brain). Oh.. and im going on vacation for a bit, you all need some time to learn stuff on your own. Dont you worry, when you all discover radio and atomic energy I'll know about it and head over to see whats up. The humans that are listening are way way over their heads so they write it down in chrnological order..
1.1a heaven
1.1b earth
1.2 water
1.2-1.5 earth rotation
1.6-1.8 air
1.9-1.10 continents
1.11-1.13 plant life
1.14-1.19 moon and/or decrease in cloud cover
1.20-1.25 land, air and sea animals
1.26-1.31 human
2.1-2.2 vacation!
The ordering is amazingly correct for a 3500+ year document. The other advice in the bible can fall under such things as, dont have unprotected sex with multiple partners or you get venereal diseases (monagomy only safe sex at the time really), dont eat animals that eat other animals (see mad cow disease), wash the food before cooking, dont kill each other, dont steal from each other, dont work too hard or too little, etc.
Anyhow lunch time, just some food for thought
P.S. God is an elected representative of an alien race called angels.. thats why he changes his mind so much
Step 2: Download, late at night, 10 parts of a very large file simultaneously
Step 3: Add up the sizes, divide by the time it takes to complete
Or more specifically.. download all 10 parts of Visual Studio 6 SP2 at 2am PST while you are blitzed on caffeine. Add the sizes (100 MB) divide by the time (3.5 minutes! Double check your math multiple times. Celebrate your cable modem speed with large amounts of liquor (no this is not optional!)
For the mathematically challenged:
Now this gives you effective download bandwidth which will be less than theoretical bandwidth due to network overhead but for a T1 you should be getting in the 1.35-1.4 Mbps range (175KBps or so). The upload speeds can be tested a similar way but you need someone with better bandwidth (say the other companies that are trying to sell you a T1) to download a 120MB file in multiple pieces off of you. Of course they are going to lie to you about the speed the detect so this wont work but you get the idea. My cable modem at home at night (not the same one described above) will typically max out any T1 at 175 +-5 KBps, so this is a valid testing method as well (hey just send me a consultants fee and a URL to test and I will do it for yaThe other part of the problem is that you are sharing the T1 with 2 other people through a hub. Unless you have a way of preventing them from using their bandwidth for the 20 minutes or so when the test would be performed, you will not get valid numbers. There are a few ways to go about this, from convincing them that you need to see if the company selling you the T1 is cheating you all, to "accidentally" unplugging their network cables.
In any case, I wouldnt trust DSLReports to give you valid numbers, but its a good first approximation plus or minus 50%.
There are many alternatives of course, but use the evil empires resources for good! Test your download speed at microsoft.com today!
P.S. Getting the math to show up somewhat legibly was such a pain.. why cant we just use the PRE html tag? *sigh*
We all know "piracy" is the killer app for broadband.
Verizon sells broadband services.
Therefore, Verizon supports piracy as it helps to sell its broadbad service. In addition, the number o subpeonas that they would have to handle if they allowed this to go through would cost a large ammount of money and possibly open them up to a lawsuit from their own users for giving out information to the RIAA.
First question you always have to ask yourself when you are listening to some lawyer or marketing droid or corporate executive speak is "Where's the money". Verizon supports "piracy" because A) it increases their money and B) preventing it will increase their costs.
Simple cost benefit analysis shows Verizon has nothing to gain from giving the RIAA what they want and something to lose. The fact that the computer hardware, internet service providers, and computer software sellers have bigger checkbooks than the RIAA means they wont be pushed around. Heck I wouldnt be surprised if Microsoft bought the entire recording industry...
As I understand it, currently standard lenses are used to focus light onto solor cells to get more power out of them. If the current lenses were replaced by this 15000x focusing lens, would the extra power generation offset the more expensive lens? Even simply using it to heat water and spin a turbine might be useful. They mentioned the laser on the other end was measured at 8 watts which seems a bit too low to be useful for power generation.
;)
Dont suppose solar panal manufacturers read slashdot and could answer my question?
sigh.. slashdot killed my bad coding joke.. :(
oh well
Hardly... Its not division by 0, its just checking for null...
if (Celandro.karma 0) {
throw new FatalException("Unsuported state!!!");
}
} else {
throw new FatalException("Unsuported state!!!");
}
Kinda sucks when the one mod you have ever gotten was on a joke post that was modded as redundant which that puts you at the same status as an Anonymous Coward.. ACs are to be seen not heard.
*cry*
No.. The article stated that the data supported 2 different hypothesis. One was that electrical charge was increasing over time, or that the speed of light was slowing down. The electrical charge hypothesis lead to a direct contradiction of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
2ndly, if you converted mass to energy, stuck it in a superconducting ring (or say a star) for billions of years and changed it back to mass, Id suppose you would end up with more mass (4 times as much for every halfing of the speed of light). As more mass was created, light would slow further down, causing the production of even more mass. A spiralling effect that would inevitabally lead to a universe collapse as the huge black holes merged and drew in the entire universe again before spewing it out once again in big bang #42.
IANAPBIPOOS (I am not a physicist but I play one on Slashdot)
Wow its amazing. An unbiased quote from the master of all things J2EE..
;)), its about robust, reliable, secure, remote communications on large scale projects with possibly multiple distinct development groups
;)) so I suppose I can see their point..
Ive been developing for J2EE since I graduated from college. While it may not be the best or least buggy thing, we have had only 1 problem in production related to a running out of memory (my bug.. I made something serializable that shouldnt have) which was easily fixed by changing the startup options for the java startup command line. This success over 2 years is directly attributable to running J2EE (on weblogic) on a sun solaris box.
We run apache stronghold as the proxy server which handles all the SSL and forwards the requests to the weblogic cluster running on our 2 monster boxes. The web applications processes requests and then sends information to a back end server through a JNI FIX Libary (fancy terms for a c based library to connect to a remote database for financial software). It all works perfectly and cpu utilization is very low, despite there being many different weblogic instances running simultaneously (for different projects.. you really think we would want to run our application under some other projects server? I dont think so!)
Anyhow J2EE is quite robust and reliable with clustering. There is no way to get guaranteed uptime without clustering as hardware can fail too even if you have a bug free application running on a bug free webserver on a bug free operating system *cough sure cough*. J2EE is not about user interfaces (excepting html/xml,etc of course which are just remote calls to a UI
P.S. Ive been trying to get my company to switch to an opensource application server but apparently saving $10K++ a year is not a big incentive.. of course we make $800K per employee (no I dont get paid nearly that much unfortunately