The latest version of IPv6 incorporates an evil bit, and adding one to IPv4 will allow existing IPv4 networks to become forward compatible with the new IPv6 networks. Without this, the mere existence of an "evil" bit in IPv6 may suggest to the poular imagination that IPv6 is more evil than IPv4. This would be catastrophic, as it would stall the uptake of IPv6, possibly forcing us to use IPv4 forever and preventing us from giving every molecule on the planet it's own IP address. This is a good day for mankind.
April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later
Only 2 symbols are required to express any algorythm (1 and 0), and whitespace has 3 ([SPACE], [TAB] and [LF]). I can see no reason off hand why whitespace cannot work, and in fact without having tried it, I suspect it is probably genuine, if not entirely serious.
I myself have successfully used gzip for factoring large prime numbers, sorting the men from the boys, unblocking the kitchen sink and cracking safes. I'm currently trying to locate Osama Bin Laden by compressing Al Jazeera footage, but all I come up with are reports of Elvis sightings.
It would make life a lot easier, though, for law enforcement to track down copyright violators and purveyors of other illicit (read illegal) material.
Not really - it would be pretty easy to spoof location data, or locate the actual data on offshore servers which the law enforcement in question can't touch. I don't see how the use of location tagging can reliably enforced without the consent of the publisher.
Storing each TV show on a Tivo for each user who wants to watch it is very inefficient in terms of total storage space used over all the Tivos in the region. By storing each show once, and piping it to users from a central server on demand, the total storage requirement is vastly reduced, and the bandwidth requirement grows possibly linearly with the number of users. Unfortunately this is exactly the opposite of what the world needs right now.
An engineer is someone who can designa system which is guaranteed to work (at least to a specified level of reliability) despite lack of certainty in the parameters of the problem, and the components used in the solution.
Being able to write a "hello world" program makes you a programmer, but doesn't make you an engineer, because it doesn't require the skills mentioned above. Does this mean that programmers are not engineers? Not necessarily. Designing a fault tolerant software system is just as much engineering as designing a fault tolerant river crossing system (bridge). But the actual programming has nothing to do with this, just as the guy who bolts the members of a suspension bridge together is not an engineer. Software engineers deserve the title of engineer, but this has nothing to do with the fact of writing programs.
How sinister would that be. You could train them to use weapons, and create your very own personal platoon of killer robots, operating as an integrated tactical system. Just imagine...
while (!SUCCESS) SUCCESS=kill("Annoying Neighbour");
An appropriate bot would be assigned to the task, with the others laying down fire support. Bwahahahaha. I wonder if they do bulk discounts?
Suffice to say, having any damamge (her than a few heat tiles) should bar it from re-entry
They had no means to repair the damage, and insufficient life support to wait in space for a repair mission to be sent. They chose to try landing a damaged shuttle (which enginners said would probably be OK anyway) instead of suffocating in orbit. What would you have done?
if I were to prove very helpful on LinuxQuestions, then I'd get a good Affero rating for that. If I then offered my help on the GNOME documentation project, they'd have proof positive of my ability
To a point, but even in a case like this, being able to answer questions on linux does not mean you are good at gnome documentation. What if you are just an expert on setting up ntpd, and puke at the sight of a GUI? Whether you had a good rating or not, most open source communities will probably accept your help based on the quality of the help you offer. The only universal application of this idea is to weed out trolls, et al. But they're hardly going to advertise their bad ratings
Doesn't it seem a bit too generic? I mean he assumes that having a good reputation in one community should translate directly into a good reputation in another community, which is often not the case.
For example, does having excellent karma in slashdot qualify you to be an authority on the linux kernel mailing list? Taking a real world example, if you were popular among all your neo-nazi friend for your strong political convictions, and you suddenly moved to israel, would/should you enjoy the same good reputation as in your previous home?
I think for this to be any use, each community would have to choose to accept and rate points from any other community. If I have X points from community A, community B might rate me as X*3, while community C rates me as X*-2 because it doesn't like community A, and community D rates me as zero, because it has never heard of community A.
Even then, there will obviously be opportunities for canny folk to abuse the system, and gain credits they don't deserve. A bit like politics really.
The stereotypical cheesy space opera. But ignore the all-American-hero and the damsel-in-distress for a moment, and we have an epic exploration of the human condition and our relationship with technology - an illustration that no matter the lengths of our technological and intellectual development, we will always be humans with human problems and shortcommings. This is a classical example of a great story being Holywoodised. Not to mention the stunning special effects. Check out those rayguns, and the interaction between the forcefield and the Monster from the Id; this was well before its time. And Leslie Nielsen in the starring role is just plain ironic.
Of course, so far, it looks like Iraq is pretty feeble militarily. I suspect the war will be over very quickly.
That's exactly what they said about Vietnam, wasn't it? Most of Iraq will almost certainly be a push over, but when they get to Bagdad, there will be loyal well trained forces who are well dug in. Not to mention a lot of peeved civilians with dismembered corpses for children thanks to stray american bombs. Technology is of very little assistance in built up areas - look how the US military fared in Mogadishu. The only way this war will be quick is if the regime just surrenders without a fight. Iraq will almost certainly lose in the end, but there's a good chance it could turn into a very bloody massacre for both sides.
This is nothing to do with flaky hardware. High impedance input driver technology such as CMOS is very sensitive to static discharges, which can create very high voltages. The discharge has no path to ground, so the gate oxide breaks down and your chip is toast. There is protection built into most devices, but this is intended to protect against voltage fluctuations, not static discharges. OK, "grounding out" is normally enough, but your still taking a chance. In any case, this is really bad advice to give to other people.
I hope this is an idea which catches on. Think what mankind could achieve if engineers were free to be creative, unhindered by the mindnumbing shackles of management and beaurocracy.
As he say in the article, the reason he uses Perl regexp is that the tools/libraries have to read the entire file. If this is a long stream, it's grossly inefficient - you have to load the entire thing into a massive tree structure in memory. If the job can be done serially with regexps without using a noticeable amount of memory or time, then it is often better. This is the point of the article - there is a choice between using a method which is often grossly innefficient for real world problems (XML libs) and a fast but messy method (Perl regexp). Neither of these is really satisfactory, hence the complaint.
It's so easy to make your own from the local computer store. You don't even need to wear those wrist protectors anymore.
That's what I do, but most people don't. The question is would they get away with it?
Why don't you need to wear wrist protectors???? (OK, you don't need to, but you certainly should if you're dealing with electronic equipment). Or have I missed something?
Slashdot Mirror
The latest version of IPv6 incorporates an evil bit, and adding one to IPv4 will allow existing IPv4 networks to become forward compatible with the new IPv6 networks. Without this, the mere existence of an "evil" bit in IPv6 may suggest to the poular imagination that IPv6 is more evil than IPv4. This would be catastrophic, as it would stall the uptake of IPv6, possibly forcing us to use IPv4 forever and preventing us from giving every molecule on the planet it's own IP address. This is a good day for mankind.
Which you can download here I believe.
Only 2 symbols are required to express any algorythm (1 and 0), and whitespace has 3 ([SPACE], [TAB] and [LF]). I can see no reason off hand why whitespace cannot work, and in fact without having tried it, I suspect it is probably genuine, if not entirely serious.
...so we can point at him an laugh ;-)
I myself have successfully used gzip for factoring large prime numbers, sorting the men from the boys, unblocking the kitchen sink and cracking safes. I'm currently trying to locate Osama Bin Laden by compressing Al Jazeera footage, but all I come up with are reports of Elvis sightings.
Taking the average, somewhere off the coast of spain.
This just goes to show that the real reason for geolocation information in web pages is to make it easier for them to nuke you. Terrorists beware!
Not really - it would be pretty easy to spoof location data, or locate the actual data on offshore servers which the law enforcement in question can't touch. I don't see how the use of location tagging can reliably enforced without the consent of the publisher.
Storing each TV show on a Tivo for each user who wants to watch it is very inefficient in terms of total storage space used over all the Tivos in the region. By storing each show once, and piping it to users from a central server on demand, the total storage requirement is vastly reduced, and the bandwidth requirement grows possibly linearly with the number of users. Unfortunately this is exactly the opposite of what the world needs right now.
Being able to write a "hello world" program makes you a programmer, but doesn't make you an engineer, because it doesn't require the skills mentioned above. Does this mean that programmers are not engineers? Not necessarily. Designing a fault tolerant software system is just as much engineering as designing a fault tolerant river crossing system (bridge). But the actual programming has nothing to do with this, just as the guy who bolts the members of a suspension bridge together is not an engineer. Software engineers deserve the title of engineer, but this has nothing to do with the fact of writing programs.
while (!SUCCESS) SUCCESS=kill("Annoying Neighbour");
An appropriate bot would be assigned to the task, with the others laying down fire support. Bwahahahaha. I wonder if they do bulk discounts?
They had no means to repair the damage, and insufficient life support to wait in space for a repair mission to be sent. They chose to try landing a damaged shuttle (which enginners said would probably be OK anyway) instead of suffocating in orbit. What would you have done?
To a point, but even in a case like this, being able to answer questions on linux does not mean you are good at gnome documentation. What if you are just an expert on setting up ntpd, and puke at the sight of a GUI? Whether you had a good rating or not, most open source communities will probably accept your help based on the quality of the help you offer. The only universal application of this idea is to weed out trolls, et al. But they're hardly going to advertise their bad ratings
Doesn't it seem a bit too generic? I mean he assumes that having a good reputation in one community should translate directly into a good reputation in another community, which is often not the case.
For example, does having excellent karma in slashdot qualify you to be an authority on the linux kernel mailing list? Taking a real world example, if you were popular among all your neo-nazi friend for your strong political convictions, and you suddenly moved to israel, would/should you enjoy the same good reputation as in your previous home?
I think for this to be any use, each community would have to choose to accept and rate points from any other community. If I have X points from community A, community B might rate me as X*3, while community C rates me as X*-2 because it doesn't like community A, and community D rates me as zero, because it has never heard of community A.
Even then, there will obviously be opportunities for canny folk to abuse the system, and gain credits they don't deserve. A bit like politics really.
...before someone works out how to solder using an iron.
The stereotypical cheesy space opera. But ignore the all-American-hero and the damsel-in-distress for a moment, and we have an epic exploration of the human condition and our relationship with technology - an illustration that no matter the lengths of our technological and intellectual development, we will always be humans with human problems and shortcommings. This is a classical example of a great story being Holywoodised. Not to mention the stunning special effects. Check out those rayguns, and the interaction between the forcefield and the Monster from the Id; this was well before its time. And Leslie Nielsen in the starring role is just plain ironic.
Ask him whether he prefers vi or emacs
That's exactly what they said about Vietnam, wasn't it? Most of Iraq will almost certainly be a push over, but when they get to Bagdad, there will be loyal well trained forces who are well dug in. Not to mention a lot of peeved civilians with dismembered corpses for children thanks to stray american bombs. Technology is of very little assistance in built up areas - look how the US military fared in Mogadishu. The only way this war will be quick is if the regime just surrenders without a fight. Iraq will almost certainly lose in the end, but there's a good chance it could turn into a very bloody massacre for both sides.
they were selling Segway Human Transporters for GBP10
This is nothing to do with flaky hardware. High impedance input driver technology such as CMOS is very sensitive to static discharges, which can create very high voltages. The discharge has no path to ground, so the gate oxide breaks down and your chip is toast. There is protection built into most devices, but this is intended to protect against voltage fluctuations, not static discharges. OK, "grounding out" is normally enough, but your still taking a chance. In any case, this is really bad advice to give to other people.
I hope this is an idea which catches on. Think what mankind could achieve if engineers were free to be creative, unhindered by the mindnumbing shackles of management and beaurocracy.
I stand corrected ;-)
As he say in the article, the reason he uses Perl regexp is that the tools/libraries have to read the entire file. If this is a long stream, it's grossly inefficient - you have to load the entire thing into a massive tree structure in memory. If the job can be done serially with regexps without using a noticeable amount of memory or time, then it is often better. This is the point of the article - there is a choice between using a method which is often grossly innefficient for real world problems (XML libs) and a fast but messy method (Perl regexp). Neither of these is really satisfactory, hence the complaint.
You mean something like this?
That's what I do, but most people don't. The question is would they get away with it?
Why don't you need to wear wrist protectors???? (OK, you don't need to, but you certainly should if you're dealing with electronic equipment). Or have I missed something?