One time I remember writing some code and it was very fast and almost always correct. The guy I was working with exclaimed "I can give you the wrong answer in zero seconds" and I shut up and did it the slower way that was right every time.
This mentality of speed at the cost of correctness is prevalent, for example I can't understand why people don't spend the extra money on ECC memory *ALL THE TIME*. One failure over the lifetime of the computer and you have paid for your RAM. I have assembled many computers and unfortunately there have been a number of times where ECC memory was not an option. In almost every case where I have used ECC memory, the computer was noticably more stable. Case in point, the most recent machine that I built has never (as far as I know) crashed and I've thrown same really nasty workloads it's way. On the other hand, a couple of notebooks I have have crashed more often than I care to remember and there is no ECC option. Not to mention the ridicule I get for suggesting that people invest the extra $30 for a "non server" machine. Go figure. Suggesting that stability is the realm of "server" machines and infer end user machines should be relegated to a realm of lowered standards of reliability makes very little sense to me especially when the investment of $30 to $40 is absolutely minuscule if it prevents a single failure. What I think (see lawsuit coming on) is that memory manufacturers will sell quality marginal products to the non ECC crowd because there is no way of validating memory quality.
I think there needs to be a significant change in the marketing of products to ensure that metrics of data integrity play a more significant role in decision making. It won't happen until the consumer demands it and I can't see that happening any time soon. Maybe, hopefully, I am wrong.
Productivity is measured by the number of services running and transactions performed.
Take an estimate of amount of traffic going through the computers you administer, weigh them by value - e.g. a financial transaction is of higher value than an email. Then you have a number.
Make killing spam messages weighted high and then every month set up some "honey pot" email addresses that you use to evaluate the quality of the spam filters. Every month then has a higher productivity than the past month and you get a nice bonus to boot.
I actually do the same kind of thing. Whenever I get a new machine, I snaphot the HDD before I even boot it the first time. Then I run the auto updates from MS and snapshot it again. I then regularly wipe the machine by restoring a snapshot. (It also forces me to keep my data somewhere else that is safe.)
The only advantage of this over the DeepFreeze thing is that I can unfreeze to multiple prior states.
I think it should be a standard feature with these 100GB++ notebook drives.
How can you verify that the source code supplied is exactly the same code that was used to create the actual device that was used to test the defendant ?
If the manufacturer is unable to produce a log of the files that were used to manufacture the product in question, then they have no case any longer.
I also suspect that if the electronics used in this device has not been carefully designed to deal with component tolerances there is another cause for dispute. You would need to track the manufacturing of the circuitry and device calibration logs.
Unless the manufacturer has done a very careful monitoring and logging of the manufacturing process, I doubt that I can stand up in a court of law and say there is no reasonable doubt.
If I have a very specific message - like an address or account number or somthing that can be transcribed incorrectly, I will use SMS from Skype if I know the recipient is not going to be able to access email. Otherwise I will simply call.
I called customer service and asked them to "block" text message services on my daughter's number.
Re:Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging...
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But there is another reason... A more realistic reason... COST...
I have a counter-example. I had a "family" plan with Cingular - oodles of roll-over talk time, free after 7PM etc etc but no allowance for text messages. Before I stopped allowing text messages, my daughter racked up $335 in text messaging in the second month of the plan which was after I told her the text messaging was coming out of her pocket - that's 3,350 text messages that month - over 100 per day - admittedly she paid for incoming as well as outgoing messages. This is the case where talk was free and SMS was expensive.
Go figure...
After that month she toned down on the messages but I still removed that service from the plan altogether after the 5th month or so as it was proving too expensive and I didn't want to spend money on a service that could be easily dealt with using plan old voice !
Which is an interesting statement, really, since it presupposes some sort of universal timeline on which it has "already" gone supernova. When in fact, there is no universal synchronicity.
Does that mean that cat I ran over last night in my car was not necessarily born yet so I didn't really run over it ? Phew, I was having a bit of a guilt trip....
Thing of beauty. One of the few legal documents I can actually read.
It appears few stones have been left unturned in the counter complaint. It clearly alleges that the RIAA have been using scare tactics to maintain their control on music distribution. The interesting thing is that they have to now prove they didn't. Given that they the big RIAA members have been convicted of collusion in the past, I can't help but see this one becoming a really big nasty mess for them.
Given the U.S. Justice system runs slower than treacle, don't expect the RIAA to be pulled through the coals for a while.
To really provide parallel programming support, you want to have more asynchronous services. Unfortunately, none of the operating systems provide a very good interface for asynchronous services, they're incomplete and littered with limitations.
Some of these problems can be mitigated by libraries but you're still stuck much of the time and there are very few cross platform asynchronous libraries.
There are some very simple multi threaded programming models that I have used. The issue is that there is an inevitable learning curve. Most developers have no idea what a state machine is. Inevitably, you end up making state machines to handle much of the complexity of things happening in different order.
Then, what for ? Most of the written can't benefit (even if they tried) from parallelization. High performance code, like servers, graphics intensive applications, video editing applications to name a few, might have some benefits, however, that's a small chunk of the code written today.
I can't wait to hear what someone would say about that...
Oh... let's not wait
Finding One - Microsoft Values Open Source as a Development Model
Let others develop the code while we steal it.
Finding Two - Microsoft Values Building on Others' Work
Let's face it, we couldn't have dunnit by ourselves.
Finding Three - Microsoft wants Choice in Licensing
Yep, the more open source licenses the better. Especially ones where I get to to use your code without any payback.
Finding Four - Microsoft Likes Interactions between Open and Closed Source
Yep, we love it when OSS code does not work with our code. It keeps our monopoly position strong. We don't have to resort to further criminal acts like we did with windows on DOS7.
Finding Five - Microsoft wants Flexibility
Yep, I don't want to be hamstrung, do I.
Theme Six - Microsoft want Choice, not Mandates
We don't need no stinkin GPL.
Summary
The Micorosoft we interviewed clearly articulated their desire for "flexibility," "choice,"
and "freedom" for themselves and no-one else.
Those teachers are dumb fucks and deserve to be fired AND sued.
"... dumb ****s", no contest
"... sued.", aw man, stop feeling like you have to drag someone through this sink hole of a legal system every time someone annoys you. Use that pent up energy fighting spammers or coming up with a solution to world peace.
Kids have extreme anxiety for all kinds of dumb reasons all the time. The next thing you're going to suggest is jailing parents who discipline their children because it causes "extreme anxiety". Stop treating kids with padded gloves otherwise you'll get adults incapable of coping with the real world. Yes, it's nice to have a touchy feely beautiful world for everyone to live in but unfortunately there are far worse people than those teachers out there that will inevitably come across those kids' lives at some point or other and dealing with situations like this with a "we'll sue 'em" only teaches them that they should cry to mommy whenever somthing bad happens rather than being strong willed and letting the crap roll off like water on a ducks back.
I'd rather live in a society where people know what it's like to be nice to one another and do so at their own expense. You don't get that by sueing "... dumb ****s" like this or making a de-facto court out of the media like most of the postings on/.
Kids got to learn the hard way about themselves. - almost always a good thing.
No-one got hurt, no I don't care if someone got stressed for 5 minutes. Getting stressed is an unfortunate part of life, get over it and learn to deal with it. If you don't push the human brain to go beyond it's comfort zone, it may never get out of being a whining spoiled brat that most of us are. This is probably the biggest favor some of these kids will ever have done to them.
Smart cars (that drive themselves) would depend on sat nav equipment to some extent. At least we don't have to wait for implementation of the vehicle control system to know that the sat nav data needs a few bug fixes...
The challenge response it the very first thing I implemented when I was trying to ensure I was talking to the right peer in my first crypto thing I did in '85 and I'm not a crypto expert at all. Given that SCOTUS said, "Enuff of this obvious stuff", I suspect that this one will be creamed if it is ever challenged all the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah - this is the bane of computer technology.
One time I remember writing some code and it was very fast and almost always correct. The guy I was working with exclaimed "I can give you the wrong answer in zero seconds" and I shut up and did it the slower way that was right every time.
This mentality of speed at the cost of correctness is prevalent, for example I can't understand why people don't spend the extra money on ECC memory *ALL THE TIME*. One failure over the lifetime of the computer and you have paid for your RAM. I have assembled many computers and unfortunately there have been a number of times where ECC memory was not an option. In almost every case where I have used ECC memory, the computer was noticably more stable. Case in point, the most recent machine that I built has never (as far as I know) crashed and I've thrown same really nasty workloads it's way. On the other hand, a couple of notebooks I have have crashed more often than I care to remember and there is no ECC option. Not to mention the ridicule I get for suggesting that people invest the extra $30 for a "non server" machine. Go figure. Suggesting that stability is the realm of "server" machines and infer end user machines should be relegated to a realm of lowered standards of reliability makes very little sense to me especially when the investment of $30 to $40 is absolutely minuscule if it prevents a single failure. What I think (see lawsuit coming on) is that memory manufacturers will sell quality marginal products to the non ECC crowd because there is no way of validating memory quality.
I think there needs to be a significant change in the marketing of products to ensure that metrics of data integrity play a more significant role in decision making. It won't happen until the consumer demands it and I can't see that happening any time soon. Maybe, hopefully, I am wrong.
I did that once when I was not sure about the viability of the patent. It turns out that it was subsequently cited as prior art.
Productivity is measured by the number of services running and transactions performed.
Take an estimate of amount of traffic going through the computers you administer, weigh them by value - e.g. a financial transaction is of higher value than an email. Then you have a number.
Make killing spam messages weighted high and then every month set up some "honey pot" email addresses that you use to evaluate the quality of the spam filters. Every month then has a higher productivity than the past month and you get a nice bonus to boot.
Other than not knowing the difference between criminal and civil court, I guess so.
Last time I looked MS was convicted of being a criminal monopolist.
Why anyone thinks this means he's pro-MS beats the hell out of me.
They're very kind things he said about MS compared to what he could have said, things like:
... and he would have been correct.
I actually do the same kind of thing. Whenever I get a new machine, I snaphot the HDD before I even boot it the first time. Then I run the auto updates from MS and snapshot it again. I then regularly wipe the machine by restoring a snapshot. (It also forces me to keep my data somewhere else that is safe.)
The only advantage of this over the DeepFreeze thing is that I can unfreeze to multiple prior states.
I think it should be a standard feature with these 100GB++ notebook drives.
How can you verify that the source code supplied is exactly the same code that was used to create the actual device that was used to test the defendant ?
If the manufacturer is unable to produce a log of the files that were used to manufacture the product in question, then they have no case any longer.
I also suspect that if the electronics used in this device has not been carefully designed to deal with component tolerances there is another cause for dispute. You would need to track the manufacturing of the circuitry and device calibration logs.
Unless the manufacturer has done a very careful monitoring and logging of the manufacturing process, I doubt that I can stand up in a court of law and say there is no reasonable doubt.
If postgres supported native unsigned integer types, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
If that's the only thing, I'm sure you can get that kind of support added in a heart beat. The type extensibility of postgresql is quite good.
Any crap programmer can write spaghetti code with or without the use of 'goto'.
translates to:
"I can write bad code in any language!"
... which is one of my fav. responses to language wars.
If I have a very specific message - like an address or account number or somthing that can be transcribed incorrectly, I will use SMS from Skype if I know the recipient is not going to be able to access email. Otherwise I will simply call.
I called customer service and asked them to "block" text message services on my daughter's number.
I have a counter-example. I had a "family" plan with Cingular - oodles of roll-over talk time, free after 7PM etc etc but no allowance for text messages. Before I stopped allowing text messages, my daughter racked up $335 in text messaging in the second month of the plan which was after I told her the text messaging was coming out of her pocket - that's 3,350 text messages that month - over 100 per day - admittedly she paid for incoming as well as outgoing messages. This is the case where talk was free and SMS was expensive.
Go figure...
After that month she toned down on the messages but I still removed that service from the plan altogether after the 5th month or so as it was proving too expensive and I didn't want to spend money on a service that could be easily dealt with using plan old voice !
Sure, but this "woman" is also suing for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, terrorism as well as for medical bills.
Sounds fine to me.
What do you think the probablility is of photons showing up soon will describe Eta C. blowing up ?
Does that mean that cat I ran over last night in my car was not necessarily born yet so I didn't really run over it ? Phew, I was having a bit of a guilt trip....
If that is the case, Eta C. should already have gone supernova. We just can't see it yet.
Thing of beauty. One of the few legal documents I can actually read.
It appears few stones have been left unturned in the counter complaint. It clearly alleges that the RIAA have been using scare tactics to maintain their control on music distribution. The interesting thing is that they have to now prove they didn't. Given that they the big RIAA members have been convicted of collusion in the past, I can't help but see this one becoming a really big nasty mess for them.
Given the U.S. Justice system runs slower than treacle, don't expect the RIAA to be pulled through the coals for a while.
To really provide parallel programming support, you want to have more asynchronous services. Unfortunately, none of the operating systems provide a very good interface for asynchronous services, they're incomplete and littered with limitations.
Some of these problems can be mitigated by libraries but you're still stuck much of the time and there are very few cross platform asynchronous libraries.
There are some very simple multi threaded programming models that I have used. The issue is that there is an inevitable learning curve. Most developers have no idea what a state machine is. Inevitably, you end up making state machines to handle much of the complexity of things happening in different order.
Then, what for ? Most of the written can't benefit (even if they tried) from parallelization. High performance code, like servers, graphics intensive applications, video editing applications to name a few, might have some benefits, however, that's a small chunk of the code written today.
I can't wait to hear what someone would say about that...
Oh ... let's not wait
Finding One - Microsoft Values Open Source as a Development Model
Let others develop the code while we steal it.
Finding Two - Microsoft Values Building on Others' Work
Let's face it, we couldn't have dunnit by ourselves.
Finding Three - Microsoft wants Choice in Licensing
Yep, the more open source licenses the better. Especially ones where I get to to use your code without any payback.
Finding Four - Microsoft Likes Interactions between Open and Closed Source
Yep, we love it when OSS code does not work with our code. It keeps our monopoly position strong. We don't have to resort to further criminal acts like we did with windows on DOS7.
Finding Five - Microsoft wants Flexibility
Yep, I don't want to be hamstrung, do I.
Theme Six - Microsoft want Choice, not Mandates
We don't need no stinkin GPL.
Summary
The Micorosoft we interviewed clearly articulated their desire for "flexibility," "choice," and "freedom" for themselves and no-one else.
"... dumb ****s", no contest
"... sued.", aw man, stop feeling like you have to drag someone through this sink hole of a legal system every time someone annoys you. Use that pent up energy fighting spammers or coming up with a solution to world peace.
Kids have extreme anxiety for all kinds of dumb reasons all the time. The next thing you're going to suggest is jailing parents who discipline their children because it causes "extreme anxiety". Stop treating kids with padded gloves otherwise you'll get adults incapable of coping with the real world. Yes, it's nice to have a touchy feely beautiful world for everyone to live in but unfortunately there are far worse people than those teachers out there that will inevitably come across those kids' lives at some point or other and dealing with situations like this with a "we'll sue 'em" only teaches them that they should cry to mommy whenever somthing bad happens rather than being strong willed and letting the crap roll off like water on a ducks back.
I'd rather live in a society where people know what it's like to be nice to one another and do so at their own expense. You don't get that by sueing "... dumb ****s" like this or making a de-facto court out of the media like most of the postings on /.
Yep the teachers were total jobs, OK.
Kids got to learn the hard way about themselves. - almost always a good thing.
No-one got hurt, no I don't care if someone got stressed for 5 minutes. Getting stressed is an unfortunate part of life, get over it and learn to deal with it. If you don't push the human brain to go beyond it's comfort zone, it may never get out of being a whining spoiled brat that most of us are. This is probably the biggest favor some of these kids will ever have done to them.
Tomorrow most will forget.
Yep the teachers were total jobs.
Smart cars (that drive themselves) would depend on sat nav equipment to some extent. At least we don't have to wait for implementation of the vehicle control system to know that the sat nav data needs a few bug fixes...
The challenge response it the very first thing I implemented when I was trying to ensure I was talking to the right peer in my first crypto thing I did in '85 and I'm not a crypto expert at all. Given that SCOTUS said, "Enuff of this obvious stuff", I suspect that this one will be creamed if it is ever challenged all the way.
No, there is a reason why it's called LOST !
How dare you pi me !