Menstrual blood is easy to tell as different from normal blood. I assume from the fact that none of the articles mention it as menstrual blood (a pretty key fact supporting Reiser's story), that it was normal blood.
Then again, I have an ex-girlfriend who left real bloodstains behind. Thankfully not on my sheets.
It wasn't his arrogance that got him a guilty verdict, it was 11 days of increasingly implausible explanations. The reporter puts it well when he says that Reiser replaced a cloud of uncertainty with a battery of stories so ridiculous they believed he was lying.
Reiser's not the first defendent to talk himself into a guilty verdict.
Physics with a few particles is easy, but it scales poorly. It's not hard to calculate a trajectory for a single object that gets hit, but truly destructible environments (the holy grail of games, for now) will require thousands of objects at least.
I played the Crysis demo on a recent graphics card, and was suitably impressed for ten minutes. After that, it was the same old boring FPS that I stopped playing five years ago. Graphics seem stuck in the exponential curve of the uncanny valley, where incremental improvements in rendering add nothing to the image except to heighten that sense of 'almost there' that signals to the brain that it's *not* photorealism.
This isn't meant to be the same old "it's the gameplay, stupid" rant that we get here. It's simply to question why any real work is being done on rendering engines when we seem to long have passed the point of diminishing returns.
I'm pretty certain that the idea of allowing users to administer their own PCs involves hardening the network to detect and withstand a badly administered PC. The idea of switching to thin clients or PCs locked down by IT is very problematic in its own right--thin clients are only fully useful to clerks and monkeys who will probably be replaced by process automation anyway, and locked down PCs are subject to a thousand exceptions on a case by case basis, which carries massive scaling problems as the company grows.
In the end, the defense-in-depth of building a network that can handle insecure PCs is probably most economical as well as most secure.
Because while an extreme ability to customize the smallest thing is great when 1) I want to customize small things, and 2) I know how to customize it, the rest of the time I want Fischer Price. I want a simple, direct interface. I don't want to spend time clicking through multiple tabs or unfolding tree menus or visually selecting one from many icons.
90% of my time is spent doing very few things that implicate the interface--terminal, browser, IDE--and are best taken care of with a very slick, minimalist interface. It's not only best for unsophisticated users; most of the time, it's most functional for power users too once they've bothered to get things the way they like.
If you had one standard framework, there'd be other, competing, one-standard-frameworks, and you'd be stuck choosing which one has the most market share, and then complaining about how that other one-standard-framework has a feature you wish you had.
The dog's lunch that is web coding is the reason that Web 2.0 has virtually 100% penetration (yes, at a cost in complexity and reliability). All those pieces are interchangeable (ASP/JSP instead of PHP, flash instead of HTML/CSS), so no company can get a lock on any of it, and you can pick from the buffet only what you want if you're not offering the full 2.0 experience.
It's definitely a tradeoff against having a nice clean development environment, but really, what you've got IS the one standard framework with a lot of choices in it, and no competition unless Silverlight (improbably) succeeds.
This is the first step, suing the telcos. In a lawsuit, discovery will reveal exactly what the telcos did and for who: what they collected, what they turned over, and how indiscriminate they were.
No one in the Bush Administration will go to jail over this, but like a truth commission, at least we'll find out exactly how bad it was.
It's not the greater good of the trial lawyers. Arguably, the telcos did nothing wrong legally even if it's as bad as we think it is. Almost certainly they'll win any case against them between claims of executive privilege and national security.
The reason the Bush Administration and Republicans have been demanding telecom immunity to prevent lawsuits is to prevent discovery of exactly what happened. If you're feeling charitable, you can believe that this is about keeping ways and means secret; if not, it's about keeping secret the gross, indiscriminate extent of the spying that's gone on.
Besides, the telcos don't favor the Republicans. They hedge their bets by flooding both parties with donations and lobbyist money.
I think you answered your own question. Take Two has several extremely profitable properties, they just take too long between releases to provide consistent profitability. That's exactly the sort of situation that an EA executive can look at and say "Hmmm... if we marry those properties to our slave ship mentality, we can make huge bucks!"
Instead of GTA IV, it'll be GTA 2008, 2009, 2010...
You're the one oversimplifying. As someone else observed, the terrorists (Hamas et al) have widespread support among the population. They are the freely elected government of the Gaza Strip. It's simply not the case that there are Xs and Ys in Gaza and it's a sorting problem.
Why does the average Palestinian who just wants to live and work and feed his family support Hamas? Because on a daily basis he sees two things (and I'm not saying this is an accurate or complete view, just the view of the average Palestinian):
1. Israeli soldiers and weapons killing other innocent Palestinians.
2. Hamas maintaining hospitals for the wounded and helping him rebuild his house that was bulldozed.
The Palestinians don't see it as "if we side with Israel to root out the terrorists we can all live in peace." They see it as "the Israelis have barricaded us in here behind a wall, deprived us of a functioning economy, and killed Palestinians indiscriminately. They're making war on us as a group, so why shouldn't I join the army of the side that's fighting for me?"
Your plan to fight tooth and nail to eliminate the terrorists perpetuates the above perception just as much as Hamas homicide bombers do. You know what Israel should do? Flood the Gaza Strip with aid: food, hospitals, etc. Build a factory and employ the average Palestinian so that he's got a job. Terrorists thrive only on a sea of popular support--take that away with carrots rather than sticks, and Hamas will wither.
Note that I never said that they should try diplomacy with Hamas. But bombing and bulldozing and targetted assassinations have failed for years. Time to try cutting off Hamas' air supply: Palestinian resentment at their treatment by Israel.
I presume that work is continuing with the data gathered from this project, in the hopes of finding some other way of powering such a laser.
The possibility of a weapon like this is to radically change warfare--it it's effective, it basically eliminates indirect fire as a factor, which has been one of the defining aspects of 20th century warfare. That THEL was actually effective in hitting targets like mortar shells detected in flight is half the equation. I can't believe that they simply rolled up the project as 'too messy'.
Real estate was cheap fifteen years ago, but it's not anymore. Victoria was the retirement capital of Canada until it filled up and got expensive. Since then, senior citizens have been moving up the coast. They hit Nanaimo about ten years ago; five years ago it was Parksville (30 minutes north); these days they're developing north of Qualicum.
It creates an interesting effect in those towns. Before the seniors get there, it's a very seasonal population with lumber and tourism providing most of the employment. Within a year the population doubles with people over sixty spending their kid's inheritance on dream retirement homes and golf memberships, which injects a lot of year round cash into the local economy. It's undeniably beneficial for the local municipalities. Property values alone tend to double.
But the seniors come in waves, and there are obvious die-offs where a bunch of seventy and eighty year olds kick, and there's a sudden glut of houses on the market (though those houses fill up again pretty quickly with more retirees).
Where the strain shows is in the faces of the teenagers working grocery store and gas station cash registers. The retirees have nothing to do but clip coupons, and think it's a great game to work as many as possible into every transaction.
1. Singularity is developed to the point where the core.NET libraries run on it. 2. That gives you the desktop experience and basic system management. 3. Re-implement Active Directory on it. 4. That gives you something you can deploy as a networked server co-operating in a Windows domain. 5. Re-implement IIS on it. 6. That gives you an application server on which you can deploy existing applications. 7. Sell it into the corporate server space as the replacement for Windows Server 2008.
If you get that far, you've got a profitable, marketable product, and that buys you the time to extend it back into desktop space. MS has already figured out that they have to differentiate their product lines, that "One Windows to Rule Them All" doesn't work.
Whether or not it takes off is an interesting question. I wouldn't be surprised to find that, in five years, Singularity is the origin of the next Windows kernel. It sounds like development has gone far enough that secondary research groups in MS could start looking at what's involved in porting the standard stable (Office, IE, mail) to it--which might just end up being reimplementations of the existing feature set.
I imagine an intermediary step would be porting the.NET libraries to Singularity; if they do that in a reasonable time, and if Singularity really does solve the basic microkernel performance problem of interprocess communication, then a lot of the work is already done.
Mainly, I would expect that a lot of people in MS are hoping to avoid another Vista death march, and looking around seriously for a whole new architecture.
"signed code" and "managed code" aren't the same thing. The point of Singularity just is "The OS should make it stays within the boundaries that [it] sets for it." SIPs and contractually defined communications provide just the security that you're saying is needed.
Interprocess communication is fast because everything actually runs in the same context and is basically on its honor not to screw with other bits of the system. (Marketing name "Software-Isolated Processes") Basically a monolithic design and not a microkernel.
No, everything is not on its honor. Yes, everything runs in the same context, but the kernel provides total process isolation, and all communication between SIPs is by a verifiable, contractually defined communications channel. In other words, by enforcing a verifiable contract for communication betweens SIPs or the kernel, it's safe to put it all in the same context and get the performance benefits.
What's cool isn't that it's C# or managed code, it's that they've established some fairly rigorous design principles that gain you a lot of security and reliability guarantees that you don't get just by writing an OS on.NET. Performance doesn't seem to be a huge problem given the ground up implementation.
It's actually not written in C#, it's written in Sing#, an extension of C# that supports the principles they're trying to implement: full process isolation in software, communication by contract, and full memory management.
That's not true, I believe. I'm pretty sure it was on the BSG wiki that I read (from one of Moore's podcasts) that there are chains of sixes (and threes and eights...). When one dies and is resurrected, her particular experience is downloaded to a new body, but it's not shared with the others of that model. This is one of the developing storylines for the fourth season: the growing individuality of certain instances of the archetype that are continaully involved in key events.
Remember, it was one six and one Boomer on Caprica that pushed for a policy change towards humans in season two, not all sixes and all Boomers. They even refer to them by experiences, calling that Six "Caprica Six", saying she's a hero for what she accomplished by seducing Baltar.
When they box number three's entire model, they do so as punishment for the transgressions of the individual three who's committing suicide in an effort to identify the final five, not because the entire line is corrupted by the experiences of one.
The producers are very much interested in not having BSG be a one-sided 'humans uber alles' series. I take it you're in the middle of the second season, where Cain's Six is being tortured and gangraped on the Pegasus. As the series continues, a lot of human decisions come back to the haunt them, and the Cylon perspective is explored.
Slashdot Mirror
Menstrual blood is easy to tell as different from normal blood. I assume from the fact that none of the articles mention it as menstrual blood (a pretty key fact supporting Reiser's story), that it was normal blood.
Then again, I have an ex-girlfriend who left real bloodstains behind. Thankfully not on my sheets.
It wasn't his arrogance that got him a guilty verdict, it was 11 days of increasingly implausible explanations. The reporter puts it well when he says that Reiser replaced a cloud of uncertainty with a battery of stories so ridiculous they believed he was lying.
Reiser's not the first defendent to talk himself into a guilty verdict.
Get a two button mouse--they work identically on Mac as they do on Windows.
Or, hold down the ctrl button while clicking with that one, lonely button.
The first link includes her response to the subpoena that was so effective. It's a good read.
Physics with a few particles is easy, but it scales poorly. It's not hard to calculate a trajectory for a single object that gets hit, but truly destructible environments (the holy grail of games, for now) will require thousands of objects at least.
But how much better do game graphics need to be?
I played the Crysis demo on a recent graphics card, and was suitably impressed for ten minutes. After that, it was the same old boring FPS that I stopped playing five years ago. Graphics seem stuck in the exponential curve of the uncanny valley, where incremental improvements in rendering add nothing to the image except to heighten that sense of 'almost there' that signals to the brain that it's *not* photorealism.
This isn't meant to be the same old "it's the gameplay, stupid" rant that we get here. It's simply to question why any real work is being done on rendering engines when we seem to long have passed the point of diminishing returns.
I'm pretty certain that the idea of allowing users to administer their own PCs involves hardening the network to detect and withstand a badly administered PC. The idea of switching to thin clients or PCs locked down by IT is very problematic in its own right--thin clients are only fully useful to clerks and monkeys who will probably be replaced by process automation anyway, and locked down PCs are subject to a thousand exceptions on a case by case basis, which carries massive scaling problems as the company grows.
In the end, the defense-in-depth of building a network that can handle insecure PCs is probably most economical as well as most secure.
Because while an extreme ability to customize the smallest thing is great when 1) I want to customize small things, and 2) I know how to customize it, the rest of the time I want Fischer Price. I want a simple, direct interface. I don't want to spend time clicking through multiple tabs or unfolding tree menus or visually selecting one from many icons.
90% of my time is spent doing very few things that implicate the interface--terminal, browser, IDE--and are best taken care of with a very slick, minimalist interface. It's not only best for unsophisticated users; most of the time, it's most functional for power users too once they've bothered to get things the way they like.
Goodness, what a charmingly hopeful picture you have of the employment opportunities available to people who post on ./
If you had one standard framework, there'd be other, competing, one-standard-frameworks, and you'd be stuck choosing which one has the most market share, and then complaining about how that other one-standard-framework has a feature you wish you had.
The dog's lunch that is web coding is the reason that Web 2.0 has virtually 100% penetration (yes, at a cost in complexity and reliability). All those pieces are interchangeable (ASP/JSP instead of PHP, flash instead of HTML/CSS), so no company can get a lock on any of it, and you can pick from the buffet only what you want if you're not offering the full 2.0 experience.
It's definitely a tradeoff against having a nice clean development environment, but really, what you've got IS the one standard framework with a lot of choices in it, and no competition unless Silverlight (improbably) succeeds.
This is the first step, suing the telcos. In a lawsuit, discovery will reveal exactly what the telcos did and for who: what they collected, what they turned over, and how indiscriminate they were.
No one in the Bush Administration will go to jail over this, but like a truth commission, at least we'll find out exactly how bad it was.
Tried that. Didn't work. Executive privilege trumps all, apparently.
It's not the greater good of the trial lawyers. Arguably, the telcos did nothing wrong legally even if it's as bad as we think it is. Almost certainly they'll win any case against them between claims of executive privilege and national security.
The reason the Bush Administration and Republicans have been demanding telecom immunity to prevent lawsuits is to prevent discovery of exactly what happened. If you're feeling charitable, you can believe that this is about keeping ways and means secret; if not, it's about keeping secret the gross, indiscriminate extent of the spying that's gone on.
Besides, the telcos don't favor the Republicans. They hedge their bets by flooding both parties with donations and lobbyist money.
I think you answered your own question. Take Two has several extremely profitable properties, they just take too long between releases to provide consistent profitability. That's exactly the sort of situation that an EA executive can look at and say "Hmmm... if we marry those properties to our slave ship mentality, we can make huge bucks!"
Instead of GTA IV, it'll be GTA 2008, 2009, 2010...
You're the one oversimplifying. As someone else observed, the terrorists (Hamas et al) have widespread support among the population. They are the freely elected government of the Gaza Strip. It's simply not the case that there are Xs and Ys in Gaza and it's a sorting problem.
Why does the average Palestinian who just wants to live and work and feed his family support Hamas? Because on a daily basis he sees two things (and I'm not saying this is an accurate or complete view, just the view of the average Palestinian):
1. Israeli soldiers and weapons killing other innocent Palestinians.
2. Hamas maintaining hospitals for the wounded and helping him rebuild his house that was bulldozed.
The Palestinians don't see it as "if we side with Israel to root out the terrorists we can all live in peace." They see it as "the Israelis have barricaded us in here behind a wall, deprived us of a functioning economy, and killed Palestinians indiscriminately. They're making war on us as a group, so why shouldn't I join the army of the side that's fighting for me?"
Your plan to fight tooth and nail to eliminate the terrorists perpetuates the above perception just as much as Hamas homicide bombers do. You know what Israel should do? Flood the Gaza Strip with aid: food, hospitals, etc. Build a factory and employ the average Palestinian so that he's got a job. Terrorists thrive only on a sea of popular support--take that away with carrots rather than sticks, and Hamas will wither.
Note that I never said that they should try diplomacy with Hamas. But bombing and bulldozing and targetted assassinations have failed for years. Time to try cutting off Hamas' air supply: Palestinian resentment at their treatment by Israel.
I presume that work is continuing with the data gathered from this project, in the hopes of finding some other way of powering such a laser.
The possibility of a weapon like this is to radically change warfare--it it's effective, it basically eliminates indirect fire as a factor, which has been one of the defining aspects of 20th century warfare. That THEL was actually effective in hitting targets like mortar shells detected in flight is half the equation. I can't believe that they simply rolled up the project as 'too messy'.
Real estate was cheap fifteen years ago, but it's not anymore. Victoria was the retirement capital of Canada until it filled up and got expensive. Since then, senior citizens have been moving up the coast. They hit Nanaimo about ten years ago; five years ago it was Parksville (30 minutes north); these days they're developing north of Qualicum.
It creates an interesting effect in those towns. Before the seniors get there, it's a very seasonal population with lumber and tourism providing most of the employment. Within a year the population doubles with people over sixty spending their kid's inheritance on dream retirement homes and golf memberships, which injects a lot of year round cash into the local economy. It's undeniably beneficial for the local municipalities. Property values alone tend to double.
But the seniors come in waves, and there are obvious die-offs where a bunch of seventy and eighty year olds kick, and there's a sudden glut of houses on the market (though those houses fill up again pretty quickly with more retirees).
Where the strain shows is in the faces of the teenagers working grocery store and gas station cash registers. The retirees have nothing to do but clip coupons, and think it's a great game to work as many as possible into every transaction.
Really? You don't know anyone playing WoW?
I don't know. I can see a release path:
.NET libraries run on it.
1. Singularity is developed to the point where the core
2. That gives you the desktop experience and basic system management.
3. Re-implement Active Directory on it.
4. That gives you something you can deploy as a networked server co-operating in a Windows domain.
5. Re-implement IIS on it.
6. That gives you an application server on which you can deploy existing applications.
7. Sell it into the corporate server space as the replacement for Windows Server 2008.
If you get that far, you've got a profitable, marketable product, and that buys you the time to extend it back into desktop space. MS has already figured out that they have to differentiate their product lines, that "One Windows to Rule Them All" doesn't work.
Whether or not it takes off is an interesting question. I wouldn't be surprised to find that, in five years, Singularity is the origin of the next Windows kernel. It sounds like development has gone far enough that secondary research groups in MS could start looking at what's involved in porting the standard stable (Office, IE, mail) to it--which might just end up being reimplementations of the existing feature set.
.NET libraries to Singularity; if they do that in a reasonable time, and if Singularity really does solve the basic microkernel performance problem of interprocess communication, then a lot of the work is already done.
I imagine an intermediary step would be porting the
Mainly, I would expect that a lot of people in MS are hoping to avoid another Vista death march, and looking around seriously for a whole new architecture.
"signed code" and "managed code" aren't the same thing. The point of Singularity just is "The OS should make it stays within the boundaries that [it] sets for it." SIPs and contractually defined communications provide just the security that you're saying is needed.
Read this PDF: http://www.research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/publications/OSR2007_RethinkingSoftwareStack.pdf
.NET. Performance doesn't seem to be a huge problem given the ground up implementation.
What's cool isn't that it's C# or managed code, it's that they've established some fairly rigorous design principles that gain you a lot of security and reliability guarantees that you don't get just by writing an OS on
It's actually not written in C#, it's written in Sing#, an extension of C# that supports the principles they're trying to implement: full process isolation in software, communication by contract, and full memory management.
That's not true, I believe. I'm pretty sure it was on the BSG wiki that I read (from one of Moore's podcasts) that there are chains of sixes (and threes and eights...). When one dies and is resurrected, her particular experience is downloaded to a new body, but it's not shared with the others of that model. This is one of the developing storylines for the fourth season: the growing individuality of certain instances of the archetype that are continaully involved in key events.
Remember, it was one six and one Boomer on Caprica that pushed for a policy change towards humans in season two, not all sixes and all Boomers. They even refer to them by experiences, calling that Six "Caprica Six", saying she's a hero for what she accomplished by seducing Baltar.
When they box number three's entire model, they do so as punishment for the transgressions of the individual three who's committing suicide in an effort to identify the final five, not because the entire line is corrupted by the experiences of one.
The producers are very much interested in not having BSG be a one-sided 'humans uber alles' series. I take it you're in the middle of the second season, where Cain's Six is being tortured and gangraped on the Pegasus. As the series continues, a lot of human decisions come back to the haunt them, and the Cylon perspective is explored.