Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
No, if you're lynched it'll be for trolling.
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
It was actually an Apple ][e or something. I think this is also what the library had at first.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
I kinda recall MicroSoft being dragged kicking and screaming into the online world, and I clearly recall that our Windows 3.1 couldn't get online without third-party networking stuff. The power and inevitability of the Internet is that it is open, which Microsoft has actually tried to work against.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
And now that Vista and (I think) XP service pack 2 support USB Video Class, this has finally come to Windows (and of course it still works for the other OSes too). Before that, you had "IMPORTANT: Run this CD before attaching your new <perhipheral>" on Windows and either "it Just Works" or "apt-get install <driver-package>" on other OSes.
Also, it [Toad] seems to get wedged if you enable DBMS_OUTPUT to one of its multitudinous window panes, but maybe I was just doing something wrong there. Urgh. I hate this utter piece of crap.
When polling for dbms_output is enabled, and it tries to poll while a query is running, it freezes until the query finishes. When there's a huge amount of output to fetch, I think it also freezes while fetching it.
From their website. If you don't feel like reading the answer, it's "we haven't got one to show you".
Q. Where can I see one of your cars?
A. It takes many years and tens of millions of dollars to create a domestic automobile for the retail market. Our competitors, are, in many cases, showing "mock-ups" of cars they hope to raise funding for. When we have spent the time and the money on a real car, we will show that car to our customers. We may allow some documentation of our mock-ups but we will not represent those efforts as engineered, market ready vehicles.
That sounds suspiciously like some of the Agile programming stuff...
And then oil came along, which was a superior energy source. Do you know of an energy source that is superior to oil? I don't.
Nuclear, geothermal. Maybe wind and solar.
Batteries are getting good enough that you can mostly use these for your car now, and are improving fast enough that this should actually be practical in a few (<10) years. They're already practical for things that don't move.
well the connection limit for a single host is the number of available ports for outbound traffic (to return data to the client)
A TCP connection is identified by the source IP:port and destination IP:port. Your web server typically will listen on only one port (80) and probably on a single IP, and TCP has 64k ports available. So, the theoretical limit is 64k connections from each and every computer with a routable IP address. Which is completely insane, so what really matters are the limits your OS puts on how many open sockets/file descriptors there can be (per process, or across the entire system), and if that's high enough then things like how much memory your OS+webserver consumes per open connection.
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
Gaming a badly/partially deregulated system, which IIRC they were involved in determining the structure of the not-quite-deregulation (I think it was something like, fixed retail prices and deregulated wholesale prices, because they (incorrectly) predicted that wholesale prices would drop significantly). There were other states that did things properly and it worked fairly well, or at least didn't cause problems like in CA.
This article from 2006 indicate that deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.
IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.
It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
No. Wikipedia article is WRONG. Free markets categorically DO NOT require (1) rationality (2) perfect information. They only require that the actors ACT on the PRICE and that they are reasonably free of third-party coercion.
Huh? What does any of that have to do with whether (free) markets are efficient, ie whether it's possible to beat the market without using inside information?
I wish that this could become a universal precept of software design, shaping everything from OS's to desktop apps -- Joe Armstrong: "Stopping a system to upgrade the code is an admission of failure."
Trouble is, that's incredibly hard (expensive, limiting) to get right. So it only makes sense where you can't even schedule maintenance downtime or instruct the load balancer to send all requests to the other machine. So it's useful for the thing that your (and everyone else in town) single, non-redundant phone line plugs in to... and not terribly much else. Certainly not for a desktop where you're not even using it at night.
Failing at rational self-interest itself requires one to deliberately act in a way known to be contrary to one's own goals. Naturally, this is a very rare occurrence.
And yet somehow, people still end up blindly clicking "yes" on something and getting a fake-antivirus scamware, or joining MLM pyramid scams, or selling everything to help DEPOSED PRINCE ABDUL OF ELBONIA get his money somewhere safe, etc.
Free markets *are* efficient -- it's the fundamental state of affairs for any market.
That is not universally accepted. In order for markets to be efficient, everyone must (1) be rational (but people are known to often not be rational), and (2) have perfect information (but information is expensive to obtain, verify, and sort through... at what point does the cost of obtaining better information outweigh the benefit of obtaining that information?).
You should check out this reference: (Apologies, you need access to the ACM Library to read the article) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299161. Robert Glass discusses this exact issue. The article offers some references to research done using alternative approaches to inspections.
There are apparently a couple different kings of things that are both called "code reviews", which one are you talking about? There's also the issue that they're supposedly (as in, according to actual studies) pretty good, so maybe you could do them slightly differently and get much better (more in line with the study results) effects.
More details on what your version of a "code review" and a "design review" are would probably get better answers...
The pilot must always have the option of manual override. *PERIOD*
Well, that depends. Do the humans or the computers have a proven history of fucking up more often?
Sure, the computer could malfunction. But how frequent is this compared to situations where it does something unexpected and the pilot thinks it's malfunctioning when it actually isn't, and that "something unexpected" is actually needed to keep the plane in the air?
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems.
How fond Americans are of reductionist dualities that are unhelpful, misleading and frequently downright dangerous: American pilot with The Right Stuff in an American plane would have saved everyone; dangerous European plane and computer killed hundreds. Oversimplified sniping, or childish fantasy?
It's not an "American" thing, it's an "idiot" thing.
If I want real facts on flying, instead of wild-assed pseudo-political trollery, I'll go read Peter Ladkin or Patrick Smith:
"The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrible storm."
Or even the news: 'unprofessional' pilot behavior related to crash (possibly because they weren't paid enough to live near the airport, and may have been tired from a long commute). There was a similar (possibly the same?) story on the TV at work, from the angle of there being several crashes related to this 'unprofessional' behavior by pilots from the same pilot school, which I guess is being investigated.
Not trying to troll or anything, but I'd always hear of how parallel programming is very complicated for programmers, but then I learnt to use pthread in C to parallelise everything in my C program from parallel concurrent processing of the same things to threading any aspect of the program, and I was surprised by how simple and straightforward it was using pthread, even creating a number of threads depending on the number of detected cores was simple.
Really? With the pthread API? Pray tell, how does that work?
Note that reading from/proc/ is neither part of the pthread API, nor portable...
#include <unistd.h>
int num_cores = sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN);
On the other hand, won't DNSSEC and simple SSL make EV SSL certificates unnecessary?
No. The point of EV certs is to tie the site back to a real-world entity (like I understand "normal" certs were originally supposed to do). It's the difference between knowing that you really are talking to paypa1.com instead of an imposter (who could very well have registered the domain with false info, so you can't trust a whois lookup), and knowing that you really are talking to a site operated by PayPal, Inc, rather than one operated by phishers. Which can really be an important difference, given that '1' and 'l' (and several other pairs) tend to look alike in many fonts.
Most users will keep using upstream DNS servers, which means that DNSSEC can prevent third party manipulations of that server's responses, but not manipulations which are injected on the "last hop".
There is one more step that a security-aware stub resolver can take
if, for whatever reason, it is not able to establish a useful trust
relationship with the recursive name servers that it uses: it can
perform its own signature validation by setting the Checking Disabled
(CD) bit in its query messages. A validating stub resolver is thus
able to treat the DNSSEC signatures as trust relationships between
the zone administrators and the stub resolver itself.
(a "stub resolver" being the system library that implements getaddrinfo() and friends)
DNSSEC certifies the data, while DNSCurve only certifies the connection between the DNS server and the resolver.
With DNSSEC, you know that the DNS records you receive are correct.
With DNSCurve, your ISP's caching resolver knows that it is talking to the proper DNS server. You do not know that you are talking to your ISP's resolver instead of an imposter, and you do not know if your ISP is forwarding the records accurately.
DNSSEC can be used for interesting things like distributing public keys. DNSCurve cannot, because it still requires you to trust your ISP and your ISP's network. (Or alternatively it would require that shared caching resolvers not be used, which would cause a major increase in traffic to the authoritative servers.)
they vouch for the fact someone had a credit card once and they got paid.
The processes that CAs go through before signing a certificate certainly should be a lot stronger, but the idea of a trusted certificate authority is still valid.
And some CAs are diligent...
The basic idea is valid, but the implementation sucks (and can probably only be made to not suck in a closed environment). Some CAs being diligent isn't enough, they all (well, all the ones trusted by any major browser) have to be diligent for the system to work at all. My choosing the best CA out there doesn't matter a bit, because they can't do anything to stop the worst from handing a phisher a cert for my domain.
the real news here is not the extra couple cores, but coherency snooping. this feature will make 4/8s machines far more attractive; it doesn't hurt that with 48 cores and 32 ddr3/1333 dimms, you have quite a monster. _and_ incidentally something that Intel can't currently answer.
That's actually 16 channels of DDR2/800, according to page 1 of TFA. I think it's supposed to be what comes out after this one that goes to 4xDDR3 per socket.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
No, if you're lynched it'll be for trolling.
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Really?
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
It was actually an Apple ][e or something. I think this is also what the library had at first.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
I kinda recall MicroSoft being dragged kicking and screaming into the online world, and I clearly recall that our Windows 3.1 couldn't get online without third-party networking stuff. The power and inevitability of the Internet is that it is open, which Microsoft has actually tried to work against.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
And now that Vista and (I think) XP service pack 2 support USB Video Class, this has finally come to Windows (and of course it still works for the other OSes too). Before that, you had "IMPORTANT: Run this CD before attaching your new <perhipheral>" on Windows and either "it Just Works" or "apt-get install <driver-package>" on other OSes.
Also, it [Toad] seems to get wedged if you enable DBMS_OUTPUT to one of its multitudinous window panes, but maybe I was just doing something wrong there. Urgh. I hate this utter piece of crap.
When polling for dbms_output is enabled, and it tries to poll while a query is running, it freezes until the query finishes. When there's a huge amount of output to fetch, I think it also freezes while fetching it.
From their website. If you don't feel like reading the answer, it's "we haven't got one to show you".
Q. Where can I see one of your cars?
A. It takes many years and tens of millions of dollars to create a domestic automobile for the retail market. Our competitors, are, in many cases, showing "mock-ups" of cars they hope to raise funding for. When we have spent the time and the money on a real car, we will show that car to our customers. We may allow some documentation of our mock-ups but we will not represent those efforts as engineered, market ready vehicles.
That sounds suspiciously like some of the Agile programming stuff...
And then oil came along, which was a superior energy source. Do you know of an energy source that is superior to oil? I don't.
Nuclear, geothermal. Maybe wind and solar.
Batteries are getting good enough that you can mostly use these for your car now, and are improving fast enough that this should actually be practical in a few (<10) years. They're already practical for things that don't move.
Yes, because the visual representation of a number totally determines your ability to calculate with it.
Number systems with place-values are much easier to work with.
That's why people using a abacus are so slow, and why binary computers are so bad at maths.
Abacuses and modern computers are all about place-values, so they work rather well.
The goal is to send 4chan ... to jail.
Anyone here have a problem with that?
Yes, they're hilarious.
Since when does the US care about international law?
When it's useful, for exporting laws or evading opposition to desired laws.
well the connection limit for a single host is the number of available ports for outbound traffic (to return data to the client)
A TCP connection is identified by the source IP:port and destination IP:port. Your web server typically will listen on only one port (80) and probably on a single IP, and TCP has 64k ports available. So, the theoretical limit is 64k connections from each and every computer with a routable IP address. Which is completely insane, so what really matters are the limits your OS puts on how many open sockets/file descriptors there can be (per process, or across the entire system), and if that's high enough then things like how much memory your OS+webserver consumes per open connection.
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
Gaming a badly/partially deregulated system, which IIRC they were involved in determining the structure of the not-quite-deregulation (I think it was something like, fixed retail prices and deregulated wholesale prices, because they (incorrectly) predicted that wholesale prices would drop significantly). There were other states that did things properly and it worked fairly well, or at least didn't cause problems like in CA.
This article from 2006 indicate that deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.
Of course they can, and they will.
Sure, they can... just like they could and did RST your bittorrent connections, or throttle/cap traffic to services that compete with their services.
Until people get pissed because they now know what's being taken away, and maybe get congress or the FCC or FTC involved.
IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.
It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
No. Wikipedia article is WRONG. Free markets categorically DO NOT require (1) rationality (2) perfect information. They only require that the actors ACT on the PRICE and that they are reasonably free of third-party coercion.
Huh? What does any of that have to do with whether (free) markets are efficient, ie whether it's possible to beat the market without using inside information?
I wish that this could become a universal precept of software design, shaping everything from OS's to desktop apps -- Joe Armstrong: "Stopping a system to upgrade the code is an admission of failure."
Trouble is, that's incredibly hard (expensive, limiting) to get right. So it only makes sense where you can't even schedule maintenance downtime or instruct the load balancer to send all requests to the other machine. So it's useful for the thing that your (and everyone else in town) single, non-redundant phone line plugs in to... and not terribly much else. Certainly not for a desktop where you're not even using it at night.
Failing at rational self-interest itself requires one to deliberately act in a way known to be contrary to one's own goals. Naturally, this is a very rare occurrence.
And yet somehow, people still end up blindly clicking "yes" on something and getting a fake-antivirus scamware, or joining MLM pyramid scams, or selling everything to help DEPOSED PRINCE ABDUL OF ELBONIA get his money somewhere safe, etc.
Free markets *are* efficient -- it's the fundamental state of affairs for any market.
That is not universally accepted. In order for markets to be efficient, everyone must (1) be rational (but people are known to often not be rational), and (2) have perfect information (but information is expensive to obtain, verify, and sort through... at what point does the cost of obtaining better information outweigh the benefit of obtaining that information?).
You should check out this reference: (Apologies, you need access to the ACM Library to read the article) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299161. Robert Glass discusses this exact issue. The article offers some references to research done using alternative approaches to inspections.
Non-paywall link: http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/ADAMS_E/CLASSES/CS370SWENGRII/WebWinter04/NOTES/Glassinspectionarticle.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_review
There are apparently a couple different kings of things that are both called "code reviews", which one are you talking about? There's also the issue that they're supposedly (as in, according to actual studies) pretty good, so maybe you could do them slightly differently and get much better (more in line with the study results) effects.
More details on what your version of a "code review" and a "design review" are would probably get better answers...
The pilot must always have the option of manual override. *PERIOD*
Well, that depends. Do the humans or the computers have a proven history of fucking up more often?
Sure, the computer could malfunction. But how frequent is this compared to situations where it does something unexpected and the pilot thinks it's malfunctioning when it actually isn't, and that "something unexpected" is actually needed to keep the plane in the air?
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems.
How fond Americans are of reductionist dualities that are unhelpful, misleading and frequently downright dangerous: American pilot with The Right Stuff in an American plane would have saved everyone; dangerous European plane and computer killed hundreds. Oversimplified sniping, or childish fantasy?
It's not an "American" thing, it's an "idiot" thing.
If I want real facts on flying, instead of wild-assed pseudo-political trollery, I'll go read Peter Ladkin or Patrick Smith: "The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrible storm."
Or even the news: 'unprofessional' pilot behavior related to crash (possibly because they weren't paid enough to live near the airport, and may have been tired from a long commute). There was a similar (possibly the same?) story on the TV at work, from the angle of there being several crashes related to this 'unprofessional' behavior by pilots from the same pilot school, which I guess is being investigated.
Not trying to troll or anything, but I'd always hear of how parallel programming is very complicated for programmers, but then I learnt to use pthread in C to parallelise everything in my C program from parallel concurrent processing of the same things to threading any aspect of the program, and I was surprised by how simple and straightforward it was using pthread, even creating a number of threads depending on the number of detected cores was simple.
Really? With the pthread API? Pray tell, how does that work?
Note that reading from /proc/ is neither part of the pthread API, nor portable...
#include <unistd.h>
int num_cores = sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN);
On the other hand, won't DNSSEC and simple SSL make EV SSL certificates unnecessary?
No. The point of EV certs is to tie the site back to a real-world entity (like I understand "normal" certs were originally supposed to do). It's the difference between knowing that you really are talking to paypa1.com instead of an imposter (who could very well have registered the domain with false info, so you can't trust a whois lookup), and knowing that you really are talking to a site operated by PayPal, Inc, rather than one operated by phishers. Which can really be an important difference, given that '1' and 'l' (and several other pairs) tend to look alike in many fonts.
Most users will keep using upstream DNS servers, which means that DNSSEC can prevent third party manipulations of that server's responses, but not manipulations which are injected on the "last hop".
Huh? Sure it can:
(a "stub resolver" being the system library that implements getaddrinfo() and friends)
I still think DNSCurve would have made more sense, http://dnscurve.org/dnssec.html
DNSSEC certifies the data, while DNSCurve only certifies the connection between the DNS server and the resolver.
With DNSSEC, you know that the DNS records you receive are correct.
With DNSCurve, your ISP's caching resolver knows that it is talking to the proper DNS server. You do not know that you are talking to your ISP's resolver instead of an imposter, and you do not know if your ISP is forwarding the records accurately.
DNSSEC can be used for interesting things like distributing public keys. DNSCurve cannot, because it still requires you to trust your ISP and your ISP's network. (Or alternatively it would require that shared caching resolvers not be used, which would cause a major increase in traffic to the authoritative servers.)
they vouch for the fact someone had a credit card once and they got paid.
The processes that CAs go through before signing a certificate certainly should be a lot stronger, but the idea of a trusted certificate authority is still valid.
And some CAs are diligent...
The basic idea is valid, but the implementation sucks (and can probably only be made to not suck in a closed environment). Some CAs being diligent isn't enough, they all (well, all the ones trusted by any major browser) have to be diligent for the system to work at all. My choosing the best CA out there doesn't matter a bit, because they can't do anything to stop the worst from handing a phisher a cert for my domain.
the real news here is not the extra couple cores, but coherency snooping. this feature will make 4/8s machines far more attractive; it doesn't hurt that with 48 cores and 32 ddr3/1333 dimms, you have quite a monster. _and_ incidentally something that Intel can't currently answer.
That's actually 16 channels of DDR2/800, according to page 1 of TFA. I think it's supposed to be what comes out after this one that goes to 4xDDR3 per socket.