Just something else I know nothing about...
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
I really haven't a clue about this NP and P stuff. Here I am thinking about transistors! Silicon, that's where it's at... Anyone know where I could find some GENERAL information on what this thread is about? I gather it is about equations or something of the like... I think this time it is just out of my league.
Journalism requires thought. Thought requires language to be decisive. Decisive language is much better to read than a Microsoft textbook. There is nothing wrong with using "big words". Fact: most peoples' vocabulary ceases to grow past age twenty-five. For those that refuse to use the "big words", I venture to say that growth ends somewhere around fifteen. your language will define your perspective on the world. Use it well and it will serve you well. Choose to use only fragments of your language and you will find yourself in a personal deficit for doing so. So please, feel free to flame me also.
I couldn't agree more. This really does seem to be the day of days for Slashdot stories that get "flamed" though. A story about flaming, right after that useless thread on distributed memory architecture supercomputers.(I refuse to say the words at this point.) Better luck later on I guess.
If you were indeed such a dominant alpha male, I would consider it unlikely that you would call yourself "Anonymous Coward". It is obvious to anyone reading this who is in a healthy relationship that you are loser. I could go on and on about this, but I choose to simply leave it at this. Maybe someday when you stop lying to yourself you'll be able to tell what a happy woman really wants from a man.
They already do this. Have a friend who got out of the military and went to work for a company in Germany, based on his skill level as a Unix Admin. It does happen, just probably not as often. There doesn't seem to be the "need" for it. I have to agree with an earlier poster though, we should be training our own people. If employers didn't cheese their way out of training people, I don't really believe we would have these "shortages".
I cannot figure out what I would do with one of these things. The only thing it seems like it would be of any use for, at least at the moment, is driving my browser over to some internet site coated in SPAM. No thanks, I'll just type the address in myself for now.
Windows could not survive in a "niche" market. Niche markets are required to provide things that the mainstream players cannot. Microsoft and their software define what the mainstream is. And who is going to write drivers for an OS that is just a niche? I think you know where that one is going... The eight hundred pound gorilla of the software world would have to go into a different business altogether if they found themselves no longer in a dominant position in the OS market. That is why they will do whatever they must to fight from losing marketshare.
Small appliances use DC. Solid state circuits use DC because it is cleaner power. However, you are unlikely to find anything that uses more than 200 watts of rms power to be using DC. Most large home appliances, such as dryers, toasters, space heaters, air conditioners, etc... That said, the main disadvantage of DC has always been the fact that it doesn't travel over large distances very efficiently and cannot overcome the internal resistance of copper cabling as well as AC, which can be stepped up to much higher voltage levels(and lower current levels, thus creating less resistance) which is why AC is a better alternative to DC for economic purposes. DC will always produce power more efficiently for a local system, as there is very little loss in a short loop. But for most of us who don't live within five minutes of the local power plant, we will probably be using AC for a long time.
I am assuming you haven't turned on any services yet then... It can consume up to about 150 MB of RAM if you turn on some services. And after it's been running for a while, it will more than likely be using around 180-190 MB of memory. That is with no apps running either! Give us hardware or give us Death! That should be MS's new slogan.
If anyone is looking for a really perplexing challenge, try to set up a really useful 2000 server for routing and remote access. I don't honestly think it could be any more of a nonsensical process. If you would like to use it for NAT, I hope you are prepared to rip every last hair out of your head. On the other hand, you could probably accomplish the same task with a floppy disk install of linux in about five minutes. My point? Just as you probably should use a crow bar instead of a big flat head screwdriver to pull boards from a floor, you should probably use the right tools for the job at hand. Basically, what MS has done with 2000 server routing and remote access is tried to make it simple enough that anyone could set it up... Yet they have tried to put so many features into a GUI that is just obscenely complex and proves to be an extreme task to make it work right. (My opinion) You should probably know what you are doing anyhow before you attempt to set up a router. Or at least be willing to learn. Windows 2000 server DNS is about the same, although I did actually manage to get that one working... Once again, a Unix DNS would have been simpler. This is my contribution to a comprehensive comparison...
Does anyone here remember the big deal the olympic committee made a while back over people using any type of domain name with the word olympic in it? I seem to think there is a contradiction in law here. They can enforce the laws surrounding olympic name useage but URLs can't be property? I just don't get it. If someone could explain this to me, please do.
That is part of the reason, but the main reason is because they had to maintain backwards compatibility with the large base of NT workstations and servers out there that do not understand the 2000 domain model.
I couldn't agree more. With my desktop machines I expect performance. But with a laptop, I have gotten used to the idea that my 266 PII is just as fast as my PIII 650 for most things. In fact, the PII 266 is built better! It just seems to reason to me that, aside from the heat of current laptops, there is no reason to complain about performance. The processor just doesn't seem to be their performance bottleneck, and laptop harddrives don't seem to be getting faster by the day... There are too many tough engineering decisions to be made with a laptop to be consumed constantly with performance. Give me better battery life. Battery life I can trust without checking my power meter every ten minutes to make sure I am not about to have to shut down everything I am working on. And of course the processor is only part of the power consumption equation. But I would much rather use a laptop with the backlight intensity turned up to its maximum output rather than set in the dark while working so that I may get a bit longer life out of the battery. I usually profess to people to get the most laptop they can afford, simply because there is little hope for upgrading a laptop later on. On the other hand, lately people have become so obsessed with "My laptop weighs.2 ounces less than your laptop." that the manufacturers are actually starting to make the cases out of shit plastic that is poorly constructed and pieced together. I used to love Dell's laptops. Their new laptops feel like garbage because of the workmanship that goes into making them lighter. I have seen enough laptops with broken hinges and displays about to fall completely off to know that being able to sustain a considerable drop is far more important than chopping a few ounces off of the overall weight. The point I am trying to make is simple. Why sacrifice quality for quantity? (more or less)
1) Battery life - quality
2) Weight - quantity
3) Processor speed - quantity
4) Overall system performance - quality
At least this is how I see it. And give me back the damn volume knob. It is ridiculous how all new laptops seem to adjust volume control through software. That pretty much sucks when the PC starts up and disturbs the atmosphere of the room with some annoying start up sound. Simple is better. Really.
Okay, starting with number one. Windows 2000 workstations can access samba file shares, even if they are in full native mode. In other words, windows 2000 workstations are still able to perform netbios over IP communications, even if they are completely active directory integrated, and rely on DNS dynamic update for Active Directory Authentication. As always though, if you want your win2k workstations to talk to a samba server on a different ethernet segment, (separated by a router) you are going to have to implement a WINS server.
Now for another part of the equation... To the best of my research into the topic, you will not be able to(as of yet) replace your active directory servers with Unix servers... Yet. Several things need to be in place for that to happen, one of which I am uncertain of, is dynamic update support for a Unix DNS machine. If Unix currently has such a beast, I'd be interested in knowing this.
If you simply want to be able to access samba shares, you are okay though. I'll post more later as time permits.
While I have been using SCSI for many years, I can assure you that it is far from a "nice standard". It is far more expensive to implement than a firewire solution would be. But this is not SCSI's real problem. SCSI tends not to be standard. Every so often new levels of performance are introduced to SCSI and every time they seem to come with a host of new connectors. As I said, I have been using SCSI for years and as it turns out, every time I have to use SCSI somewhere, I end up having to purchase new (and costly) cables to support the devices. ALWAYS have to buy new cables. And if you want the lay person to use SCSI, you can simply forget it. There is just way too much information about SCSI that needs to be absorbed before you can start using it. Most people aren't willing to take the time. Firewire really needs to succeed. I personally could do without all of the Ultra ATA crap on the market right now. And from what I've read about the USB 2.0 standard, I can do without that too. As far as USB being a standard, it is still too few and far between that you find people with USB peripherals to consider it a standard. Ever run into someone who misplaced their USB cable to their external ZIP drive? I'll bet you don't just happen to have one lying around that you could give to them. But you could probably scrounge up a parallel port cable if you had to... The point is simple, don't be the first to jump at the new stuff or you can expect to get burned. And as for the speed issues with USB 2.0, if that is what "the market wants"(the market defined by microsoft and intel marketing strategy) then that is what the market shall have. As is the case with SCSI, people who are out buying a new Compaq home computer are not taking the time to research relevant standards for their port configurations. But I suppose all of this is the reason technical folks don't get along with the bean counting folks.
I would have to agree with you on this one. I used to find interesting information in Slashdot news threads. Now I just come to Slashdot to find out what it is still happening in the world. There is a big difference between the two. I can get the news from a number of places. It is difficult to find a majority of people with something interesting to say on the internet. I guess a few bad apples spoils the bunch. But I'll stick around. I've just taken to setting my threshold a bit higher... I commend you for your efforts though.
Hitting a keystroke may be easier than writing the same letter with a pen, but I'll bet you wouldn't have missed that "g" in the word recognition with a pen. Yes, sometimes, when lost in thought, I have occasionally forgotten what letter I was meaning to write, possibly already thinking I wrote it. But this scenario is much more likely to occur when you are typing as you can quickly type right past the error and never look back at the mistake. If I want something quick, I'll type it. But for some reason, if I really want to write something creative, I will use a pen. It seems to bring out the creative thought process better for me than a keyboard. I think that is the true advantage of a pen over the keyboard.
Some of us don't do it for the money. We do it because we enjoy the job more than anything else we've ever done. I personally don't make that much money at it, but perhaps someday I will. Until that time, I'll just continue to do my job the best I can as I always have done. Agreed, I am not looking for a pat on the back. It would just be nice not to hear people saying that I don't deserve one. At least if noone says anything I can go home feeling like I earned my paycheck. But then again, what the heck, everyone else gets a day for doing their job (secretaries, bosses, etc...) so why not? Besides, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Slashdot who has ever heard of this holiday. I personally think someone made it up.
First of all, if you read the article, only one in 20,000 packets directed towards a target gets logged. This is hardly every packet. Second, and probably more importantly, the cost of this upgrade in equipment and deployment is immense and is certainly not imminent. It stands to reason that companies with a lot to lose from a drawn out DoS attack would seek to protect their investments by adopting a technology that protects themselves. This type of protection is necesary if the fear of this type of attack is ever to be alleviated though. Perhaps a better alternative to tracing all the way back to the source might be the end station notifying routers along the routes it knows that this attack is taking place, and the routers could simply refuse to forward the packets from this source for a specified period of time. Think of it as a sort of anti-DoS protection that secures anonymity. Once again, this would be very costly to implement and is going to find much resistance from anyone who just bought that shiny new Cisco router. Perhaps an IOS upgrade could be done to achieve this without requiring new routers...
Yes indeed, websites are always being redesigned and the ones that are not are unlikely to be doing any crazy dynamic html stuff anyhow. As an example, many people, myself included, do not often update their home pages. Then again, there is little more than standard html in those pages either. You make an outstanding point. I hope someone will moderate it up a bit...
Slashdot Mirror
This is useful knowledge. I'll have to take this info with me to show off at my next ebonics night class.
heheh, that's pretty funny.
I really haven't a clue about this NP and P stuff. Here I am thinking about transistors! Silicon, that's where it's at... Anyone know where I could find some GENERAL information on what this thread is about? I gather it is about equations or something of the like... I think this time it is just out of my league.
Journalism requires thought. Thought requires language to be decisive. Decisive language is much better to read than a Microsoft textbook. There is nothing wrong with using "big words". Fact: most peoples' vocabulary ceases to grow past age twenty-five. For those that refuse to use the "big words", I venture to say that growth ends somewhere around fifteen. your language will define your perspective on the world. Use it well and it will serve you well. Choose to use only fragments of your language and you will find yourself in a personal deficit for doing so. So please, feel free to flame me also.
I couldn't agree more. This really does seem to be the day of days for Slashdot stories that get "flamed" though. A story about flaming, right after that useless thread on distributed memory architecture supercomputers.(I refuse to say the words at this point.) Better luck later on I guess.
If you were indeed such a dominant alpha male, I would consider it unlikely that you would call yourself "Anonymous Coward". It is obvious to anyone reading this who is in a healthy relationship that you are loser. I could go on and on about this, but I choose to simply leave it at this. Maybe someday when you stop lying to yourself you'll be able to tell what a happy woman really wants from a man.
They already do this. Have a friend who got out of the military and went to work for a company in Germany, based on his skill level as a Unix Admin. It does happen, just probably not as often. There doesn't seem to be the "need" for it. I have to agree with an earlier poster though, we should be training our own people. If employers didn't cheese their way out of training people, I don't really believe we would have these "shortages".
I cannot figure out what I would do with one of these things. The only thing it seems like it would be of any use for, at least at the moment, is driving my browser over to some internet site coated in SPAM. No thanks, I'll just type the address in myself for now.
Windows could not survive in a "niche" market. Niche markets are required to provide things that the mainstream players cannot. Microsoft and their software define what the mainstream is. And who is going to write drivers for an OS that is just a niche? I think you know where that one is going... The eight hundred pound gorilla of the software world would have to go into a different business altogether if they found themselves no longer in a dominant position in the OS market. That is why they will do whatever they must to fight from losing marketshare.
Small appliances use DC. Solid state circuits use DC because it is cleaner power. However, you are unlikely to find anything that uses more than 200 watts of rms power to be using DC. Most large home appliances, such as dryers, toasters, space heaters, air conditioners, etc... That said, the main disadvantage of DC has always been the fact that it doesn't travel over large distances very efficiently and cannot overcome the internal resistance of copper cabling as well as AC, which can be stepped up to much higher voltage levels(and lower current levels, thus creating less resistance) which is why AC is a better alternative to DC for economic purposes. DC will always produce power more efficiently for a local system, as there is very little loss in a short loop. But for most of us who don't live within five minutes of the local power plant, we will probably be using AC for a long time.
I am assuming you haven't turned on any services yet then... It can consume up to about 150 MB of RAM if you turn on some services. And after it's been running for a while, it will more than likely be using around 180-190 MB of memory. That is with no apps running either! Give us hardware or give us Death! That should be MS's new slogan.
If anyone is looking for a really perplexing challenge, try to set up a really useful 2000 server for routing and remote access. I don't honestly think it could be any more of a nonsensical process. If you would like to use it for NAT, I hope you are prepared to rip every last hair out of your head. On the other hand, you could probably accomplish the same task with a floppy disk install of linux in about five minutes. My point? Just as you probably should use a crow bar instead of a big flat head screwdriver to pull boards from a floor, you should probably use the right tools for the job at hand. Basically, what MS has done with 2000 server routing and remote access is tried to make it simple enough that anyone could set it up... Yet they have tried to put so many features into a GUI that is just obscenely complex and proves to be an extreme task to make it work right. (My opinion) You should probably know what you are doing anyhow before you attempt to set up a router. Or at least be willing to learn. Windows 2000 server DNS is about the same, although I did actually manage to get that one working... Once again, a Unix DNS would have been simpler. This is my contribution to a comprehensive comparison...
Does anyone here remember the big deal the olympic committee made a while back over people using any type of domain name with the word olympic in it? I seem to think there is a contradiction in law here. They can enforce the laws surrounding olympic name useage but URLs can't be property? I just don't get it. If someone could explain this to me, please do.
It isn't about pride, it's about money.
That is part of the reason, but the main reason is because they had to maintain backwards compatibility with the large base of NT workstations and servers out there that do not understand the 2000 domain model.
I couldn't agree more. With my desktop machines I expect performance. But with a laptop, I have gotten used to the idea that my 266 PII is just as fast as my PIII 650 for most things. In fact, the PII 266 is built better! It just seems to reason to me that, aside from the heat of current laptops, there is no reason to complain about performance. The processor just doesn't seem to be their performance bottleneck, and laptop harddrives don't seem to be getting faster by the day... There are too many tough engineering decisions to be made with a laptop to be consumed constantly with performance. Give me better battery life. Battery life I can trust without checking my power meter every ten minutes to make sure I am not about to have to shut down everything I am working on. And of course the processor is only part of the power consumption equation. But I would much rather use a laptop with the backlight intensity turned up to its maximum output rather than set in the dark while working so that I may get a bit longer life out of the battery. I usually profess to people to get the most laptop they can afford, simply because there is little hope for upgrading a laptop later on. On the other hand, lately people have become so obsessed with "My laptop weighs .2 ounces less than your laptop." that the manufacturers are actually starting to make the cases out of shit plastic that is poorly constructed and pieced together. I used to love Dell's laptops. Their new laptops feel like garbage because of the workmanship that goes into making them lighter. I have seen enough laptops with broken hinges and displays about to fall completely off to know that being able to sustain a considerable drop is far more important than chopping a few ounces off of the overall weight. The point I am trying to make is simple. Why sacrifice quality for quantity? (more or less)
1) Battery life - quality
2) Weight - quantity
3) Processor speed - quantity
4) Overall system performance - quality
At least this is how I see it. And give me back the damn volume knob. It is ridiculous how all new laptops seem to adjust volume control through software. That pretty much sucks when the PC starts up and disturbs the atmosphere of the room with some annoying start up sound. Simple is better. Really.
Okay, starting with number one. Windows 2000 workstations can access samba file shares, even if they are in full native mode. In other words, windows 2000 workstations are still able to perform netbios over IP communications, even if they are completely active directory integrated, and rely on DNS dynamic update for Active Directory Authentication. As always though, if you want your win2k workstations to talk to a samba server on a different ethernet segment, (separated by a router) you are going to have to implement a WINS server. Now for another part of the equation... To the best of my research into the topic, you will not be able to(as of yet) replace your active directory servers with Unix servers... Yet. Several things need to be in place for that to happen, one of which I am uncertain of, is dynamic update support for a Unix DNS machine. If Unix currently has such a beast, I'd be interested in knowing this. If you simply want to be able to access samba shares, you are okay though. I'll post more later as time permits.
While I have been using SCSI for many years, I can assure you that it is far from a "nice standard". It is far more expensive to implement than a firewire solution would be. But this is not SCSI's real problem. SCSI tends not to be standard. Every so often new levels of performance are introduced to SCSI and every time they seem to come with a host of new connectors. As I said, I have been using SCSI for years and as it turns out, every time I have to use SCSI somewhere, I end up having to purchase new (and costly) cables to support the devices. ALWAYS have to buy new cables. And if you want the lay person to use SCSI, you can simply forget it. There is just way too much information about SCSI that needs to be absorbed before you can start using it. Most people aren't willing to take the time. Firewire really needs to succeed. I personally could do without all of the Ultra ATA crap on the market right now. And from what I've read about the USB 2.0 standard, I can do without that too. As far as USB being a standard, it is still too few and far between that you find people with USB peripherals to consider it a standard. Ever run into someone who misplaced their USB cable to their external ZIP drive? I'll bet you don't just happen to have one lying around that you could give to them. But you could probably scrounge up a parallel port cable if you had to... The point is simple, don't be the first to jump at the new stuff or you can expect to get burned. And as for the speed issues with USB 2.0, if that is what "the market wants"(the market defined by microsoft and intel marketing strategy) then that is what the market shall have. As is the case with SCSI, people who are out buying a new Compaq home computer are not taking the time to research relevant standards for their port configurations. But I suppose all of this is the reason technical folks don't get along with the bean counting folks.
Why do idiots have to post off-topic lameness?
I would have to agree with you on this one. I used to find interesting information in Slashdot news threads. Now I just come to Slashdot to find out what it is still happening in the world. There is a big difference between the two. I can get the news from a number of places. It is difficult to find a majority of people with something interesting to say on the internet. I guess a few bad apples spoils the bunch. But I'll stick around. I've just taken to setting my threshold a bit higher... I commend you for your efforts though.
This is all you need to know: CMJ
Hitting a keystroke may be easier than writing the same letter with a pen, but I'll bet you wouldn't have missed that "g" in the word recognition with a pen. Yes, sometimes, when lost in thought, I have occasionally forgotten what letter I was meaning to write, possibly already thinking I wrote it. But this scenario is much more likely to occur when you are typing as you can quickly type right past the error and never look back at the mistake. If I want something quick, I'll type it. But for some reason, if I really want to write something creative, I will use a pen. It seems to bring out the creative thought process better for me than a keyboard. I think that is the true advantage of a pen over the keyboard.
Some of us don't do it for the money. We do it because we enjoy the job more than anything else we've ever done. I personally don't make that much money at it, but perhaps someday I will. Until that time, I'll just continue to do my job the best I can as I always have done. Agreed, I am not looking for a pat on the back. It would just be nice not to hear people saying that I don't deserve one. At least if noone says anything I can go home feeling like I earned my paycheck. But then again, what the heck, everyone else gets a day for doing their job (secretaries, bosses, etc...) so why not? Besides, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Slashdot who has ever heard of this holiday. I personally think someone made it up.
First of all, if you read the article, only one in 20,000 packets directed towards a target gets logged. This is hardly every packet. Second, and probably more importantly, the cost of this upgrade in equipment and deployment is immense and is certainly not imminent. It stands to reason that companies with a lot to lose from a drawn out DoS attack would seek to protect their investments by adopting a technology that protects themselves. This type of protection is necesary if the fear of this type of attack is ever to be alleviated though. Perhaps a better alternative to tracing all the way back to the source might be the end station notifying routers along the routes it knows that this attack is taking place, and the routers could simply refuse to forward the packets from this source for a specified period of time. Think of it as a sort of anti-DoS protection that secures anonymity. Once again, this would be very costly to implement and is going to find much resistance from anyone who just bought that shiny new Cisco router. Perhaps an IOS upgrade could be done to achieve this without requiring new routers...
Yes indeed, websites are always being redesigned and the ones that are not are unlikely to be doing any crazy dynamic html stuff anyhow. As an example, many people, myself included, do not often update their home pages. Then again, there is little more than standard html in those pages either. You make an outstanding point. I hope someone will moderate it up a bit...