Yes, but Hitler did invade most of Europe. Sadam only invaded Kuweit, and that was *after* Kuweit started pumping huge quantities of oil from under both countries. The US helped the (rather undemocratic) rulers back into their seat and called it quits. Furthermore, Sadam was mostly interested in power and power alone. He did some atrocious things to make sure he was left in power, but I don't think he was separating out any group of people in particular unless they were fighting them. Yes, he was brutal, but nothing as much as the Nazi party in the later years.
But the biggest difference between WWII and Iraq is that WWII was about freeing Europe from a conqueror nobody wanted. That's why there were huge celebrations all throughout Europe when the German forces were overthrown. This is in stark contrast with the internal struggle in Irak. In Europe, the old powers came back into force after only a 4-6 year absence. In Iraq it has been trouble ever since.
I won't call Godwin on you, because both rulers were obviously atrocious dictators, but that's where the comparison ends.
Yeah, but I haven't had a lot of luck with their video drivers on Linux. Since 2K and XP will be out of support and Vista may be a bit much, I wonder if this will give VIA some more reason to open them up.
I mean, my latest upgrade to 7.10 broke my VIA (CL700) drivers for good. After that you start trying things (on the CLI!) and as a non-guru, you mess things up for good trying to get it to work. This would not have happened if the Ubuntu distribution would have OS drivers on EPIA. As it is now, it's for testing purposes only.
I was on the way to check Hardy Heron (8.04) on my VIA and decided to upgrade my Desktop first. The trouble is that the HH distribution is terribly weak for some reason. This might be the problem of the hard drive or the sound blaster audigy drivers or a PCI issue, but I'll be darned if I'm going to try and find that out.
All this from somebody who *desperately* wants to upgrade to Ubuntu and has loads of knowledge about computers, operating systems and software.
Except for the web-applications of course. My brother re-installed Windows XP today. Why? Internet Explorer was missing.dll's. Do you think he backed up his applications? Probably only his photo collection and some study and tax related documents. Maybe a few internet links. Mail etc. is kept on the ISP's server. He'll re-install Photoshop, run update and that's it. Do you still need a PC? Sure, but it might not be the PC you would expect.
I do hope that operating system and application programmers will be wise and start to program to cater for faster system drives and slower storage drives. It's a shame if a game uses a real fast drive just to load some levels. Safe the big number data on a "slow" moving drive and store the engine and some much used textures on the main drive.
256 GB SDD (or a spanking new 300 GB Velociraptor for that matter) can be lots of fun, but not if each and every game stores 40 GB of uncompressed game data on the drive. This could easily fit on a single layer, single sided BD disk, so this cannot be far off.
I don't know, but since the eee laptops don't feature bluetooth and/or mobile internet, I keep wondering what they want to do with those things. Since you need a mobile with the laptop anyway, bluetooth is a requirement for any miniature laptop I am going to buy. Also, I would need to have a better resolution to read eBooks.
It's a shame though, I can live with all the other features (or lack of them), certainly at that price point.
The trick with PGP is to send the public key using email (if possible, let multiple persons sign the key first). Then call the person that is to receive the key and tell him the key signature. He can check after importing if the key is indeed the right one. Or SMS it to his cell phone.
Even without these measures, what is the chance you get the wrong key just as your contact send his key to you? With the same from address? Quite negligible I guess. The PGP protocol is pretty secure, and I don't see too many attacks on 2048 bit DSA keys (the default) in the near future.
Another advantage: everyone can download GPG for free and you don't need to setup servers etc. for it to work. If you don't like the stuff in your mail client you could just encrypt/sign the attachments.
Two security hints though: mail headers (including the subject!) are not encrypted or signed and not every mail client can handle encrypted MIME messages.
"null pointers, however, don't seem to be anything Java or C# are really interested in getting rid of"
Oh really? See the Java JSR-308 and the work of Michael Ernst and his MIT collegues (e.g. @NotNull, @ReadOnly, @Interned and @Immutable annotations) for more info.
If the schema's would be a problem you could write your own deamon to update the customers (simplified) database. Although due to testing and timing issues and such, this might be infinitely more difficult than entering a standardized Oracle command.
But I'm wondering if people that use the database on regular basis wouldn't be able to guess the schema's no matter what. IMHO, most database schema's are pretty easy to guess looking at a screen with an interface to the DB. Then again, I'm not experienced in using very complicated databases.
Yeah, I think so too, I was just playing religious believer for a while to come up with the most likely answer they could dream up, and make fun of it.
No funny mod points, so I guess I've failed - at least someone fell for it:)
As long as you speak about the US, this comment is OK. But don't forget that the obsession about politicians sexual lives is not the same in each country.
I know we had some gay politicians in the Netherlands but I think I can remember only one. I believe our prime minister is married, but I doubt that more than 10% of the population would be able to name his wife.
Of course there is a sex scandal now and then. We've had a politician that went to a place where many illegal prostitutes operate (and caused serious problems). And some time ago some local politicians were caught having sex in the bicycle shed (which is, come to think of it, rather defining:)
But that's different than putting a magnifying glass over their personal lives. Of course it gets different if you are a very public proponent of e.g. monogamy and you practice unsafe sex with practically each and every person that you meet. Maybe that's also why it's such a big deal in the US.
Since God tries humans for their faith, many good people become ill, so they can prove they are straight Christans. Other people are punished because they are bad.
So although atheists just die from diseases, Christans die because god is either trying them to see if they are good, or they die because they have been bad.
That these percentages are about equal is necessary otherwise it would prove that god exists, and this would mean that people cannot be faith-tested anymore. That's the good people of course.
Yes, but who's reading the information? They could use it to blackmail the US if they found out that they performed an illegal attack. Or they could send real rockets in return. I think that real rockets hurt more than a botnet attack.
If you do, make sure to return the results to Tech ARP. Or post them in the forums of Guru3D, where the tuning app was made. Other people might be interested, and they did some hard work to create the applications.
Of course, if you look in the Guru3D forums, the hack isn't new, and I don't know what Tech ARP really did other than write a tiny article around it. Bring it in the spotlight I suppose.
The primary DNS server of my ISP (XS4ALL) has always been 194.109.6.66, but it seems that it now reverse-dnses to resolver.xs4all.nl (they want people to use the cached servers I suppose, they're getting a bit big). I always thought is was pretty funny to have everyone type in that number, although not many people will have to do that nowadays (PPP is pretty good at supplying the IP adresses for DNS).
Hehehe.. I wish zero wasn't standard for 'no errors' now... d'oh! Unless you are using an older language without exceptions, zero should NEVER EVER mean 'no errors', especially not when returning a float.
You should either use exceptions or maybe a special return value indicating if the function returned without any error.
That or you are a manager that got triggered by the previous jokes. In that case: carry on!
Except if you never heard about a company that sells dumb terminals for a PC including virtualization software. Google for Ncomputing in that case. It's not a laptop.
Yeah, even better, use complete different VM's. Of course, if you want any communication between those you need to use sockets or files, including authentication etc.
With different processes you have the same problem as between two different VM's, although you may make use of non-networked resources such as pipes and local files.
The big advantage of threads is that they run in the same memory space. If you use managed code within the threads, this means that the threads cannot access the other thread's memory unless you allow them to do so.
One of the best known applications on Linux is of course Apache. Guess which way they went? Yeah.
Exactly. We need better a bigger focus on multi-threading within the current languages, if still possible.
I've just seen a very nice presentation on how null pointer exceptions can be avoided using annotations in the Java language. The same presentation also showed how to annotate variables to be immutable: changes to the variable would be picked up by the compiler.
That said, with the possible exception of Java arrays, it's pretty easy to make variables immutable (basic types are referenced by value, collections can easily be made immutable as well). Add to that the many threading classes and the synchronized method and you've got a very nice language to handle parallelism, even though it doesn't do multi-threading automatically. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if that would be added to the JVM in some long distance future.
Problem with Java is the way that Beans have become so important, at least in the EE framework. These are the devil if you are a proponent of immutability and should be handled very carefully.
Anyway: link to the presentation on @NonNull and @Immutable:
Don't microcontrollers already integrate non-volatile memory? Whether it's FLASH or MRAM, that doesn't seem to be a problem. Yes, they do, but not in the control logic.
The interesting thing here is that they've made something that until now has only been theoretical. True enough, but as you mentioned, it just functions as static memory. The inclusion in control logic and the speed would (seem to) be the main reasons for practical implementations.
Well, I don't see any reasons why it would not be as fast as SRAM or why it wouldn't be possible to integrate it directly within the CPU. We have chips that contain flash alright, but not right within the core of the CPU. Think registers that are ready for use even after being powered down. This also makes it possible to create cells that retain their information locally even when not operating. At least, that is my interpretation of what they are saying here.
What I don't understand is the reason why it could not be integrated into CPU design almost directly. Circuit design may be expensive, but if this kind of technology can be created in a standard fab, I wonder how long it will take until we see this in actual products.
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Yes, but Hitler did invade most of Europe. Sadam only invaded Kuweit, and that was *after* Kuweit started pumping huge quantities of oil from under both countries. The US helped the (rather undemocratic) rulers back into their seat and called it quits. Furthermore, Sadam was mostly interested in power and power alone. He did some atrocious things to make sure he was left in power, but I don't think he was separating out any group of people in particular unless they were fighting them. Yes, he was brutal, but nothing as much as the Nazi party in the later years.
But the biggest difference between WWII and Iraq is that WWII was about freeing Europe from a conqueror nobody wanted. That's why there were huge celebrations all throughout Europe when the German forces were overthrown. This is in stark contrast with the internal struggle in Irak. In Europe, the old powers came back into force after only a 4-6 year absence. In Iraq it has been trouble ever since.
I won't call Godwin on you, because both rulers were obviously atrocious dictators, but that's where the comparison ends.
Yeah, but I haven't had a lot of luck with their video drivers on Linux. Since 2K and XP will be out of support and Vista may be a bit much, I wonder if this will give VIA some more reason to open them up.
I mean, my latest upgrade to 7.10 broke my VIA (CL700) drivers for good. After that you start trying things (on the CLI!) and as a non-guru, you mess things up for good trying to get it to work. This would not have happened if the Ubuntu distribution would have OS drivers on EPIA. As it is now, it's for testing purposes only.
I was on the way to check Hardy Heron (8.04) on my VIA and decided to upgrade my Desktop first. The trouble is that the HH distribution is terribly weak for some reason. This might be the problem of the hard drive or the sound blaster audigy drivers or a PCI issue, but I'll be darned if I'm going to try and find that out.
All this from somebody who *desperately* wants to upgrade to Ubuntu and has loads of knowledge about computers, operating systems and software.
Except for the web-applications of course. My brother re-installed Windows XP today. Why? Internet Explorer was missing .dll's. Do you think he backed up his applications? Probably only his photo collection and some study and tax related documents. Maybe a few internet links. Mail etc. is kept on the ISP's server. He'll re-install Photoshop, run update and that's it. Do you still need a PC? Sure, but it might not be the PC you would expect.
I do hope that operating system and application programmers will be wise and start to program to cater for faster system drives and slower storage drives. It's a shame if a game uses a real fast drive just to load some levels. Safe the big number data on a "slow" moving drive and store the engine and some much used textures on the main drive.
256 GB SDD (or a spanking new 300 GB Velociraptor for that matter) can be lots of fun, but not if each and every game stores 40 GB of uncompressed game data on the drive. This could easily fit on a single layer, single sided BD disk, so this cannot be far off.
I don't know, but since the eee laptops don't feature bluetooth and/or mobile internet, I keep wondering what they want to do with those things. Since you need a mobile with the laptop anyway, bluetooth is a requirement for any miniature laptop I am going to buy. Also, I would need to have a better resolution to read eBooks.
It's a shame though, I can live with all the other features (or lack of them), certainly at that price point.
The trick with PGP is to send the public key using email (if possible, let multiple persons sign the key first). Then call the person that is to receive the key and tell him the key signature. He can check after importing if the key is indeed the right one. Or SMS it to his cell phone.
Even without these measures, what is the chance you get the wrong key just as your contact send his key to you? With the same from address? Quite negligible I guess. The PGP protocol is pretty secure, and I don't see too many attacks on 2048 bit DSA keys (the default) in the near future.
Another advantage: everyone can download GPG for free and you don't need to setup servers etc. for it to work. If you don't like the stuff in your mail client you could just encrypt/sign the attachments.
Two security hints though: mail headers (including the subject!) are not encrypted or signed and not every mail client can handle encrypted MIME messages.
"null pointers, however, don't seem to be anything Java or C# are really interested in getting rid of"
Oh really? See the Java JSR-308 and the work of Michael Ernst and his MIT collegues (e.g. @NotNull, @ReadOnly, @Interned and @Immutable annotations) for more info.
If the schema's would be a problem you could write your own deamon to update the customers (simplified) database. Although due to testing and timing issues and such, this might be infinitely more difficult than entering a standardized Oracle command.
But I'm wondering if people that use the database on regular basis wouldn't be able to guess the schema's no matter what. IMHO, most database schema's are pretty easy to guess looking at a screen with an interface to the DB. Then again, I'm not experienced in using very complicated databases.
Yeah, I think so too, I was just playing religious believer for a while to come up with the most likely answer they could dream up, and make fun of it.
:)
No funny mod points, so I guess I've failed - at least someone fell for it
YES! Faster actually :) Remember, this is the time of ICT.
As long as you speak about the US, this comment is OK. But don't forget that the obsession about politicians sexual lives is not the same in each country.
:)
I know we had some gay politicians in the Netherlands but I think I can remember only one. I believe our prime minister is married, but I doubt that more than 10% of the population would be able to name his wife.
Of course there is a sex scandal now and then. We've had a politician that went to a place where many illegal prostitutes operate (and caused serious problems). And some time ago some local politicians were caught having sex in the bicycle shed (which is, come to think of it, rather defining
But that's different than putting a magnifying glass over their personal lives. Of course it gets different if you are a very public proponent of e.g. monogamy and you practice unsafe sex with practically each and every person that you meet. Maybe that's also why it's such a big deal in the US.
Since God tries humans for their faith, many good people become ill, so they can prove they are straight Christans. Other people are punished because they are bad.
So although atheists just die from diseases, Christans die because god is either trying them to see if they are good, or they die because they have been bad.
That these percentages are about equal is necessary otherwise it would prove that god exists, and this would mean that people cannot be faith-tested anymore. That's the good people of course.
Get it?
Yes, but who's reading the information? They could use it to blackmail the US if they found out that they performed an illegal attack. Or they could send real rockets in return. I think that real rockets hurt more than a botnet attack.
"But it is certainly possible to create an uncompromiseable botnet."
True enough, but it would not work if the bots themselves are running on uncontrolled PC's. You could then at least parse all the control information.
Then again, if they only would run on DoD computers, they would be relatively easy to block.
If you do, make sure to return the results to Tech ARP. Or post them in the forums of Guru3D, where the tuning app was made. Other people might be interested, and they did some hard work to create the applications.
Of course, if you look in the Guru3D forums, the hack isn't new, and I don't know what Tech ARP really did other than write a tiny article around it. Bring it in the spotlight I suppose.
http://www.guru3d.com/category/rivatunerfaq/
Yeah, sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, she never returned my calls.
The primary DNS server of my ISP (XS4ALL) has always been 194.109.6.66, but it seems that it now reverse-dnses to resolver.xs4all.nl (they want people to use the cached servers I suppose, they're getting a bit big). I always thought is was pretty funny to have everyone type in that number, although not many people will have to do that nowadays (PPP is pretty good at supplying the IP adresses for DNS).
You should either use exceptions or maybe a special return value indicating if the function returned without any error.
That or you are a manager that got triggered by the previous jokes. In that case: carry on!
Except if you never heard about a company that sells dumb terminals for a PC including virtualization software. Google for Ncomputing in that case. It's not a laptop.
Web 2.0, web 2.0, web 2.0 (sorry, I'm in a mean mood lately).
That's specieism. They should be made not to wear their honorary axes though.
Yeah, even better, use complete different VM's. Of course, if you want any communication between those you need to use sockets or files, including authentication etc.
With different processes you have the same problem as between two different VM's, although you may make use of non-networked resources such as pipes and local files.
The big advantage of threads is that they run in the same memory space. If you use managed code within the threads, this means that the threads cannot access the other thread's memory unless you allow them to do so.
One of the best known applications on Linux is of course Apache. Guess which way they went? Yeah.
Exactly. We need better a bigger focus on multi-threading within the current languages, if still possible.
I've just seen a very nice presentation on how null pointer exceptions can be avoided using annotations in the Java language. The same presentation also showed how to annotate variables to be immutable: changes to the variable would be picked up by the compiler.
That said, with the possible exception of Java arrays, it's pretty easy to make variables immutable (basic types are referenced by value, collections can easily be made immutable as well). Add to that the many threading classes and the synchronized method and you've got a very nice language to handle parallelism, even though it doesn't do multi-threading automatically. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if that would be added to the JVM in some long distance future.
Problem with Java is the way that Beans have become so important, at least in the EE framework. These are the devil if you are a proponent of immutability and should be handled very carefully.
Anyway: link to the presentation on @NonNull and @Immutable:
http://www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jspring_2008/sessions/00042/
Well, I don't see any reasons why it would not be as fast as SRAM or why it wouldn't be possible to integrate it directly within the CPU. We have chips that contain flash alright, but not right within the core of the CPU. Think registers that are ready for use even after being powered down. This also makes it possible to create cells that retain their information locally even when not operating. At least, that is my interpretation of what they are saying here.
What I don't understand is the reason why it could not be integrated into CPU design almost directly. Circuit design may be expensive, but if this kind of technology can be created in a standard fab, I wonder how long it will take until we see this in actual products.