I worked freelance for four years before returning to academia (and still freelancing occasionally). You don't have bosses, you have customers. And, if you're living somewhere with a low cost of living (as I was) then you can easily afford to refuse to do business with ones that you don't get on well with. I worked for a variety of companies, and I occasionally decided that some customers were not worth the effort. It also helps to have deadlines that have a reasonable amount of slack in them, so you can decide you can't be bothered to work and go to the beach if you feel like it.
You can make RAM even faster - returning the result in a single cycle every time - if you don't care whether the result it returns is the correct one...
Because, during prohibition, bootleg beer had no quality controls and usually had a very strong (and unpleasant) yeasty taste. If you chill a drink, it deadens your taste buds, and so it doesn't taste as bad. The amusing thing is that Americans mock other countries for producing beer that you can drink in a way that doesn't take the taste away...
who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance,
Spoken like someone who has never studied history. Detailed accounts of average people (or average members of a demographic) are immensely valuable in attempting to reconstruct an accurate picture of a particular time in the past. If anything, uninteresting people are more valuable: they provide a representative snapshot that can be used to extrapolate others. If you have a few hundred of them, you can do very detailed comparisons and discover the common details. The historian in me cringes whenever I see someone delete an email.
Running an XMPP server doesn't take much effort. I've been running an eJabberd server for about 6 years and was running jabberd 1 before then. The original jabberd took a reasonable amount of configuration effort, but ejabberd (especially if you use mnesia) requires almost none: just install it, tell it your domain, and either enable in-band registration or manually add users. That's basically it. Pull in any security updates as they appear (your operating system's package manager should handle this) and you're good. It's no harder than running a mail server.
I never understood this holiday. It was intended as some sort of reaction to valentine's day, but it makes me think that the people who came up with it are somehow doing valentine's day all wrong if this needs to be a separate holiday...
It was a slightly contrived test, but it demonstrated a real difference. At the time, CPUs were expensive but most OEMs used the cheapest possible cooling system. The Athlon on my desk at work got through 4 CPUs because the lowest-bidder cooling fan kept getting blocked up with dust and baking the chip (it got through 3 motherboards because the chipset fan did the same thing). In contrast, if you did the same thing to a P4, it just ran really slowly. We actually had some problems with this, because we had a cluster of P4 machines. The cooling in the nodes would periodically fail but they'd keep going, just really slowly. It's a lot easier to identify a failed cluster node than the one that's running at a tenth normal speed and slowing the entire job down...
Not just the radio. An older Nokia phone will easily last 2 weeks in standby mode too. It's the large, backlit, colour screen and the CPU / GPU that drain the battery life in a modern phone far faster than pinging a network tower periodically to let it know you're still active.
I first heard that in the '80s, but the quote then was '64KB ought to be enough for anyone' and was a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) comment by Gates about one of the hard limitations in Microsoft BASIC. So, I'm quite prepared to believe that he is entirely sincere when he claims not to have said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone'.
There is a great Slashdot post from one of the developers of Quartz around 2001 about why they chose to reinvent the wheel instead of using X11. The problem is, none of his criticisms applies to X.org circa 2006 or later. It was shown, by counterexample, that it was possible to add all of the missing features that Apple wanted to X11, without breaking backwards compatibility. And, as part of their rewrite, they lost some separation of concerns and they lost compatibility with X11 applications except via an ugly (visually) compatibility layer. The latter wasn't a problem for Apple, because they didn't want to be running X11 apps, they wanted people to write new Cocoa apps. It is a problem for a system attempting to take advantage of the large corpus of existing X11 apps.
Maybe they use the same recommendation algorithm as Amazon, which specialises in telling me I want to buy things in the same category as something I've just bought?
I'm not okay with DRM, but I do use a Netflix competitor for DVD rentals and I'd like a streaming service. I fail to understand why the same company will send me DVDs, which are trivial for someone to rip and post online, but insists on trying to lock down their lower quality online streams. DRM does nothing to protect against unauthorised copying, because everything in their catalogue is already available for illicit downloads in a variety of places, but does mean that I can't use their service on my tablet or on the computer connected to my projector.
It's odd that Google invests so much money and effort in trying to create a profile of me to target ads at, when their older model of targeting them at the page content worked so much better. The fact that I may be in the market for some category of product at approximately this time is far less relevant than the fact that I am interested in a specific topic right now.
It's far from trivial. JavaScript code running animations in a canvas tag runs in the same context as all of the other JavaScript on a page. ActionScript controlling a Flash animation runs in a separate context. You can stop the entire Flash movie without any side effects on the rest of the page. Stopping an HTML5 canvas element may interfere with other JavaScript on the page, and will consume CPU (and battery) if you leave it active but simply not drawn.
For those unsure whether the above post is sarcasm and too lazy to read the linked article, the dot in the amounts is a thousands separator and not, as is conventional in English, a decimal point.
Even if they aren't showing ads, they're still harvesting information to build a profile of the students. How valuable is it to Google that by the time someone becomes old enough to have a job and start earning, they already have 10+ years of profiling data to know exactly what to market to them?
The point is that, because everything of value is in the web server, on such a machine there is no need for a full client compromise. On my laptop, a web site needs an arbitrary code execution vulnerability and possibly a privilege escalation vulnerability to be able to compromise most of my data. On ChromeOS, it just needs a cross-site scripting vulnerability.
It's a very volatile market that has no regulation. Or, to put it another way, it's a completely unregulated online casino. If you can't see the market for this, you haven't been paying attention for the last few years...
Anyway, the important point is they they are entirely arbitrary and made-up.
No, the important point is that they matter to some people. Most groups of people have some irrational rules that matter to them. If you break these rules, you insult members of this group. You are completely free to decide that you actively wish to insult members of that group, but doing so out of ignorance puts you at a disadvantage.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked freelance for four years before returning to academia (and still freelancing occasionally). You don't have bosses, you have customers. And, if you're living somewhere with a low cost of living (as I was) then you can easily afford to refuse to do business with ones that you don't get on well with. I worked for a variety of companies, and I occasionally decided that some customers were not worth the effort. It also helps to have deadlines that have a reasonable amount of slack in them, so you can decide you can't be bothered to work and go to the beach if you feel like it.
You can make RAM even faster - returning the result in a single cycle every time - if you don't care whether the result it returns is the correct one...
Why is American beer served chilled?
Because, during prohibition, bootleg beer had no quality controls and usually had a very strong (and unpleasant) yeasty taste. If you chill a drink, it deadens your taste buds, and so it doesn't taste as bad. The amusing thing is that Americans mock other countries for producing beer that you can drink in a way that doesn't take the taste away...
Where is alcohol being banned (as opposed to excess consumption discouraged), outside of Sharia states?
who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance,
Spoken like someone who has never studied history. Detailed accounts of average people (or average members of a demographic) are immensely valuable in attempting to reconstruct an accurate picture of a particular time in the past. If anything, uninteresting people are more valuable: they provide a representative snapshot that can be used to extrapolate others. If you have a few hundred of them, you can do very detailed comparisons and discover the common details. The historian in me cringes whenever I see someone delete an email.
Running an XMPP server doesn't take much effort. I've been running an eJabberd server for about 6 years and was running jabberd 1 before then. The original jabberd took a reasonable amount of configuration effort, but ejabberd (especially if you use mnesia) requires almost none: just install it, tell it your domain, and either enable in-band registration or manually add users. That's basically it. Pull in any security updates as they appear (your operating system's package manager should handle this) and you're good. It's no harder than running a mail server.
Google stock is down 7.24 on yesterday and down 24.3 since two weeks ago, so how's that working out for you?
Carrier pigeons.
I never understood this holiday. It was intended as some sort of reaction to valentine's day, but it makes me think that the people who came up with it are somehow doing valentine's day all wrong if this needs to be a separate holiday...
It was a slightly contrived test, but it demonstrated a real difference. At the time, CPUs were expensive but most OEMs used the cheapest possible cooling system. The Athlon on my desk at work got through 4 CPUs because the lowest-bidder cooling fan kept getting blocked up with dust and baking the chip (it got through 3 motherboards because the chipset fan did the same thing). In contrast, if you did the same thing to a P4, it just ran really slowly. We actually had some problems with this, because we had a cluster of P4 machines. The cooling in the nodes would periodically fail but they'd keep going, just really slowly. It's a lot easier to identify a failed cluster node than the one that's running at a tenth normal speed and slowing the entire job down...
Not just the radio. An older Nokia phone will easily last 2 weeks in standby mode too. It's the large, backlit, colour screen and the CPU / GPU that drain the battery life in a modern phone far faster than pinging a network tower periodically to let it know you're still active.
If you'd like to live in a ditch and swap dead squirrels with other people, you're free to do so.
If you do so in the USA, then the US government will still require that taxes be paid in US dollars on the transactions.
I first heard that in the '80s, but the quote then was '64KB ought to be enough for anyone' and was a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) comment by Gates about one of the hard limitations in Microsoft BASIC. So, I'm quite prepared to believe that he is entirely sincere when he claims not to have said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone'.
There is a great Slashdot post from one of the developers of Quartz around 2001 about why they chose to reinvent the wheel instead of using X11. The problem is, none of his criticisms applies to X.org circa 2006 or later. It was shown, by counterexample, that it was possible to add all of the missing features that Apple wanted to X11, without breaking backwards compatibility. And, as part of their rewrite, they lost some separation of concerns and they lost compatibility with X11 applications except via an ugly (visually) compatibility layer. The latter wasn't a problem for Apple, because they didn't want to be running X11 apps, they wanted people to write new Cocoa apps. It is a problem for a system attempting to take advantage of the large corpus of existing X11 apps.
Maybe they use the same recommendation algorithm as Amazon, which specialises in telling me I want to buy things in the same category as something I've just bought?
I'm not okay with DRM, but I do use a Netflix competitor for DVD rentals and I'd like a streaming service. I fail to understand why the same company will send me DVDs, which are trivial for someone to rip and post online, but insists on trying to lock down their lower quality online streams. DRM does nothing to protect against unauthorised copying, because everything in their catalogue is already available for illicit downloads in a variety of places, but does mean that I can't use their service on my tablet or on the computer connected to my projector.
It's odd that Google invests so much money and effort in trying to create a profile of me to target ads at, when their older model of targeting them at the page content worked so much better. The fact that I may be in the market for some category of product at approximately this time is far less relevant than the fact that I am interested in a specific topic right now.
It's far from trivial. JavaScript code running animations in a canvas tag runs in the same context as all of the other JavaScript on a page. ActionScript controlling a Flash animation runs in a separate context. You can stop the entire Flash movie without any side effects on the rest of the page. Stopping an HTML5 canvas element may interfere with other JavaScript on the page, and will consume CPU (and battery) if you leave it active but simply not drawn.
For those unsure whether the above post is sarcasm and too lazy to read the linked article, the dot in the amounts is a thousands separator and not, as is conventional in English, a decimal point.
Even if they aren't showing ads, they're still harvesting information to build a profile of the students. How valuable is it to Google that by the time someone becomes old enough to have a job and start earning, they already have 10+ years of profiling data to know exactly what to market to them?
The point is that, because everything of value is in the web server, on such a machine there is no need for a full client compromise. On my laptop, a web site needs an arbitrary code execution vulnerability and possibly a privilege escalation vulnerability to be able to compromise most of my data. On ChromeOS, it just needs a cross-site scripting vulnerability.
Personally I don't see the point of bitcoins
It's a very volatile market that has no regulation. Or, to put it another way, it's a completely unregulated online casino. If you can't see the market for this, you haven't been paying attention for the last few years...
Anyway, the important point is they they are entirely arbitrary and made-up.
No, the important point is that they matter to some people. Most groups of people have some irrational rules that matter to them. If you break these rules, you insult members of this group. You are completely free to decide that you actively wish to insult members of that group, but doing so out of ignorance puts you at a disadvantage.
Your comment would carry more weight if it didn't say right there in the headline that they were trying to build a steam-powered spaceport...
A policy as you outline would be illegal in all of the EU, so I guess the moral is to buy from amazon.co.uk, not amazon.com...