It looks to me that the letter simply confirms that there was an artist who lived at the right time, and there may be an old painting painted at the right time and possibly by that same artist -- BUT not that it's a painting of Ada Byron...
It seems to me that essentially Microsoft is trying to buy their way out of what is a fundamental problem with their corporate culture. The *reason* their products are crap is they don't understand how to inspire their troops to excellence and resort to browbeating them instead. Buying out Yahoo isn't going to fix that, it'll just drag Yahoo down to their level.
FTP isn't going to go away until the readily available secure alternatives perform as well. Especially since data moving operations have been increasing their "need for speed" along with the amounts of data involved.
I've been involved with performance testing on a data warehouse product that must transfer umpteen-GB nightly, where we've found that FTP transfers typically perform at least 30x faster than then next fastest alternative-- scp, sftp, etc. On a 1000MB link between two computers sitting next to each other we're seeing a 20 minute FTP turn into like 3.5 hours when we switch to sftp. We've resorted to parallel connections as a work around which helps, but it's still dog-slow compared to FTP.
There's a patch
to OpenSSH that helps, but FTP is still notably faster, and almost no OpenSSH program binary distributions contain the patch, so you have to have a development system and know how to use it to even try it (and on Windows, that also usually means $$$).
I agree there is a real need for a secure replacement for FTP, but have yet to seen any contenders that I can take seriously.
No, that isn't anyone's main flaw. But it should be mandatory that these lawmakers should have at least enough of a clue to determine if what they are proposing is even possible before they start drafting legislation.
This makes as much sense as drafting a law making it illegal for it to rain on Thursdays. The frightening part is that the bozo drafting the law doesn't see why it's a problem.
You should be glad the guy doesn't understand technology enough to draft a law that would actually have some effect-- as once these bozos do finally "get it" they're actually liable to do some real damage to our rights...
It would not be the first time that a government has gone to great length to convince others that the stolen data they have is real, when really it is not, rather it is carefully crafted misinformation designed to fubar any project or plans it is used in.
Yeah, and it would not be the first time that a government has gone to great length to convince others that they are completely incompetent.
When I first started programming, all they asked you at a job is if you ever programmed *something*, they didn't care what. Of course, for the most part what they wanted was someone to do some programming in their proprietary language, most of which have all died out now. But they knew that if you could program in Fortran or whatever, you could learn to code in whatever obscure language they needed, and they weren't going to find someone with specific experience in their own proprietary language anyway.
Now things are different-- job listings claim to be looking for someone with 10 years experience in a technology that is only 5 years old, and consequently there's no reason to do anything but ignore the listed requirements on a job posting, providing you can get your way past HR.
But what you really want when looking for someone to take over a job in a language that is no longer "popular," is to find an old-timer. What you want is someone who is *willing* to do the work, and capable of handling the bad decisions the previous guy made, you don't need someone whose been working for the last 10 years coding web apps in COBOL just because that's what the previous guy had been doing, but you also don't want a young punk whose going to get too soon bored doing that even if he had the skillz. It's true, the old-timer will probably be more expensive-- but the good ones will be likely to care naught about what tools are being used and what things are written in, and be able to pick whatever it is up without complaint and get the job done.
The ISPs better stop wasting their time with plans for throttling and metering, as the successful ISPs are going to be the ones that see that bandwidth needs are only going to increase, and pressure will soon be put on them not just from the content consumers, but the content providers as well who have a lot more clout-- legal, political and financial. It's quite possible that in time most people will watch their nightly TV programs via internet stream rather than cable channel (which itself has need for increased bandwidth for HD signals). YouTube could go HD, and of course we all can't wait for higher quality ads all over web pages. Advertisers will NOT be happy if the cost of the pipe goes up, and "tiered" services just won't cut it-- you can't have people choosing NOT to watch the latest DRM protected HD internet content because the requisite bandwidth requires the next tier and consequently a lot of extra $$$. The content providers want to make it as easy as possible for you to see their adverts, and tiering them out of peoples price range isn't any way to do that.
No, successful cable companies will probably need to look for new modem technologies that can multiplex the network traffic over multiple cable channels and better utilize the wire for network delivery, rather than trying to squeeze a penny out here and there by dumbing down the services with artificial delays. That, and more fiber. The ones that do that will succeed, while the others will get squeezed out by alternatives that will become available-- better WiFi coverage or a new Googlified 700MHZ technology perhaps.
And, since several cable companies are being grabbed up by media companies (Time Warner comes to mind), many ISPs themselves are going to see the bandwidth need firsthand. It is the wave of the future, and the sooner an ISP stops whining about it and starts upgrading their gear in anticipation, the more likely they'll be around in 10 years...
I wrote the bit below which I'll keep because it might be interesting to someone, but dm(Hannu) already mentioned the claw flaw in the logic behind the PP and article summary: if the CPU is the bottleneck, how could adding more threads possibly help?
It doesn't unless you have multiple cores-- in which case adding more threads is specifically throwing more CPUs at the problem, at least with an OS like Windows which won't automatically distribute a single process across multiple CPUs...
Not only that, hotmail's spam filter is a complete joke. I'll repeatedly get junk from the same address and mark it as junk and the spam filter just never learns to recognize it. Any spam filter I've ever seen works way better than hotmail's.
But I too use Firefox 2.0 and while hotmail works kinda quirky under it, it works well enough for my purposes. Though I run everything through noscript and a proxy filter so any site that tries to do much of anything beyond basic html with some minor javascripting gets horribly crippled-- which is exactly the way I like things...
Capitalism 101-- you need to know how markets work. People buy things based on perception and hope, not on facts and reality. Products don't have to work, they just have to sell. If people want something that does not and cannot exist, those facts do not matter-- it remains there is a waiting market for that impossible thing, and enterprises can still thrive producing products that appeal to such a market.
No, though I visited there once. I was in a field office in southern ca. Hadn't heard the story about nuclear power, but the Beaverton plant was pretty impressive. They had some bleedin' geniuses in analog engineering. The 7000 series oscope readout wasn't digital, but analog-- a triangular pulse was fed into an IC that had a lot of multi-emitter transistors, configured so that the output would trace the x & y waveforms that would draw the characters on the display-- no dot matrix or 7-segment for those guys-- it was weirdly analog. They did their own ICs and most of their CRTS, including the storage CRTs (which IIRC, were invented at Tek)...
I know what you are saying, about minerals, bit I don't think they did much if anything at all to treat the water they used in the wash rack at Tek. I don't think even a water softener. Now that I think about it, we did use compressed air to blow it off after washing, likely it simply didn't leave enough residue to be a problem. I suppose multi-gigahertz modern gear might be more sensitive, but we never had any problems from it in the years I worked there (about '72-'76)-- washing the gear was a daily procedure...
paper caps are soaked in wax, so that's not an issue-- and you'll only find them in really old gear anymore where you likely will need to replace them anyway, as the old paper caps don't do very well with age, much less water...
Actually, water isn't all that harmful to electronics (at least, when powered off) if a little care is taken.
Eons ago I was a repair tech fixing oscilloscopes for Tektronix. Standard procedure for ANY piece of gear coming in the office was it went into the "wash rack." We took off all the side panels, hosed it down using essentially the same equipment you use in a self-serv car wash (w/soap & water), rinsed it, then it went into the dryers (I forget the exact temp, but as I recall it was relatively low, less than 150F I think). The only important thing we needed to remember is to put it in the dryers such that certain power transformer cans had their opening facing down (otherwise they could fill with water and three days then wasn't enough to dry it out). After that, we plugged it in and fired it up. This included both the ancient vacuum tube equipment and modern IC circuit-board equipment, including CRTs and the like. I suppose current gear with LCDs may get waterspots on the panels, and certain components might be uniquely sensitive. Mechanical devices such as VCRs might have grease on some moving parts that could be an issue but nothing Tek made at the time had that problem, and if they did the solution would likely be to re-lube the device.
The important thing if you drop your ipod or whatever into the toilet, is to take out the batteries as soon as possible and open it up to the extent possible and leave it out to dry for a week or so. Movies & television shows that show dropping something electrical into water causing lots of sparks is mostly special-effect pyrotechnics and not reality. If it's plugged into AC though, unplug it from the wall first before you reach into the water, or you may get zapped...
Tap water does conduct electricity so if it gets wet when it's powered on it could cause shorts that may damage things, but probably only with sensitive circuitry, as water looks like a resistor not a dead short so many circuits could survive it without damage. Battery powered units should be powered off ASAP though, as it could cause things to heat up. Yank out the batteries completely right away as well to minimize such adverse effects...
I'd be curious to know what Mr. Paul thinks is needed to be done in healthcare-- with the industry now primarily in the control of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, causing the costs to skyrocket-- just what exactly is the libertarian "free market" solution? Seems to me the "free market" solution is currently in operation there, and is spiralling out of control. The only way you can "open up competition" in healthcare is to remove patent protection on prescription drugs, and that may have the side effect of reducing incentives on drug development. This may be a very hard question, and I think a candidates answer to it would be crucial to their thinking processes (or lack thereof). However, I don't see many people even asking it...
he's right... but the thing is, the Federal Government isn't doing this to provide us with more security, they're doing it to provide themselves with more power, power over us. Consequently, they don't much care about our privacy, and there's no reasoning with them on that score.
You're right about that-- but they also don't much care about our security, for the same reasons. As long as some "bread and circuses" rewards them political brownie points, they can pass legislation "designed to increase security" that actually decreases it, and they can still come out ahead while the rest of us lose...
If you want either security or privacy, the absolute last place to look for it is the Federal Government-- they're much of the problem, not the solution.
Yes, and that is exactly why it is so valuable. Philosophies that "solve everything," (such as GodDidIt) in fact produce empty solutions to anything. Drop an apple, it falls down, GodDidIt. Drop an apple, it falls up, GodDidIt. The answer explains anything, and thereby nothing. The fact that it's possible to find a mistake in a scientific solution provides at least some chance of improvement, even if there are countless things that it can't address at all. Religion on the other hand, has no reliable means of improvement-- it is not possible to identify a "mistake" in a religious "solution," as belief overrides reality via apologetics when the "solution" produces otherwise contradictory results.
I'd do that too, but not before using the "bully pulpit" to tell everyone to STOP VOTING FOR EITHER REPUBLICANS OR DEMOCRATS. It's not the only choice you have, unless you think it is. As long as you do you're going to get the same old crap we've been getting. BOOT THEM BOTH OUT ON THEIR EARS. And tell the networks to OPEN UP THE DEBATES OR WE'RE TURNING OFF OUR SETS...
- Availability of 3rd party applications
- Graphics UI performance
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but I use it because serious bleeding-edge 3D design and video apps are not available for Linux. Show me Linux apps of the caliber of Zbrush, Mudbox, Poser, Real Flow, After Effects CS3, etc., and we'll talk.
And that's just for the sort of apps that I happen to be familiar with-- many categories things are much the same, (show me a serious Sonar, Cubase or Pro Tools contender on Linux)-- a large number of end users are going to be influenced by the availability of off-the-shelf games. Need we start comparing lists of those?
Linux may be acceptable in some areas, and certainly graphics UI performance isn't as bad as it used to be. But if you think Linux does everything better than Windows, you're either seriously deluded or simply ignorant.
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Also, from this painting of Ada from Wikipedia, it looks like neither the hair or eye color are correct, though it's hardly definitive: Ada Lovelace
It looks to me that the letter simply confirms that there was an artist who lived at the right time, and there may be an old painting painted at the right time and possibly by that same artist -- BUT not that it's a painting of Ada Byron...
Yeah, and they produce a lot of O3-- a good thing in the stratosphere, but not a good thing to be breathing a lot of down here. See here.
For starters, throwing more money at a problem doesn't automatically produce a better solution, so budget is largely irrelevant here.
Actually, throwing chairs at the problem is the Microsoft way. Microsoft didn't get rich by throwing money at problems...
in the quality of their product...
It seems to me that essentially Microsoft is trying to buy their way out of what is a fundamental problem with their corporate culture. The *reason* their products are crap is they don't understand how to inspire their troops to excellence and resort to browbeating them instead. Buying out Yahoo isn't going to fix that, it'll just drag Yahoo down to their level.
Seems to me that an enterprising hacker or two might end up teaming up with an "innocent party" in order to set the RIAA up for just such a case...
FTP isn't going to go away until the readily available secure alternatives perform as well. Especially since data moving operations have been increasing their "need for speed" along with the amounts of data involved.
I've been involved with performance testing on a data warehouse product that must transfer umpteen-GB nightly, where we've found that FTP transfers typically perform at least 30x faster than then next fastest alternative-- scp, sftp, etc. On a 1000MB link between two computers sitting next to each other we're seeing a 20 minute FTP turn into like 3.5 hours when we switch to sftp. We've resorted to parallel connections as a work around which helps, but it's still dog-slow compared to FTP.
There's a patch to OpenSSH that helps, but FTP is still notably faster, and almost no OpenSSH program binary distributions contain the patch, so you have to have a development system and know how to use it to even try it (and on Windows, that also usually means $$$).
I agree there is a real need for a secure replacement for FTP, but have yet to seen any contenders that I can take seriously.
No, that isn't anyone's main flaw. But it should be mandatory that these lawmakers should have at least enough of a clue to determine if what they are proposing is even possible before they start drafting legislation.
This makes as much sense as drafting a law making it illegal for it to rain on Thursdays. The frightening part is that the bozo drafting the law doesn't see why it's a problem.
You should be glad the guy doesn't understand technology enough to draft a law that would actually have some effect-- as once these bozos do finally "get it" they're actually liable to do some real damage to our rights...
It would not be the first time that a government has gone to great length to convince others that the stolen data they have is real, when really it is not, rather it is carefully crafted misinformation designed to fubar any project or plans it is used in.
Yeah, and it would not be the first time that a government has gone to great length to convince others that they are completely incompetent.
When I first started programming, all they asked you at a job is if you ever programmed *something*, they didn't care what. Of course, for the most part what they wanted was someone to do some programming in their proprietary language, most of which have all died out now. But they knew that if you could program in Fortran or whatever, you could learn to code in whatever obscure language they needed, and they weren't going to find someone with specific experience in their own proprietary language anyway.
Now things are different-- job listings claim to be looking for someone with 10 years experience in a technology that is only 5 years old, and consequently there's no reason to do anything but ignore the listed requirements on a job posting, providing you can get your way past HR.
But what you really want when looking for someone to take over a job in a language that is no longer "popular," is to find an old-timer. What you want is someone who is *willing* to do the work, and capable of handling the bad decisions the previous guy made, you don't need someone whose been working for the last 10 years coding web apps in COBOL just because that's what the previous guy had been doing, but you also don't want a young punk whose going to get too soon bored doing that even if he had the skillz. It's true, the old-timer will probably be more expensive-- but the good ones will be likely to care naught about what tools are being used and what things are written in, and be able to pick whatever it is up without complaint and get the job done.
The ISPs better stop wasting their time with plans for throttling and metering, as the successful ISPs are going to be the ones that see that bandwidth needs are only going to increase, and pressure will soon be put on them not just from the content consumers, but the content providers as well who have a lot more clout-- legal, political and financial. It's quite possible that in time most people will watch their nightly TV programs via internet stream rather than cable channel (which itself has need for increased bandwidth for HD signals). YouTube could go HD, and of course we all can't wait for higher quality ads all over web pages. Advertisers will NOT be happy if the cost of the pipe goes up, and "tiered" services just won't cut it-- you can't have people choosing NOT to watch the latest DRM protected HD internet content because the requisite bandwidth requires the next tier and consequently a lot of extra $$$. The content providers want to make it as easy as possible for you to see their adverts, and tiering them out of peoples price range isn't any way to do that.
No, successful cable companies will probably need to look for new modem technologies that can multiplex the network traffic over multiple cable channels and better utilize the wire for network delivery, rather than trying to squeeze a penny out here and there by dumbing down the services with artificial delays. That, and more fiber. The ones that do that will succeed, while the others will get squeezed out by alternatives that will become available-- better WiFi coverage or a new Googlified 700MHZ technology perhaps.
And, since several cable companies are being grabbed up by media companies (Time Warner comes to mind), many ISPs themselves are going to see the bandwidth need firsthand. It is the wave of the future, and the sooner an ISP stops whining about it and starts upgrading their gear in anticipation, the more likely they'll be around in 10 years...
I wrote the bit below which I'll keep because it might be interesting to someone, but dm(Hannu) already mentioned the claw flaw in the logic behind the PP and article summary: if the CPU is the bottleneck, how could adding more threads possibly help?
It doesn't unless you have multiple cores-- in which case adding more threads is specifically throwing more CPUs at the problem, at least with an OS like Windows which won't automatically distribute a single process across multiple CPUs...
Not only that, hotmail's spam filter is a complete joke. I'll repeatedly get junk from the same address and mark it as junk and the spam filter just never learns to recognize it. Any spam filter I've ever seen works way better than hotmail's.
But I too use Firefox 2.0 and while hotmail works kinda quirky under it, it works well enough for my purposes. Though I run everything through noscript and a proxy filter so any site that tries to do much of anything beyond basic html with some minor javascripting gets horribly crippled-- which is exactly the way I like things...
Capitalism 101-- you need to know how markets work. People buy things based on perception and hope, not on facts and reality. Products don't have to work, they just have to sell. If people want something that does not and cannot exist, those facts do not matter-- it remains there is a waiting market for that impossible thing, and enterprises can still thrive producing products that appeal to such a market.
No, though I visited there once. I was in a field office in southern ca. Hadn't heard the story about nuclear power, but the Beaverton plant was pretty impressive. They had some bleedin' geniuses in analog engineering. The 7000 series oscope readout wasn't digital, but analog-- a triangular pulse was fed into an IC that had a lot of multi-emitter transistors, configured so that the output would trace the x & y waveforms that would draw the characters on the display-- no dot matrix or 7-segment for those guys-- it was weirdly analog. They did their own ICs and most of their CRTS, including the storage CRTs (which IIRC, were invented at Tek)...
I know what you are saying, about minerals, bit I don't think they did much if anything at all to treat the water they used in the wash rack at Tek. I don't think even a water softener. Now that I think about it, we did use compressed air to blow it off after washing, likely it simply didn't leave enough residue to be a problem. I suppose multi-gigahertz modern gear might be more sensitive, but we never had any problems from it in the years I worked there (about '72-'76)-- washing the gear was a daily procedure...
paper caps are soaked in wax, so that's not an issue-- and you'll only find them in really old gear anymore where you likely will need to replace them anyway, as the old paper caps don't do very well with age, much less water...
Actually, water isn't all that harmful to electronics (at least, when powered off) if a little care is taken.
Eons ago I was a repair tech fixing oscilloscopes for Tektronix. Standard procedure for ANY piece of gear coming in the office was it went into the "wash rack." We took off all the side panels, hosed it down using essentially the same equipment you use in a self-serv car wash (w/soap & water), rinsed it, then it went into the dryers (I forget the exact temp, but as I recall it was relatively low, less than 150F I think). The only important thing we needed to remember is to put it in the dryers such that certain power transformer cans had their opening facing down (otherwise they could fill with water and three days then wasn't enough to dry it out). After that, we plugged it in and fired it up. This included both the ancient vacuum tube equipment and modern IC circuit-board equipment, including CRTs and the like. I suppose current gear with LCDs may get waterspots on the panels, and certain components might be uniquely sensitive. Mechanical devices such as VCRs might have grease on some moving parts that could be an issue but nothing Tek made at the time had that problem, and if they did the solution would likely be to re-lube the device.
The important thing if you drop your ipod or whatever into the toilet, is to take out the batteries as soon as possible and open it up to the extent possible and leave it out to dry for a week or so. Movies & television shows that show dropping something electrical into water causing lots of sparks is mostly special-effect pyrotechnics and not reality. If it's plugged into AC though, unplug it from the wall first before you reach into the water, or you may get zapped...
Tap water does conduct electricity so if it gets wet when it's powered on it could cause shorts that may damage things, but probably only with sensitive circuitry, as water looks like a resistor not a dead short so many circuits could survive it without damage. Battery powered units should be powered off ASAP though, as it could cause things to heat up. Yank out the batteries completely right away as well to minimize such adverse effects...
I'd be curious to know what Mr. Paul thinks is needed to be done in healthcare-- with the industry now primarily in the control of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, causing the costs to skyrocket-- just what exactly is the libertarian "free market" solution? Seems to me the "free market" solution is currently in operation there, and is spiralling out of control. The only way you can "open up competition" in healthcare is to remove patent protection on prescription drugs, and that may have the side effect of reducing incentives on drug development. This may be a very hard question, and I think a candidates answer to it would be crucial to their thinking processes (or lack thereof). However, I don't see many people even asking it...
he's right ... but the thing is, the Federal Government isn't doing this to provide us with more security, they're doing it to provide themselves with more power, power over us. Consequently, they don't much care about our privacy, and there's no reasoning with them on that score.
You're right about that-- but they also don't much care about our security, for the same reasons. As long as some "bread and circuses" rewards them political brownie points, they can pass legislation "designed to increase security" that actually decreases it, and they can still come out ahead while the rest of us lose...
If you want either security or privacy, the absolute last place to look for it is the Federal Government-- they're much of the problem, not the solution.
Science absolutely does not solve everything.
Yes, and that is exactly why it is so valuable. Philosophies that "solve everything," (such as GodDidIt) in fact produce empty solutions to anything. Drop an apple, it falls down, GodDidIt. Drop an apple, it falls up, GodDidIt. The answer explains anything, and thereby nothing. The fact that it's possible to find a mistake in a scientific solution provides at least some chance of improvement, even if there are countless things that it can't address at all. Religion on the other hand, has no reliable means of improvement-- it is not possible to identify a "mistake" in a religious "solution," as belief overrides reality via apologetics when the "solution" produces otherwise contradictory results.I'd do that too, but not before using the "bully pulpit" to tell everyone to STOP VOTING FOR EITHER REPUBLICANS OR DEMOCRATS. It's not the only choice you have, unless you think it is. As long as you do you're going to get the same old crap we've been getting. BOOT THEM BOTH OUT ON THEIR EARS. And tell the networks to OPEN UP THE DEBATES OR WE'RE TURNING OFF OUR SETS...
What specifically does Windows do better than Linux? By which I mean Windows the OS, not Windows the platform.
OS or platform, the answer is the same-- attract commercial developers.
For starters, how about:
- Availability of 3rd party applications
- Graphics UI performance
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but I use it because serious bleeding-edge 3D design and video apps are not available for Linux. Show me Linux apps of the caliber of Zbrush, Mudbox, Poser, Real Flow, After Effects CS3, etc., and we'll talk.
And that's just for the sort of apps that I happen to be familiar with-- many categories things are much the same, (show me a serious Sonar, Cubase or Pro Tools contender on Linux)-- a large number of end users are going to be influenced by the availability of off-the-shelf games. Need we start comparing lists of those?
Linux may be acceptable in some areas, and certainly graphics UI performance isn't as bad as it used to be. But if you think Linux does everything better than Windows, you're either seriously deluded or simply ignorant.