Well, infinity isn't a number either, so standard math doesn't really apply either;)
A number divided by infinity isn't equal to zero, because you cannot divide a number by a non-number. The best way to represent the concept is like this:
lim[x->inf] 3/x == 0
Now, that differs in an important way from this:
lim[x->inf] -3/x == 0
Keep in mind that the percent does not equal the limit, but it approaches the limit as x tends to infinity. The first approaches 0 from the right (positive), and the second approaches 0 from the left (negative). These correspond to an infinitely small positive number and an infinitely small negative number, respectively. My sock example is of the first type, therefore I believe it qualifies as "an infinitely small positive nubmer" and therefore fits the original poster's criteria.
I could've also explained this with infinitessimals instead of limits, but I figured that limits are more familiar to the average reader.
"Basically, you can't say that energy gets more disorganized over time and still say that evolution is why we are able to "fly a kite" whereas a dinosaur could not."
That rule of thermodynamics is only true for closed systems. The only truly closed system around is the universe considered as a whole. In an open system, like the Earth, energy *can* get more organized over time because it has the Sun as an energy source.
You can't assume that a certain positive percentage of *all* primes differ by two as stated in number two, because that's an analogous statement to what you're trying to prove.
Say I have an infinite number of socks. All are white, except 3, which are grey. I have a positive percentage of grey socks, but that doesn't mean anything since that percentage is infinitessimal. It will be infinitessimal for any number of grey socks, so you can't say that you are assumed have a positive percentage of grey socks *unless* you have an infinite number of grey socks, and that's a tautological argument.
I believe SQL Server 2000 supported SSL for remote connections, but they intend to add encryption of tables and similar constructs in this version. As several other posters have mentioned, at least one open-source database (MySQL) already supports this.
Language and UI design are hard. Evading the problem by making everything changeable does not fix the problem.
This may be the most insightful thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Software designers take note of this, and moderators, mod parent up like it deserves.
You can install Win2k3 Server headless. It also supports install scripting so you can just pop a CD in each computer and go. I'd imagine that any "Windows HPC" version would not only have those features, but extend them to make them even more applicable to the headless environment.
Reinstalling doesn't mean that the files are all in the same place. It's entirely possible that his hard drive is having problems, and the reinstall simply landed the critical OS files in a different part of the hard drive that wasn't corrupted. Or the sectors went bad after the files were on them, the hard drive marked them bad, and they didn't get used when he reinstalled.
In a manner very similar to Linux, Windows requires a boot partition that your BIOS can read that will contain the NT bootloader. As long as that partition is bootable by the BIOS, Windows can be practically anywhere else.
I have around 80gb of music that was organized by iTunes while I was on Windows, and my only major gripe is about it's naming scheme. I'd like it if iTunes let me use a slightly different order:
Genre/Artist - Album - Number - Title
That way, when I put songs on my player or copy them to another folder, I don't have incredibly verbose names like "03 Dream On.mp3". Is that Aerosmith? Depeche Mode? Some obscure punk band? It's nice that iTunes tries to avoid redundancy and long names, but I 'd like the option...
Look up hyperreal numbers and infinitessimal calculus. Really fun stuff which gives a solid system to calculate with infinitely large and small numbers.
Re:whats keeping xvid from doing mainstream...
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's illegal to distribute binaries of an MPEG4 encoder without paying fees to the MPEG Licensing Authority. Distributing source is ok, though. Unless you can talk MPEG into granting some kind of exception for Xvid, you're not likely to get any kind of binaries soon.
I'd trust a warezed copy of WinXP more than the real one. Most respectable warez groups are pretty paranoid about security and viruses. They're interested in distributing software, and they want to keep their "customers". If some group slipped a trojan into a release of WinXP, nobody would ever download their releases again. The files you download from Kazaa with viruses are usually just a guy with a grudge trying to mess up people's computers.
Disclaimer: I've never done any of the things I've said or implied I've done in this post.
"The installation hurdles that existed in SP1 will be back again for SP2 - no more, no less."
Yes, and as with SP1, the day after SP2 comes out, there'll be 10 warez releases of WinXP with SP2 slipstreamed in for your downloading pleasure. They will also come complete with working CD keys and some handy tools to bypass activation if necessary. I agree, this isn't really news at all.
"I should probably get an account and stop posting as AC =)"
Yeah, you should. You're ruining the image of ACs by posting intelligent comments;) Thanks for the informative reply. Point taken, and I apologize for getting defensive.
Likewise, I shouldn't be responding to AC's, but here goes...
That's pretty much what I was trying to say. I guess it depends on how them implement it. Even with only having to emulate half the registers, it's still going to be a very significant slowdown. Unless you can keep them in cache, your emulated registers are going to be in RAM, which is painfully slow compared to hardware registers. I hope they have a competent team, cause I really want to see this work in the near future at decent speeds.
"If you think that having 2x the number of registers makes a big difference you're sorely mistaken."
Read my comment again. I stated that having 2x as many registers will *not* make that much of a difference.
"The P4 has atleast 128 registers. They are just hidden behind a little thing called register renaming"
The P4 does NOT have 128 seperate general-purpose registers. Register renaming does not allow you to use any more general-purpose registers per program than if you only had one set. It's simply a fast hardware mechanism for context-switching.
"look it up, register WINDOWS are used by Sun chips and are VERY bad for many reasons"
I know about register windows. They have their benefits, just as register renaming has it's pitfalls. Again, completely off-topic, since we're talking about usable general-purpose registers.
"x86 processor of today is at its core simply a RISC processor"
That's completely right. Unfortunately, it has absolutely no bearing on what we're talking about, since you can't access the RISC core even using assembly language. None of what you said applies in the situation referenced by original poster, since none of those features can be used to make emulation of a different architecture faster.
Right in principle, but the PPC still has *way* more registers than any Athlon64. The x86-64 architecture has something like 8 general purpose registers as opposed to x86's 3 or 4. PPC has 32, as is common among RISC architectures like Sparc and MIPS. More registers also means more code to save and restore them on context switches, but the good CPUs have register windows and such to speed that up.
Bottom line is that the number of registers makes it more difficult than it would seem.
Disclaimer: I don't have the specs in front of me, so my numbers may be a bit off. Feel free to check them yourself if you think I may be very far off.
As a sibling poster mentioned somewhat rudely, yes, it's entirely possible to embed information in an EXE file using steganographic techniques. I retract any part of my statements which attempts to deny that.
I would like to say that my post was in reply to a post claiming that the virus author was captured because of a Microsoft backdoor in their own compiler products. He did not specify that the virus author had a trojaned copy, or that his compiler was altered in any way from one I might install. He implied that there was a backdoor in the standard installation of MS tools and Windows which inserted enough personal information for tracking. I'd simply like to state that under the conditions stated by original poster, that technique is not practical, and extremely unlikely.
The nice part about bringing steganography into the argument is that it has deniability: It's pretty much impossible to prove that something does *not* contain steganography. I can't argue that it's impossible for EXE files to contain steganographic information, but I will argue that it's extremely unlikely given the specific circumstances in original parent.
A file format standard isn't "my opinion". The PE specification is published in many places, and followed by many compilers, including GCC. You can open an EXE file and compare it to the standard. There are no hidden sections or secret codes in an EXE file. Would you say that someone could secretly embed personally unique information in an XML document?[1]
If you want proof, get the exact same version of Windows and MSVC++ and compile the exact same source with the exact same compile time options on two different computers. Binary diff the result. If there are differences, determine whether they actually represent information about the machines in question, or are simply quirks of compilation.
I'm not going to post an in-depth dissection of the PE format with analysis of each section on Slashdot, because I don't have the time to justify my statements to someone who can't understand the difference between facts and opinions.
[1] - Yes, it's theoretically possible to use a form of steganography to embed data in the number of spaces between the end of a line and the linebreak, but let's stick to practical concepts...
"Each user can install plugins to his own profile directory."
How? When I tried to install mouse gestures, it gave an error about permissions. I had to chmod a+rw the chrome folder in/usr/lib/mozilla, then change it back after installation. It's a pain in the ass, and there should be a better way. Maybe there is, and I just couldn't find it. Any suggestions?
WinFS isn't a low-level filesystem, more of an abstraction on top of NTFS. I'd imagine that he wants the Mozilla developers to offer some of the browser's data such as bookmarks, browser history, or email in a WinFS-compatible way so the user could use WinFS to search through those things using standard Windows tools. I'd also imagine that they plan on having IE do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, infinity isn't a number either, so standard math doesn't really apply either ;)
A number divided by infinity isn't equal to zero, because you cannot divide a number by a non-number. The best way to represent the concept is like this:
lim[x->inf] 3/x == 0
Now, that differs in an important way from this:
lim[x->inf] -3/x == 0
Keep in mind that the percent does not equal the limit, but it approaches the limit as x tends to infinity. The first approaches 0 from the right (positive), and the second approaches 0 from the left (negative). These correspond to an infinitely small positive number and an infinitely small negative number, respectively. My sock example is of the first type, therefore I believe it qualifies as "an infinitely small positive nubmer" and therefore fits the original poster's criteria.
I could've also explained this with infinitessimals instead of limits, but I figured that limits are more familiar to the average reader.
"Basically, you can't say that energy gets more disorganized over time and still say that evolution is why we are able to "fly a kite" whereas a dinosaur could not."
That rule of thermodynamics is only true for closed systems. The only truly closed system around is the universe considered as a whole. In an open system, like the Earth, energy *can* get more organized over time because it has the Sun as an energy source.
You can't assume that a certain positive percentage of *all* primes differ by two as stated in number two, because that's an analogous statement to what you're trying to prove.
;)
Say I have an infinite number of socks. All are white, except 3, which are grey. I have a positive percentage of grey socks, but that doesn't mean anything since that percentage is infinitessimal. It will be infinitessimal for any number of grey socks, so you can't say that you are assumed have a positive percentage of grey socks *unless* you have an infinite number of grey socks, and that's a tautological argument.
Chocolate chip, please
I believe SQL Server 2000 supported SSL for remote connections, but they intend to add encryption of tables and similar constructs in this version. As several other posters have mentioned, at least one open-source database (MySQL) already supports this.
You can install Win2k3 Server headless. It also supports install scripting so you can just pop a CD in each computer and go. I'd imagine that any "Windows HPC" version would not only have those features, but extend them to make them even more applicable to the headless environment.
Reinstalling doesn't mean that the files are all in the same place. It's entirely possible that his hard drive is having problems, and the reinstall simply landed the critical OS files in a different part of the hard drive that wasn't corrupted. Or the sectors went bad after the files were on them, the hard drive marked them bad, and they didn't get used when he reinstalled.
Yep, I was confirming what you said.
In a manner very similar to Linux, Windows requires a boot partition that your BIOS can read that will contain the NT bootloader. As long as that partition is bootable by the BIOS, Windows can be practically anywhere else.
I have around 80gb of music that was organized by iTunes while I was on Windows, and my only major gripe is about it's naming scheme. I'd like it if iTunes let me use a slightly different order:
Genre/Artist - Album - Number - Title
That way, when I put songs on my player or copy them to another folder, I don't have incredibly verbose names like "03 Dream On.mp3". Is that Aerosmith? Depeche Mode? Some obscure punk band? It's nice that iTunes tries to avoid redundancy and long names, but I 'd like the option...
Look up hyperreal numbers and infinitessimal calculus. Really fun stuff which gives a solid system to calculate with infinitely large and small numbers.
It's illegal to distribute binaries of an MPEG4 encoder without paying fees to the MPEG Licensing Authority. Distributing source is ok, though. Unless you can talk MPEG into granting some kind of exception for Xvid, you're not likely to get any kind of binaries soon.
Not that I'd know, but there are already full releases of WinXP with SP1 slipstreamed and WinXP with SP2 RC1 slipstreamed floating around IRC.
I'd trust a warezed copy of WinXP more than the real one. Most respectable warez groups are pretty paranoid about security and viruses. They're interested in distributing software, and they want to keep their "customers". If some group slipped a trojan into a release of WinXP, nobody would ever download their releases again. The files you download from Kazaa with viruses are usually just a guy with a grudge trying to mess up people's computers.
Disclaimer: I've never done any of the things I've said or implied I've done in this post.
"The installation hurdles that existed in SP1 will be back again for SP2 - no more, no less."
Yes, and as with SP1, the day after SP2 comes out, there'll be 10 warez releases of WinXP with SP2 slipstreamed in for your downloading pleasure. They will also come complete with working CD keys and some handy tools to bypass activation if necessary. I agree, this isn't really news at all.
"I should probably get an account and stop posting as AC =)"
;) Thanks for the informative reply. Point taken, and I apologize for getting defensive.
Yeah, you should. You're ruining the image of ACs by posting intelligent comments
Likewise, I shouldn't be responding to AC's, but here goes...
That's pretty much what I was trying to say. I guess it depends on how them implement it. Even with only having to emulate half the registers, it's still going to be a very significant slowdown. Unless you can keep them in cache, your emulated registers are going to be in RAM, which is painfully slow compared to hardware registers. I hope they have a competent team, cause I really want to see this work in the near future at decent speeds.
"If you think that having 2x the number of registers makes a big difference you're sorely mistaken."
Read my comment again. I stated that having 2x as many registers will *not* make that much of a difference.
"The P4 has atleast 128 registers. They are just hidden behind a little thing called register renaming"
The P4 does NOT have 128 seperate general-purpose registers. Register renaming does not allow you to use any more general-purpose registers per program than if you only had one set. It's simply a fast hardware mechanism for context-switching.
"look it up, register WINDOWS are used by Sun chips and are VERY bad for many reasons"
I know about register windows. They have their benefits, just as register renaming has it's pitfalls. Again, completely off-topic, since we're talking about usable general-purpose registers.
"x86 processor of today is at its core simply a RISC processor"
That's completely right. Unfortunately, it has absolutely no bearing on what we're talking about, since you can't access the RISC core even using assembly language. None of what you said applies in the situation referenced by original poster, since none of those features can be used to make emulation of a different architecture faster.
Right in principle, but the PPC still has *way* more registers than any Athlon64. The x86-64 architecture has something like 8 general purpose registers as opposed to x86's 3 or 4. PPC has 32, as is common among RISC architectures like Sparc and MIPS. More registers also means more code to save and restore them on context switches, but the good CPUs have register windows and such to speed that up.
Bottom line is that the number of registers makes it more difficult than it would seem.
Disclaimer: I don't have the specs in front of me, so my numbers may be a bit off. Feel free to check them yourself if you think I may be very far off.
As a sibling poster mentioned somewhat rudely, yes, it's entirely possible to embed information in an EXE file using steganographic techniques. I retract any part of my statements which attempts to deny that.
I would like to say that my post was in reply to a post claiming that the virus author was captured because of a Microsoft backdoor in their own compiler products. He did not specify that the virus author had a trojaned copy, or that his compiler was altered in any way from one I might install. He implied that there was a backdoor in the standard installation of MS tools and Windows which inserted enough personal information for tracking. I'd simply like to state that under the conditions stated by original poster, that technique is not practical, and extremely unlikely.
The nice part about bringing steganography into the argument is that it has deniability: It's pretty much impossible to prove that something does *not* contain steganography. I can't argue that it's impossible for EXE files to contain steganographic information, but I will argue that it's extremely unlikely given the specific circumstances in original parent.
A file format standard isn't "my opinion". The PE specification is published in many places, and followed by many compilers, including GCC. You can open an EXE file and compare it to the standard. There are no hidden sections or secret codes in an EXE file. Would you say that someone could secretly embed personally unique information in an XML document?[1]
If you want proof, get the exact same version of Windows and MSVC++ and compile the exact same source with the exact same compile time options on two different computers. Binary diff the result. If there are differences, determine whether they actually represent information about the machines in question, or are simply quirks of compilation.
I'm not going to post an in-depth dissection of the PE format with analysis of each section on Slashdot, because I don't have the time to justify my statements to someone who can't understand the difference between facts and opinions.
[1] - Yes, it's theoretically possible to use a form of steganography to embed data in the number of spaces between the end of a line and the linebreak, but let's stick to practical concepts...
"Each user can install plugins to his own profile directory."
/usr/lib/mozilla, then change it back after installation. It's a pain in the ass, and there should be a better way. Maybe there is, and I just couldn't find it. Any suggestions?
How? When I tried to install mouse gestures, it gave an error about permissions. I had to chmod a+rw the chrome folder in
WinFS isn't a low-level filesystem, more of an abstraction on top of NTFS. I'd imagine that he wants the Mozilla developers to offer some of the browser's data such as bookmarks, browser history, or email in a WinFS-compatible way so the user could use WinFS to search through those things using standard Windows tools. I'd also imagine that they plan on having IE do the same thing.