Each of those lines you single out is true. The post gives a specific concrete example of FOX News hackery, which is exactly what other posts in this thread asked for. But that shouldn't be modded informative why exactly?
Maybe you should ask yourself why you, apparently, believe that being stupid is some kind of insult or attack? Some people are just dumb, yet they may have many more redeeming qualities that some genius lacks. Take Bush for example, people liked him pretty well despite his, uh, shortcomings (compare IQ to Carter@173 (tested), Nixon@155 (estimate), or Clinton@182 (estimate) for instance).
So use rsync to download the images. Why on earth would you use WinXP just to start up vmware? Just do a quick linux install of any distro and use vmware for linux. In my experience the linux version is much better anyway (for whatever reason).
One caution, with some distro's vmware has to actually interpret a lot of programs (due to guest / host vm spaces overlapping). On these system combinations vmware will be *really* slow... basically anything fedora. On other systems you're talking maybe 5% average overhead, depending on workload of course.
Pretty much all of Fox "News" comes from AP or Reuters. Then what they often do is make "edits" to it by adding in remarks diminishing negatives against Rebulicans and conservatives and adding elaboration to attack pretty much anybody else. Of course this justifies a "by" line from one of their staffers and, if the story appears on other sites, they add a small disclaimer on the bottom that "the AP contributed to this report".
The first time I noticed this was when Johnny Cochran died (I don't actually watch Fox "News" very often since to any thinking person it is disgusting). I was reading the story and was looking for more information (specifically whether he knew he had a tumor and for how long) when I noticed the story on FOX News was virtually identical to the associated press story. In fact, 18 of 44 paragraphs in the FOX piece were copied verbatim from the AP article with no changes whatsoever. Most of the other paragraphs had extremely minor grammatical structural changes, but were essentially identical to the original AP content. The rest was political spin (innuendo) that really had no place in the article.
What really struck me most was that FOX News in the by-line claimed credit for the article. Under the title the article clearly said "Tuesday, March 29, 2005" followed by "FOX NEWS". The Associated Press was not mentioned until the very end where the article said "FOX News' Jane Roh and The Associated Press contributed to this report"; however, even this was misleading since as far as I can tell Jane Roh's function was nothing other than minor cosmetic editing (ie it should have said, Jone Roh edited the article).
This is just one of a great many actual example of journalistic hackery at FOX "News" that happen all the time. You can believe that it is "only their opinion shows" or that they have serious journalistic talent, but if so you are an idiot. Look I'm not trying to insult you with ad hominem... it would just take somebody pretty fucking dumb not to see the puppet theatre at Fox.
And no, all of MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC correctly attributed the article and did not add political spin to it as FOX did. They are not just as bad as FOX. Now the article does not even exist on FOX's site... much easier to get away with this crap when you sweep it under the rug. I have copies though of the "FOX POV" and original AP, if you doubt.
The problem I have with Linux re: GPL 3 is that he's just being ignorant. He has some beef about people having to give out their own personal private keys that has been shot down by any number of people that actually know what they are talking about legally (PJ, Eben, etc). Just casually reading the license and Linus' comments, he just isn't making any sense.
My best bet is that Linus doesn't actually want to understand the GPL v3. Linux is eminently practical, and the practical thing to do to increase Linux usage, fix bugs, and add new features is to make Linux corporate friendly. A *lot* of contributions come from the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Novell, and other companies. I bet the prospect of these companies pulling out their support is a major consideration (whether intentional or not).
Hurd is a failure because Linux exists. Without Linux, the same developers working on it would be working on Hurd (or a fork of hurd). Torvolds was in the right place at the right time, and did a competent job of capitalizing on it. In this respect he is like Bill Gates, with people saying how if it hadn't been for Microsoft we'd still be using DOS. I think this kind of argument, that it could never have turned out as well without , is pretty absurd.
I am convinced that the equipment has progressed to the point that the greatest threat to vote integrity is not the machines being used (assuming they are at least as secure as the TSx and include a voter verifiable printed audit log) but the lack of procedures or the local election official's unwillingness to follow them.
I call Bullshit. All of the machines I know of actually take away many opportunities for procedures to prevent abuse. For instance, they remove the ability for obvservers to monitor the counting process. A private citizen cannot verify the machine's count because a manual count is only done on audit. I know a person who did an election audit and it was basically "are the seals on there? ok the computer tally must be right then go on to the next". I say it's crap to blame the officials when your product is making it much harder for them to protect the election.
I for one would love to hang out after the election and do my own count as the poll workers add up votes and then check my local polls number the next day in the results, and in the past I could do this. These machines make this pretty much impossible, since verifying the computer readout with the count the next day is a pretty meaningless of a check. In additon, recently laws have been passed in my state (and others) to prevent ordinary citizens from observing the count at all... you have to apply for a small number of permits (as in 10 per poll) and the voting admins select who gets to observe.
Even if you are not personally corrupt or entirely responsible, it seems clear from your posts that are helping to accomplish these really negative results. In your own way, you are responsible for diminishing democracy in this country.
Also the reasons you give for voting machines, 'lager print' and 'reads the vote out loud instead of using braille' seem like pretty poor reasons to me for replacing verified voting with magic numbers since they can be done easily with paper ballots.
I think you are missing the point (maybe on purpose). The machine does not need to know who the candidates are. If each machine merely gives its own winner x% more votes by flipping votes from other candidates then the winner in the most number of polling places will get more total votes than they should (ie 2x * (w-l), where w-l is the difference in number of polling places by candidate and x is the number of votes flipped). Since rural voters tend toward Republicans and have more polling places, this simple algorithm favors Republicans in elections across the board with absolutely no knowledge of individual elections, candidates, or any information other than the machine's local winner (which it clearly knows).
So to take you through an example:
Majority Republican polls: 118,000 Majority Democratic polls: 63,000 Shift at each poll: 3 votes
2x * (w-l): = 2(3) * (118,000-63,000) = 330,000
Republican canditate gets 330,000 more votes than the Democrat by shifting only 3 votes at each poll without any extra information. The actual election may be 49.9% vs 50.1% due to democratic polls having higher number of voters per poll machine. These are made up numbers, just to demonstrate the concept since it seems very hard for certain people to grasp.
In addition this method is robust against voter-verified trails, because the incident rate at any particular terminal is so low that the voter will not remember correctly or be believed. The poll workers will just assume that the one or two people it happens to just misvoted and not even report the incident. And that's if the voter actually notices, which I would bet just out of pure hunch is less than a 20% rate. In Ohio for instance, I believe the statitic was that if just one vote was flipped in every district then Kerry would have won. So even a small effect on a global scale is enough.
With an ID so low it almost rules out parent poster being a paid shill for Diebold. This discussion sure *sounds* like astroturfing though. There are so many ways these electronic machines can be rigged it's not even funny. If you can't see *any* of them even after having been led through one I really have no choice but to resort to ad hominem.
Biology doesn't have fancy million square foot production centers to make one cpu/brain like we do. The question is really, when we can emulate a human brain at 1000x faster what place will there be for us to do anything. When this mind can spend 24000 hours a day creating a better and faster version of itself, what law of nature gives us the ability to compete with that?
This is the singularity. Even if we can't improve on nature's design we will still be obsolete. Incidentally, that's why I vote for conservatives. There's just nobody out there better at slowing down progress than they are.
They say this can be used for solar cells too. Imagine what 300 billion dollars investment could have done to make this a reality. We're like the 3rd generation of rich kid, the one that pisses away the fortune on gambling and yahts instead of doing something productive with it.
Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.
Congratulations. You've just invented objects (only crappy ones). If you think that's cool you should check out Java ClassLoader, for instance... you can do all the things you mention for files and more. In Ruby you can call.write method regardless of whether the object is a file or socket or audio device or pipe or graphics device handle or whatever. You can add new methods like you add files to a plan 9 filesystem, the only difference is that it's ridiculously easy.
The main problem I have with Plan 9 is how little actual progress there is. It's like when the old geezer comes up with the same idea over and over again. It's just kinda sad really (check out Squeak for example).
The facts are that the administration has violated our trust and laws many times in a great many ways and this arrest sounds pretty shady on the surface. You are trying to say the villagers should have believed the boy-who-cried-wolf because what happened in the past is not sufficient proof, but that would be totally the wrong interpretation of the fable.
The moral is that if you keep lying people won't believe you even when you tell the truth not that people should believe liers because they might be telling the truth this time.
It's now up to the administration to prove their actions are not illegal, nefarious, deceitful, and so on because of their history until they can re-establish trust. In other words, "we don't have all the facts" is not the neutral position in regards to the administration's actions. The fair and balanced position is "without more facts I have to assume there is actually something shady".
stereotypically "conservative" American... would rather see Americans live under constant surveillance with no actual freedom than have one single person stand a chance of being killed (or even injured) by some nebulous "terrorist" bogeyman-of-the-week.
Yes it's called being a coward. They're too chickenshit to stand up to the terrorists (attacking iraq instead of getting osama) or make us even slightly self-sufficient in energy or start correcting the environment or even cut the budget. These neo-conservatives basically haven't even got a shred of courage at all.
My favorite Einstein quote is "It should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." There is a point at which over simplifying something inherently complex is counter productive.
Yeah I know, originally Einstein thought it should be Java = MC^2, but then decided it was just a tad bit too simple. Maybe he wanted the giants standing on his shoulders to actually have to work at a grand unified theory...
But consider that the actual engine for quake is quite small and deals with simple concepts (polygons, quad/octtree, textures). At some point a program can get so large and complicated that a person simply can't grasp enough of it at a low level to optimize it well. A JVM for instance can inline a set of functions 6 levels deep or deeper even and then optimize that entire section of code as a unit. But as a person try optimizing 100k of assembly code that has basically no relationship other than that 95% of the time the code follows this particular call sequence (for the other 5% you branch out into non-inlined code).
What's really amusing is for real programs Java is within 1.2-2x of C speed despite having array bounds checks, no pointer arithmetic, type safety, garbage collection, etc. Java is doing so much more than C by all rights it should be ridiculously slow, but it's actually in the same ballpark.
Try taking some real C program and for every structure add an id to the beginning. Turn every array into a struct with array and length. Turn every array access into a bounds check followed by access. Turn every free into a no-op and every malloc into a memory request from a garbage collector. Turn every cast into a type check (for that matter turn every pointer assignment into a type check).
Now compare their performance. C is a dog performance wise, but you can make it really fast at something specific and with a lot of work by ditching any high-level language features. That does not make it a 'fast' language or 'faster', it just makes it another assembly language.
Yet the fact remains that user-mode NTFS is both faster and far, far more complete than kernel mode NTFS. There must be some explanation for it. It seems obvious that kernel mode drivers are too tedious and cumbersome to write effectively.
I do not imply kernel code can't do large IO, but rather that in general it won't have the features to recognize and combine IO as well as user-mode code will. The reason being that *all* code in the kernel has to be perfect so a lot of times you do not even attempt something complex without need. That's nice that you can make pageable kernel memory on some systems, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a PITA compared to user mode allocations.
Your point about swapping a swapping out dynamic data structures for the fs being for single user machines or being slow is pretty weak. For instance, if you insert all the file nodes into a hashtable then you have O(1) disk access to look up something in particular vs however many to locate it in a hierarchy like a btree for instance. So I'm not saying that it necessarily would be faster, but the concept certainly isn't guarenteed slower or only for single-process use.
It seems to me like the parent has read a magazine article and jumped to conclusions. Or perhaps they are even an experienced developer, but took huge liberties with the wording of their statement.
No what he said was perfectly reasonable, you are just being overly literaly. Yes there is memory allocation in the linux kernel, but it's not swappable. Yes, you can put an extra 1 megabyte of standard C++ library in the kernel to support your filesystem and make it fast, but then you have 1 megabyte less for caches and program data, not to mention the space wasted by these to favor performance. Check out the 'standard library' of functions that come standard with the linux kernel. Other than a few crypto it's limited to 'strlen' and friends.
A user-space filesystem, especially one a fantastically complex as NTFS, can be very much faster in user-space. For example, the user-space one can easily render the filesystem structures into something speed efficient but not space efficient. When you go to use the fs these get swapped back in as needed, so you may get a slow latency on the first request but then subsequent ones fly. Another huge factor is being able to focus on the actual optimization rather than managing memory and coding in a demand-driven style like in the kernel. For example, being able to issue one read command for 1 gigabyte of sequential data on the disk is far more efficient than 256 thousand 4k ones.
I've also done kernel coding and yes if you have unlimited resources a linux kernel driver will be faster than a user-space one. But when you don't even have resources to port to 64-bit you're going to be lucky just getting read support in your kernel driver whereas the user-space one will be doing writes already.
I had a disk with a problem of a couple bad blocks that cause NTFS to freak out. Connecting it to another Windows machine cause it to freak out also (as in ntfs driver hosed and left 2nd system's filesystem corrupt). So I wouldn't count on examining a Windows rootkit from another Windows system if I had linux available.
Sellers don't switch because there are fewer bidders so their auctions go for a lower price. So a solution is to let the seller set a minimum price. The bidders don't see the auction minimum until the winner, and then in order of bid value they get to choose whether they want to meet the minimum bid or cancel their bid at no cost of course. If nobody completes the sale then the seller is not charged, or charged a very small amount.
The seller is happy because they can list things without having to risk having to sell for a small amount. The buyer is okay with it because he basically got out-bid; nobody expects to win an auction you just want to, so they get slightly pissed but since they have the choice of meeting the minimum and the system is free to them it's no big deal.
How do you prevent abuse? Give the buyers who do not meet the minimum the chance to rate the seller's minimum price, so people can identify auctions where the seller is asking 'too much' (or just keep stats on how many of seller's auctions didn't sell b/c of the minimum not being met). You may also say if the seller sets a minimum bid, they have to also set a maximum bid (or the maximum bid is a certain factor of the minimum bid, like 2x). This is the 'buyout' price. Depending on how much the item sells for you charge the seller different amounts.
I think something like that could work. Basically as long as the lower sale prices are offset with less risk then they will list on the site. You can pay the sellers to list, like you mention, or you can take away some of their losses.
On the other hand, with overhead power lines what would the rats tunnel in? That's right, underground power lines routinely get infested with rats enabling them to travel anywhere.
Re:What a ridiculous trend... CORBA to WebServices
on
The Rise and Fall of Corba
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The problem with CORBA was mostly the technicalities and 'grossness' of the design. Yes I used the Java bindings, and it was just crap. All these "helper" objects and peers and stubs and junk. You'd compile an IDL, which was some hacked up C++ interface which wasn't even C++, get a buttload of Java classes that did not act anything like any other Java object on the planet. Lots of 'icky' exceptions. It just, for lack of a better way to describe it, had no style.
Try to teach CORBA to some normal programmer and they'll be thinking that creating their own wire protocol is probably going to be easier for 99% of the things they need to do. Seriously, you just don't look at CORBA bindings (for Java at least) and want to have anything to do with it. It's probably not so bad for C++ developers because they are used to a lot of noise and complexity, and they have templates and stuff to 'spray perfume' on CORBA and make it smell... better.
But seriously, when your technology drains the life out of any competent developer who actually likes to program then you know something is very wrong.
Java has StrictMath and corresponding strictfp class/method modifier for using the ieee standard floating point rather than the cpu's flavor. It doesn't let you change the rounding mode explicitly, but then again neither does C.
Video codecs are rarely written in C though, mostly the core parts of them are written in assembly. That's one reason why you don't see many ports to Power for instance. Generally excellent performance is not whether the language is JIT compiled or ahead-of-time compiled, it's whether the language is safe or not (ie can you turn safety features off). For instance turn off type checking, errors, exceptions, etc on lisp code and you wouldn't believe how fast it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Yes. Your point. Whatever.
Each of those lines you single out is true. The post gives a specific concrete example of FOX News hackery, which is exactly what other posts in this thread asked for. But that shouldn't be modded informative why exactly?
Maybe you should ask yourself why you, apparently, believe that being stupid is some kind of insult or attack? Some people are just dumb, yet they may have many more redeeming qualities that some genius lacks. Take Bush for example, people liked him pretty well despite his, uh, shortcomings (compare IQ to Carter@173 (tested), Nixon@155 (estimate), or Clinton@182 (estimate) for instance).
So use rsync to download the images. Why on earth would you use WinXP just to start up vmware? Just do a quick linux install of any distro and use vmware for linux. In my experience the linux version is much better anyway (for whatever reason).
One caution, with some distro's vmware has to actually interpret a lot of programs (due to guest / host vm spaces overlapping). On these system combinations vmware will be *really* slow... basically anything fedora. On other systems you're talking maybe 5% average overhead, depending on workload of course.
Pretty much all of Fox "News" comes from AP or Reuters. Then what they often do is make "edits" to it by adding in remarks diminishing negatives against Rebulicans and conservatives and adding elaboration to attack pretty much anybody else. Of course this justifies a "by" line from one of their staffers and, if the story appears on other sites, they add a small disclaimer on the bottom that "the AP contributed to this report".
The first time I noticed this was when Johnny Cochran died (I don't actually watch Fox "News" very often since to any thinking person it is disgusting). I was reading the story and was looking for more information (specifically whether he knew he had a tumor and for how long) when I noticed the story on FOX News was virtually identical to the associated press story. In fact, 18 of 44 paragraphs in the FOX piece were copied verbatim from the AP article with no changes whatsoever. Most of the other paragraphs had extremely minor grammatical structural changes, but were essentially identical to the original AP content. The rest was political spin (innuendo) that really had no place in the article.
What really struck me most was that FOX News in the by-line claimed credit for the article. Under the title the article clearly said "Tuesday, March 29, 2005" followed by "FOX NEWS". The Associated Press was not mentioned until the very end where the article said "FOX News' Jane Roh and The Associated Press contributed to this report"; however, even this was misleading since as far as I can tell Jane Roh's function was nothing other than minor cosmetic editing (ie it should have said, Jone Roh edited the article).
This is just one of a great many actual example of journalistic hackery at FOX "News" that happen all the time. You can believe that it is "only their opinion shows" or that they have serious journalistic talent, but if so you are an idiot. Look I'm not trying to insult you with ad hominem... it would just take somebody pretty fucking dumb not to see the puppet theatre at Fox.
And no, all of MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC correctly attributed the article and did not add political spin to it as FOX did. They are not just as bad as FOX. Now the article does not even exist on FOX's site... much easier to get away with this crap when you sweep it under the rug. I have copies though of the "FOX POV" and original AP, if you doubt.
The problem I have with Linux re: GPL 3 is that he's just being ignorant. He has some beef about people having to give out their own personal private keys that has been shot down by any number of people that actually know what they are talking about legally (PJ, Eben, etc). Just casually reading the license and Linus' comments, he just isn't making any sense.
My best bet is that Linus doesn't actually want to understand the GPL v3. Linux is eminently practical, and the practical thing to do to increase Linux usage, fix bugs, and add new features is to make Linux corporate friendly. A *lot* of contributions come from the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Novell, and other companies. I bet the prospect of these companies pulling out their support is a major consideration (whether intentional or not).
Hurd is a failure because Linux exists. Without Linux, the same developers working on it would be working on Hurd (or a fork of hurd). Torvolds was in the right place at the right time, and did a competent job of capitalizing on it. In this respect he is like Bill Gates, with people saying how if it hadn't been for Microsoft we'd still be using DOS. I think this kind of argument, that it could never have turned out as well without , is pretty absurd.
I am convinced that the equipment has progressed to the point that the greatest threat to vote integrity is not the machines being used (assuming they are at least as secure as the TSx and include a voter verifiable printed audit log) but the lack of procedures or the local election official's unwillingness to follow them.
I call Bullshit. All of the machines I know of actually take away many opportunities for procedures to prevent abuse. For instance, they remove the ability for obvservers to monitor the counting process. A private citizen cannot verify the machine's count because a manual count is only done on audit. I know a person who did an election audit and it was basically "are the seals on there? ok the computer tally must be right then go on to the next". I say it's crap to blame the officials when your product is making it much harder for them to protect the election.
I for one would love to hang out after the election and do my own count as the poll workers add up votes and then check my local polls number the next day in the results, and in the past I could do this. These machines make this pretty much impossible, since verifying the computer readout with the count the next day is a pretty meaningless of a check. In additon, recently laws have been passed in my state (and others) to prevent ordinary citizens from observing the count at all... you have to apply for a small number of permits (as in 10 per poll) and the voting admins select who gets to observe.
Even if you are not personally corrupt or entirely responsible, it seems clear from your posts that are helping to accomplish these really negative results. In your own way, you are responsible for diminishing democracy in this country.
Also the reasons you give for voting machines, 'lager print' and 'reads the vote out loud instead of using braille' seem like pretty poor reasons to me for replacing verified voting with magic numbers since they can be done easily with paper ballots.
I think you are missing the point (maybe on purpose). The machine does not need to know who the candidates are. If each machine merely gives its own winner x% more votes by flipping votes from other candidates then the winner in the most number of polling places will get more total votes than they should (ie 2x * (w-l), where w-l is the difference in number of polling places by candidate and x is the number of votes flipped). Since rural voters tend toward Republicans and have more polling places, this simple algorithm favors Republicans in elections across the board with absolutely no knowledge of individual elections, candidates, or any information other than the machine's local winner (which it clearly knows).
So to take you through an example:
Majority Republican polls: 118,000
Majority Democratic polls: 63,000
Shift at each poll: 3 votes
2x * (w-l):
= 2(3) * (118,000-63,000)
= 330,000
Republican canditate gets 330,000 more votes than the Democrat by shifting only 3 votes at each poll without any extra information. The actual election may be 49.9% vs 50.1% due to democratic polls having higher number of voters per poll machine. These are made up numbers, just to demonstrate the concept since it seems very hard for certain people to grasp.
In addition this method is robust against voter-verified trails, because the incident rate at any particular terminal is so low that the voter will not remember correctly or be believed. The poll workers will just assume that the one or two people it happens to just misvoted and not even report the incident. And that's if the voter actually notices, which I would bet just out of pure hunch is less than a 20% rate. In Ohio for instance, I believe the statitic was that if just one vote was flipped in every district then Kerry would have won. So even a small effect on a global scale is enough.
With an ID so low it almost rules out parent poster being a paid shill for Diebold. This discussion sure *sounds* like astroturfing though. There are so many ways these electronic machines can be rigged it's not even funny. If you can't see *any* of them even after having been led through one I really have no choice but to resort to ad hominem.
Am I the only one that read that as string theory terrorist?
Save the tubes
Biology doesn't have fancy million square foot production centers to make one cpu/brain like we do. The question is really, when we can emulate a human brain at 1000x faster what place will there be for us to do anything. When this mind can spend 24000 hours a day creating a better and faster version of itself, what law of nature gives us the ability to compete with that?
This is the singularity. Even if we can't improve on nature's design we will still be obsolete. Incidentally, that's why I vote for conservatives. There's just nobody out there better at slowing down progress than they are.
They say this can be used for solar cells too. Imagine what 300 billion dollars investment could have done to make this a reality. We're like the 3rd generation of rich kid, the one that pisses away the fortune on gambling and yahts instead of doing something productive with it.
Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.
.write method regardless of whether the object is a file or socket or audio device or pipe or graphics device handle or whatever. You can add new methods like you add files to a plan 9 filesystem, the only difference is that it's ridiculously easy.
Congratulations. You've just invented objects (only crappy ones). If you think that's cool you should check out Java ClassLoader, for instance... you can do all the things you mention for files and more. In Ruby you can call
The main problem I have with Plan 9 is how little actual progress there is. It's like when the old geezer comes up with the same idea over and over again. It's just kinda sad really (check out Squeak for example).
The facts are that the administration has violated our trust and laws many times in a great many ways and this arrest sounds pretty shady on the surface. You are trying to say the villagers should have believed the boy-who-cried-wolf because what happened in the past is not sufficient proof, but that would be totally the wrong interpretation of the fable.
The moral is that if you keep lying people won't believe you even when you tell the truth not that people should believe liers because they might be telling the truth this time.
It's now up to the administration to prove their actions are not illegal, nefarious, deceitful, and so on because of their history until they can re-establish trust. In other words, "we don't have all the facts" is not the neutral position in regards to the administration's actions. The fair and balanced position is "without more facts I have to assume there is actually something shady".
stereotypically "conservative" American ... would rather see Americans live under constant surveillance with no actual freedom than have one single person stand a chance of being killed (or even injured) by some nebulous "terrorist" bogeyman-of-the-week.
Yes it's called being a coward. They're too chickenshit to stand up to the terrorists (attacking iraq instead of getting osama) or make us even slightly self-sufficient in energy or start correcting the environment or even cut the budget. These neo-conservatives basically haven't even got a shred of courage at all.
My favorite Einstein quote is "It should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." There is a point at which over simplifying something inherently complex is counter productive.
Yeah I know, originally Einstein thought it should be Java = MC^2, but then decided it was just a tad bit too simple. Maybe he wanted the giants standing on his shoulders to actually have to work at a grand unified theory...
But consider that the actual engine for quake is quite small and deals with simple concepts (polygons, quad/octtree, textures). At some point a program can get so large and complicated that a person simply can't grasp enough of it at a low level to optimize it well. A JVM for instance can inline a set of functions 6 levels deep or deeper even and then optimize that entire section of code as a unit. But as a person try optimizing 100k of assembly code that has basically no relationship other than that 95% of the time the code follows this particular call sequence (for the other 5% you branch out into non-inlined code).
What's really amusing is for real programs Java is within 1.2-2x of C speed despite having array bounds checks, no pointer arithmetic, type safety, garbage collection, etc. Java is doing so much more than C by all rights it should be ridiculously slow, but it's actually in the same ballpark.
Try taking some real C program and for every structure add an id to the beginning. Turn every array into a struct with array and length. Turn every array access into a bounds check followed by access. Turn every free into a no-op and every malloc into a memory request from a garbage collector. Turn every cast into a type check (for that matter turn every pointer assignment into a type check).
Now compare their performance. C is a dog performance wise, but you can make it really fast at something specific and with a lot of work by ditching any high-level language features. That does not make it a 'fast' language or 'faster', it just makes it another assembly language.
Yet the fact remains that user-mode NTFS is both faster and far, far more complete than kernel mode NTFS. There must be some explanation for it. It seems obvious that kernel mode drivers are too tedious and cumbersome to write effectively.
I do not imply kernel code can't do large IO, but rather that in general it won't have the features to recognize and combine IO as well as user-mode code will. The reason being that *all* code in the kernel has to be perfect so a lot of times you do not even attempt something complex without need. That's nice that you can make pageable kernel memory on some systems, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a PITA compared to user mode allocations.
Your point about swapping a swapping out dynamic data structures for the fs being for single user machines or being slow is pretty weak. For instance, if you insert all the file nodes into a hashtable then you have O(1) disk access to look up something in particular vs however many to locate it in a hierarchy like a btree for instance. So I'm not saying that it necessarily would be faster, but the concept certainly isn't guarenteed slower or only for single-process use.
It seems to me like the parent has read a magazine article and jumped to conclusions. Or perhaps they are even an experienced developer, but took huge liberties with the wording of their statement.
No what he said was perfectly reasonable, you are just being overly literaly. Yes there is memory allocation in the linux kernel, but it's not swappable. Yes, you can put an extra 1 megabyte of standard C++ library in the kernel to support your filesystem and make it fast, but then you have 1 megabyte less for caches and program data, not to mention the space wasted by these to favor performance. Check out the 'standard library' of functions that come standard with the linux kernel. Other than a few crypto it's limited to 'strlen' and friends.
A user-space filesystem, especially one a fantastically complex as NTFS, can be very much faster in user-space. For example, the user-space one can easily render the filesystem structures into something speed efficient but not space efficient. When you go to use the fs these get swapped back in as needed, so you may get a slow latency on the first request but then subsequent ones fly. Another huge factor is being able to focus on the actual optimization rather than managing memory and coding in a demand-driven style like in the kernel. For example, being able to issue one read command for 1 gigabyte of sequential data on the disk is far more efficient than 256 thousand 4k ones.
I've also done kernel coding and yes if you have unlimited resources a linux kernel driver will be faster than a user-space one. But when you don't even have resources to port to 64-bit you're going to be lucky just getting read support in your kernel driver whereas the user-space one will be doing writes already.
I had a disk with a problem of a couple bad blocks that cause NTFS to freak out. Connecting it to another Windows machine cause it to freak out also (as in ntfs driver hosed and left 2nd system's filesystem corrupt). So I wouldn't count on examining a Windows rootkit from another Windows system if I had linux available.
Sellers don't switch because there are fewer bidders so their auctions go for a lower price. So a solution is to let the seller set a minimum price. The bidders don't see the auction minimum until the winner, and then in order of bid value they get to choose whether they want to meet the minimum bid or cancel their bid at no cost of course. If nobody completes the sale then the seller is not charged, or charged a very small amount.
The seller is happy because they can list things without having to risk having to sell for a small amount. The buyer is okay with it because he basically got out-bid; nobody expects to win an auction you just want to, so they get slightly pissed but since they have the choice of meeting the minimum and the system is free to them it's no big deal.
How do you prevent abuse? Give the buyers who do not meet the minimum the chance to rate the seller's minimum price, so people can identify auctions where the seller is asking 'too much' (or just keep stats on how many of seller's auctions didn't sell b/c of the minimum not being met). You may also say if the seller sets a minimum bid, they have to also set a maximum bid (or the maximum bid is a certain factor of the minimum bid, like 2x). This is the 'buyout' price. Depending on how much the item sells for you charge the seller different amounts.
I think something like that could work. Basically as long as the lower sale prices are offset with less risk then they will list on the site. You can pay the sellers to list, like you mention, or you can take away some of their losses.
The problem is not that drugs are illegal, the problem is that you get caught with them and you get sent to prison instead of rehab.
On the other hand, with overhead power lines what would the rats tunnel in? That's right, underground power lines routinely get infested with rats enabling them to travel anywhere.
The problem with CORBA was mostly the technicalities and 'grossness' of the design. Yes I used the Java bindings, and it was just crap. All these "helper" objects and peers and stubs and junk. You'd compile an IDL, which was some hacked up C++ interface which wasn't even C++, get a buttload of Java classes that did not act anything like any other Java object on the planet. Lots of 'icky' exceptions. It just, for lack of a better way to describe it, had no style.
Try to teach CORBA to some normal programmer and they'll be thinking that creating their own wire protocol is probably going to be easier for 99% of the things they need to do. Seriously, you just don't look at CORBA bindings (for Java at least) and want to have anything to do with it. It's probably not so bad for C++ developers because they are used to a lot of noise and complexity, and they have templates and stuff to 'spray perfume' on CORBA and make it smell... better.
But seriously, when your technology drains the life out of any competent developer who actually likes to program then you know something is very wrong.
Java has StrictMath and corresponding strictfp class/method modifier for using the ieee standard floating point rather than the cpu's flavor. It doesn't let you change the rounding mode explicitly, but then again neither does C.
Video codecs are rarely written in C though, mostly the core parts of them are written in assembly. That's one reason why you don't see many ports to Power for instance. Generally excellent performance is not whether the language is JIT compiled or ahead-of-time compiled, it's whether the language is safe or not (ie can you turn safety features off). For instance turn off type checking, errors, exceptions, etc on lisp code and you wouldn't believe how fast it is.