Perfectly true, of course. Some amount of bugs and holes are to be expected. But it seems to me that software companies are held to far looser standards than, say, automobile companies. And I think this relates largely to the relative age of each industry.
People take it for granted that cars work reliably, just as they take it for granted that computers don't. Back when I started using PCs around the time of Windows 3.1, I took it for granted that errors occurred (actually, I remember, though perhaps inaccuratley, 3.1 being surprisingly stable; 95 was where the real issues started) and that I'd have to hit the power switch every so often. That was my accepted norm.
So too, opinion seems to be that security holes are entirely the fault of the attacker, never of the software designers. Do people hold MS responsible when they get infected with a virus? Sure, they grumble, but I see no class-action lawsuits, no new legislation, no nothing. Perhaps I am confusing reliability--resilience against failure in the course of normal use--with security--resilience against intentional attacks--but when Ford Pintos started blowing up because some jackass wired the turn signals through the gas tank, Ford paid (quite dearly, as well, thanks to punitive damages).
I don't remember the specifics of the defects I've seen Apple accused of having ignored, but I imagine plenty are simple fixes (a fix of a buffer overflow on the screen-saver lock took a long time, if I remember right; this should be a simple matter of adding a boundary check on the input). The point is, if software companies were liable for any serious defects, they might try harder. And if they were liable for ignoring those defects, I betcha they'd be able to find someone to get to work on it. Getting that next release out on time, adding that flashy new feature, and staying under budget are natural priorities for software makers. We, the public simply need to weigh in with some careful legislation to balance those priorities with stability, reliability, and maturity. It should not be more profitable to spend money on advertising security than on actually building it.
1) Who says they model themselves as a hardware company? Companies that do both hardware and the software that runs on it are common in enterprise computing (Sun, IBM, SGI, etc). Would you say these companies have little software experience because they are hardware companies? Apple is much the consumer equivalent of these; they make hardware and software woven very tightly together; the idea behind a Mac is not that you get superior hardware or superior software, but that you get a package. And that in being a cohesive package, it is superior, almost inherently, than a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf components (much like Sun's claim that Solaris is the best OS for Sparc, or SGI and IBM with IRIX and AIX (which are both perhaps on the way out, in favor of custom Linux distros)).
2) Yes, Apple patches are offered as timely as Microsoft (which is to say, perhaps not as timely as they should be). I've seen plenty of reports on Bugtraq of Apple being unresponsive to reported bugs, but then I've seen the same with MS. Presumably, they simply didn't take the issue seriously or deemed it unworthy of addressing for some other reason (which leads us back to just how trustworthy your computing really is, if you can't trust the company that designed it).
3) What ``BSD patching system''? I'm pretty well experienced with administering Open and FreeBSD, and I am totally unaware of some patching system inherent to all BSD-derived OSes (say, Solaris?). Both Open and Free have similar pkg and port systems, but this is more because Open liked the way Free did it, not because they are both BSD's (that is, BSD refers to the underlying OS components--as opposed to, say, GNU--not anything else (certainly not the kernel, which, on OSX, is Mach-, not FreeBSD-based)). I think you are confused.
I'm flattered that you think so much of me, but I assure you, content distributers don't redesign their business plans when they realize that their current formats aren't compatible with me. However much I may wish that to be the case.
The claim being made is not that this proves it to be a hoax, but that it disproves the only real evidence for it to be authentic, that it is too complex to be a forgery. In other words, it simply opens the debate a bit more.
I use exclusively Linux on my desktop and have no issues with IE-only sites. Except for a very select few, most sites render fine in Firebird, Mozilla, or Konqueror. I know offhand of one that only seems to work in Opera, and maybe two more that render fine but without certain features they have on IE, like dropdown menues. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but everything seems to be fine.
Perhaps the issue is not that they are designed to work only in IE, but that they are using web standards that were developed since your browser was made (i.e.XHTML 1.0, CSS 1.0, etc). These standards do, in fact, change, and believe it or not, are actually often improvements.
But I guess insisting on a no longer supported browser because it is somehow indefinably better ammounts to Ludditism now, eh? (No, I'm not trying to be an ass, but I can just as easily set my browser to be ``immune to flash, java tricks, and lame DHTML.'')
You know, I'm pretty much in the same boat. I kept a Windows machine around for the longest time for compatibility, but ditched it a bit ago after deciding I rarely used it and didn't even want to have to remember to patch it. My desktop is a $500 midlevel AthlonXP.
For a while, I've wanted a laptop, as well. Now, I could get a wintel for probably seven or eight hundred, and even load linux on it and probably get most of the APM features to work, even. But I also think OSX would be great for some other reasons, such as solving my problems viewing certain kinds of media, running proprietary software, etc. Maybe I'll even start using iTMS. And Mac laptops--and, in fact, Mac workstations (just not low end desktops)--are priced fairly competitively.
So I admit, I've been thinking, if I get a decent payout from my current work, I may very well spring for a low-end iBook. As an easy-to-use, low-maintanance, commercially-supported Unix on the desktop, it can't be beat.
As much as I am a fan of FreeBSD, it seems that ipfw/natd leaves a lot to be desired. I recently finished up a project at work to pretty much duplicate NoCatAuth (we sorta wish we'd known about it before we started). We were debating between Free, Open, or Linux. We chose Linux. The ability to specify rule precedence is key to our design--adding and removing rules for authenticated users--and as far as I could tell from the docs (I'm far more familiar with iptables anyway), natd requires actually reloading natd to add nat rules, and on Open you still can't specify rule orders without reloading all the rules, either. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
He's not specifically trying to pass the buck. He's pointing out that we get ourselves worked up over certain risks more than others.
For example; I know people who refuse to fly, for fear of airplane crashes, but are willing to drive hours every day. Many people, in a similar vein, stopped flying after September 11, even though the probability of being a casualty of terrorism is still extremely low (lower than many other activities they would willingly engage in).
The point is not passing the buck (though I think maybe ou meant to say something else here, since he wasn't trying to say anyone else was responsible for the pollution instead of polluters), but rather that we are perhaps overly concerned about unknown risk, though it is likely smaller than many known risks we willingly accept.
I suppose this doesn't count, since it's run by MS. But they claim they used Windows to serve up the website for the Olympic Games in 2002.
Not that I think it was really more efficient, reliable, and secure than Unix. But you certainly can implement Windows solutions here, if you really, really want to. It just seems far more trouble than it's worth.
Couple of small points to nitpick. First, you, as so many others, seem to think it's a novel idea to not implement the bleeding edge beta software on your critical hardware. No need to point this out; you presumably have a standard policy of testing all upgrades and patches on development hardware before moving it to your production equipment (or should, if you can afford it).
Second, you're probably right about the publishers of the paper, but hey, what can you do? The people with the most interest in these studies are those who have some major investment in the results. Then again, IBM (though perhaps the Linux Technology Center are biased) has AIX as well. But you are right, they have a strong Linux agenda.
Finally, you make the same old criticism that Linux isn't desktop-ready. Fine. Correct. I couldn't agree more; a properly configured desktop may be easy as pie, but that configuration still isn't automated enough for someone totally unskilled to do. But that doesn't matter. That's not what IBM cares about, it's not what large enterprise users care about, and it's not what most home Linux users really care much about, either. That's why it doesn't get done.
I don't think anything is likely to challenge Windows on the desktop anytime soon (and this isn't the threat MS see from Linux, either). But Linux is gaining ground on Windows in datacenters and on servers; companies are turning from Windows to Linux, looking for stability and security (what this paper tests), and power users rely on Linux for advanced tools and efficiency. That, not desktop usability, is where the future of Linux lies.
Your points all are valid, I think, and actually very interesting, but I don't think this means there's no such thing as cheating. If you plagiarize, the issue is not the text you copied, but the ideas. So yeah, perhaps this system would allow us to actually crack down on plagiarists, as well, by detecting copied ideas, even if restated. But I suspect we might find that a lot of papers aren't really as original as the authors thought.
OK, so you're going to argue that there is no morality, that we all have free reign to do what we must to get ahead? I can't argue this position; if you don't feel that there is some imperative to do what is right--say, the greatest good for the greatest number--I certainly can't convince you otherwise. Or perhaps you don't feel that cheating harms anyone (and you may well be right; I acknowledged that most of those who cheated never took anything away from me, those conceivably they did take things away from some students who didn't cheat but also underachieved).
But I doubt you truly feel this way, or else you yourself would cheat; it's not really that hard (especially in a major like EE where there really isn't enough variety in the answers to homework and tests that your distinct writing style stands out).
I sympathize with your predicament (and I admit my grades sunk quite a bit from what I was used to when I went to college), but I stand by what I said. Cheating, of the teen-age sort we talk about most frequently, doesn't get you anywhere. However, expanding the argument, we might conclude that there are serious issues of cheating (a number of famous historians have been discovered to be plagiarists recently; a number of corporate executives have been discovered to be completely falsifying financial and performance related information recently; etc) that are largely irrelevant to technology-based fixes like automatic plagiarism detection.
Anywho, good luck in school. And really, a 120 IQ doesn't sound all that bad (isn't 100 average?). If there's anything I can say, it's that your goals may not match those you are trying to achieve, anyway. I know that I wouldn't particularly enjoy my success if I simply cheated to get there. And money, as Pink Floyd sang, isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway.
Good point. Of course, with all the stories about E911 enabled cell phones, tracking isn't restricted to your car anymore (I'm about to get a new cell phone, and it's going to have GPS onboard, and there's not really a lot I can do about it).
But of course you could get a prepaid phone for a few bucks and hook it up to your car's electrical system and hide it somewhere. Bit of a DIY job, but someone could sell kits. Then you sign it up for a tracking service and you got it when you need it.
Then again, the cost is pretty high (though certainly competitive with OnStar) for such low overhead. I wonder how cheaply you could make dedicated devices for this.
This isn't necessarily the big problem it appears. I've heard of many college professors and high school teachers using automated plagiarism detectors in the news, and that strikes me as stupid, as well. I mean, if a student has to write a paper on _The Bell Jar_, I'm sure he can find one online. But in most classes, you expect some level of familiarity with the students, on part of the teacher. If a kid who sleeps in every class and who's comments tend to be off topic or stupid turns in a paper worthy of The Atlantic Monthly, the teacher ought to realize something is up. Sure, it may not be absolute proof of wrongdoing, but it warrants a talk with the student about his erratic performance.
College courses might be a bit tougher; there are certainly plenty in which the course is simply too large for the professor to know all the students, but in most courses, the subject matter is novel enough that finding a paper online that's relevant should be pretty difficult.
I went to a high school with quite a lot of cheating (probably at least half the students engaged in it occasionally or more), and it really did get me. The co-valedictorian was this fat bitch who cheated on a regular basis (and even had been caught at it). And even in college I've seen some things that were borderline or worse. But there are better answers to this than ``let's do everything we can to stop cheaters.''
First, cheating is symptomatic of misplaced priorities and pressures. The students who cheated the most were the ones who didn't really understand why they should go to school.
Second, as trite as it sounds, you really are only cheating yourself. The kids who cheated the most in my high school didn't get very far (save perhaps for the co-valedictorian). I never cheated, and (not to toot my own horn, of course) I was the other co-valedictorian, I went to the prestigious school, I had the career opportunities, etc. The thing that always struck me as funny was that most of the kids who cheated didn't do very well anyway.
And finally, even if some people cheat and get good grades, does it really matter? Your grades aren't relative to others, they are your own. Sure, colleges look at what percentile you are in, but I don't think cheating ever helped anyone that much to begin with. And grades themselves, cheating or no, are pretty meaningless; grade inflation and average GPAs vary enough from school to school as to be useless as objective indicators anyway. You hope colleges can see a bit more into the personality of their applicants than simply the GPA (and if they can't, it's the admissions system, not cheating, that's at fault).
To be fair (I do agree that OnStar is way overpriced and limited in use), he's got a point about some of the features. I've never locked my keys in my car, but the rest aren't really his fault.
Cars get stolen, and OnStar seems like a nice replacement for LoJack. Cars break down, and it's nice to be able to diagnose the problem (though certainly it'd be better to just have the screen in the car display the output itself, so I can call a tow truck myself on my cell phone). And especially the accident alert thing seems useful; if I get in an accident on some country road (and I admit, I have been involved in accidents; it's less a case of stupidity then hitting black ice or driving in dangerous conditions) it'd be really, really nice to have help on the way, even if I am incapacitated. Think about it a bit first, will you, before you reply?
What if the person is not an American citizen? Last I checked, immigrants--especially of the illegal variety--aren't given the right to an attorney, or a fair trial, or to be secure from search and seizure. In fact, check out this story (which was reported on by numerous mainstream news outlets, but the facts of which are admittedly hazy).
Then again, look at Jose Padilla. In plenty of situations, citizens aren't given those rights, either.
I have a friend who used to joke that he really wanted a bootup screen that said, ``This laptop will self-destruct in 5 minutes...4...3...''. Figured it'd be great fun to watch the guys scramble when they ask him to boot up his machine.
Then again, I think that was before September 11. Now the risk of having someone else inspecting my body cavities would convince me not to try it.
This would still just do context-switching at regular intervals, no? Even that would be useless without the OS still managing the rest of the scheduling, I would think (I don't know a whole lot about this, though).
There are a couple of ways of looking at this. The first is that they use chemical sniffers (as a previous poster mentioned) to try to detect explosives, regardless of opening your device. This should be, in theory, far more accurate anyway.
But I think the reality, disturbing as it may be, is that there are so many loopholes that they can do little more than a token effort. Remember that student who hid boxcutters on airplanes to show how insecure they still are? For that matter, if blades are a threat (and in reality, using a plane as a weapon is a far greater threat than simply blowing up the plane itself), one could easily a) get one of those nifty carbon fiber commando-style blades that don't set off metal detectors, b) hide a blade in some metal case (like a laptop chassis), c) hide a thin blade inside something metallic like a pen, d) watch James Bond movies for more inspiration.
The point of the matter, in my opinion, is that it doesn't really matter if someone does damage to a plane or its occupants--I ride Amtrak regularly and there's no security at all--but rather the risk of someone taking over a plane. 250 casualties are certainly bad (but there are plenty of other public situations--Amtrak, for instance--in which we all face the same risk), but the real risk, as I said, is that of someone taking over a plane. And we could prevent that with a lot less effort and a lot less difficulty if we simply beefed up the cockpit doors.
this guy says that the scheduling itself is O(1) but the balancing is O(n). I don't know this myself, but that makes a whole lot more sense; according to the ars article, the scheduler simply keeps two stacks of processes--which is can seemingly do in constant time--but of course doing the load balancing is proportionate to the number of processes (times some constant--you remove constant multipliers in big-O--to do the context switching).
I'm not sure I understand how a hardware scheduler would work. It would need to keep track of the process's state, including virtual memory and registers, no? I don't know how the hardware would do that without the OS's support. You would need a software scheduler to manage these things; otherwise, it seems like you'd be limited to one process per CPU. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
I'm not a Windows user, but I could've sworn that MS no longer support NT4. This is very clearly a troll; as previous posters noted, it is filled with other nonsense and contradictions.
I think the other replier is right. Double's have greater precision than floats (double the precision, in fact:P), so probably are the best option. Ints can be small on some systems, and floats are relatively useless compared to doubles. I can't remember offhand if longs are standard or system-specific, but I'm inclined to think the latter.
Or could it be that they prefer the rounding effect of floating point notation? After all, if you measure a really damn big interval, a few milliseconds probably don't matter a whole lot. So a TimeInterval, in that sort of usage, might not mind the loss of precision that would obviously be debilitating in, say, the datatype that actually holds the system time (bash$ date Sun Dec 21 sometime at night).
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People take it for granted that cars work reliably, just as they take it for granted that computers don't. Back when I started using PCs around the time of Windows 3.1, I took it for granted that errors occurred (actually, I remember, though perhaps inaccuratley, 3.1 being surprisingly stable; 95 was where the real issues started) and that I'd have to hit the power switch every so often. That was my accepted norm.
So too, opinion seems to be that security holes are entirely the fault of the attacker, never of the software designers. Do people hold MS responsible when they get infected with a virus? Sure, they grumble, but I see no class-action lawsuits, no new legislation, no nothing. Perhaps I am confusing reliability--resilience against failure in the course of normal use--with security--resilience against intentional attacks--but when Ford Pintos started blowing up because some jackass wired the turn signals through the gas tank, Ford paid (quite dearly, as well, thanks to punitive damages).
I don't remember the specifics of the defects I've seen Apple accused of having ignored, but I imagine plenty are simple fixes (a fix of a buffer overflow on the screen-saver lock took a long time, if I remember right; this should be a simple matter of adding a boundary check on the input). The point is, if software companies were liable for any serious defects, they might try harder. And if they were liable for ignoring those defects, I betcha they'd be able to find someone to get to work on it. Getting that next release out on time, adding that flashy new feature, and staying under budget are natural priorities for software makers. We, the public simply need to weigh in with some careful legislation to balance those priorities with stability, reliability, and maturity. It should not be more profitable to spend money on advertising security than on actually building it.
Oh, yeah. And OpenDarwin provides FreeBSD-style ports, while Fink provides apt and packages based on the .deb format from Debian.
1) Who says they model themselves as a hardware company? Companies that do both hardware and the software that runs on it are common in enterprise computing (Sun, IBM, SGI, etc). Would you say these companies have little software experience because they are hardware companies? Apple is much the consumer equivalent of these; they make hardware and software woven very tightly together; the idea behind a Mac is not that you get superior hardware or superior software, but that you get a package. And that in being a cohesive package, it is superior, almost inherently, than a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf components (much like Sun's claim that Solaris is the best OS for Sparc, or SGI and IBM with IRIX and AIX (which are both perhaps on the way out, in favor of custom Linux distros)).
2) Yes, Apple patches are offered as timely as Microsoft (which is to say, perhaps not as timely as they should be). I've seen plenty of reports on Bugtraq of Apple being unresponsive to reported bugs, but then I've seen the same with MS. Presumably, they simply didn't take the issue seriously or deemed it unworthy of addressing for some other reason (which leads us back to just how trustworthy your computing really is, if you can't trust the company that designed it).
3) What ``BSD patching system''? I'm pretty well experienced with administering Open and FreeBSD, and I am totally unaware of some patching system inherent to all BSD-derived OSes (say, Solaris?). Both Open and Free have similar pkg and port systems, but this is more because Open liked the way Free did it, not because they are both BSD's (that is, BSD refers to the underlying OS components--as opposed to, say, GNU--not anything else (certainly not the kernel, which, on OSX, is Mach-, not FreeBSD-based)). I think you are confused.
I'm flattered that you think so much of me, but I assure you, content distributers don't redesign their business plans when they realize that their current formats aren't compatible with me. However much I may wish that to be the case.
The claim being made is not that this proves it to be a hoax, but that it disproves the only real evidence for it to be authentic, that it is too complex to be a forgery. In other words, it simply opens the debate a bit more.
Perhaps the issue is not that they are designed to work only in IE, but that they are using web standards that were developed since your browser was made (i.e.XHTML 1.0, CSS 1.0, etc). These standards do, in fact, change, and believe it or not, are actually often improvements.
But I guess insisting on a no longer supported browser because it is somehow indefinably better ammounts to Ludditism now, eh? (No, I'm not trying to be an ass, but I can just as easily set my browser to be ``immune to flash, java tricks, and lame DHTML.'')
For a while, I've wanted a laptop, as well. Now, I could get a wintel for probably seven or eight hundred, and even load linux on it and probably get most of the APM features to work, even. But I also think OSX would be great for some other reasons, such as solving my problems viewing certain kinds of media, running proprietary software, etc. Maybe I'll even start using iTMS. And Mac laptops--and, in fact, Mac workstations (just not low end desktops)--are priced fairly competitively.
So I admit, I've been thinking, if I get a decent payout from my current work, I may very well spring for a low-end iBook. As an easy-to-use, low-maintanance, commercially-supported Unix on the desktop, it can't be beat.
As much as I am a fan of FreeBSD, it seems that ipfw/natd leaves a lot to be desired. I recently finished up a project at work to pretty much duplicate NoCatAuth (we sorta wish we'd known about it before we started). We were debating between Free, Open, or Linux. We chose Linux. The ability to specify rule precedence is key to our design--adding and removing rules for authenticated users--and as far as I could tell from the docs (I'm far more familiar with iptables anyway), natd requires actually reloading natd to add nat rules, and on Open you still can't specify rule orders without reloading all the rules, either. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
For example; I know people who refuse to fly, for fear of airplane crashes, but are willing to drive hours every day. Many people, in a similar vein, stopped flying after September 11, even though the probability of being a casualty of terrorism is still extremely low (lower than many other activities they would willingly engage in).
The point is not passing the buck (though I think maybe ou meant to say something else here, since he wasn't trying to say anyone else was responsible for the pollution instead of polluters), but rather that we are perhaps overly concerned about unknown risk, though it is likely smaller than many known risks we willingly accept.
Not that I think it was really more efficient, reliable, and secure than Unix. But you certainly can implement Windows solutions here, if you really, really want to. It just seems far more trouble than it's worth.
Second, you're probably right about the publishers of the paper, but hey, what can you do? The people with the most interest in these studies are those who have some major investment in the results. Then again, IBM (though perhaps the Linux Technology Center are biased) has AIX as well. But you are right, they have a strong Linux agenda.
Finally, you make the same old criticism that Linux isn't desktop-ready. Fine. Correct. I couldn't agree more; a properly configured desktop may be easy as pie, but that configuration still isn't automated enough for someone totally unskilled to do. But that doesn't matter. That's not what IBM cares about, it's not what large enterprise users care about, and it's not what most home Linux users really care much about, either. That's why it doesn't get done.
I don't think anything is likely to challenge Windows on the desktop anytime soon (and this isn't the threat MS see from Linux, either). But Linux is gaining ground on Windows in datacenters and on servers; companies are turning from Windows to Linux, looking for stability and security (what this paper tests), and power users rely on Linux for advanced tools and efficiency. That, not desktop usability, is where the future of Linux lies.
Your points all are valid, I think, and actually very interesting, but I don't think this means there's no such thing as cheating. If you plagiarize, the issue is not the text you copied, but the ideas. So yeah, perhaps this system would allow us to actually crack down on plagiarists, as well, by detecting copied ideas, even if restated. But I suspect we might find that a lot of papers aren't really as original as the authors thought.
But I doubt you truly feel this way, or else you yourself would cheat; it's not really that hard (especially in a major like EE where there really isn't enough variety in the answers to homework and tests that your distinct writing style stands out).
I sympathize with your predicament (and I admit my grades sunk quite a bit from what I was used to when I went to college), but I stand by what I said. Cheating, of the teen-age sort we talk about most frequently, doesn't get you anywhere. However, expanding the argument, we might conclude that there are serious issues of cheating (a number of famous historians have been discovered to be plagiarists recently; a number of corporate executives have been discovered to be completely falsifying financial and performance related information recently; etc) that are largely irrelevant to technology-based fixes like automatic plagiarism detection.
Anywho, good luck in school. And really, a 120 IQ doesn't sound all that bad (isn't 100 average?). If there's anything I can say, it's that your goals may not match those you are trying to achieve, anyway. I know that I wouldn't particularly enjoy my success if I simply cheated to get there. And money, as Pink Floyd sang, isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway.
But of course you could get a prepaid phone for a few bucks and hook it up to your car's electrical system and hide it somewhere. Bit of a DIY job, but someone could sell kits. Then you sign it up for a tracking service and you got it when you need it.
Then again, the cost is pretty high (though certainly competitive with OnStar) for such low overhead. I wonder how cheaply you could make dedicated devices for this.
College courses might be a bit tougher; there are certainly plenty in which the course is simply too large for the professor to know all the students, but in most courses, the subject matter is novel enough that finding a paper online that's relevant should be pretty difficult.
I went to a high school with quite a lot of cheating (probably at least half the students engaged in it occasionally or more), and it really did get me. The co-valedictorian was this fat bitch who cheated on a regular basis (and even had been caught at it). And even in college I've seen some things that were borderline or worse. But there are better answers to this than ``let's do everything we can to stop cheaters.''
First, cheating is symptomatic of misplaced priorities and pressures. The students who cheated the most were the ones who didn't really understand why they should go to school.
Second, as trite as it sounds, you really are only cheating yourself. The kids who cheated the most in my high school didn't get very far (save perhaps for the co-valedictorian). I never cheated, and (not to toot my own horn, of course) I was the other co-valedictorian, I went to the prestigious school, I had the career opportunities, etc. The thing that always struck me as funny was that most of the kids who cheated didn't do very well anyway.
And finally, even if some people cheat and get good grades, does it really matter? Your grades aren't relative to others, they are your own. Sure, colleges look at what percentile you are in, but I don't think cheating ever helped anyone that much to begin with. And grades themselves, cheating or no, are pretty meaningless; grade inflation and average GPAs vary enough from school to school as to be useless as objective indicators anyway. You hope colleges can see a bit more into the personality of their applicants than simply the GPA (and if they can't, it's the admissions system, not cheating, that's at fault).
I guess I'm a bit offtopic now. Ah, well.
Cars get stolen, and OnStar seems like a nice replacement for LoJack. Cars break down, and it's nice to be able to diagnose the problem (though certainly it'd be better to just have the screen in the car display the output itself, so I can call a tow truck myself on my cell phone). And especially the accident alert thing seems useful; if I get in an accident on some country road (and I admit, I have been involved in accidents; it's less a case of stupidity then hitting black ice or driving in dangerous conditions) it'd be really, really nice to have help on the way, even if I am incapacitated. Think about it a bit first, will you, before you reply?
Then again, look at Jose Padilla. In plenty of situations, citizens aren't given those rights, either.
Then again, I think that was before September 11. Now the risk of having someone else inspecting my body cavities would convince me not to try it.
This would still just do context-switching at regular intervals, no? Even that would be useless without the OS still managing the rest of the scheduling, I would think (I don't know a whole lot about this, though).
But I think the reality, disturbing as it may be, is that there are so many loopholes that they can do little more than a token effort. Remember that student who hid boxcutters on airplanes to show how insecure they still are? For that matter, if blades are a threat (and in reality, using a plane as a weapon is a far greater threat than simply blowing up the plane itself), one could easily a) get one of those nifty carbon fiber commando-style blades that don't set off metal detectors, b) hide a blade in some metal case (like a laptop chassis), c) hide a thin blade inside something metallic like a pen, d) watch James Bond movies for more inspiration.
The point of the matter, in my opinion, is that it doesn't really matter if someone does damage to a plane or its occupants--I ride Amtrak regularly and there's no security at all--but rather the risk of someone taking over a plane. 250 casualties are certainly bad (but there are plenty of other public situations--Amtrak, for instance--in which we all face the same risk), but the real risk, as I said, is that of someone taking over a plane. And we could prevent that with a lot less effort and a lot less difficulty if we simply beefed up the cockpit doors.
this guy says that the scheduling itself is O(1) but the balancing is O(n). I don't know this myself, but that makes a whole lot more sense; according to the ars article, the scheduler simply keeps two stacks of processes--which is can seemingly do in constant time--but of course doing the load balancing is proportionate to the number of processes (times some constant--you remove constant multipliers in big-O--to do the context switching).
I'm not sure I understand how a hardware scheduler would work. It would need to keep track of the process's state, including virtual memory and registers, no? I don't know how the hardware would do that without the OS's support. You would need a software scheduler to manage these things; otherwise, it seems like you'd be limited to one process per CPU. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
That said, he was a moron.
I'm not a Windows user, but I could've sworn that MS no longer support NT4. This is very clearly a troll; as previous posters noted, it is filled with other nonsense and contradictions.
Or could it be that they prefer the rounding effect of floating point notation? After all, if you measure a really damn big interval, a few milliseconds probably don't matter a whole lot. So a TimeInterval, in that sort of usage, might not mind the loss of precision that would obviously be debilitating in, say, the datatype that actually holds the system time (bash$ date
Sun Dec 21 sometime at night).