Thanks for not understanding anything about Java. Java CAN use native widgets -- check out SWT. SWT apps look great. Take Eclipse and Azureus for example: they're superb applications, they integrate well with nice shortcuts and launchers and whatnot, and they look wonderful. Even swing apps can look great if some effort is put into their design; Netbeans is a great IDE.
Isn't that always how it is? I mean, AMD and Intel mostly succeed because they can ship chips in volume and at low prices. Most actual innovation takes place at Sun, IBM, or other server-oriented companies if I'm not mistaken. The Alpha is just a particularly poignant example.
SSH rules -- definitely one of the triumphs of modern software development. An absolutely essential set of tools, with open standards, competing implementations, and availability on every platform conceivable.
You're totally missing the point. Texas didn't decide to create a statewide wifi service or anything. They just respected the rights of individual municipalities to make up their own minds. If the residents of a town want free wifi from their local government, then they should have it. Sure, it might be a mistake (although I doubt it), but it's undemocratic to stop them just because the state government has a hard-on for private services.
Government always functions best at the lowest levels, because that's where politicians have the most accountability and direct contact with their constituents. Having the state make decisions for municipalities is a mistake, just like having the federal government make decisions for the states is undemocratic. Higher levels of government are at best a necessary evil, and they need to be stopped from needlessly interfering with the lower levels.
Yes, that's what I mean. It would presumably slow down to a crawl as it slowly gathered more entropy. Of course, it might deliberately stop functioning, as an entropy daemon in such a state is almost certainly more open to manipulation.
Speaking from experience, Java's SecureRandom slows down a few bytes a second, because it has to wait for sufficient context switches to take place within the JVM.
Unfortunately, IO monitoring is generally somewhat bounded in terms of how much entropy you can gather. There are only so many interrupts per second, only so many context switches per second, etc. I don't know how quickly/dev/random can be exhausted, but I was quite surprised to discover that Java's SecureRandom class can be exhausted if you request as few as 2500 bytes from it at once. Of course, SecureRandom only uses thread-switching behaviour as a source of entropy, so/dev/random can certainly provide more -- but a limit certainly exists, probably up around a few hundred megabytes.
It's only a lost sale if the downloader WOULD have bought the album had it not been available for free. For example, I would never, ever have paid for Beck's "Guero". It's worth the five minutes of my time necessary to download, but it's definitely not worth the $25 that is being charged for it at any of the nearby music stores.
Whichever label owns Beck didn't lose even a penny because of my downloading because I would NEVER pay for such a terrible album. I just wanted to see how it sounded.
The whole "lost sales" idea is a joke, seriously. People are still buying just as many albums as they ever were, as sales figures demonstrate.
Thanks for turning this into a partisan issue. Good job. The entire debate has been improved because of your ridiculous attempt to point out that another political party is just as pathetically corrupt as the one that is currently in power. I salute your blind political idolatry.
The argument actually applies just as well inside the US. Municipal governments could easily be taken to task for wasting their money on products that support jobs off in Washington, rather than on local techs to support OSS products. You know, that whole "think globally, act locally" deal. Not that I'm personally a big fan of that in general; globalism has a lot to offer if it's managed properly. But municipal and state/provincial governments are always looking for things that they can show off to voters and say "look, we're creating jobs!" OSS offers a way for savvy software companies to exploit that.
Browsers are easily the most common way of accessing network resources of all kinds. Virtually all ecommerce, business, data access, etc, goes through a browser. Lots of people access their email through a browser, and that tendency seems to be increasing. This makes browser security absolutely paramount. It is the biggest gateway into the system.
Just out of curiosity, how does fish:// differ from sftp:// ? I've used the latter but never the former, and am curious if it's superior or advantageous in some way.
There's nothing quite as awesome as a genuine computer science course, taught by someone who loves the field. Algorithms II was just about the best I took in university; the professor was just so interested in randomized algorithms and approximation algorithms that it was infectious. Her three hour crash course on Turing Machines was pretty neat too, although certainly no substitute for the dedicated course on the subject.
The only other professors who even came close were the Physics 101 professor who drove around the lecture theatre in a tiny little car to demonstrate accelleration and velocity with the rangefinder and his Macintosh, and the Chemistry 100 prof who electrocuted pickles and detonated balloons full of various ratios of hydrogen and oxygen.
My province has a similar problem with our phone service. It was privatized some time ago, and is now terrible. And yet the exact same company that is mismanaging the telephone network provides absolutely superb DSL service -- because they're in ruthless competition with the local cable companies.
The free market is a thing of beauty when it works, and is an absolute nightmare when it fails. The exact opposite of crown corporations, actually. Crown corporations are just all uniformly annoying; not particularly well run, but not particularly badly run.
That's only true in the most backwater parts of the continent. In cities and suburban areas, prices and quality of service are quite good. Our broadband isn't as fast or cheap as in some places, but it's still pretty damn good. My internet connection is actually more reliable than my phone line these days. I, for example, get a 1.5 megabit line for just 25 Canadian dollars a month -- that's like $3.15/mo in US currency.;)
Naturally though, this only true in places where a cable provider and a DSL provider are at each other's throats, or in one of the rare locales with multiple cable or DSL providers. In towns with just one internet provider, the normal monopoly problems exist.
Private utilities aren't so bad -- as long as there is competition. Look at the cell phone networks or the North American internet network -- the free market has done a great job with these. It's only when the utility is singular that the free market fails -- just look at places that have privatized their reservoirs or power grid.
Okay, how about you go and try to convince a bunch of suburbanites that having cougars living in the woods near their neighbourhood is okay. Let me know how it goes.
That's the great thing about the US -- virtually every single bit of forest left is near either agricultural land or suburbs. Farmers don't want predators eating their livestock, and suburbanites don't want predators eating their pets and children.
Reintroducing predators isn't always practical. They are difficult to breed in captivity, and lots of people don't want predators living near their homes. Cougars, wolves, and bears are all quite willing to kill people's pets and livestock. Cougars in particular are quite willing to attack children. If food is scarce they'll even attack full-grown humans.
That's why I very clearly said "free range". The only rodents and insects killed to feed a free range ruminant are those that get stepped on by the aforementioned ruminant.
They managed because of top predators. Most of the top predators are gone now though, thanks to us. Wolves are rare, cougars practically wiped out, and bears have seriously declined. North America now has a serious lack of predators, other than the pink two-legged kind.
Please excuse my overly liberal use of the word "everyone". I just mean "lots of people" -- enough people that large predators have been virtually wiped out. Even if it were just a minority of people are doing the complaining, that can be enough constitute "everyone" in a political sense; look at how much power the 20% of Americans who are fundamentalist-Christian exert over the other 80%.
I used to dislike hunters. Then I met one -- hell of a guy. He gave my family an assload of venison steaks and moose sausage. Damn good stuff. Later, when I took biology in University, I learned about how much of a problem the unchecked growth of American deer populations causes for forest ecosystems, all because of overly strict hunting limits.
As a sidenote, dickwads with anything are a problem. Is there really any tool you would trust a dickwad with? Guns are just a particularly extreme example.
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Thanks for not understanding anything about Java. Java CAN use native widgets -- check out SWT. SWT apps look great. Take Eclipse and Azureus for example: they're superb applications, they integrate well with nice shortcuts and launchers and whatnot, and they look wonderful. Even swing apps can look great if some effort is put into their design; Netbeans is a great IDE.
Isn't that always how it is? I mean, AMD and Intel mostly succeed because they can ship chips in volume and at low prices. Most actual innovation takes place at Sun, IBM, or other server-oriented companies if I'm not mistaken. The Alpha is just a particularly poignant example.
So hats off to OpenSSH, y'all. :)
Government always functions best at the lowest levels, because that's where politicians have the most accountability and direct contact with their constituents. Having the state make decisions for municipalities is a mistake, just like having the federal government make decisions for the states is undemocratic. Higher levels of government are at best a necessary evil, and they need to be stopped from needlessly interfering with the lower levels.
Yes, that's what I mean. It would presumably slow down to a crawl as it slowly gathered more entropy. Of course, it might deliberately stop functioning, as an entropy daemon in such a state is almost certainly more open to manipulation.
Speaking from experience, Java's SecureRandom slows down a few bytes a second, because it has to wait for sufficient context switches to take place within the JVM.
Unfortunately, IO monitoring is generally somewhat bounded in terms of how much entropy you can gather. There are only so many interrupts per second, only so many context switches per second, etc. I don't know how quickly /dev/random can be exhausted, but I was quite surprised to discover that Java's SecureRandom class can be exhausted if you request as few as 2500 bytes from it at once. Of course, SecureRandom only uses thread-switching behaviour as a source of entropy, so /dev/random can certainly provide more -- but a limit certainly exists, probably up around a few hundred megabytes.
Whichever label owns Beck didn't lose even a penny because of my downloading because I would NEVER pay for such a terrible album. I just wanted to see how it sounded.
The whole "lost sales" idea is a joke, seriously. People are still buying just as many albums as they ever were, as sales figures demonstrate.
Thanks for turning this into a partisan issue. Good job. The entire debate has been improved because of your ridiculous attempt to point out that another political party is just as pathetically corrupt as the one that is currently in power. I salute your blind political idolatry.
The argument actually applies just as well inside the US. Municipal governments could easily be taken to task for wasting their money on products that support jobs off in Washington, rather than on local techs to support OSS products. You know, that whole "think globally, act locally" deal. Not that I'm personally a big fan of that in general; globalism has a lot to offer if it's managed properly. But municipal and state/provincial governments are always looking for things that they can show off to voters and say "look, we're creating jobs!" OSS offers a way for savvy software companies to exploit that.
Funny and insightful. I'd mod you up if I still had my mod points from this morning.
Browsers are easily the most common way of accessing network resources of all kinds. Virtually all ecommerce, business, data access, etc, goes through a browser. Lots of people access their email through a browser, and that tendency seems to be increasing. This makes browser security absolutely paramount. It is the biggest gateway into the system.
My campus had those posters too, but some wag went around putting up posters for StarOffice right above them. Hi-larious.
Damn, that is cool.
We never got to fire metal washers, sadly... but we did get to use a Jacob's Ladder to cut glass rods.
Just out of curiosity, how does fish:// differ from sftp:// ? I've used the latter but never the former, and am curious if it's superior or advantageous in some way.
The only other professors who even came close were the Physics 101 professor who drove around the lecture theatre in a tiny little car to demonstrate accelleration and velocity with the rangefinder and his Macintosh, and the Chemistry 100 prof who electrocuted pickles and detonated balloons full of various ratios of hydrogen and oxygen.
My province has a similar problem with our phone service. It was privatized some time ago, and is now terrible. And yet the exact same company that is mismanaging the telephone network provides absolutely superb DSL service -- because they're in ruthless competition with the local cable companies.
The free market is a thing of beauty when it works, and is an absolute nightmare when it fails. The exact opposite of crown corporations, actually. Crown corporations are just all uniformly annoying; not particularly well run, but not particularly badly run.
Naturally though, this only true in places where a cable provider and a DSL provider are at each other's throats, or in one of the rare locales with multiple cable or DSL providers. In towns with just one internet provider, the normal monopoly problems exist.
Private utilities aren't so bad -- as long as there is competition. Look at the cell phone networks or the North American internet network -- the free market has done a great job with these. It's only when the utility is singular that the free market fails -- just look at places that have privatized their reservoirs or power grid.
That's the great thing about the US -- virtually every single bit of forest left is near either agricultural land or suburbs. Farmers don't want predators eating their livestock, and suburbanites don't want predators eating their pets and children.
Reintroducing predators isn't always practical. They are difficult to breed in captivity, and lots of people don't want predators living near their homes. Cougars, wolves, and bears are all quite willing to kill people's pets and livestock. Cougars in particular are quite willing to attack children. If food is scarce they'll even attack full-grown humans.
That's why I very clearly said "free range". The only rodents and insects killed to feed a free range ruminant are those that get stepped on by the aforementioned ruminant.
They managed because of top predators. Most of the top predators are gone now though, thanks to us. Wolves are rare, cougars practically wiped out, and bears have seriously declined. North America now has a serious lack of predators, other than the pink two-legged kind.
Please excuse my overly liberal use of the word "everyone". I just mean "lots of people" -- enough people that large predators have been virtually wiped out. Even if it were just a minority of people are doing the complaining, that can be enough constitute "everyone" in a political sense; look at how much power the 20% of Americans who are fundamentalist-Christian exert over the other 80%.
As a sidenote, dickwads with anything are a problem. Is there really any tool you would trust a dickwad with? Guns are just a particularly extreme example.