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User: Mr+Z

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  1. Re:20 second explanation on Null References, the Billion Dollar Mistake · · Score: 1

    Ok, in the Javascript case, you make the "next" or "prev" fields disappear, which isn't hard to do in such a dynamic language. It's the difference between "if (!exists($hash{$key})" and "if (!defined($hash{$key}))" in Perl. (ie. not a huge difference, but sometimes important.)

    It sounds pretty much identical to the variant record statement I made above, just with slightly different mechanisms of implementation. In the end, though, you need some way of signaling "the end" of something. We're arguing over how "in band" or "out of band" it should be.

  2. Re:20 second explanation on Null References, the Billion Dollar Mistake · · Score: 1

    Ok, so you have a solution databases. Now describe how you would implement common data structures such as linked lists and binary trees. Keep in mind that in those contexts, NULL is just a sentinel value, so converting NULL to "a magic copy of the structure" isn't really eliminating NULL, since the contents of the structure are still meaningless.

    I imagine your solution ends up looking like Pascal's variant record, where you have a boolean tag that says "has next element" or "has child element", and a conditionally present field that holds that pointer. Hurray for wasting space.

    Decrying NULL pointers is very much like railing against sentinel values. NULL is just a sentinel value of "reference" or "pointer" type.

  3. Not Steve on Without Jobs, Will Open Source Suffer? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Heh... was I the only one who misread this as something to do with Steve Jobs? (And subsequently went "Murrrrrh?")

  4. Re:Nice rant! on A Real Bill Gates Rant · · Score: 1

    I admire, or at least complement this aspect of him. I'm no fan of Microsoft as a whole nor am I an adoring fan of Bill, but Microsoft is not Bill Gates.

  5. Re:I have trouble understanding parts of it though on A Real Bill Gates Rant · · Score: 1

    I imagine he's putting himself in his customer's shoes, trying to think of how Aunt Tillie might interpret the dialog boxes he's seeing, mixed with what he knows about Windows from being inside Microsoft. I've seen a few doozies go by in the Windows Update. (That is, while I still had that enabled. These days corporate IT insists on rolling out patches manually on their own schedule, so I don't see these any more.)

    His download experience was pretty horrific, and I think he was right to call folks on it. Bill's vision long ago was a computer in every home, running Microsoft software to make it a friendly, approachable experience. Good on him for actually trying it on and seeing how far off the mark they are from that target. It's best if your harshest critics are internal.

    I'm actually a Linux user (since 1993!) and I don't particularly like Windows. I'm a command line sort of guy anyway. So, I'm not exactly a Microsoft apologist. I respect Bill though for actually caring about the quality of their company's product.

  6. Nice rant! on A Real Bill Gates Rant · · Score: 1

    It's rather cool that Bill himself sent such rants internally. I know I've sent rants and/or filed numerous bugs on our own products at work from the standpoint of usability and usefulness.

    I'm not the greatest at designing a UI, but I can certainly highlight what doesn't work. What's least likely to work is stuff that crosses organizational boundaries, and it looks like Bill's experience here is one of those: The integration just isn't there.

    I'm not a big fan of Microsoft or its tactics over the years, but I still admire Bill Gates at least a little.

  7. Re:What's most important to keep. on Freeing and Forgetting Data With Science Commons · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With a large and expensive dataset that can be mined many ways, yes, it makes sense to keep the raw data. This is actually pretty similar to the raw datasets that various online providers have published over the years for researchers to datamine. (AOL and Netflix come to mind.) Those data sets are large and hard to reproduce, and lend themselves to multiple experiments.

    But, there are other experiments where the experiment is larger than the data, and so keeping the raw data isn't quite so important as documenting the technique and conclusions. The Michelson-Morley interferometer experiments (to detect the 'ether'), the Millikan oil-drop experiment (which demonstrated quantized charges)... for both of these the experiment and technique were larger than the data, so the data collected doesn't matter so much.

    Thus, there's no simple "one size fits all" answer.

    When it comes to these ginormous data sets that were collected in the absence of any particular experiment or as the side effect of some experiment, their continued existence and maintenance is predicated on future parties constructing and executing experiments against the data. This is where your LHC comment fits.

  8. Re:most are the elderly many alone and without fam on Confusion Reigns As Analog TV Begins Shutdown · · Score: 1

    If only there were some way to, you know, advertise the change in advance? Perhaps some sort of announcement to the public would serve the purpose? A form of public service announcement?

    Wait, what are all these commercials with a TV in the middle of a swimming pool all about?

  9. Re:Authentic is the wrong word on The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune · · Score: 1

    Have you listened to the Extended Dance Remix?

  10. Re:You mean... on Users' Admin Logins Make Most Windows Malware Worse · · Score: 1

    Things are presented much differently in the GUI, and there are things you can do at the command line that are at a minimum unobvious in the GUI. For example, application bundles look like single files in the GUI, but are full directory trees that you can navigate at the command line. I believe the GUI also nerf-coats certain things to make it harder to affect the functioning of the system. The CLI, on the other hand, does not.

    That said, any process you run has the full rights associated with your UNIX user ID. So, while the Finder environment might prevent you from doing something with the mouse, any program you launch has your full privileges, and can do anything the underlying privilege model will let you do. If you can do it from the command line, you can do it with a program launched from the GUI. Any additional "access control" or restrictions placed by the default controls/dialogs/etc. are like lane markers on the road--useful indicators, but in the end, only advisory, since they don't actually keep your car in its lane.

    So, if the Applications directory is writable by the "Admin" group, and your account is a member of the "Admin" group, it's trivial to go muck about with installed applications and infect them without prompting the user.

    (Note: I'm not an OSX expert by any stretch of the imagination. I've just toyed with it a little bit.)

  11. Re:Survey says.... on Windows 7 To Come In Multiple Versions · · Score: 1

    Some of it may be related to service contracts, and trading component cost vs. service tech time to provide a certain level of service.

    If the disabled component fails in isolation (ie. extra RAM goes bad and starts flipping its own bits; extra CPU becomes glitchy), and it doesn't affect the rest of the system around it, then it doesn't turn into a service event.

    If an enabled component fails and there's an equivalent disabled component already installed, service can be migrated from the enabled component to the disabled component, potentially automatically, or at least with reduced downtime. (This is also the reasoning behind hot spares.)

    If a customer has a sudden capacity issue (e.g. traffic spike), they could enable the disabled components in parallel with the already enabled components to absorb the spike, in trade for $$. This provides for a quicker turnaround on an upgrade, for a temporary loss in redundancy/failover.

    If the system fails when using the previously disabled component, now you really do have to "roll a truck" to go fix it. That gets an actual tech involved, and may involve a greater level of downtime.

    At least, that's how I imagine it works, or could work.

    --Joe

  12. Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" on We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories · · Score: 1

    They can influence allocation of resources. They are a source of demand. They also control the price of money which affects both supply and demand. And finally, they can impose tariffs, taxes, create monopolies (or near monopolies) and so on, which further distorts the functioning of the market economy.

    Sure, you can't sustain broad, long term growth purely through governmental spending. I don't think anyone is trying to argue that. But government spending and government policy can have a definite impact on economic growth.

  13. Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" on We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories · · Score: 1

    Actually, yes I do. In fact, I remember writing exam answers to questions of the form "Given these details, what would you do as President, and what economic policies would you adopt?" Seriously.

    The executive branch directly controls a lot of spending, and is one of the more powerful forces shaping the national agenda. The US Treasury resides within the executive branch, and so its policies extend from the president's priorities. And finally, the president can submit bills to Congress, even though he cannot vote on them there.

    That's just a smattering of how the president can influence the economy. Other governmental actors on the economy (such as Congress and the Fed) are technically independent, but the reality is that the executive branch wields a some amount of political power over them.

  14. Re:from TFA on AMD Phenom II Overclocked To 6.5GHz · · Score: 1

    Hmmm... if you're going to go with 486 overclocking, that probably tops out more like 200MHz.

  15. Re:FUD, censorship, and freedom. on "Nuclear Archaeology" Inspires Replica of Hiroshima's Little Boy · · Score: 1

    No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs

    Then why do major metropolises have radiation detectors to detect and prevent against dirty bomb attacks? That seems like an even less efficient use of radioactive material.

  16. Re:How soon until... on "Nuclear Archaeology" Inspires Replica of Hiroshima's Little Boy · · Score: 1

    Ask this guy.

  17. Re:Turbo button... on How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer? · · Score: 1

    Could be worse. The first ATs ran at a blistering 6MHz. Then there were the ricers of the PC world, dropping NEC V20 and NEC V30 chips in their XT machines for a few extra %....

    (That would have been me if I had the $$ back in the day.)

  18. Re:Turbo button... on How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Even my computer with the Turbo button switched between 8MHz and 25MHz. (Later, 8MHz and 33MHz.) And that was a scant 16 years ago...

    Your computer is probably of legal drinking age by now!

  19. Re:so, to summarize... on Windows 7 Taskbar Not So Similar To OS X Dock After All · · Score: 1

    errr, s/doc/dock/. Meesa can't spell.

  20. Re:so, to summarize... on Windows 7 Taskbar Not So Similar To OS X Dock After All · · Score: 1

    This guy didn't have the doc yet, but I think he's got a heckuva lot of prior art even on Xerox. ;-)

  21. Re:Highlights one of the problems.. on Google Terminates Six Services · · Score: 1

    It isn't free, but isn't it accounted for here?

    and the minimal amount of staff time needed to keep it running.

    If everything hums along nicely because it was configured properly up front, and the system is resilient to hardware failures (or maybe lucky and has avoided hardware failures?), and user demand is stable, then what maintenance is there really?

    It's not as if the IT guys have to continually tweak settings and options to keep the mail system from bubbling over. If the demand on the system is pretty stable, and the configuration is sane, then the maintenance mostly boils down to swapping out hardware components when they go ka-put. Making the up front investment with competent personnel is expensive (and perhaps that ought to be rolled in), but that's NRE. The recurring costs ought to be dominated by such mundane things as electricity bills and replacement hardware in that case.

  22. Re:Hmm on Google Terminates Six Services · · Score: 1

    If you want to convert an asset into a liquid asset, I believe "liquidate" is the correct form, as oppose to liquefy. That aside, a liquid asset is not a monetized asset.

    Suppose you have a car. Liquidating the car would convert it into cash or other liquid asset--ie. you'd sell it. Monetizing the car means you've figured out how to make money using the car. You've turned a piece of equipment into a source of money. Maybe you deliver pizzas with it. This is sense 3 of the definition. You've retained the asset (the car in this case), but you've turned it into a money maker. It isn't money, but it's become a source of money./P>

    Compare to the phrase "make a mint off of (whatever)."

  23. Some issues on Solution Against Cold Boot Attack In the Making · · Score: 1

    In many cases, all you need is the right Firewire device to scan memory, for one thing.

    The other is that saving the keys in the register file doesn't help much if context switches can still happen. Guess where the keys get saved on a context switch? RAM, naturally. And don't forget paging behavior--although if the page holding the keys was allocated within the kernel with kmalloc(), you're ok there.

    If I were going to try to brute-force a key based on a chilled RAM, I'd just dump the entire contents of RAM as a set of 32-bit words, sort it, remove the dupes, and use that as a dictionary. On a machine with 4GB of RAM, that'd probably net me a dictionary with only a dozen million "words," tops. Say, for the sake of argument, there are 2^24 unique 32-bit words.

    With this "dictionary", I could then try to brute-force all the 128-bit AES keys picking 4 entries out of the dictionary. That nets me a keyspace of 2^(24*4) = 2^96. That's still huge, but I've truncated the keyspace dramatically. If I wanted to squeeze it further, I'd take as much RAM out of the system prior to dumping as I could to limit my dictionary size. Less RAM is sometimes better.

    If I wanted to get WAY smarter about it, though, I'd realize that the key is probably stored contiguously or nearly contiguously, so I'd only pick combinations of words that were near each other in the original dump. In that case, the key space drops down to something I could probably try over lunch.

  24. Re:Solution on How Best To Deal With WiFi Interference? · · Score: 1

    Keeping with the funny he could line the inside of his entire condo in a faraday cage.

    Yeah, that's funny like a dropped cell phone call. :-)

  25. Re:Let's take that seriously for a moment on Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet · · Score: 1

    Hmmm.... What's to say that the hypothesis can't be applied on a smaller scale, say to a subterranean biosphere? That is to say, there is a boundary that effectively encloses a biosphere. Is it necessary that that boundary be defined by the planet and its atmosphere, or could it be more localized?