Which SATA Seagates from 2004 have bad firmware and what is the nature of the flaw? I have drives of that description that cause some really strange errors in my hot-swap IDE enclosure.
Downloads are a good indication of popularity by what metric? Oh, I forgot, popularity is by definition the metric of last resort. In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman's grits are popular.
What you meant, if you had turned on your brain, is that total downloads are the best available proxy on Firefox's broad-based mindshare. The other proxy available, user agent strings reported to web servers, is a better proxy on page views. But even this proxy is weak, since it fails to account for a wide range of caching effects. Anyone extrapolating short-term trends based on these metrics would be challenged to outperform fortune cookies.
Does anyone else see the irony in a long essay about undervalued 22 year-olds posted on Slashdot?
I was impressed with his observation that when you're young "you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart". Apparently we've had it backwards all along. Slashdot should immediately adopt a negative moderation system:
-1 lacks penetrating insight -1 not so funny as always -1 rare knowledge gap exposed
This is just stupid. We exhausted the 16-bit address space in the era of the Osborne and Apple Poo. Ten years later we experienced a painful "transition" to 32 bits (after completely exhausting kludge space). The present situation is that high end machines can make good use of a 64-bit address space in kernel, but 99.9% of userland processes could remain 32-bit for a long time yet. The rare exceptions, such as database servers, those have been 64-bit clean since before the Alpha was first invented.
Sure, let's compare a transition that took place ten years after the pain was universal to a transition that took place quietly ten years before most people realized that a 32-bit virtual address space could be exhausted with far less physical memory as a result of mechanisms such as nmap.
This guy gets modded up for observing that AMD "doesn't have the volume". How much volume do you need to sell chips at $2650 a pop (Opteron 875)? Volume is a compensation for thin margins, a problem which AMD has been trying to put in their rear view mirror for a decade now. What AMD lacks, presently, is the volume to open the floodgates on their premium 90nm technology to the niggling unwashed masses. How much volume do you need to satisfy the market for people who really need this much performance? With dual core you can search Google in two tabs at once. The only sense in which AMD lacks volume is that it couldn't fill the crater if Intel suddenly imploded all at once. What AMD needs far more than volume is pricing power where the profits live. And for once they have that.
This is a clear-cut example of feature creep. The old one-cylinder farm trackers would go forward and backward quite happily without changing gears, often with no operator input required. Also, there are plenty of cars out there that can do every legal speed in just one forward gear, or even cruise the autobahn in second gear if every passenger supplies their own iPod. The five speed transmission is an overstuffed contraption devised by a bunch of Swiss watchmakers trying to prove their continued relevance in the 20'th century. You can get most of the same effects by adjusting tire pressure, so I say we should stop making things more complicated than they need to be.
The flaw used by panpipes has existed unnoticed for over a decade. If attackers were indeed actively looking for flaws all along, did they miss this one? If nobody was ever looking for any flaws, could there be more exploitable flaws lurking?
The rest of the article is good fun, but this passage is a brain fart. There are millions of lines of source code in any modern operating system. Exploits don't sprout overnight like mana from heaven. The most useful skill for divining exploits is to notice the existence of edge cases in how various subsystems interact with one another. There is also the important case where "chance favors the prepared mind". This is where something funny happens as a result of an honest mistake, then the "prepared mind" notices (and pursues) the chance event's darker implications.
Serious bugs that lurk for decades are hardly unknown. The ASN.1 bug springs to mind. It's hard to image a bug more widely deployed that escaped detection for such a long time. The question here is why, for such a long time, this simple flaw evaded interactions with dark energy. It's for precisely the same reason that experts rarely make the best testers. There are certain kinds of elementary programming mistakes that the "prepared mind" will habitually avoid. This distribution has a slim tail. If the minions of evil fail to stumble into any telltale clues after five years, chances are good it will remain hidden for a long time yet.
This is in fact the same mistake that Kurweil makes in predicting the imminent singularity: that intellectual power is a fully ordered function, based on the premise that a really smart person can achieve any interesting result that any person much less smart can achieve. To put this in perspective, consider the recently discovered AKS primality test. This is what AKS achieved by some clever tricks using concepts of undergraduate algebra and a 15-year old theorem.
This is the same distortion that applies to unemployment statistics, which fails to take into account those whose case has become so hopeless they've dropped out completely. Republicans have a different place to count these people: criminal lay-abouts. But let's not get into that.
What the authors of this study might have concluded instead is that those who continue using e-mail are willing to inflict upon themselves fewer ulcers than before by channeling constant annoyance toward a situation unlikely to change anytime soon.
Let's not forget who invented this protocol that has since been so successfully hacked by the lowest form of life. We did. Or rather, those of us who formed the early slashdot community and later realized it was mostly a waste of time (and returned to our coding). Me, I guess I'm a slow learner. Anyone else here more embarrassed than annoyed? Just thought I'd ask for once.
This is the same view of Fortune 500 Enterprise that Toronto has of its role within Canada. Whether the other nine provinces have ceased to exist depends on who you ask.
After the project switches to the GPL, I suspect you'll choose to donate in Stallman dollars. But don't forget to also publish your printing plates and make them available for anyone who asks, that's required under the Stallman-dollar GPL.
Come on, even flames need to uphold a minimum standard of common sense. Why should OpenBSD change their license first? Why not the U.S Treasury instead, the other half of the exchange you propose?
A lot of studies were done in the NRC's anachoic chamber in Ottawa and eventually they decided to gather up a group of "golden ears" who had demonstrated in past studies superior discrimination. What they found was that time and frequency are a trade-off. The best in frequency were worse in time, etc. Someone determined could dig up the study. I last saw it on the internet about three years ago.
I can sometimes tell the difference (staring normally) between 85 and 90Hz, but no higher. Wag a finger in front of the monitor, you can figure out any rate.
To say that A is better than B does not demand that anything B can do, A can to better. One might in that case say that A "owns" or "dominates" B. As you observe there is no single "dominant" package system. There are still grounds to ask whether or not A is better than B.
Your argument becomes more interesting when one considers that "B" doesn't even exist. Does B refer to Woody, Woody plus random backports, or Debian testing? What is Debian testing if not a crap shoot in motion. Debian package system, on a good day, if ever released again, could be compared on rough equal terms to the FreeBSD ports collection. But please, let's not pretend that three year intervals between stable releases a package system makes.
I've been personally involved with all these technologies. In my shop, we run two OpenBSD firewalls, one on each available broadband service. Our automated build system is based on SCons, and our scripts make heavy use of rsync internally. Our embedded surveillance project runs Linux which we compile in a chroot build environment along the lines of scratchbox (but scratchbox didn't exist when we started). We also have an ARM7 microcontroller in our product running on top of the GNU tools compilation environment, with some structural similarities to eCos/Redboot. Have I missed anyone?
I have a coworker here educated at the U. of Calgary (where I grew up myself) who knows (but does not enjoy) Theo through overlapping social circles. We had a short debate just a few weeks ago over a spicy Sichuan lunch special about where the boundaries between competence and personality belong. My coworker suggested "couldn't he accomplish as much without pissing people off?" I countered, "for someone with a knack for pissing people off, he retains some of the smartest out there within his circle. How does he do that?" There's a line I once read in Drucker that I've taken to heart "you're not in business to win friends". For me, the bottom line is that Theo delivers, and I admire the end results of his zealous rigour (regardless of where one might choose to draw the line between those qualities).
Before I became involved in this shop, I studied computational linguistics, which brought me into contact with just about everything in the area from which rsync originated. I was depressed that Tridge had to lose the award he deserves as much (well, almost as much, although it pains me to say it).
I've read all the benchmarks over the past year that show how OpenBSD is as slow as a senile dog. Whatever. For the purpose we employ those boxes, we've never had an iota of concern over performance level except for the negotiation phase on https. Guess what? Once Via/IBM finally coughs up the C7 Esther, OpenBSD running on a steroid enhanced 486 will crush the most expensive present day Pentium IV on our most essential performance metric.
The odd thing about OpenBSD, which many people never manage to assimilate, is that you have to look at that project through a very narrow gun turret to realize just how much they accomplish by entirely ignoring the whingings from everyone else.
It's an odd day in my personal universe to see RMS pat Theo on the back. I guess it takes one to know one after all.
Today's user wants to grab just about anything. That would include all the music and movies ever made without paying any royalties. It would include just about everything except MJ's crotch. Todays' user is a seething mass of unrequited desires, same as yesterday's user and the lusers of lore. Galaxies will not align themselves as a result of this rantelation. As a living fossil, if there's one thing JD should know, that would be it: the more things stay the same, the more people complain.
The fact that a programmer would even consider this a noteworthy challenge is itself a remarkable testament to the game's complexity.
Brilliant. We've discovered a new scaling effect. When you reduce a game where all the pieces begin on the board, it loses complexity more rapidly than a game which begins with an empty board where pieces can be added at will.
I get a stream of far more remarkable testaments in my spambox every day.
I started on OpenBSD 2.6 and I liked it. Just text mode as a firewall. The initial install was a little bumpy but then the man pages were excellent.
I've since used FreeBSD a fair amount. I'm becoming comfortable there, but I still feel more at home with OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 5 is not the best place to start. Some important things have changed and there isn't much support for these changes on the web yet. You'll find lots of older "howto" articles that won't work as written. I managed to bootstrap my FreeBSD server using PXEboot, but I had to liberally adapt the approaches I found because of the many changes in 5.x
There's a lot of negativity floating around about FreeBSD 5.x lately. It seems they've put a lot of energy in breaking hard ground over the past two years. It remains to be seen whether lush vegetation will spout in future versions as they tune these improvements. I think in any project with sufficient ambition, there are times when things have to go sideways for a period of time.
Recall how Tiger Woods decided to tune his golf swing when he was on top of the world. I sure hope it works out better for FreeBSD.
No no no. Eliminate the ESC key by depressing a foot pedal to activate insert mode. Extra bonus: eliminate modes as well as the spastic reflex to slap the ESC key every time your mind wanders. Or here's another idea: put a torsion sensor in your seat pan to detect left cheek lilt, right cheek lilt and use that to control insert/command modes in VI. Extra bonus: more opportunities to unleash "silent but deadly".
The last time I tried to help a friend recover from a failed HP printer driver I had to boot in safe mode to run the installer which promptly informed me "unable to run uninstaller in VGA mode". But that was the only mode I could boot into while their POS driver was messing up the system! Then I went to the HP web support page and typed a problem report for 15 minutes. When I finally clicked "send" I got the response "404 web site not found".
While all that was taking place, they were busy in their boardrooms planning region codes for print cartridges. What's the region code for the scrap heap? Did I ask that question already?
The fact that the "father" of the Tokamak declares that the program was never going to achieve its stated purpose proves exceedingly little. Perhaps the majority of speculative, high budget science is directed toward ancilliary ideas concerning applications the administration does not wish to openly discuss.
I went through the SF airport in the early eighties and there was a grade A kook there handing out these "from another planet" booklets about the Tokamak program. They were about the size of a comic book but with glossy cover sheets, not quite a full magazine. Everything written there made my eyes bug out of my head, as if the author were six time zones and a dateline to the right of Ronald Reagan.
On that same trip I met with a friend at Stanford who had recently attended a lecture by a speaker associated (perhaps tenuously) with one of the right wing think tanks that sprouted up like mushrooms in that era. This guy was smart according to my friend and in his speech he explained that the entire military build-up that was taking place at the time was a ploy to push Soviet Russia over the brink economically. That interpretation of the situation was not widely circulated at the time and IIRC it didn't hit the mainstream media until years later. Meanwhile, people were seriously debating whether Star Wars might possibly work, as if it mattered to the underlying objective.
My view is that the MX missile system, the Star Wars program, the Space Shuttle, and maybe even Tokamak were all elements of a conscious effort on the part of American government to incite Russia to bankrupt itself. Let's not forget that the Shuttle was used to deploy military spy satellites. My opinion is that the shuttle would never have been built in its final form if rolling secret satellites out of the cargo bay was not on the drawing board.
Let's suppose there were Russian scientists sitting around sharing the realization that "that American Tokamak program which is devouring so much of their funds is never going to achieve the public goals they put forward to the American people". The second Russian would have chimed in "and what else can you tell me about the price of tea in China?" No one would have sat there and said "I guess that about wraps it up for fusion power".
If someone wished to advance the position that while large amounts of money have been spent in programs of fusion research, it is not clear for political reasons how much of this money has been directed toward the goal of producing a viable reactor, then it might be interesting to include a link to the disavowal of one of the key Tokamak participants.
There might be other ways to achieve fusion. The US government chose to invest in an approach that involved big ass magnets, plasma confinement systems, and laser ignition systems rather than racks of beakerware stuffed with palladium electrodes. What a huge surprise.
Given that Tokamak served as a political pawn in the final chapter of the cold war it's amazingly disingenuous to pluck any primary document out of its original context.
I guess you've never read a book before. People engaged in a behaviour tend to view their behaviour through a different construct than other parties who are impacted by these behaviours. This is sometimes referred to as human nature, or when documented, as literature.
The fat cats on the other side of the fence have their own constructs, not so entirely different. They get their kicks out of hobnobbing with other financial and politcal elites in expensive smoking lounges and hacking away at the foundations of the democratic process. Democracy and capitalism are uneasy bedmates. Democracy tends to wake up in the middle of the night and cry out "my blankees are gone again!" It's too bad we've never figured out as a society how to define criminal encroachment.
Whether you label one group or another as criminal or not, where it stands in the entertainment industry right now, there are no virtuous parties.
I once had the privilege to sit in front of one of workstations at Xerox Parc circa 1983, when I was invited to visit some friends from the University of Waterloo who had transfered to PhD programs at Stanford. One of these friends had a cool job on the side at Xerox.
The main thing I remember is that the machine had a useful THREE button mouse. Not long afterwards I bought one of the early generation Fat Macs, with its completely crippled one button mouse.
What you got with the Fat Mac was a monochrome screen with far too few pixels, most of which were devoted to scroll bars and other window clutter. What was left over to get your work done was not a whole lot better than a 40 column text display with no lower case letters (that other "lightning" strike).
How about a mouse with a mouse wheel instead of all that screen real-estate wasted on scroll bars?
It's easy to worship the Mac design twenty years later. Did you ever try to use one for real work?
If there's anything I dislike more than Microsoft it's monoculture. Why do so many members of the GPL camp attempt to position the GPL as the monoculture of open source? I belive in open source first of all, and free software as well, within limits.
Instead of asking whether the new GPL will become the next Super Mrs Pacman, why don't we instead ask whether these changes to the GPL makes the GPL better suited to the projects it serves?
In my view, the GPL serves best for platform initiatives, such as Linux. I prefer the BSD license for protocols and standards, such as the TCP/IP stack, which have no purpose unless everyone adopts a compatible implementation, on both sides of the fence.
There was one intelligent post already about how the driver contributes to the quality of his own car by giving consistent and accurate feedback to his engineering pit crew. There's more to driving at this level than being a fantastic clutch monkey.
Another brilliant poster noted that if you put a sufficiently bad driver into any car no matter how good, the result will suck. Excellent deduction, Sherlock.
Let's say the F1 tour consists of a pool of twenty top drivers and twenty top cars. The drivers and cars will be randomly paired up. You have the option to bet on the race, but you can only bet on the driver, or the car, BEFORE you know how the random pairings are made.
Are you going to plunk you money down on the car or the driver? At this point in F1 the consensus seems to be that voting on the car is the better option.
This is a somewhat stupid exercise in any case. The third term is how well the driver fits the car, and this is largely a function of chemistry between the driver and his crew. The talented clutch monkeys who contribute toward bad chemistry end up piloting a poorly tuned ride, or they don't trust the car 100% in every situation so they're afraid to leave everything the car can do out on the track (er, I mean metaphorically).
Then it gets even more complicated because a driver with good chemistry in an astrobucks team concept might suck in a financially constrained environment, and vv.
Now that I think about it, this whole thread is silly (duh, like I didn't know that). We should stop talking about F1 and start reading Ken Dryden's book (from ages past) about the difference between a "good good team goaltender" and a "good bad team goaltender". The role of the "good good" goaltender is to not make mistakes so his team can go out and win it on talent up front. The "good bad" goaltender is expected to take chances and stand on his head so that his crappy teammates have a chance to win on a flukely goal or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Which SATA Seagates from 2004 have bad firmware and what is the nature of the flaw? I have drives of that description that cause some really strange errors in my hot-swap IDE enclosure.
Downloads are a good indication of popularity by what metric? Oh, I forgot, popularity is by definition the metric of last resort. In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman's grits are popular.
What you meant, if you had turned on your brain, is that total downloads are the best available proxy on Firefox's broad-based mindshare. The other proxy available, user agent strings reported to web servers, is a better proxy on page views. But even this proxy is weak, since it fails to account for a wide range of caching effects. Anyone extrapolating short-term trends based on these metrics would be challenged to outperform fortune cookies.
Does anyone else see the irony in a long essay about undervalued 22 year-olds posted on Slashdot?
I was impressed with his observation that when you're young "you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart". Apparently we've had it backwards all along. Slashdot should immediately adopt a negative moderation system:
-1 lacks penetrating insight
-1 not so funny as always
-1 rare knowledge gap exposed
This is just stupid. We exhausted the 16-bit address space in the era of the Osborne and Apple Poo. Ten years later we experienced a painful "transition" to 32 bits (after completely exhausting kludge space). The present situation is that high end machines can make good use of a 64-bit address space in kernel, but 99.9% of userland processes could remain 32-bit for a long time yet. The rare exceptions, such as database servers, those have been 64-bit clean since before the Alpha was first invented.
Sure, let's compare a transition that took place ten years after the pain was universal to a transition that took place quietly ten years before most people realized that a 32-bit virtual address space could be exhausted with far less physical memory as a result of mechanisms such as nmap.
This guy gets modded up for observing that AMD "doesn't have the volume". How much volume do you need to sell chips at $2650 a pop (Opteron 875)? Volume is a compensation for thin margins, a problem which AMD has been trying to put in their rear view mirror for a decade now. What AMD lacks, presently, is the volume to open the floodgates on their premium 90nm technology to the niggling unwashed masses. How much volume do you need to satisfy the market for people who really need this much performance? With dual core you can search Google in two tabs at once. The only sense in which AMD lacks volume is that it couldn't fill the crater if Intel suddenly imploded all at once. What AMD needs far more than volume is pricing power where the profits live. And for once they have that.
This is a clear-cut example of feature creep. The old one-cylinder farm trackers would go forward and backward quite happily without changing gears, often with no operator input required. Also, there are plenty of cars out there that can do every legal speed in just one forward gear, or even cruise the autobahn in second gear if every passenger supplies their own iPod. The five speed transmission is an overstuffed contraption devised by a bunch of Swiss watchmakers trying to prove their continued relevance in the 20'th century. You can get most of the same effects by adjusting tire pressure, so I say we should stop making things more complicated than they need to be.
The flaw used by panpipes has existed unnoticed for over a decade. If attackers were indeed actively looking for flaws all along, did they miss this one? If nobody was ever looking for any flaws, could there be more exploitable flaws lurking?
The rest of the article is good fun, but this passage is a brain fart. There are millions of lines of source code in any modern operating system. Exploits don't sprout overnight like mana from heaven. The most useful skill for divining exploits is to notice the existence of edge cases in how various subsystems interact with one another. There is also the important case where "chance favors the prepared mind". This is where something funny happens as a result of an honest mistake, then the "prepared mind" notices (and pursues) the chance event's darker implications.
Serious bugs that lurk for decades are hardly unknown. The ASN.1 bug springs to mind. It's hard to image a bug more widely deployed that escaped detection for such a long time. The question here is why, for such a long time, this simple flaw evaded interactions with dark energy. It's for precisely the same reason that experts rarely make the best testers. There are certain kinds of elementary programming mistakes that the "prepared mind" will habitually avoid. This distribution has a slim tail. If the minions of evil fail to stumble into any telltale clues after five years, chances are good it will remain hidden for a long time yet.
This is in fact the same mistake that Kurweil makes in predicting the imminent singularity: that intellectual power is a fully ordered function, based on the premise that a really smart person can achieve any interesting result that any person much less smart can achieve. To put this in perspective, consider the recently discovered AKS primality test. This is what AKS achieved by some clever tricks using concepts of undergraduate algebra and a 15-year old theorem.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1917/19171290.htm
Undergraduate concepts in algebra exploited to achieve mathematical immortality. That ought to frame a tiny, unnoticed flaw in OS/X.
This is the same distortion that applies to unemployment statistics, which fails to take into account those whose case has become so hopeless they've dropped out completely. Republicans have a different place to count these people: criminal lay-abouts. But let's not get into that.
What the authors of this study might have concluded instead is that those who continue using e-mail are willing to inflict upon themselves fewer ulcers than before by channeling constant annoyance toward a situation unlikely to change anytime soon.
Let's not forget who invented this protocol that has since been so successfully hacked by the lowest form of life. We did. Or rather, those of us who formed the early slashdot community and later realized it was mostly a waste of time (and returned to our coding). Me, I guess I'm a slow learner. Anyone else here more embarrassed than annoyed? Just thought I'd ask for once.
This is the same view of Fortune 500 Enterprise that Toronto has of its role within Canada. Whether the other nine provinces have ceased to exist depends on who you ask.
l0ameness f1odder la2meness fo3dder lam4eness fod4der lame5ness fodd5er lamene6ss fodd6er lamene7ss fodde7r lamenes8s fodd9er lameness9
After the project switches to the GPL, I suspect you'll choose to donate in Stallman dollars. But don't forget to also publish your printing plates and make them available for anyone who asks, that's required under the Stallman-dollar GPL.
Come on, even flames need to uphold a minimum standard of common sense. Why should OpenBSD change their license first? Why not the U.S Treasury instead, the other half of the exchange you propose?
A lot of studies were done in the NRC's anachoic chamber in Ottawa and eventually they decided to gather up a group of "golden ears" who had demonstrated in past studies superior discrimination. What they found was that time and frequency are a trade-off. The best in frequency were worse in time, etc. Someone determined could dig up the study. I last saw it on the internet about three years ago.
I can sometimes tell the difference (staring normally) between 85 and 90Hz, but no higher. Wag a finger in front of the monitor, you can figure out any rate.
To say that A is better than B does not demand that anything B can do, A can to better. One might in that case say that A "owns" or "dominates" B. As you observe there is no single "dominant" package system. There are still grounds to ask whether or not A is better than B.
Your argument becomes more interesting when one considers that "B" doesn't even exist. Does B refer to Woody, Woody plus random backports, or Debian testing? What is Debian testing if not a crap shoot in motion. Debian package system, on a good day, if ever released again, could be compared on rough equal terms to the FreeBSD ports collection. But please, let's not pretend that three year intervals between stable releases a package system makes.
I've been personally involved with all these technologies. In my shop, we run two OpenBSD firewalls, one on each available broadband service. Our automated build system is based on SCons, and our scripts make heavy use of rsync internally. Our embedded surveillance project runs Linux which we compile in a chroot build environment along the lines of scratchbox (but scratchbox didn't exist when we started). We also have an ARM7 microcontroller in our product running on top of the GNU tools compilation environment, with some structural similarities to eCos/Redboot. Have I missed anyone?
I have a coworker here educated at the U. of Calgary (where I grew up myself) who knows (but does not enjoy) Theo through overlapping social circles. We had a short debate just a few weeks ago over a spicy Sichuan lunch special about where the boundaries between competence and personality belong. My coworker suggested "couldn't he accomplish as much without pissing people off?" I countered, "for someone with a knack for pissing people off, he retains some of the smartest out there within his circle. How does he do that?" There's a line I once read in Drucker that I've taken to heart "you're not in business to win friends". For me, the bottom line is that Theo delivers, and I admire the end results of his zealous rigour (regardless of where one might choose to draw the line between those qualities).
Before I became involved in this shop, I studied computational linguistics, which brought me into contact with just about everything in the area from which rsync originated. I was depressed that Tridge had to lose the award he deserves as much (well, almost as much, although it pains me to say it).
I've read all the benchmarks over the past year that show how OpenBSD is as slow as a senile dog. Whatever. For the purpose we employ those boxes, we've never had an iota of concern over performance level except for the negotiation phase on https. Guess what? Once Via/IBM finally coughs up the C7 Esther, OpenBSD running on a steroid enhanced 486 will crush the most expensive present day Pentium IV on our most essential performance metric.
The odd thing about OpenBSD, which many people never manage to assimilate, is that you have to look at that project through a very narrow gun turret to realize just how much they accomplish by entirely ignoring the whingings from everyone else.
It's an odd day in my personal universe to see RMS pat Theo on the back. I guess it takes one to know one after all.
Dvorak is giving us fossils a bad name.
Today's user wants to grab just about anything. That would include all the music and movies ever made without paying any royalties. It would include just about everything except MJ's crotch. Todays' user is a seething mass of unrequited desires, same as yesterday's user and the lusers of lore. Galaxies will not align themselves as a result of this rantelation. As a living fossil, if there's one thing JD should know, that would be it: the more things stay the same, the more people complain.
The fact that a programmer would even consider this a noteworthy challenge is itself a remarkable testament to the game's complexity.
Brilliant. We've discovered a new scaling effect. When you reduce a game where all the pieces begin on the board, it loses complexity more rapidly than a game which begins with an empty board where pieces can be added at will.
I get a stream of far more remarkable testaments in my spambox every day.
I started on OpenBSD 2.6 and I liked it. Just text mode as a firewall. The initial install was a little bumpy but then the man pages were excellent.
I've since used FreeBSD a fair amount. I'm becoming comfortable there, but I still feel more at home with OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 5 is not the best place to start. Some important things have changed and there isn't much support for these changes on the web yet. You'll find lots of older "howto" articles that won't work as written. I managed to bootstrap my FreeBSD server using PXEboot, but I had to liberally adapt the approaches I found because of the many changes in 5.x
There's a lot of negativity floating around about FreeBSD 5.x lately. It seems they've put a lot of energy in breaking hard ground over the past two years. It remains to be seen whether lush vegetation will spout in future versions as they tune these improvements. I think in any project with sufficient ambition, there are times when things have to go sideways for a period of time.
Recall how Tiger Woods decided to tune his golf swing when he was on top of the world. I sure hope it works out better for FreeBSD.
No no no. Eliminate the ESC key by depressing a foot pedal to activate insert mode. Extra bonus: eliminate modes as well as the spastic reflex to slap the ESC key every time your mind wanders. Or here's another idea: put a torsion sensor in your seat pan to detect left cheek lilt, right cheek lilt and use that to control insert/command modes in VI. Extra bonus: more opportunities to unleash "silent but deadly".
But first it will face stiff competition from all the other chips that claimed to be just as good. Only the one true great pretender shall prevail.
What's the region code for the scrap heap?
The last time I tried to help a friend recover from a failed HP printer driver I had to boot in safe mode to run the installer which promptly informed me "unable to run uninstaller in VGA mode". But that was the only mode I could boot into while their POS driver was messing up the system! Then I went to the HP web support page and typed a problem report for 15 minutes. When I finally clicked "send" I got the response "404 web site not found".
While all that was taking place, they were busy in their boardrooms planning region codes for print cartridges. What's the region code for the scrap heap? Did I ask that question already?
The fact that the "father" of the Tokamak declares that the program was never going to achieve its stated purpose proves exceedingly little. Perhaps the majority of speculative, high budget science is directed toward ancilliary ideas concerning applications the administration does not wish to openly discuss.
I went through the SF airport in the early eighties and there was a grade A kook there handing out these "from another planet" booklets about the Tokamak program. They were about the size of a comic book but with glossy cover sheets, not quite a full magazine. Everything written there made my eyes bug out of my head, as if the author were six time zones and a dateline to the right of Ronald Reagan.
On that same trip I met with a friend at Stanford who had recently attended a lecture by a speaker associated (perhaps tenuously) with one of the right wing think tanks that sprouted up like mushrooms in that era. This guy was smart according to my friend and in his speech he explained that the entire military build-up that was taking place at the time was a ploy to push Soviet Russia over the brink economically. That interpretation of the situation was not widely circulated at the time and IIRC it didn't hit the mainstream media until years later. Meanwhile, people were seriously debating whether Star Wars might possibly work, as if it mattered to the underlying objective.
My view is that the MX missile system, the Star Wars program, the Space Shuttle, and maybe even Tokamak were all elements of a conscious effort on the part of American government to incite Russia to bankrupt itself. Let's not forget that the Shuttle was used to deploy military spy satellites. My opinion is that the shuttle would never have been built in its final form if rolling secret satellites out of the cargo bay was not on the drawing board.
Let's suppose there were Russian scientists sitting around sharing the realization that "that American Tokamak program which is devouring so much of their funds is never going to achieve the public goals they put forward to the American people". The second Russian would have chimed in "and what else can you tell me about the price of tea in China?" No one would have sat there and said "I guess that about wraps it up for fusion power".
If someone wished to advance the position that while large amounts of money have been spent in programs of fusion research, it is not clear for political reasons how much of this money has been directed toward the goal of producing a viable reactor, then it might be interesting to include a link to the disavowal of one of the key Tokamak participants.
There might be other ways to achieve fusion. The US government chose to invest in an approach that involved big ass magnets, plasma confinement systems, and laser ignition systems rather than racks of beakerware stuffed with palladium electrodes. What a huge surprise.
Given that Tokamak served as a political pawn in the final chapter of the cold war it's amazingly disingenuous to pluck any primary document out of its original context.
I guess you've never read a book before. People engaged in a behaviour tend to view their behaviour through a different construct than other parties who are impacted by these behaviours. This is sometimes referred to as human nature, or when documented, as literature.
The fat cats on the other side of the fence have their own constructs, not so entirely different. They get their kicks out of hobnobbing with other financial and politcal elites in expensive smoking lounges and hacking away at the foundations of the democratic process. Democracy and capitalism are uneasy bedmates. Democracy tends to wake up in the middle of the night and cry out "my blankees are gone again!" It's too bad we've never figured out as a society how to define criminal encroachment.
Whether you label one group or another as criminal or not, where it stands in the entertainment industry right now, there are no virtuous parties.
I once had the privilege to sit in front of one of workstations at Xerox Parc circa 1983, when I was invited to visit some friends from the University of Waterloo who had transfered to PhD programs at Stanford. One of these friends had a cool job on the side at Xerox.
The main thing I remember is that the machine had a useful THREE button mouse. Not long afterwards I bought one of the early generation Fat Macs, with its completely crippled one button mouse.
What you got with the Fat Mac was a monochrome screen with far too few pixels, most of which were devoted to scroll bars and other window clutter. What was left over to get your work done was not a whole lot better than a 40 column text display with no lower case letters (that other "lightning" strike).
How about a mouse with a mouse wheel instead of all that screen real-estate wasted on scroll bars?
It's easy to worship the Mac design twenty years later. Did you ever try to use one for real work?
If there's anything I dislike more than Microsoft it's monoculture. Why do so many members of the GPL camp attempt to position the GPL as the monoculture of open source? I belive in open source first of all, and free software as well, within limits.
Instead of asking whether the new GPL will become the next Super Mrs Pacman, why don't we instead ask whether these changes to the GPL makes the GPL better suited to the projects it serves?
In my view, the GPL serves best for platform initiatives, such as Linux. I prefer the BSD license for protocols and standards, such as the TCP/IP stack, which have no purpose unless everyone adopts a compatible implementation, on both sides of the fence.
There was one intelligent post already about how the driver contributes to the quality of his own car by giving consistent and accurate feedback to his engineering pit crew. There's more to driving at this level than being a fantastic clutch monkey.
Another brilliant poster noted that if you put a sufficiently bad driver into any car no matter how good, the result will suck. Excellent deduction, Sherlock.
Let's say the F1 tour consists of a pool of twenty top drivers and twenty top cars. The drivers and cars will be randomly paired up. You have the option to bet on the race, but you can only bet on the driver, or the car, BEFORE you know how the random pairings are made.
Are you going to plunk you money down on the car or the driver? At this point in F1 the consensus seems to be that voting on the car is the better option.
This is a somewhat stupid exercise in any case. The third term is how well the driver fits the car, and this is largely a function of chemistry between the driver and his crew. The talented clutch monkeys who contribute toward bad chemistry end up piloting a poorly tuned ride, or they don't trust the car 100% in every situation so they're afraid to leave everything the car can do out on the track (er, I mean metaphorically).
Then it gets even more complicated because a driver with good chemistry in an astrobucks team concept might suck in a financially constrained environment, and vv.
Now that I think about it, this whole thread is silly (duh, like I didn't know that). We should stop talking about F1 and start reading Ken Dryden's book (from ages past) about the difference between a "good good team goaltender" and a "good bad team goaltender". The role of the "good good" goaltender is to not make mistakes so his team can go out and win it on talent up front. The "good bad" goaltender is expected to take chances and stand on his head so that his crappy teammates have a chance to win on a flukely goal or two.
This applies to a lot more sports than hockey.