Why would you want to checksum a file to see if it's changed? As a web server, the time stamp is adaquate to determine if it's changed, and as a web browser or web proxy, HEAD is adaquate to check the time stamp.
While we're at it. I'm going to rush to the patent office and see if I can "patent" 64bit date time stamps, so I have a lead in on the next big crisis!
Bravo... At my company we've encountered this exact issue.. There are various elements in our organization that have differing skills. Some artistic, some executive, and others coding guru's.
Since Perl was a local favorite, we did something that I assume is similar to "Velocity" referenced elsewhere. Basically separate engines produce HTML (either through flat pages, or through cached perl-scripts (similar to FastCGI or Apache::Registry)), and then a template merger will take important parts of the various pages and produce the final HTML. The approach is generic enough to allow side-content to be applied (kind of like a static layered HTML).
In this, a template is specified for a directory (via putting a file and possibly munging a config), then throwing cgi's or htm's all over the place.. Exec's can use Front Page, or artists can use Photoshop, and us guru's blow in complex perl code. The best part is that it's transparent... Nobody need learn anything new.
Well, unfortunately that only seems to work efficiently with perl.. So basically you'd have to reinvent the wheel for each language, since there would be a different problem set.. Java wouldn't be too bad (a la Velocity, I'm sure), PHP would probably be a b*tch, and so on.
One slight addition was going to be the general piping of HTML to the merging engine. Thus non-Perl CGI's could just be exec'd and passed through. I'm sure through post-filtering in Apache you could accomplish this just fine with any other language.
The problem mostly arises in how you generate the HTML around the actual data you're trying to display (i.e. the table or pretty printed dynamic forms). Creative uses of templates could work. But mostly we resort to language and package specific methods: CGI.pm, embperl macro's, PHP thingies, etc. Don't really have an answer for that..
Another idea could be the micro-translation of data-types into HTML widgets... The recreation of the document (a la XML descriptions) with an associated style sheet could be ideal. Especially if this is all passed to the browser for final construction.
Other issues come from sidebars and dynamic menus.. The graphics designer will make all the reall cool button graphics, but how do they implement the switching logic without doing any code. I'm a big fan of static (non context sensative) menus, but on bigger sites that's just not practical. The only solutions I've come across require definate communication between developer and artist.
I'd be more than happy to learn what other's have found.
What happens if someone forges a AVES DNS entry to point to an internel IP, and then uses the AVES protocal hooks on the NAT to actually drive through the NAT and hit that machine?
Theoretically, this is easy to defend against.. You simply provide private-key authentication between the NAT server and the AVES router. Yes it can be implemented poorly (especially with proprietary closed-eyes windows drivers).
Additionally, I would assume that the NAT is client-side configured to explicitly allow ports and machines. Thus quake, web and email ports would be all that could be hit. Faking the router (as I assume you're talking about), wouldn't be able to bypass anything; with the possible exeption of DOS attacks.
Doesn't work for DHCP of the firewall. Theoretically, when the firewall starts up, it is reconnected to name-tree with the new IP address, thus quakerserver.mygames.XXX will allow one-stop-configuration. Existing methods require the startup process to post the firewall's new IP address on some 3'rd party's site, which is less than convinient.
A war between nations is incomprable to a scuffle between individuals.
I don't see how.. If a neighboring country covets your land, it's not unlike a bully liking your watch. You either defend/assert yourself, or are conquored. Standing up to a bully can give you a bloody nose or get suspended from school; possibly altering your future. If you're in a bad part of town, the bully might be a gang with little concern for your life.
And as you allude to the situation in israel, do you think the people there on either side prefer the current state of war to the previous of peace?
What peace ever existed between these nations? Since Israel's inception there have been skirmishes and wars.
And moreso, in the current age, where any large scale war immediately becomes a question of total annihilation, do you really think that desirable? Well, the cold war potentially saved hundreds of millions of lives (if not billions of lives) since we never -actually- went to war.. It was the mutual respect due to assertiveness and demonstrability of the intention to use force that allowed rational thinking and eventually MAD (mutually assured destruction). If you know you can't win, then there's no point in playing the game.
Likewise, if you've demonstrated to a bully that you can kick his but, and you already know that he's going to ruin your day, then the two of you will not litely engage in squabbles.
Whether or not you agree with the logic, if you are a passifistic government no protected by an aggressive government, then you will be fodder for the "bully countries"; UN or no.
They are still a nation because the US gives them billions of dollars a year
True I suppose, but another element of survival is the friends/contacts you make. However, Israel does have a good infrastructure. Virtually everyone is literate, and I believe most males are required to serve in the military. The other oil bearing Arab nations get plenty of money, yet their military is with mixed capabilities due to many factors.
I agree, but further wanted to add that we were not allowed to apply intelligent warefare against the north. We were limited in the amount of bombing we were allowed to do; We couldn't enter their zones for political reasons.
The problem was that we didn't want to insite the Chinese or Russians. By merely helping defend the south, we were not being agressive. However, If we were determined to take the north, we probably wouldn't have suffered any more than we did, but would have come away with more pride. But this would have been at the expensive of possibly triggering an all out war.
Its sad that so few americans (Im from the UK) actually spend some time learning the full history of the vietnam conflict.
I agree in principle, but would like to argue that almost all "history" is squeezed into 4 yeras of American High School.. Most anything in elementary school is prepreatory / culturally based. History is by no means a requirement in College. In that time, obviously American and European history takes great precidence, and then there's the desire for politics. Finally the rest of the world is grouped together at the whims of a given teacher.
The biggest problem is that very few people actually understand Vietnam.. Even after studying it, I don't really understand it intelligently enough. With people squabbling over the "whys" and results, it's difficult to formulate a "chapter" in American or world history on the subject, as you would World War I or II.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if our shame prevents us from bringing the topic up at all. Children of the 70's and 80's would be taught about the "baby killers", and other such outrages. Being a conservative teacher, it would be difficult to reconsile such topics in class. I recently heard on TV how the Japanese made it illegal to refer to certain massacres they committed during World War II. It's omitted from their text books, etc.
It's not surprising that a 3'rd party would have a larger point of view on the topic of Vietnam.
Assuming 80% of the Chinese population is agriculturally based, that leaves 200M sophisticated citizens (assuming some degree of serious schooling, etc). Though it's true that raw infantry can be pulled from the 800M ranks, they won't be as useful for an offensive (which can be too demoralizing).
I've mentioned in a previous post that the only way China could invade the US is by sea, which would leave them totally vulnerable. We are essentially safe from China's immediate non-nuclear retalliation. As for us invading China, we have absolutely no reason to do so. One does not engage in a land war with Russia or China; period.
That being said, war sucks and should be avoided- because they can be no winners.
Not true. The best way to handle a bully is to stand up to them.. Otherwise they'll walk all over you.. Best advice you can give a geek: Be willing to take a few bruises, since the Bully will think twice before harrasing you (since there's now a cost to each encounter).
If a nation simply appeases at each standoff, then the smaller wolves will gain some bravery. Look at Israel and it's neighbors.. They've gone to war numerous times to assert themselves in the bullied area. Sure they don't play nicely either, but they're still here as a nation because they have the means and the resolve to confront bullies.
In fact, it's very natural to war. Those passive animals that only flee don't get the water hole when times are bad, and eventually die off.
Explain why the US Government was so reluctant to join the war earlier then?
Did ANYBODY watch the Transformers Generation 2 series? It was, after all modeled after the Americans in WW2. The Quntisons were a "peaceful" race. At least in the sence that they never fought. Sure they had gladitory areans for foreigners, but that's just an ancient form of boxing right?
Anyway, the point is that we were well into the war before a single American died. Our industry and exports were _enormous_ due to the sale of arms to European Allies. We were supplying the Chinese with airplanes, the British with tanks and guns, while at the same time, building our own infrastructure.
It wasn't the war that empowered us, it was the demand for industrial products that spawned exports and full employment.
Given this view, it should make sence WHY we wanted to stay out of it. We had everything to gain. Allow the Europeans to decimate their natural resources, and man-power, while staying safe in our natural barrier; getting richer all the while. By the time we joined the war, any remaining unemployment was obsorbed through a dramatic population reduction.
The idea that war itself invigorates the economy is misleading. In the "Battle tech" saga, war-torn lands had their factories distroyed regularly, their raw minerals either consumed, or destoryed (due to scored earth policies), their brightest minds assasinated, their bravest men slaughtered. When all is said and done, all that is left are the cowards that knew to run and hide, and the small time farmers.. Essentially, a giant leap backwards. You might proclaim "innovation", but if your experimental factories are constantly being destroyed and every penny you have is being devoted towards basic guns, you simply don't have the resources to devote towards experimentation.
Again, the only reason WWII provided such innovation was because research was able to be carried on in remote, protected regions. Germany quickly established a safe inner land, and the US mainland obviously was never touched. It would be rather difficult to hold large experiments in the often bombed british isles, especially with much of their money going to the US and other nations.
If they can put space capsules into orbit, don't you think they could put a nuke anywhere on the globe?
The USA and USSR had the exact same issue.. The problem was not one of shere ICBM force, but more of accuracy in landing. If I launch a missile half way around the world, how do I know it'll even hit land? China is further away from the US then Russia is, so their problem is exaserbated.
I have no idea what their current capability is; have they stolen enough secrets from the US or bought enough from Russia? It's only a matter of time until they do, but right now, I would be surprised if they could apply a strategic ICBM attack. Russia's response was of course to simply apply great redundancy - multiple warheads aimed at the same strategic location. To be sure washington, norad, and NYC would be targets, but it's doubtful that our military might would be vanquished on a first strike by China.
Historically spy planes have not been very stealthy. The U2 and the SR-71 were simply high / fast flyers that would evade missiles. Missile attacks obviously suggests being spotted. However these planes were not capable of carrying much load, so they were very costly relative to the amount of information they gathered.
During peace times, however, "reconnaissance" missions can afford to be less defensive, since being shot down would cause an international incident.. Thus these air-ships are loaded to the gills with equipment capturing many orders of magnitude as much info as the simple camera mounted high fliers (which, by the way have been replaced by satilites).
Given that a "spy" insinuates secrecy, a spy-plane or satalites is anything but. Perhaps when the U2 was first invented, there was an element of surprize, but not in the modern day. In fact, I'm not even aware of any modern airplanes that could act in a "spying" mode. The stealth fighters and bomber are hardly suited for effective spying. The former are again too small to do much other than picture taking, and the latter are too big and expensive to risk using for anything other than bombing.
My take is that we've culturally merged the two words, and the net effect is the same.. Gathering intelligence.
its 1.2 billion people, 80% of whom are still farmers (compare 2% in developed countries.)
Interesting thought exercize. What happens if more of the Chinese switch from farming to more industrial forms of labor?
Well, one thing definately happens, labor supply goes up and food production goes down. In a free-market economy, this would mean wages would go through the floor while the supply of food deminishes. (cost of food escalates) Thus workers wouldn't be able to earn enough to buy the same foods that they were previously growing... Thus, people would predominantly stick with farming.
In pure communism, theoretically everyone gets paid the same (and only bonuses are applied as incentives), thus the government's role is to employ people so as to best offset the cost of their salary. Well this requires the creation of new industries (even if there isn't sufficient demand). Well, with the decimation of the farming labor, the industrialization of agriculture would have to happen so as to feed everyone. Ok, that might balance, but now what about the actual industrialization. Surely the Chinese would require massive imports (as any other modern nation). Which means they'd have to export something valuable. But now we enter the realm of free-markets; something Communism doesn't work well with. One need only look at Russia to see how industry plagued with communisitic innefficiencies can stiffle development.
I'm not personally worried about China dominating the world economy (and thereby positioning itself for world domination).
If China grows more powerful, it will be due to some natural phenomina, not just a beurocratic manipulation of vast land and labor resources. There is no such thing as Utopia; in any system, there are resistive feed-backs that will prevent perpetual growth.
Additionally, I do not believe China would benifit from war. Any major nation that they might come to war with would incite world war III. If it leads to nuclear war, then everyone dies, and obviously nobody wins. If everyone sticks to traditional warfare, then the only advantage China has is manpower (essentially as Russia had durring WW II). It is unlikely that they could mount a sea attack against the US, since they'd have to ferry troops on ships which could easily be sunk. Thus they'd be more advantaged to attack Asian nations. Which ultimately means either Europe or Russia. But attacking Russia would probably mean facing all major world powers. And at that point, they're outnumbered at least 1.1 to one.
If they found Russia to be an ally, then they'd possibly succeed, but that's a whole new problem.
And most important, they think the Communist Party is doing a pretty good job, all things considered.
Ever read 1984? The biggest job of a government is to convince its subjects that it's doing a good job. This in and of itself is not a measure of greatness. Not to mention the homogeneity of the Chinese people is in stark contrast with China against virtually any other nation.
England was unable to maintain civility between the Hindu people and the Islamic people. How can anyone believe that in this day and age, the entire world can fall under a single rule of law?
No imperialist power could maintain a stranglehold on the entire world today. It would take the entire Chinese population to act as a police force for the rest of the world (1 in every 4). (Hey, it would get them out of agriculture).
It was just out of curiosity, given that regular expressions are a bit arcane.
I think this is the single biggest misunderstanding of Perl.. People call perl line-noise because of all the shift-numbers scattered throughout.
The fact of the matter is that the regular expression package is a very standard mechanism of pattern matching (though there are slight syntactic deviations from one implimentation to another). If you don't understand the importance or power, then you've obviously never taken a compilers course, and have little room to critique a language. Additionally, sed, awk, and even C or Java _do_ have regular expression packages. If Perl expressions are incomprehensible, then you're no better off there (with possibly the added benifit of seeing a class name that denotes what's going on).
The fact of the matter is that the traditional C / Java style string searches DO exist in perl. You have printf with %s includes, you have "index", "rindex", etc. But they suck for complex operation (in both performance and readibility).. Once you actually spend the time to learn expression matching it becomes a powerful tool and actually makes it easier to read complex parsing code. (just think of how difficult UNIX/DOS would be without "foo.*")
As for the other 'confusing notations', such as $hash_ref_name->{field_name}[ $index ]. This was a necessary evil to maintain 'string interpolibility'. Meaning, we aren't restricted to 'res = sprintf( "value = %s, %i\n", name, age)'. We can now just say $res = "value = $name, $age". Again, once you learn the rule-set, it makes string-based operations significantly easier.
The problem is that it's now being used for things other than text, so these get in the way.
In fact, Perl has one of the easiest to read variaents of the regular-expression language, since it allows liberal use of white-space and comments. If someone throws together a 5 line regular expression, then it's no better than a c coder that put everything on the same line with little or no white-space. It's just a matter of programing style (which admitadly most perl coders lack).
The addage, "best tool for the job" applies.. If you're doing text manipulation (which often includes web page generation), then Perl is indispensible. If all you're doing is back-end database manipulation, maybe Python, VB or Java is better suited. I wouldn't advocate Bash programming because the same arguments that apply to Perl are doubly so in many other shell languages.
Lastly, as to the stability of perl. As long as you don't resort to volitle C code or "experimental features" of the reg-ex's, then you're pretty stable (aside from memory leaks). I've rarely ever had perl core without one of these two factors. Yes there are well documented ways that you can abuse regular expressions (the 50 million year search time due to exponential back-tracking, for example), but that's part of learning the language.
A large group of friends of mine have an informal gaming club. It's basically where one person's house is designated the "clubhouse", and everybody that plays regularly purchases an extra monitor, keyboard, and mouse to store permanently in that house. Then they bring a mini tower (which is pretty easy to lug around) on game days. Since a used monitor only costs like $80, you're talking $100 over-head.. That's NOTHING compared to the overhead of a laptop.
Perl code should actually port fine to Windows. There are subtle problems. Even something as stupid as hard-coding a "/tmp" path can make a program fail to port to Windows.
Doing mod_perl, I can't imagine that one would be using material that's non portable. The caveat is C-compiled extensions, such as DBD::Mysql. I believe the windows client is freely available, but it might not be trivial to get everything going.
As for coding to "/tmp", what's wrong with making a temp-directory? I thought the slashes were adaptable in perl.
Not saying there might not be problems - Hell the CPAN module issue became a nightmare when we moved from Linux to Solaris - but most pure perl code should be inherently portable. Even the UNIX fork now works in windows (thanks to interpreter multi-threading).
Arthor C Clark's (sp?) series on "Rama" talked about an alien species that used a color spectrum for communication. They obviously had a much greater spectral range than we. Other species used extremely high pitched communication (e.g. higher bandwidth).
Other posters have talked about alterior methods of communication such as odor, or gravitational fluxuations, but I can't imagine the BW would be sufficient for an advanced race to be productive.
I'm inclined to believe, however, that the highest BW you can achieve for communication requires a direct link between communicators (kind of like using copper or fiber). The simplest could be the twiddling of human-like digits or tenticles (unless you actually believe in telekinesis and or ESP), but could also involve electric discharge (since many terrestrian creatures are capable of doing this).
The only way we will be able to survive with our societies intact is to be the cheapest supplier of some valued raw material.
What about comparitive advantage? After all, they may be the best at garbage collection, but not every Alpha Centarian has time to take out the garbage right?;)
I had a _very_ loving family, with a mother who stayed home and raised us. We were part of a whole-some Catholic family and I didn't even start swearing until mid High school.
My brother and I would tell stores about our day to our mother each and every day, so there was little or nothing kept from our parents.
On occasion, when I was heavily picked on, my parents would find out (because they were inquisitive and attended school activities), and actively coerce the school to rectify certain matters.
On paper, it's an ideal childhood by nearly saintly parents.
Guess what.. I hated my peers. I was the brunt of mockery; a loner until mid-high school where I found people like myself. Being smart, but not wealthy basically meant your life was hell in our school. The cool people were most of the bullys because of psychological war-fare (though there were the occasional brute-force bullies as well.. My books were stolen, I was tripped.. You know, the whole 9 yards). I felt great depression at times, and my brother had it even worse; he was nearly suicidal (if not for the religious up-bringing, I'm sure).
Now, the two of us would most likely not have gunned down a school, but if it hadn't been for a few supportive peers, suicide wouldn't have been out of the question.
I balk at people who say we need better teachers, support groups, and more responsible parents.. Yes these things can and are great.. But the problem is peer-interaction. Plain and simple.. Visual appearences, sexual motivation / identity, the human nature to reject deviants. These are the sources of the problems.. Anything that does not directly address the problems in this class are insulting kids to lived my life.
I have ideas for solutions, but I'd have to research it further before proclaiming any answers..
School Uniforms reduce the amount of visual distinction between peer-groups.
Segregation of the sexes during the peek years of high-school might alleviates much of the grand-standing and devotion of time by the masses during "institutional hours".
Physical punishment (a la extra phys-ed hours) might also help "break the will" of externalized deviants. (where-as detention/suspension has failed)
Well, nand isn't the fastest (active buffers, cheater-switches, and inverts fill that role). Plus most logic-design I've encountered provide macro-cells that perform efficient and often used functions. The one's I've worked with (in class) utilized a two-stage multi-AND / single-OR cell so as to provide generic combinational logic. And then they provide macro-cells such as Multiplexors, memory cells, or what-have-you.
The details are exploited or emulated by the synthesizer stage (if memory serves). Thus you can abstractly program with VHDL or what-have-you and not worry too much about what's really happening. I'm curious to learn what 'VIVA' adds to the development environment. Maybe it's Visual VHDL (tm) with drag and drop widgets.:)
Logic gate programming is slightly more complex than syntactic abstraction. I know a good number of computer engineers that gave up and went back to traditional computer science (who's programming skills can apparently be learned "in 21 days").
Having gone completely through the process myself, it's as easy as skiing for me, so I can't objectively analyize it.
The biggest problem is in debugging; you have to trace through dozens, hundreds or thousands of "signals" on a simulator. Logging is also not always an option.
Put up a CPU monitor and see how much time your machine spends CPU-bound: in most cases, the CPU is very rarely fully loaded, and actually spends much of its time waiting for disk.
Disk-IO should never be a problem. If it is, then you need to alter the system. If your work-station is disk-bound, then you simply add more memory, if your high-end server is disk bound, then you put in a very expensive RAID.
Typical applications are Office suites, video games, web servers and databases. Well a game should never have to hit the disk except for level loads / movies. Office should only have a hit the first time you start it up(and nowadays that's reduced by boot-time prefetching). web-servers should _always_ contain enough memory to serve the majority of the web-site. And professional Databases will typically demand multiple expensive drives.
Most other operations only require a moderate use of IO, which is further reduced by OS level caching. It's not hard at all to get 2 or more CPU-load doing things like compiles (which are obviously very IO bound). The CPU is more than taxed in such circumstances.
All levels could beboth larger and faster There is most certainly a boost from memory latency and bandwidth enhancement, but I don't agree that these are the universal bottleneck.. Many applications are nicely optimized to fit within the half meg of L2 still commonly found. This applies to video games, heavy-duty compression tools, etc. For example, I got 99% performance boost on a dual-processor when doing MP3 encoding. Obviously main memory / disk-IO wasn't the bottle-neck.
I think Lx$ becomes a bottle-neck when you context-switch often; thereby flushing the $.
Unfortunately economically sound SMT isn't going to be as fast as SMP because you can't have fully redundant and optimized L2 (which will affect large-data-set applications). What I see happening is the use of thread-independant register sets and L0 cache (for the x86 processors at least), then having a large number of ports on the shared L1, and finally a minimally ported, though larger than current on-die L2. There would possibly be a very large off-die L3 (typically targeted at 2Meg).
It won't help all applications (Apache 1.x or Postgres 7 certainly won't improve), but more and more Solaris and Windows applications could definately benifit (heck, even the traditional win-benchmark Quake 3 is MT aided).
What I see as ideal is SMT/P interleaved memory. You use 2-way SMT to take up the slack where ILP bottles up. Then you have a second separate chip (possibly on the same cartraige, sharing an external L3 $ ). In this way, you have a minimal increase in complexity of the core, and you optionally sell more cores (kind of like the 3DFX's VSA-100 mentality.. Make the core simple and scalable). So long as you have a large enough $ and a minimal number of loading processes, putting all the cores on the same system-memory-bus shouldn't be a problem (thus alleviating the complexity of the EV8 point-to-point bus). I don't believe AMD's P2P architecture is going to be worth the added cost, delays, and complexity. Not to mention, main-stream memory can't handle the additional BW.
Bloat-ware has inherent problems; no matter how good a release is, the next feature-patch is capable of breaking 50% of everything because of shared bloat-ware libraries.
Ops. Didn't mean break.. I meant to destabalize. Obviously it would be broken out-right or they wouldn't have shipped the patch.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you want to checksum a file to see if it's changed? As a web server, the time stamp is adaquate to determine if it's changed, and as a web browser or web proxy, HEAD is adaquate to check the time stamp.
While we're at it. I'm going to rush to the patent office and see if I can "patent" 64bit date time stamps, so I have a lead in on the next big crisis!
-Michael
Bravo... At my company we've encountered this exact issue.. There are various elements in our organization that have differing skills. Some artistic, some executive, and others coding guru's.
Since Perl was a local favorite, we did something that I assume is similar to "Velocity" referenced elsewhere. Basically separate engines produce HTML (either through flat pages, or through cached perl-scripts (similar to FastCGI or Apache::Registry)), and then a template merger will take important parts of the various pages and produce the final HTML. The approach is generic enough to allow side-content to be applied (kind of like a static layered HTML).
In this, a template is specified for a directory (via putting a file and possibly munging a config), then throwing cgi's or htm's all over the place.. Exec's can use Front Page, or artists can use Photoshop, and us guru's blow in complex perl code. The best part is that it's transparent... Nobody need learn anything new.
Well, unfortunately that only seems to work efficiently with perl.. So basically you'd have to reinvent the wheel for each language, since there would be a different problem set.. Java wouldn't be too bad (a la Velocity, I'm sure), PHP would probably be a b*tch, and so on.
One slight addition was going to be the general piping of HTML to the merging engine. Thus non-Perl CGI's could just be exec'd and passed through. I'm sure through post-filtering in Apache you could accomplish this just fine with any other language.
The problem mostly arises in how you generate the HTML around the actual data you're trying to display (i.e. the table or pretty printed dynamic forms). Creative uses of templates could work. But mostly we resort to language and package specific methods: CGI.pm, embperl macro's, PHP thingies, etc. Don't really have an answer for that..
Another idea could be the micro-translation of data-types into HTML widgets... The recreation of the document (a la XML descriptions) with an associated style sheet could be ideal. Especially if this is all passed to the browser for final construction.
Other issues come from sidebars and dynamic menus.. The graphics designer will make all the reall cool button graphics, but how do they implement the switching logic without doing any code. I'm a big fan of static (non context sensative) menus, but on bigger sites that's just not practical. The only solutions I've come across require definate communication between developer and artist.
I'd be more than happy to learn what other's have found.
-Michael
What happens if someone forges a AVES DNS entry to point to an internel IP, and then uses the AVES protocal hooks on the NAT to actually drive through the NAT and hit that machine?
Theoretically, this is easy to defend against.. You simply provide private-key authentication between the NAT server and the AVES router. Yes it can be implemented poorly (especially with proprietary closed-eyes windows drivers).
Additionally, I would assume that the NAT is client-side configured to explicitly allow ports and machines. Thus quake, web and email ports would be all that could be hit. Faking the router (as I assume you're talking about), wouldn't be able to bypass anything; with the possible exeption of DOS attacks.
-Michael
why try to extend IPv4 when IPv6 is already here?
Can you assign an IPv6 address to a cable-internet modem/gateway and play everquest today?
Thank you.
-Michael
Doesn't work for DHCP of the firewall. Theoretically, when the firewall starts up, it is reconnected to name-tree with the new IP address, thus quakerserver.mygames.XXX will allow one-stop-configuration. Existing methods require the startup process to post the firewall's new IP address on some 3'rd party's site, which is less than convinient.
-Michael
A war between nations is incomprable to a scuffle between individuals.
/assert yourself, or are conquored. Standing up to a bully can give you a bloody nose or get suspended from school; possibly altering your future. If you're in a bad part of town, the bully might be a gang with little concern for your life.
I don't see how.. If a neighboring country covets your land, it's not unlike a bully liking your watch. You either defend
And as you allude to the situation in israel, do you think the people there on either side prefer the current state of war to the previous of peace?
What peace ever existed between these nations? Since Israel's inception there have been skirmishes and wars.
And moreso, in the current age, where any large scale war immediately becomes a question of total annihilation, do you really think that desirable?
Well, the cold war potentially saved hundreds of millions of lives (if not billions of lives) since we never -actually- went to war.. It was the mutual respect due to assertiveness and demonstrability of the intention to use force that allowed rational thinking and eventually MAD (mutually assured destruction). If you know you can't win, then there's no point in playing the game.
Likewise, if you've demonstrated to a bully that you can kick his but, and you already know that he's going to ruin your day, then the two of you will not litely engage in squabbles.
Whether or not you agree with the logic, if you are a passifistic government no protected by an aggressive government, then you will be fodder for the "bully countries"; UN or no.
-Michael
They are still a nation because the US gives them billions of dollars a year
True I suppose, but another element of survival is the friends/contacts you make. However, Israel does have a good infrastructure. Virtually everyone is literate, and I believe most males are required to serve in the military. The other oil bearing Arab nations get plenty of money, yet their military is with mixed capabilities due to many factors.
-Michael
I agree, but further wanted to add that we were not allowed to apply intelligent warefare against the north. We were limited in the amount of bombing we were allowed to do; We couldn't enter their zones for political reasons.
The problem was that we didn't want to insite the Chinese or Russians. By merely helping defend the south, we were not being agressive. However, If we were determined to take the north, we probably wouldn't have suffered any more than we did, but would have come away with more pride. But this would have been at the expensive of possibly triggering an all out war.
Its sad that so few americans (Im from the UK) actually spend some time learning the full history of the vietnam conflict.
I agree in principle, but would like to argue that almost all "history" is squeezed into 4 yeras of American High School.. Most anything in elementary school is prepreatory / culturally based. History is by no means a requirement in College. In that time, obviously American and European history takes great precidence, and then there's the desire for politics. Finally the rest of the world is grouped together at the whims of a given teacher.
The biggest problem is that very few people actually understand Vietnam.. Even after studying it, I don't really understand it intelligently enough. With people squabbling over the "whys" and results, it's difficult to formulate a "chapter" in American or world history on the subject, as you would World War I or II.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if our shame prevents us from bringing the topic up at all. Children of the 70's and 80's would be taught about the "baby killers", and other such outrages. Being a conservative teacher, it would be difficult to reconsile such topics in class. I recently heard on TV how the Japanese made it illegal to refer to certain massacres they committed during World War II. It's omitted from their text books, etc.
It's not surprising that a 3'rd party would have a larger point of view on the topic of Vietnam.
-Michael
Assuming 80% of the Chinese population is agriculturally based, that leaves 200M sophisticated citizens (assuming some degree of serious schooling, etc). Though it's true that raw infantry can be pulled from the 800M ranks, they won't be as useful for an offensive (which can be too demoralizing).
I've mentioned in a previous post that the only way China could invade the US is by sea, which would leave them totally vulnerable. We are essentially safe from China's immediate non-nuclear retalliation. As for us invading China, we have absolutely no reason to do so. One does not engage in a land war with Russia or China; period.
-Michael
That being said, war sucks and should be avoided- because they can be no winners.
Not true. The best way to handle a bully is to stand up to them.. Otherwise they'll walk all over you.. Best advice you can give a geek: Be willing to take a few bruises, since the Bully will think twice before harrasing you (since there's now a cost to each encounter).
If a nation simply appeases at each standoff, then the smaller wolves will gain some bravery. Look at Israel and it's neighbors.. They've gone to war numerous times to assert themselves in the bullied area. Sure they don't play nicely either, but they're still here as a nation because they have the means and the resolve to confront bullies.
In fact, it's very natural to war. Those passive animals that only flee don't get the water hole when times are bad, and eventually die off.
-Michael
Explain why the US Government was so reluctant to join the war earlier then?
Did ANYBODY watch the Transformers Generation 2 series? It was, after all modeled after the Americans in WW2. The Quntisons were a "peaceful" race. At least in the sence that they never fought. Sure they had gladitory areans for foreigners, but that's just an ancient form of boxing right?
Anyway, the point is that we were well into the war before a single American died. Our industry and exports were _enormous_ due to the sale of arms to European Allies. We were supplying the Chinese with airplanes, the British with tanks and guns, while at the same time, building our own infrastructure.
It wasn't the war that empowered us, it was the demand for industrial products that spawned exports and full employment.
Given this view, it should make sence WHY we wanted to stay out of it. We had everything to gain. Allow the Europeans to decimate their natural resources, and man-power, while staying safe in our natural barrier; getting richer all the while. By the time we joined the war, any remaining unemployment was obsorbed through a dramatic population reduction.
The idea that war itself invigorates the economy is misleading. In the "Battle tech" saga, war-torn lands had their factories distroyed regularly, their raw minerals either consumed, or destoryed (due to scored earth policies), their brightest minds assasinated, their bravest men slaughtered. When all is said and done, all that is left are the cowards that knew to run and hide, and the small time farmers.. Essentially, a giant leap backwards. You might proclaim "innovation", but if your experimental factories are constantly being destroyed and every penny you have is being devoted towards basic guns, you simply don't have the resources to devote towards experimentation.
Again, the only reason WWII provided such innovation was because research was able to be carried on in remote, protected regions. Germany quickly established a safe inner land, and the US mainland obviously was never touched. It would be rather difficult to hold large experiments in the often bombed british isles, especially with much of their money going to the US and other nations.
-Michael
The USA and USSR had the exact same issue.. The problem was not one of shere ICBM force, but more of accuracy in landing. If I launch a missile half way around the world, how do I know it'll even hit land? China is further away from the US then Russia is, so their problem is exaserbated.
I have no idea what their current capability is; have they stolen enough secrets from the US or bought enough from Russia? It's only a matter of time until they do, but right now, I would be surprised if they could apply a strategic ICBM attack. Russia's response was of course to simply apply great redundancy - multiple warheads aimed at the same strategic location. To be sure washington, norad, and NYC would be targets, but it's doubtful that our military might would be vanquished on a first strike by China.
-Michael
Historically spy planes have not been very stealthy. The U2 and the SR-71 were simply high / fast flyers that would evade missiles. Missile attacks obviously suggests being spotted. However these planes were not capable of carrying much load, so they were very costly relative to the amount of information they gathered.
During peace times, however, "reconnaissance" missions can afford to be less defensive, since being shot down would cause an international incident.. Thus these air-ships are loaded to the gills with equipment capturing many orders of magnitude as much info as the simple camera mounted high fliers (which, by the way have been replaced by satilites).
Given that a "spy" insinuates secrecy, a spy-plane or satalites is anything but. Perhaps when the U2 was first invented, there was an element of surprize, but not in the modern day. In fact, I'm not even aware of any modern airplanes that could act in a "spying" mode. The stealth fighters and bomber are hardly suited for effective spying. The former are again too small to do much other than picture taking, and the latter are too big and expensive to risk using for anything other than bombing.
My take is that we've culturally merged the two words, and the net effect is the same.. Gathering intelligence.
-Michael
its 1.2 billion people, 80% of whom are still farmers (compare 2% in developed countries.)
Interesting thought exercize. What happens if more of the Chinese switch from farming to more industrial forms of labor?
Well, one thing definately happens, labor supply goes up and food production goes down. In a free-market economy, this would mean wages would go through the floor while the supply of food deminishes. (cost of food escalates) Thus workers wouldn't be able to earn enough to buy the same foods that they were previously growing... Thus, people would predominantly stick with farming.
In pure communism, theoretically everyone gets paid the same (and only bonuses are applied as incentives), thus the government's role is to employ people so as to best offset the cost of their salary. Well this requires the creation of new industries (even if there isn't sufficient demand). Well, with the decimation of the farming labor, the industrialization of agriculture would have to happen so as to feed everyone. Ok, that might balance, but now what about the actual industrialization. Surely the Chinese would require massive imports (as any other modern nation). Which means they'd have to export something valuable. But now we enter the realm of free-markets; something Communism doesn't work well with. One need only look at Russia to see how industry plagued with communisitic innefficiencies can stiffle development.
I'm not personally worried about China dominating the world economy (and thereby positioning itself for world domination).
If China grows more powerful, it will be due to some natural phenomina, not just a beurocratic manipulation of vast land and labor resources. There is no such thing as Utopia; in any system, there are resistive feed-backs that will prevent perpetual growth.
Additionally, I do not believe China would benifit from war. Any major nation that they might come to war with would incite world war III. If it leads to nuclear war, then everyone dies, and obviously nobody wins. If everyone sticks to traditional warfare, then the only advantage China has is manpower (essentially as Russia had durring WW II). It is unlikely that they could mount a sea attack against the US, since they'd have to ferry troops on ships which could easily be sunk. Thus they'd be more advantaged to attack Asian nations. Which ultimately means either Europe or Russia. But attacking Russia would probably mean facing all major world powers. And at that point, they're outnumbered at least 1.1 to one.
If they found Russia to be an ally, then they'd possibly succeed, but that's a whole new problem.
And most important, they think the Communist Party is doing a pretty good job, all things considered.
Ever read 1984? The biggest job of a government is to convince its subjects that it's doing a good job. This in and of itself is not a measure of greatness. Not to mention the homogeneity of the Chinese people is in stark contrast with China against virtually any other nation.
England was unable to maintain civility between the Hindu people and the Islamic people. How can anyone believe that in this day and age, the entire world can fall under a single rule of law?
No imperialist power could maintain a stranglehold on the entire world today. It would take the entire Chinese population to act as a police force for the rest of the world (1 in every 4). (Hey, it would get them out of agriculture).
-Michael
It was just out of curiosity, given that regular expressions are a bit arcane.
/DOS would be without "foo.*")
I think this is the single biggest misunderstanding of Perl.. People call perl line-noise because of all the shift-numbers scattered throughout.
The fact of the matter is that the regular expression package is a very standard mechanism of pattern matching (though there are slight syntactic deviations from one implimentation to another). If you don't understand the importance or power, then you've obviously never taken a compilers course, and have little room to critique a language. Additionally, sed, awk, and even C or Java _do_ have regular expression packages. If Perl expressions are incomprehensible, then you're no better off there (with possibly the added benifit of seeing a class name that denotes what's going on).
The fact of the matter is that the traditional C / Java style string searches DO exist in perl. You have printf with %s includes, you have "index", "rindex", etc. But they suck for complex operation (in both performance and readibility).. Once you actually spend the time to learn expression matching it becomes a powerful tool and actually makes it easier to read complex parsing code. (just think of how difficult UNIX
As for the other 'confusing notations', such as $hash_ref_name->{field_name}[ $index ]. This was a necessary evil to maintain 'string interpolibility'. Meaning, we aren't restricted to 'res = sprintf( "value = %s, %i\n", name, age)'. We can now just say $res = "value = $name, $age". Again, once you learn the rule-set, it makes string-based operations significantly easier.
The problem is that it's now being used for things other than text, so these get in the way.
In fact, Perl has one of the easiest to read variaents of the regular-expression language, since it allows liberal use of white-space and comments. If someone throws together a 5 line regular expression, then it's no better than a c coder that put everything on the same line with little or no white-space. It's just a matter of programing style (which admitadly most perl coders lack).
The addage, "best tool for the job" applies.. If you're doing text manipulation (which often includes web page generation), then Perl is indispensible. If all you're doing is back-end database manipulation, maybe Python, VB or Java is better suited. I wouldn't advocate Bash programming because the same arguments that apply to Perl are doubly so in many other shell languages.
Lastly, as to the stability of perl. As long as you don't resort to volitle C code or "experimental features" of the reg-ex's, then you're pretty stable (aside from memory leaks). I've rarely ever had perl core without one of these two factors. Yes there are well documented ways that you can abuse regular expressions (the 50 million year search time due to exponential back-tracking, for example), but that's part of learning the language.
-Michael
A large group of friends of mine have an informal gaming club. It's basically where one person's house is designated the "clubhouse", and everybody that plays regularly purchases an extra monitor, keyboard, and mouse to store permanently in that house. Then they bring a mini tower (which is pretty easy to lug around) on game days. Since a used monitor only costs like $80, you're talking $100 over-head.. That's NOTHING compared to the overhead of a laptop.
-Michael
Doing mod_perl, I can't imagine that one would be using material that's non portable. The caveat is C-compiled extensions, such as DBD::Mysql. I believe the windows client is freely available, but it might not be trivial to get everything going.
As for coding to "/tmp", what's wrong with making a temp-directory? I thought the slashes were adaptable in perl.
Not saying there might not be problems - Hell the CPAN module issue became a nightmare when we moved from Linux to Solaris - but most pure perl code should be inherently portable. Even the UNIX fork now works in windows (thanks to interpreter multi-threading).
-Michael
Arthor C Clark's (sp?) series on "Rama" talked about an alien species that used a color spectrum for communication. They obviously had a much greater spectral range than we. Other species used extremely high pitched communication (e.g. higher bandwidth).
Other posters have talked about alterior methods of communication such as odor, or gravitational fluxuations, but I can't imagine the BW would be sufficient for an advanced race to be productive.
I'm inclined to believe, however, that the highest BW you can achieve for communication requires a direct link between communicators (kind of like using copper or fiber). The simplest could be the twiddling of human-like digits or tenticles (unless you actually believe in telekinesis and or ESP), but could also involve electric discharge (since many terrestrian creatures are capable of doing this).
-Michael
What about comparitive advantage? After all, they may be the best at garbage collection, but not every Alpha Centarian has time to take out the garbage right?
-Michael
I had a _very_ loving family, with a mother who stayed home and raised us. We were part of a whole-some Catholic family and I didn't even start swearing until mid High school.
My brother and I would tell stores about our day to our mother each and every day, so there was little or nothing kept from our parents.
On occasion, when I was heavily picked on, my parents would find out (because they were inquisitive and attended school activities), and actively coerce the school to rectify certain matters.
On paper, it's an ideal childhood by nearly saintly parents.
Guess what.. I hated my peers. I was the brunt of mockery; a loner until mid-high school where I found people like myself. Being smart, but not wealthy basically meant your life was hell in our school. The cool people were most of the bullys because of psychological war-fare (though there were the occasional brute-force bullies as well.. My books were stolen, I was tripped.. You know, the whole 9 yards). I felt great depression at times, and my brother had it even worse; he was nearly suicidal (if not for the religious up-bringing, I'm sure).
Now, the two of us would most likely not have gunned down a school, but if it hadn't been for a few supportive peers, suicide wouldn't have been out of the question.
I balk at people who say we need better teachers, support groups, and more responsible parents.. Yes these things can and are great.. But the problem is peer-interaction. Plain and simple.. Visual appearences, sexual motivation / identity, the human nature to reject deviants. These are the sources of the problems.. Anything that does not directly address the problems in this class are insulting kids to lived my life.
I have ideas for solutions, but I'd have to research it further before proclaiming any answers..
School Uniforms reduce the amount of visual distinction between peer-groups.
Segregation of the sexes during the peek years of high-school might alleviates much of the grand-standing and devotion of time by the masses during "institutional hours".
Physical punishment (a la extra phys-ed hours) might also help "break the will" of externalized deviants. (where-as detention/suspension has failed)
-Michael
Well, nand isn't the fastest (active buffers, cheater-switches, and inverts fill that role). Plus most logic-design I've encountered provide macro-cells that perform efficient and often used functions. The one's I've worked with (in class) utilized a two-stage multi-AND / single-OR cell so as to provide generic combinational logic. And then they provide macro-cells such as Multiplexors, memory cells, or what-have-you.
:)
The details are exploited or emulated by the synthesizer stage (if memory serves). Thus you can abstractly program with VHDL or what-have-you and not worry too much about what's really happening. I'm curious to learn what 'VIVA' adds to the development environment. Maybe it's Visual VHDL (tm) with drag and drop widgets.
-Michael
Logic gate programming is slightly more complex than syntactic abstraction. I know a good number of computer engineers that gave up and went back to traditional computer science (who's programming skills can apparently be learned "in 21 days").
Having gone completely through the process myself, it's as easy as skiing for me, so I can't objectively analyize it.
The biggest problem is in debugging; you have to trace through dozens, hundreds or thousands of "signals" on a simulator. Logging is also not always an option.
-Michael
Put up a CPU monitor and see how much time your machine spends CPU-bound: in most cases, the CPU is very rarely fully loaded, and actually spends much of its time waiting for disk.
Disk-IO should never be a problem. If it is, then you need to alter the system. If your work-station is disk-bound, then you simply add more memory, if your high-end server is disk bound, then you put in a very expensive RAID.
Typical applications are Office suites, video games, web servers and databases. Well a game should never have to hit the disk except for level loads / movies. Office should only have a hit the first time you start it up(and nowadays that's reduced by boot-time prefetching). web-servers should _always_ contain enough memory to serve the majority of the web-site. And professional Databases will typically demand multiple expensive drives.
Most other operations only require a moderate use of IO, which is further reduced by OS level caching. It's not hard at all to get 2 or more CPU-load doing things like compiles (which are obviously very IO bound). The CPU is more than taxed in such circumstances.
All levels could beboth larger and faster
There is most certainly a boost from memory latency and bandwidth enhancement, but I don't agree that these are the universal bottleneck.. Many applications are nicely optimized to fit within the half meg of L2 still commonly found. This applies to video games, heavy-duty compression tools, etc. For example, I got 99% performance boost on a dual-processor when doing MP3 encoding. Obviously main memory / disk-IO wasn't the bottle-neck.
I think Lx$ becomes a bottle-neck when you context-switch often; thereby flushing the $.
Unfortunately economically sound SMT isn't going to be as fast as SMP because you can't have fully redundant and optimized L2 (which will affect large-data-set applications). What I see happening is the use of thread-independant register sets and L0 cache (for the x86 processors at least), then having a large number of ports on the shared L1, and finally a minimally ported, though larger than current on-die L2. There would possibly be a very large off-die L3 (typically targeted at 2Meg).
It won't help all applications (Apache 1.x or Postgres 7 certainly won't improve), but more and more Solaris and Windows applications could definately benifit (heck, even the traditional win-benchmark Quake 3 is MT aided).
What I see as ideal is SMT/P interleaved memory. You use 2-way SMT to take up the slack where ILP bottles up. Then you have a second separate chip (possibly on the same cartraige, sharing an external L3 $ ). In this way, you have a minimal increase in complexity of the core, and you optionally sell more cores (kind of like the 3DFX's VSA-100 mentality.. Make the core simple and scalable). So long as you have a large enough $ and a minimal number of loading processes, putting all the cores on the same system-memory-bus shouldn't be a problem (thus alleviating the complexity of the EV8 point-to-point bus). I don't believe AMD's P2P architecture is going to be worth the added cost, delays, and complexity. Not to mention, main-stream memory can't handle the additional BW.
Bloat-ware has inherent problems; no matter how good a release is, the next feature-patch is capable of breaking 50% of everything because of shared bloat-ware libraries.
Ops. Didn't mean break.. I meant to destabalize. Obviously it would be broken out-right or they wouldn't have shipped the patch.
-Michael