Oh please, read the article. If that is too much trouble for you, here it is. The company also has access to web sites that invite you to log in with your actual name and personal info. They then know which id logged in and which person (if you don't lie at the login). The connection is now made and your ID in the cookie is now no longer annonymous. Is it spying when a company can trace much of your web use via banner ads? Your choice, but now they can if your not very careful (and paranoid would help).
Has anyone thought about writing a quick cookie scrambler that would know track the ID field in offensive cookies and randomly alter it every powerup/day/second? Cookies are just files and it shouldn't be too dificult to reverse engineer them if they're small. 10% of the viewing population would make a real mess of their data. It would be sabotage, but seeing as its sabotage of data on your own hard drive, placed there without your permission for purposes of which you do not approved and to which have not consented, I can't guess what the legal ramifications would be - the cookie issuer might be in really deep... Note that I'm not advocating this, I'm just curious.
Actually, there is one difference between laptops and desktops. The laptop has an LCD, while the desktop uses a CRT. (I know, this is changing, but it is close to a rule right now). CRT's are driven from a card via a DAC (Digitial to Analog Converter). This is told a small number of things - number of lines, number of Pixels per line, refresh rate, H-Blank, V-Blank interval timings and the mode is set.
On LCDs there is only one mode and all the others have to be emulated in a way that doesn't look TOO ugly. No a priori reason why this should be more difficult than programming a DAC, but in practice it seems to be. This may justify a premium, but not 3x.
Quite correct. Some PCI graphics cards have the cute ability to lock up the system if someone reads/writes the wrong address. It doesn't matter what mode the software is running, if it touches these areas, the CPU is halted forever. This happens because some designers didn't bother handling I/O to unused addresses, so the card never responds (ACKs) the PCI I/O and the PCI bus logic keeps the CPU halted. Yuck!
If you have to keep the X-Server on the same CPU (as, let's face it, most people would want to), wouldn't the best way be to create a very thin kernel-level driver that mapped the card PCI memory area, and ONLY the card PCI memory area, into user space. The X-Server could call this once at start up and run forever in user mode.
The rest mass of a photon (particle of electro-magnetic radiation, which includes all frequencies of visible light) is 0 - not 0."some very small amount" but just plain 0. And, in the absence of electro-magnetic fields, a photon has speed c in all relativistic frames of reference. (hence "c" is the "speed of light", which is "invariant in a vacuum").
The simplest way to think of what is actually happening is to think of space itself being "bent" by gravity and so the path of light through that space is not straight in the classical, Euclidean/Cartesian sense.
Another way to describe what is happening, without having to understand what is meant by space being "bent" (after all, any N-dimensional manifold can be embedded in a 2*N [-1?] - dimensional Euclidean space) is that light travels along a path in space-time with minimum seperation, where seperation is a 4-dimensional measure, somewhat akin to distance, determined by the metric tensor of the space-time traversed. In the presence of a gravitational field caused by mass (actually any gravitational field - but thats an even weirder subject), the metric tensor differs from that of Euclidean 4-space, so the path of a photon is NOT a Euclidean straight line.
(Of course, the simplest approach is just to say that gravity bends light and not try to explain why;-)
The key here is "Fiduciary responsibility". The reason the PHBs ask "who do we sue?" is that top managers in a company have a legal responsibility to the owners (shareholders) of a company to behave in a fically responsible manner. In other words, if a manager loses money irresponsibly, the owners can sue him/her. Hence the PHB wants someone else that he/she can sue in turn (or, preferebly, instead).
If (once?) UCITA passes, shrinkwrap can (and will) become immune to court challenges and fiduciary responsibility would, IMHO, REQUIRE managers to choose the option that gave them control of the source, seeing as they would no longer have even the theoretical right to sue.
In other words, UCITA could end up leaving managers open to law suits if they *didn't* use open source programs when these are a viable option. Another wonderful instance of the law of unintended consequences!
I think you're absolutely right about what the average computer user wants. I don't know if Linux CAN deliver the experience that they desire, though I see no reason why not - it's really just a matter of packaging and pretty (software) wrappers.
Where I really can't agree with you is the suggestion that low (computer)knowledge users get the experience that they desire from MS (gee, I've never noticed before that their initials suggest a nasty disease:-) products. For instance, my wife does just about all here work on her computer at home. She is a pure user, without a trace of geek (though maybe a little wanabe). Mostly she uses Filmaker Pro to keep track a her client's business for him, but she also does some web page creation/editting using FrontPage. Before her recent upgrade to FP 2000, she experience continual flakey behaviour, forcing her to repeatedly reload FP. Just before the upgrade the only way she could open a page to edit was by first opening a page she hadn't touched in several months and then opening the one she wanted to edit. Things were looking grim, as she was running out of old, untouched pages. Even now, when she alters a gif, she has to go through a ritual dance of saving the gif, reloading and refreshing pages, closing and re-opening applications to see whether a simple change has had the desired effect.
I assure you she does not enjoy the windows "experience" and totally fails to understand why software companies think they can release non-working programs then charge a fortune for "upgrades" with "features" that she has no use for and that rarely work any better than the program that she wants to use, if only it would work.
Microsoft knows what the average user wants and slickly promises him/her just that, but they *don't* deliver, which is why the chairman of GM can make pointed jokes about MS software reliability. Lack of performance, whether speed or reliable behaviour, is also a significant nuisance to an ordinary user and if they don't wise up soon, this is what will really collapse the MS house of cards.
It's interesting that you're taken with the MFC (and hence the underlying Windows) message passing. This is the main cause of slow app. behaviour and the reason that adding new features causes the application to slow down.
The Windows message passing requires every window in the food chain to examine each message with a string of compares to see if it handles this message. This causes an geometric increase in message processing time with increased functionality (each added unit of function uses a "Window").
Ironically enough, considering the Winbloat phenomenon, this was a conscious trade-off sacrificing speed to reduce size. Reasonable enough on a 1MB system with a 50 MB hard drive, but not we have 64 MB systems with 8 GB hard drives and we STILL pay the price of that decission. (So much for WGIII's legendary technological leadership:-).
Does anyone else find these numbers a little strange? 24% by cost = 14% by volume?? The competition here is Linux, NT, commercial Unix in various flavours, proprietory OSes and free Unixen.
All but the free alternatives cost more than Linux (assuming you pay, which is not actually necessary), so how come the volume percentage is lower than the cost percentage? What am I missing?
Impressive numbers, aren't they? But suppose we halve the intensity and need 30,000,000 m^2. 1 km = 1,000 m., so one square kilometer is 1,000,000 m^2. We're talking about 30 square kilometers. Metropolitan Toronto, where I currently work and near where I currently live, covers 10 to 15 times this area. The Greater London Area in the UK covers several times more.
Or to put it another way, the 401 highway in Ontario, Canada is over 600 km in length and averages over 20 m in width. That means it covers more than 12 square kilometers - in fact it probably covers over half the required area. Yes, replacing one terrestrial power station with an SPS is a large civil engineering project but we already do many bigger ones. It is by no means impossibly or even impractical.
As I said before, the problems with SPSs are technical - to a certain degree, they look feasible on paper - and, to a far greater degree, economic. It's just not obvious that they could pay for themselves, although a carbon tax could sway that considerably.
Of all the responses that I've seen here, the one about radio astronomy is by far the most serious and valid concern about SPSs.
Anyway, it was fun to actually work some numbers here. Thanks for your response.
Oops, quite right. The trouble with "stream of consciousness" writing.
Indeed, I read once that the average temperature on the Earth's surface would be below the freezing point of water, without the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, thus putting it outside a naive definition of the "habitable range" in the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, read the article. If that is too much trouble for you, here it is. The company also has access to web sites that invite you to log in with your actual name and personal info. They then know which id logged in and which person (if you don't lie at the login). The connection is now made and your ID in the cookie is now no longer annonymous. Is it spying when a company can trace much of your web use via banner ads? Your choice, but now they can if your not very careful (and paranoid would help).
... Note that I'm not advocating this, I'm just curious.
Has anyone thought about writing a quick cookie scrambler that would know track the ID field in offensive cookies and randomly alter it every powerup/day/second? Cookies are just files and it shouldn't be too dificult to reverse engineer them if they're small. 10% of the viewing population would make a real mess of their data. It would be sabotage, but seeing as its sabotage of data on your own hard drive, placed there without your permission for purposes of which you do not approved and to which have not consented, I can't guess what the legal ramifications would be - the cookie issuer might be in really deep
Actually, there is one difference between laptops and desktops. The laptop has an LCD, while the desktop uses a CRT. (I know, this is changing, but it is close to a rule right now). CRT's are driven from a card via a DAC (Digitial to Analog Converter). This is told a small number of things - number of lines, number of Pixels per line, refresh rate, H-Blank, V-Blank interval timings and the mode is set.
On LCDs there is only one mode and all the others have to be emulated in a way that doesn't look TOO ugly. No a priori reason why this should be more difficult than programming a DAC, but in practice it seems to be. This may justify a premium, but not 3x.
Quite correct. Some PCI graphics cards have the cute ability to lock up the system if someone reads/writes the wrong address. It doesn't matter what mode the software is running, if it touches these areas, the CPU is halted forever. This happens because some designers didn't bother handling I/O to unused addresses, so the card never responds (ACKs) the PCI I/O and the PCI bus logic keeps the CPU halted. Yuck!
If you have to keep the X-Server on the same CPU (as, let's face it, most people would want to), wouldn't the best way be to create a very thin kernel-level driver that mapped the card PCI memory area, and ONLY the card PCI memory area, into user space. The X-Server could call this once at start up and run forever in user mode.
Well, uh, no.
;-)
The rest mass of a photon (particle of electro-magnetic radiation, which includes all frequencies of visible light) is 0 - not 0."some very small amount" but just plain 0. And, in the absence of electro-magnetic fields, a photon has speed c in all relativistic frames of reference. (hence "c" is the "speed of light", which is "invariant in a vacuum").
The simplest way to think of what is actually happening is to think of space itself being "bent" by gravity and so the path of light through that space is not straight in the classical, Euclidean/Cartesian sense.
Another way to describe what is happening, without having to understand what is meant by space being "bent" (after all, any N-dimensional manifold can be embedded in a 2*N [-1?] - dimensional Euclidean space) is that light travels along a path in space-time with minimum seperation, where seperation is a 4-dimensional measure, somewhat akin to distance, determined by the metric tensor of the space-time traversed. In the presence of a gravitational field caused by mass (actually any gravitational field - but thats an even weirder subject), the metric tensor differs from that of Euclidean 4-space, so the path of a photon is NOT a Euclidean straight line.
(Of course, the simplest approach is just to say that gravity bends light and not try to explain why
The key here is "Fiduciary responsibility". The reason the PHBs ask "who do we sue?" is that top managers in a company have a legal responsibility to the owners (shareholders) of a company to behave in a fically responsible manner. In other words, if a manager loses money irresponsibly, the owners can sue him/her. Hence the PHB wants someone else that he/she can sue in turn (or, preferebly, instead).
If (once?) UCITA passes, shrinkwrap can (and will) become immune to court challenges and fiduciary responsibility would, IMHO, REQUIRE managers to choose the option that gave them control of the source, seeing as they would no longer have even the theoretical right to sue.
In other words, UCITA could end up leaving managers open to law suits if they *didn't* use open source programs when these are a viable option. Another wonderful instance of the law of unintended consequences!
I think you're absolutely right about what the average computer user wants. I don't know if Linux CAN deliver the experience that they desire, though I see no reason why not - it's really just a matter of packaging and pretty (software) wrappers.
:-) products. For instance, my wife does just about all here work on her computer at home. She is a pure user, without a trace of geek (though maybe a little wanabe). Mostly she uses Filmaker Pro to keep track a her client's business for him, but she also does some web page creation/editting using FrontPage. Before her recent upgrade to FP 2000, she experience continual flakey behaviour, forcing her to repeatedly reload FP. Just before the upgrade the only way she could open a page to edit was by first opening a page she hadn't touched in several months and then opening the one she wanted to edit. Things were looking grim, as she was running out of old, untouched pages. Even now, when she alters a gif, she has to go through a ritual dance of saving the gif, reloading and refreshing pages, closing and re-opening applications to see whether a simple change has had the desired effect.
Where I really can't agree with you is the suggestion that low (computer)knowledge users get the experience that they desire from MS (gee, I've never noticed before that their initials suggest a nasty disease
I assure you she does not enjoy the windows "experience" and totally fails to understand why software companies think they can release non-working programs then charge a fortune for "upgrades" with "features" that she has no use for and that rarely work any better than the program that she wants to use, if only it would work.
Microsoft knows what the average user wants and slickly promises him/her just that, but they *don't* deliver, which is why the chairman of GM can make pointed jokes about MS software reliability. Lack of performance, whether speed or reliable behaviour, is also a significant nuisance to an ordinary user and if they don't wise up soon, this is what will really collapse the MS house of cards.
It's interesting that you're taken with the MFC (and hence the underlying Windows) message passing. This is the main cause of slow app. behaviour and the reason that adding new features causes the application to slow down.
:-).
The Windows message passing requires every window in the food chain to examine each message with a string of compares to see if it handles this message. This causes an geometric increase in message processing time with increased functionality (each added unit of function uses a "Window").
Ironically enough, considering the Winbloat phenomenon, this was a conscious trade-off sacrificing speed to reduce size. Reasonable enough on a 1MB system with a 50 MB hard drive, but not we have 64 MB systems with 8 GB hard drives and we STILL pay the price of that decission. (So much for WGIII's legendary technological leadership
Does anyone else find these numbers a little strange? 24% by cost = 14% by volume?? The competition here is Linux, NT, commercial Unix in various flavours, proprietory OSes and free Unixen.
All but the free alternatives cost more than Linux (assuming you pay, which is not actually necessary), so how come the volume percentage is lower than the cost percentage? What am I missing?
Wrong country, wrong words, (roughly) right translation.
Others have pointed out the NASA phrase, which you're mingly with the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) motto:
"Per ardua ad astra" - through hardship to the stars.
Impressive numbers, aren't they? But suppose we halve the intensity and need 30,000,000 m^2. 1 km = 1,000 m., so one square kilometer is 1,000,000 m^2. We're talking about 30 square kilometers. Metropolitan Toronto, where I currently work and near where I currently live, covers 10 to 15 times this area. The Greater London Area in the UK covers several times more.
Or to put it another way, the 401 highway in Ontario, Canada is over 600 km in length and averages over 20 m in width. That means it covers more than 12 square kilometers - in fact it probably covers over half the required area. Yes, replacing one terrestrial power station with an SPS is a large civil engineering project but we already do many bigger ones. It is by no means impossibly or even impractical.
As I said before, the problems with SPSs are technical - to a certain degree, they look feasible on paper - and, to a far greater degree, economic. It's just not obvious that they could pay for themselves, although a carbon tax could sway that considerably.
Of all the responses that I've seen here, the one about radio astronomy is by far the most serious and valid concern about SPSs.
Anyway, it was fun to actually work some numbers here. Thanks for your response.
Oops, quite right. The trouble with "stream of consciousness" writing.
Indeed, I read once that the average temperature on the Earth's surface would be below the freezing point of water, without the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, thus putting it outside a naive definition of the "habitable range" in the solar system.
Thanks for the reminder.