Having worked some overtime that was not properly compensated earlier in my career, I can tell you that frustrations mount. Excessive, reoccurring overtime is the hallmark of bad management. It made me feel awful, as if the situation was my fault, and that it would be solved if I just worked a bit harder.
No, these people are not slaves, but anyone who has been forced into this scenario certainly appreciates their freedom when it's over.
When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.
Past CO2 levels have been documented in peer-reviewed journals:
We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.
We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.
Think about it this way... biological systems perform some computation in the course of their metabolism. How many times have you seen a quicksort implemented chemically within the organelles of a cell? How relevant is E.F. Codd in the function of a ribosome?
It is possible that someday we may subvert biology to these purposes. It is unlikely that Java would be a good fit when using tools like this. However, if the system is acting in a calculation or control capacity, it would fall under the auspices of computer science... but a computer science unlike anything we know.
I also don't think that Java will work well with quantum computing, but then again, somebody implemented a quantum library for perl, so I may be wrong.
- Many of the algorithms in use today do not work well in massively parallel systems. As the industry moves in the direction of Sun Niagra, the importance of parallel programming will grow.
- A quantum Turing machine is definitely not the same as a classical Turing machine, forcing a different approach to algorithm design.
- Some have advanced the idea of using DNA as a computational engine. Such computing methods will not look anything like C.
- The most important thing that you will ever do is relate to other people. The methods that you use to do this will determine your success or failure in life. Don't skimp - the liberal arts institution is probably more use; history and literature will make you rounded in this area.
- Modern computer science instruction ignores some great authors. My favorite is Brian Kernighan. Reading some of the things that he wrote exposed me to great revelation, and I am still excited about it even now. A lot of people like Knuth, but I don't care for him. I learned more about computer science self-taught than I ever learned in school. (I say we throw Pascal out of the schools and spend more time with Kernighan's toolchain.)
- Computer science instruction ignores the influence of industry. Schools find certifications to be irrelevant (MCSE, CNA, OCP, etc.); however, these very industries drive whole segments of technological development and drag the schools along with them. This attitude is pretty laughable.
- Computer science is changing very quickly. What is being taught now could be completely irrelevant in 15 years. Aggressive technical exposure might not be as valuable as you think.
I regularly use RunAs to run Safari as a separate restricted user to insulate me from any defects in it's design.
It will run this way even on Windows 2000 with 3.0.3 (the last version that ran on 2000). It will even run as the Guest user, which has even less power than a restricted user.
I am surprised that Apple a) didn't build this Safari to run this way all the time, and b) doesn't support 2000 in the latest releases.
If I need to browse the web as an administrator, I think the safest way to do so is with Safari and RunAs.
Universal's entire catalog of music ought to be for sale at WalMart.
I should be able to select the album, then come back in a maximum of 30 minutes to pick up my burned CD with inkjet cover art.
FLAC-type files for popular music should be cached at the store; more esoteric material should be transferred on demand.
Each label ought to be able to control marketing campaigns that let them target not just regionally, but down to an individual store. WalMart's cut should be a flat $1/disc.
That would be the sensible way to do it. Running pressed media around on fork trucks is foolish and wasteful.
Thanks for your long comment on this issue. I don't agree with the conclusions at all, but I can see your points. I didn't realize that the telcoms could be seen to be not so far in the wrong.
Still, when I see "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." - I think that case law has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
From what I can see, the act(s) were criminal at the time, and the carriers have civil liability to the victims of the eavesdropping.
Passing immunity changes the harmed party from the eavesdropping victims to the carriers. Can the law retroactively redefine the injured party? I certainly hope not.
While the law may be clear, if it allows this, the law is wrong. Correctly argued, SCOTUS may strike it.
AFAIK, the OpenBSD kernel has adopted the SMP approach of the Linux 2.2 kernel (i.e. one great big kernel lock), and threads are implemented in a userland library. I assume that there will be less of a performance benefit on OpenBSD.
Given this stance, is it very likely that either the core maintainers, or the maintainers for the portable releases, will integrate this code?
Given the danger of protecting critical sections of code from race conditions and other exploits, should we keep things simple?
p.s. Is there any performance loss when using the privilege separation multi-process model? Could this threading approach from the article be reworked to use standard SysV IPC to make better use of these processes?
With rumors of NSA backdoors into MS operating systems, and Google maintaining search history until the end of time, both of these companies practically have the power on their own to become George Orwell's big brother. If we had any sense as citizens and consumers, there would be a huge rush for the exits (yet here I sit on Windows searching with Google).
I don't like this power over society. Whichever one takes more effective means in demonstrating that their power is benign will have my support. Neither has taken effective measures to prove their goodwill towards consumers as of yet.
...if I create a new, non-admin user on an OS-X system, can I browse to any site I want, launch any hostile process that I want, and feel secure that I won't damage either the OS or other accounts (that use the default privileges)?
Both under windows and OS-X, creating restricted users and using those accounts to browse potentially hostile websites is what I've always done to keep my system clean - this means that malware must first find a hole in the browser, then launch a process that finds a hole in an admin/root process for escalation (which is a much harder target to hit).
I never work as a privileged user. Is not not enough anymore?
I have encoded much of my classical music collection that way. I listen to it at work at low volume on a portable player, so that is probably overkill.
...and this is precisely what RedHat has done by dropping their open products.
I use the closed, licensed server products from RedHat at work, but they are on none of my home systems, none of my friends' small business systems, and they are nowhere to be seen in my life outside of the corporate environment.
Contributions aside, I can see how they could be completely forgotten by most of the Linux community, and this is precisely what they wanted.
Add this to several unwise actions that many in the industry perceive as attacks, and I'm not so sure that the billion dollar market cap is feasible.
I still own RedHat stock from the IPO, but Larry Ellison is going to figure out how to dissolve RedHat eventually. It may take time, because this style of game is new to him, but the fist of the giant will eventually fall.
While POWER5 was out-of-order, POWER6 is now in-order. That's how they plan to hit 5ghz.
While you've added 8 more registers, you've also doubled the size of pointers (and thus doubled the memory bandwidth required for them). We've seen several cases where Sparc-32 compiled applications are faster than Sparc-64 on the same platform - therefore I'd benchmark an application in 32-bit mode before I'd take the 64-bit version.
...the OpenBSD philosophy is security through openness. When you receive a security patch as source code, you can see exactly what is being done. If the patch were to include a binary image, verification would be slightly more difficult.
There have been binary patch projects (I used to use one at openbsd.org.mx), but since I have resigned myself to installing a compiler and the whole of the OS source code into/usr/src, I find the binary patches to be superfluous.
OpenBSD does cling to some of the other BSD behaviors in lieu of POSIX. Default use of the long-deprecated C-Shell and old-style "ps" behavior ("ps aux" rather than "ps -ef") come to mind.
Having everything in/usr/src is really the UNIX way from the days of old. It's a shame that we moved away from this practice.
The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
This is not true. Time, space, and mass are relative. They depend upon the frame of reference of the observer.
The only constant is the speed of light in vacuum. All other parameters are relative to the frame of reference of the observer, and adjust to preserve this one constant.
I remember that the progenitor architecture was the "IDT Centaur/Winchip" - and that this processor was described as a simplified, single issue, classic CISC (or maybe that was Cyrix, which was bought and abandoned, but the name was applied to the Centaur).
It is certainly true that CO2 levels have been vastly higher in the distant past, but they have not been as high as they are now in the history of the human species.
Since our "ice house" is below normal CO2 concentrations on the grand scale, it would be reasonable to claim that these levels will eventually rise with or without our interference. We may be accelerating the change, but it would have happened anyway. Our civilization may suffer because of the abnormal acceleration, but will we really have to worry about environmental impacts in the next 200 years?
And if the real impacts of our activity are 200 years out or more, will any of the current infrastructure be worth anything to the future civilization?
If the risk of damage is far off, then it seems to me that we should be more concerned with the accelerated pace of the extinction of species than with greenhouse gas emissions.
We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.
While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our
species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.
My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed
in the interview below:
We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second,
the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.
We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.
My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more
partisan summary of this information:
When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by
32 percent across species.
An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.
One would assume that there are a few critical sequences in the virus, without which it would not function or evolve around. Could the structure of its protein shell be corrupted to cause it to immediately fall apart, a la penicillin? Could changes be made to ensure that it would remain forever dormant?
It would seem that, with this technique, a little sabotage might get nearly the same benefit as cleaning it all out, for much less effort and risk.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, the article only refers to data mining. Perhaps these questions are better answered by Oracle, DB2, or other TPC score winners.
Having worked some overtime that was not properly compensated earlier in my career, I can tell you that frustrations mount. Excessive, reoccurring overtime is the hallmark of bad management. It made me feel awful, as if the situation was my fault, and that it would be solved if I just worked a bit harder.
No, these people are not slaves, but anyone who has been forced into this scenario certainly appreciates their freedom when it's over.
From what I've read, current CO2 levels are at the low end of what plant life can tolerate.
Past CO2 levels have been documented in peer-reviewed journals:
This discussion may prove enlightening:
Think about it this way... biological systems perform some computation in the course of their metabolism. How many times have you seen a quicksort implemented chemically within the organelles of a cell? How relevant is E.F. Codd in the function of a ribosome?
It is possible that someday we may subvert biology to these purposes. It is unlikely that Java would be a good fit when using tools like this. However, if the system is acting in a calculation or control capacity, it would fall under the auspices of computer science... but a computer science unlike anything we know.
I also don't think that Java will work well with quantum computing, but then again, somebody implemented a quantum library for perl, so I may be wrong.
I regularly use RunAs to run Safari as a separate restricted user to insulate me from any defects in it's design.
It will run this way even on Windows 2000 with 3.0.3 (the last version that ran on 2000). It will even run as the Guest user, which has even less power than a restricted user.
I am surprised that Apple a) didn't build this Safari to run this way all the time, and b) doesn't support 2000 in the latest releases.
If I need to browse the web as an administrator, I think the safest way to do so is with Safari and RunAs.
Universal's entire catalog of music ought to be for sale at WalMart.
I should be able to select the album, then come back in a maximum of 30 minutes to pick up my burned CD with inkjet cover art.
FLAC-type files for popular music should be cached at the store; more esoteric material should be transferred on demand.
Each label ought to be able to control marketing campaigns that let them target not just regionally, but down to an individual store. WalMart's cut should be a flat $1/disc.
That would be the sensible way to do it. Running pressed media around on fork trucks is foolish and wasteful.
Thanks for your long comment on this issue. I don't agree with the conclusions at all, but I can see your points. I didn't realize that the telcoms could be seen to be not so far in the wrong.
Still, when I see "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." - I think that case law has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
From what I can see, the act(s) were criminal at the time, and the carriers have civil liability to the victims of the eavesdropping.
Passing immunity changes the harmed party from the eavesdropping victims to the carriers. Can the law retroactively redefine the injured party? I certainly hope not.
While the law may be clear, if it allows this, the law is wrong. Correctly argued, SCOTUS may strike it.
Congress cannot pass ex post facto laws.
Even if such a law is passed, it should be struck down by the court system. It certainly increases legal expenses, though.
AFAIK, the OpenBSD kernel has adopted the SMP approach of the Linux 2.2 kernel (i.e. one great big kernel lock), and threads are implemented in a userland library. I assume that there will be less of a performance benefit on OpenBSD.
Given this stance, is it very likely that either the core maintainers, or the maintainers for the portable releases, will integrate this code?
Given the danger of protecting critical sections of code from race conditions and other exploits, should we keep things simple?
p.s. Is there any performance loss when using the privilege separation multi-process model? Could this threading approach from the article be reworked to use standard SysV IPC to make better use of these processes?
With rumors of NSA backdoors into MS operating systems, and Google maintaining search history until the end of time, both of these companies practically have the power on their own to become George Orwell's big brother. If we had any sense as citizens and consumers, there would be a huge rush for the exits (yet here I sit on Windows searching with Google).
I don't like this power over society. Whichever one takes more effective means in demonstrating that their power is benign will have my support. Neither has taken effective measures to prove their goodwill towards consumers as of yet.
Oh, and you can throw in AT&T in that mix, too.
...here is why:
...if I create a new, non-admin user on an OS-X system, can I browse to any site I want, launch any hostile process that I want, and feel secure that I won't damage either the OS or other accounts (that use the default privileges)?
Both under windows and OS-X, creating restricted users and using those accounts to browse potentially hostile websites is what I've always done to keep my system clean - this means that malware must first find a hole in the browser, then launch a process that finds a hole in an admin/root process for escalation (which is a much harder target to hit).
I never work as a privileged user. Is not not enough anymore?
I have encoded much of my classical music collection that way. I listen to it at work at low volume on a portable player, so that is probably overkill.
...and this is precisely what RedHat has done by dropping their open products.
I use the closed, licensed server products from RedHat at work, but they are on none of my home systems, none of my friends' small business systems, and they are nowhere to be seen in my life outside of the corporate environment.
Contributions aside, I can see how they could be completely forgotten by most of the Linux community, and this is precisely what they wanted.
Add this to several unwise actions that many in the industry perceive as attacks, and I'm not so sure that the billion dollar market cap is feasible.
I still own RedHat stock from the IPO, but Larry Ellison is going to figure out how to dissolve RedHat eventually. It may take time, because this style of game is new to him, but the fist of the giant will eventually fall.
...the OpenBSD philosophy is security through openness. When you receive a security patch as source code, you can see exactly what is being done. If the patch were to include a binary image, verification would be slightly more difficult.
There have been binary patch projects (I used to use one at openbsd.org.mx), but since I have resigned myself to installing a compiler and the whole of the OS source code into /usr/src, I find the binary patches to be superfluous.
OpenBSD does cling to some of the other BSD behaviors in lieu of POSIX. Default use of the long-deprecated C-Shell and old-style "ps" behavior ("ps aux" rather than "ps -ef") come to mind.
Having everything in /usr/src is really the UNIX way from the days of old. It's a shame that we moved away from this practice.
This is not true. Time, space, and mass are relative. They depend upon the frame of reference of the observer.
The only constant is the speed of light in vacuum. All other parameters are relative to the frame of reference of the observer, and adjust to preserve this one constant.
Contact Theo de Raadt, and get the top 5 targetted pieces of hardware for which the manufacturers will not provide documentation.
Reverse engineer drivers for this unsupported hardware, both for OpenSolaris and a generic BSD (under a BSD license).
And, yes, when you talk to Theo, you will learn that YOU are in the top 5 list. Fix that.
If you bring your guns to the OpenBSD driver crusade, you will get all the PR that you want.
I remember that the progenitor architecture was the "IDT Centaur/Winchip" - and that this processor was described as a simplified, single issue, classic CISC (or maybe that was Cyrix, which was bought and abandoned, but the name was applied to the Centaur).
Are there micro-ops on VIA's chips?
Since our "ice house" is below normal CO2 concentrations on the grand scale, it would be reasonable to claim that these levels will eventually rise with or without our interference. We may be accelerating the change, but it would have happened anyway. Our civilization may suffer because of the abnormal acceleration, but will we really have to worry about environmental impacts in the next 200 years?
And if the real impacts of our activity are 200 years out or more, will any of the current infrastructure be worth anything to the future civilization?
If the risk of damage is far off, then it seems to me that we should be more concerned with the accelerated pace of the extinction of species than with greenhouse gas emissions.
We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.
While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.
My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:
RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of MinnesotaJC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer
I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:
My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:
An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.
One would assume that there are a few critical sequences in the virus, without which it would not function or evolve around. Could the structure of its protein shell be corrupted to cause it to immediately fall apart, a la penicillin? Could changes be made to ensure that it would remain forever dormant?
It would seem that, with this technique, a little sabotage might get nearly the same benefit as cleaning it all out, for much less effort and risk.