I am deeply sorry to say this, but Microsoft is wasting their money lobbying to GWB: Al Gore will be the next president (goodbye, Second Amendment. It was nice while it lasted).
Unfortunately, in the US the media is predominantly Liberal in its leanings, and this gives a tremendous advantage to the Democrats. The Republicans have less chance of winning the election than Microsoft has of hiring RMS.
when I'm sure an ethernet port would cost somewhere in the lines of another $75-$100 to install
Sorry, wrong. A tulip-based ethernet port would add at most $20, and more likely $10, to the BOM (bill of material, the cost of the parts in the unit). Labor costs are nil, since the pick-and-place system that stuffs the rest of the parts would handle the ethernet.
I tried to do my part to/. the webbies, but I couldn't get it to give me the selection. I even allowed cookies and javascript on my machine for the duration (and if you knew me, you'd know how big a stretch that is.) And I registered, and gave my proper e-mail. I start getting (even more) spam, I know who to blame....
When the system drops your security to a less secure setting, that is only per-session, right?
Actually, it's only per process. In other words, if you edit a "classified" file with vi, only vi gets knocked down to "classified". However, this is what makes it fun: what if you are running X, and you cut and paste from a secure document? Now you have to track the security level of the X cut&paste buffer. Again, this is why getting to a B2 security level is so hard: every time you think you've got it covered, another issue pops up.
That problem is the very thing that makes it hard. However, it can be solved.
Let's take your simple program that opens a "secret" classification file and opens a "confidential" (lower rated file), then copies the secret file to the classified file.
The program starts life with a default classification inherited from the shell that started it (let's say this shell is top secret rated, just to make it interesting). When it opens the secret rated file for read, the system says "OK, you can read secret since your currently top secret" and the open succeeds. Then you try to open the other file as classified for write. The system says "well, you could do this, but I'd have to drop you to classified level. Oops, you have a file descriptor open at secret. Sorry Charlie, but no. E_BUTIWOULDHAVETOKILLYOU".
Alternatively, let's say you do the classified file first, then the secret file. When you open the classified file for write, your process security goes to "classified", and then the open to the secret file fails.
Now, think about all the various file descriptors a process has open, and think about making them all match in security. Now you see why getting a B rating takes a lot of work.
(sorry about the pun. It's early yet and the coffee hasn't cut in...)
When doing thermal analysis, it's useful to make an analogy to electrical circuits. You convert heat flow into current, temperature into voltage, and thermal resistance into electrical resistance.
That said, a normal Peltier module can generate about a 50 degree C drop with no thermal load (this is equivelent to the open circuit voltage of a battery), and move about 5 watts of heat with no heat difference (just like shorting a battery out and measuring the current).
However, I read in EE Times (I think it was) about a new breakthrough in Peltier technology: by doping the module with a little Cesium, they got the open circuit temperature drop to 200 degrees C. Still won't move any more heat, but it'll move it over a larger temperature difference.
Now, I wonder what will happen when those babies become available....
Since source code has been judged a form of free speech.... #include <government.hpp> void example(void) { Government us; ++us; --us; # ERROR - operator -- not defined for class Government
bash>
In other words, governments, once enacted, do not shrink. Just as a cancerous tumor secretes substances to increase its blood supply, governments seek to increase their money supply via taxes. Just as the best way to keep a cancer from growing is to prevent angiogenesis, the best way to keep a government small is to limit its budget by limiting taxes. In fact, this was one of the very reasons that the Founding Fathers of the US prohibited the federal government from imposing an income tax (then along came the 16th amendment, which made it legal). Consider all the intrusions into your life that come about as a result of income tax:
Your income must be reported to the federal government
The size of your family must be reported in order to compute deductions.
The amount of interest you pay on your home must be reported
The amount you pay anybody in your employ must be reported
and so on. The number of taxes we pay needs to be decreased, and more of what the federal government does needs to be done either by the state or local goverments, or (hold on to your hat, strange idea coming up) by the people themselves.
However, since the actions to make this happen must be taken by the government, who will not benefit from them, they are about as likely as the source code for Windows 2000 quantum tunneling out of Redmond into Sunsite.
The switching speed of a transistor is measured as it's gain/bandwidth product: as the frequency goes up, the gain goes down. At gain==1, the transistor isn't doing you much good.
That said, the GBP of a normal transistor is much higher than the GBP of a phototransistor, primarily because the base area (gate area, for MOS transistors) is much larger in a phototransistor than a regular transistor (My, what a big gate you have! The better to see you with, my dear!).
The large gate area equals larger capacitance, which slows switching times down.
Contents of a writ delivered to Celera. I won't say how they were leaked...
To: Celera, Inc.
From: God
Your attempts to reverse-engineer my closed source project "man" are in violation of federal law. The data encoded in the media "DNA" are encrypted, and in circumventing that encryption you are in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Cease and desist all furthur attempts to decode this information, and destroy all copies. Do not disseminate this information, and notify all mirror sites to do the same.
No, he's been an engineer for 12 years and I'm sure he's heard the 'tons of debugging code' excuse for slow software before.
Yes, I've even used it myself a few times;^>
However, with respect to some earlier comments to the effect of "they are fixing the bugs, then they'll speed it up", this worries me. I've heard the same argument used elsewhere (KDE, for example).
I agree with the concept of "Get it working first, then tweak it." However, in my experience "tweaks" can get you at best 20% speedups (unless your starting code was really dreadful. However, when you start looking to get order of magnitude increases, you don't just "tweak": you have to go down to the fundimental algorithms and completely revamp them. A simple example: you can tweak and polish a bubblesort all you want, and you might get 10% improvement out of it. However, if you go to a quicksort, you will start to get near order of magnitude improvements.
What worries me is that several aspects of Mozilla need order of magnitude improvements. I'm worried that by the time the Mozilla team gets around to working on those sections of code, too much will have been cast in concrete and it won't be possible to make the sweeping changes needed to get the speed up.
Now, I'll grant that if the code is very modular, with good interfaces between modules, it should be possible to replace subsystems without breaking everything. I've not had enough time to go over the Mozilla code myself (I have a big project I'm working on and I don't have time to contribute much to Mozilla (more's the pity)) so I cannot say if it is or isn't that modular (but from what I've seen of the team working on it I have high hopes).
I just hope they are able to make the improvements needed, because as it is today, Mozilla ain't a competitor to Netscape 4.7, and sure ain't close to IE. (excuse me, I must wash my hands now. I feel so dirty....)
And before anybody calls me a dirty stinkin' MicroSoftie: I'm using Netscape 4.72 under RH6.2beta right now. The last time I booted one of my computers under Windows a week ago, and that's just because the program I needed to run won't run under Wine.
You've been an engineer for 12 years, and you don't understand that a pre-release alpha with tons of debugging code is going to be slower than a release version?
Yes, I understand that debugging code will have a performance impact (generally in my code I get about a 10% to 20% slowdown due to additional checking and logging). However, to have this level of impact their code would have to look like:
Especially for a preview release (i.e. a release that "normal people" might look at), they need to have operations as close as possible to final product. People will judge Netscape 6 by this: a hyper-sub-light interface like this will turn more people to Internet Exploiter than any amount of Microsoft marketing.
When I tried M[{11}-{14}], I understood that it was going to be slower than release, and I accepted this. But this is rediculous!
Also, you add a signature but you post as an AC. Why don't you create an account? (I don't mean this as a flame, but as a real question). It's not like it costs anything, and then your comments would be more likely to be moderated up.
I've been keeping my eyes on the Lucent cards - they seem reasonbly priced and they have a decent throughput. However, the base units are a little pricey.
Is it possible to just get two cards, put them in two computers, and link the two machines? In other words is the base unit needed for anything other than connection to the main network?
After all, I already have a Linux firewall machine on my network: adding a wireless NIC to it would be child's play.
I've tried about every milestone release since M11, and they have all run like Windows on a 386SX.
To clarify: they may render pages quickly, but any attempt to do any kind of configuration takes several tens of seconds to get the screen up. This is on a Celeron-400, RH6.2beta, and 256M of RAM!
I've done several clean installs, I've pulled every trick 12 years of being a professional software engineer has taught me, and my results are consistent. Either I keep making the same mistake or something's rotten.
Anybody have good response time doing configuration?
Yes, it's "Hammer to Fall", and I also botched the album: the album is "The Works". However, part of the reason I gave a slightly longer title was to allow more people on/. who might not be hardcore Queen fans to get the joke.
In order to fully capture this data, you need a DVD player with a disgronification circuit in the video path. This will also allow you to hear the backwards Satanic messages found on Slim Whitman records.
For those of you who don't get this joke, this is a reference to a very similar joke pulled by Rush Limbaugh, back before he sold out and became just a shill for the extreme right.
I really never had much use for the wallpaper (neat, but I'd rather my XServer spend it's cycles rendering what I'm working on, not the background) but I loved the story! It's a shame he won't be keeping that story up to date: Maybe that's what we need, a OSS version of the story of Propaganda, like the old "Never ending stories" we used to have back in the BBS days. (You mean there was something before the Internet, Papa Smurf? Yes you little whippersnapper, let me tell you about when we only had 300 baud, and we were thankful!....)
(let's try that again...) I have a song request: anybody who lives in the Redmond area, see if you can get your local classic rock station to start playing Queen's Waiting for the Hammer to Fall off of Radio Ga-Ga, and dedicate it to Bill.
Everyone knows that most high tech stocks, especially the IPOs of late, are riding a bubble, and at some point, that bubble *has* to burst
The burst will not happen for another five years or so. What is driving the rediculous stock prices is all the 401K money the various retirement plans have: they have to do something with it, so in a classic case of large demand and small supply, the price of stock in general is being driven up as the fund managers look for something, anything to invest in.
In large part, this money is coming from the baby boomers, the largest segment of which were born about nine months after 1945. They are now 55 years old, and will be retiring in about ten years. In about five years, they will start moving their retirement money from long term growth (stocks) into guaranteed value high liquidity (bonds), and thus the demand for stock will drop precipitously. Once the slide begins, other fund managers will sell, and the system will cacade downward.
The folks who will really be shafted are those who will be retiring in about 15 years: they will be trying to convert to liquid assets right at the wrong time.
Luckily for folks like me who were born at the end of the boom, things should have stabilized by the time we start moving our funds over. If our fund managers are smart, they will be buying stock like mad during the correction, and thus we'll make out like bandits.
I think metamod and moderation are limited to individuals with a positive karma. However, since it's not hard to get one upmod, I think that what's happening is the trolls are creating a large number of bogus accounts, get a single upmod on each, and then metamoderate badly. Perhaps what should happen is that you shouldn't be allowed to metamoderate until you have +10 or more karma (if you can generate 10 good points, you probably know what a good post/bad post looks like), and you cannot moderate until you have a karma of +20 or more.
Excuse me, but I thought that Darwin was just the core OS (a.k.a. BSD). Which, unless I've fallen into a strange parallel universe, was open source to begin with.
<analogy>I take a liter of air (which is free), and offer to give it to you free. Does this make me a wonderful guy, or just a huckster?</analogy>
As far as I can tell, Apple is taking the sweat of the open source movement, and profiting from it without returning anything. Times like this I feel that RMS is right about the BSD license.
As for Sorensen saying Apple prevents them from releasing the codec: this just sounds like standard run-around to me: "Apple says we can't release this, sorry, talk to them." "It's Sorensen's codec, talk to them!"
Sorry, but I'll beleive Apple really supports open source when they start walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
Has any work been done on dealing with the Distributed Denial of Service attack that Slashdot has been undergoing for the past several months?
I refer of course to the trolls who are waging a DDoS attack on moderator points. Just like any other DoS attack, they seek to consume all of a resource to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. Instead of consuming sockets, bandwidth, CPU, or disk space, these guys are consuming moderator points.
I've even noticed that the last several times I've moderated, I end up losing about 3-4 points of Karma. Now, perhaps I'm being "a bad moderator", but I don't think so: I take great care to moderate well and in the spirit of the Moderator guidelines. I wonder if the Trolls haven't managed to get several accounts they use for bogus MetaModeration.
So I wonder what if any attempts to correct this have been added to Slash1.0
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, in the US the media is predominantly Liberal in its leanings, and this gives a tremendous advantage to the Democrats. The Republicans have less chance of winning the election than Microsoft has of hiring RMS.
Sorry, wrong. A tulip-based ethernet port would add at most $20, and more likely $10, to the BOM (bill of material, the cost of the parts in the unit). Labor costs are nil, since the pick-and-place system that stuffs the rest of the parts would handle the ethernet.
I tried to do my part to
</humor>
Actually, it's only per process. In other words, if you edit a "classified" file with vi, only vi gets knocked down to "classified". However, this is what makes it fun: what if you are running X, and you cut and paste from a secure document? Now you have to track the security level of the X cut&paste buffer. Again, this is why getting to a B2 security level is so hard: every time you think you've got it covered, another issue pops up.
Let's take your simple program that opens a "secret" classification file and opens a "confidential" (lower rated file), then copies the secret file to the classified file.
The program starts life with a default classification inherited from the shell that started it (let's say this shell is top secret rated, just to make it interesting). When it opens the secret rated file for read, the system says "OK, you can read secret since your currently top secret" and the open succeeds. Then you try to open the other file as classified for write. The system says "well, you could do this, but I'd have to drop you to classified level. Oops, you have a file descriptor open at secret. Sorry Charlie, but no. E_BUTIWOULDHAVETOKILLYOU".
Alternatively, let's say you do the classified file first, then the secret file. When you open the classified file for write, your process security goes to "classified", and then the open to the secret file fails.
Now, think about all the various file descriptors a process has open, and think about making them all match in security. Now you see why getting a B rating takes a lot of work.
When doing thermal analysis, it's useful to make an analogy to electrical circuits. You convert heat flow into current, temperature into voltage, and thermal resistance into electrical resistance.
That said, a normal Peltier module can generate about a 50 degree C drop with no thermal load (this is equivelent to the open circuit voltage of a battery), and move about 5 watts of heat with no heat difference (just like shorting a battery out and measuring the current).
However, I read in EE Times (I think it was) about a new breakthrough in Peltier technology: by doping the module with a little Cesium, they got the open circuit temperature drop to 200 degrees C. Still won't move any more heat, but it'll move it over a larger temperature difference.
Now, I wonder what will happen when those babies become available....
#include <government.hpp>
void example(void)
{
Government us;
++us;
--us;
# ERROR - operator -- not defined for class Government
bash>
In other words, governments, once enacted, do not shrink. Just as a cancerous tumor secretes substances to increase its blood supply, governments seek to increase their money supply via taxes. Just as the best way to keep a cancer from growing is to prevent angiogenesis, the best way to keep a government small is to limit its budget by limiting taxes. In fact, this was one of the very reasons that the Founding Fathers of the US prohibited the federal government from imposing an income tax (then along came the 16th amendment, which made it legal). Consider all the intrusions into your life that come about as a result of income tax:
and so on. The number of taxes we pay needs to be decreased, and more of what the federal government does needs to be done either by the state or local goverments, or (hold on to your hat, strange idea coming up) by the people themselves.
However, since the actions to make this happen must be taken by the government, who will not benefit from them, they are about as likely as the source code for Windows 2000 quantum tunneling out of Redmond into Sunsite.
That said, the GBP of a normal transistor is much higher than the GBP of a phototransistor, primarily because the base area (gate area, for MOS transistors) is much larger in a phototransistor than a regular transistor (My, what a big gate you have! The better to see you with, my dear!).
The large gate area equals larger capacitance, which slows switching times down.
Is that it can be applied to the NY Times as well.e rlaw/07law.html. In other words, change the www to partners.
For example, to bypass the login for this article use
http:// partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/cyber/cyb
Yes, I've even used it myself a few times
However, with respect to some earlier comments to the effect of "they are fixing the bugs, then they'll speed it up", this worries me. I've heard the same argument used elsewhere (KDE, for example).
I agree with the concept of "Get it working first, then tweak it." However, in my experience "tweaks" can get you at best 20% speedups (unless your starting code was really dreadful. However, when you start looking to get order of magnitude increases, you don't just "tweak": you have to go down to the fundimental algorithms and completely revamp them. A simple example: you can tweak and polish a bubblesort all you want, and you might get 10% improvement out of it. However, if you go to a quicksort, you will start to get near order of magnitude improvements.
What worries me is that several aspects of Mozilla need order of magnitude improvements. I'm worried that by the time the Mozilla team gets around to working on those sections of code, too much will have been cast in concrete and it won't be possible to make the sweeping changes needed to get the speed up.
Now, I'll grant that if the code is very modular, with good interfaces between modules, it should be possible to replace subsystems without breaking everything. I've not had enough time to go over the Mozilla code myself (I have a big project I'm working on and I don't have time to contribute much to Mozilla (more's the pity)) so I cannot say if it is or isn't that modular (but from what I've seen of the team working on it I have high hopes).
I just hope they are able to make the improvements needed, because as it is today, Mozilla ain't a competitor to Netscape 4.7, and sure ain't close to IE. (excuse me, I must wash my hands now. I feel so dirty....)
And before anybody calls me a dirty stinkin' MicroSoftie: I'm using Netscape 4.72 under RH6.2beta right now. The last time I booted one of my computers under Windows a week ago, and that's just because the program I needed to run won't run under Wine.
Yes, I understand that debugging code will have a performance impact (generally in my code I get about a 10% to 20% slowdown due to additional checking and logging). However, to have this level of impact their code would have to look like:
void somefunc(int x)
{
assert(1==1);
assert(x==x);
++x;
assert(x==x);
}
Especially for a preview release (i.e. a release that "normal people" might look at), they need to have operations as close as possible to final product. People will judge Netscape 6 by this: a hyper-sub-light interface like this will turn more people to Internet Exploiter than any amount of Microsoft marketing.
When I tried M[{11}-{14}], I understood that it was going to be slower than release, and I accepted this. But this is rediculous!
Also, you add a signature but you post as an AC. Why don't you create an account? (I don't mean this as a flame, but as a real question). It's not like it costs anything, and then your comments would be more likely to be moderated up.
Is it possible to just get two cards, put them in two computers, and link the two machines? In other words is the base unit needed for anything other than connection to the main network?
After all, I already have a Linux firewall machine on my network: adding a wireless NIC to it would be child's play.
To clarify: they may render pages quickly, but any attempt to do any kind of configuration takes several tens of seconds to get the screen up. This is on a Celeron-400, RH6.2beta, and 256M of RAM!
I've done several clean installs, I've pulled every trick 12 years of being a professional software engineer has taught me, and my results are consistent. Either I keep making the same mistake or something's rotten.
Anybody have good response time doing configuration?
You mean, Pinkerton is going to talk to somebody about this idea?
Did they contact John, or did John contact them?
They actually read the comments on
Excuse me, but I must go outside and see what color the sky is in this strange, new, parallel world I find myself in.
This is a significant moment in
I remember when the Findings of Fact came out, and Slashdot had a bunch of legal experts analyze it. Will they do the same for the Findings of Law?
Yes, it's "Hammer to Fall", and I also botched the album: the album is "The Works". However, part of the reason I gave a slightly longer title was to allow more people on /. who might not be hardcore Queen fans to get the joke.
For those of you who don't get this joke, this is a reference to a very similar joke pulled by Rush Limbaugh, back before he sold out and became just a shill for the extreme right.
I really never had much use for the wallpaper (neat, but I'd rather my XServer spend it's cycles rendering what I'm working on, not the background) but I loved the story! It's a shame he won't be keeping that story up to date: Maybe that's what we need, a OSS version of the story of Propaganda, like the old "Never ending stories" we used to have back in the BBS days. (You mean there was something before the Internet, Papa Smurf? Yes you little whippersnapper, let me tell you about when we only had 300 baud, and we were thankful!....)
(let's try that again...)
I have a song request: anybody who lives in the Redmond area, see if you can get your local classic rock station to start playing Queen's Waiting for the Hammer to Fall off of Radio Ga-Ga, and dedicate it to Bill.
In large part, this money is coming from the baby boomers, the largest segment of which were born about nine months after 1945. They are now 55 years old, and will be retiring in about ten years. In about five years, they will start moving their retirement money from long term growth (stocks) into guaranteed value high liquidity (bonds), and thus the demand for stock will drop precipitously. Once the slide begins, other fund managers will sell, and the system will cacade downward.
The folks who will really be shafted are those who will be retiring in about 15 years: they will be trying to convert to liquid assets right at the wrong time.
Luckily for folks like me who were born at the end of the boom, things should have stabilized by the time we start moving our funds over. If our fund managers are smart, they will be buying stock like mad during the correction, and thus we'll make out like bandits.
Now, I'm on record. Let's see if I'm right...
It's good to be root....
I think metamod and moderation are limited to individuals with a positive karma. However, since it's not hard to get one upmod, I think that what's happening is the trolls are creating a large number of bogus accounts, get a single upmod on each, and then metamoderate badly. Perhaps what should happen is that you shouldn't be allowed to metamoderate until you have +10 or more karma (if you can generate 10 good points, you probably know what a good post/bad post looks like), and you cannot moderate until you have a karma of +20 or more.
<analogy>I take a liter of air (which is free), and offer to give it to you free. Does this make me a wonderful guy, or just a huckster?</analogy>
As far as I can tell, Apple is taking the sweat of the open source movement, and profiting from it without returning anything. Times like this I feel that RMS is right about the BSD license.
As for Sorensen saying Apple prevents them from releasing the codec: this just sounds like standard run-around to me: "Apple says we can't release this, sorry, talk to them." "It's Sorensen's codec, talk to them!"
Sorry, but I'll beleive Apple really supports open source when they start walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
I refer of course to the trolls who are waging a DDoS attack on moderator points. Just like any other DoS attack, they seek to consume all of a resource to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. Instead of consuming sockets, bandwidth, CPU, or disk space, these guys are consuming moderator points.
I've even noticed that the last several times I've moderated, I end up losing about 3-4 points of Karma. Now, perhaps I'm being "a bad moderator", but I don't think so: I take great care to moderate well and in the spirit of the Moderator guidelines. I wonder if the Trolls haven't managed to get several accounts they use for bogus MetaModeration.
So I wonder what if any attempts to correct this have been added to Slash1.0