Sorry to reply to your.sig...
I read Michael Moore's books and agree with him on nearly all points EXCEPT this one (gun control)
Sorry to feed a gun control thread..
We will say such things, however, because the truth is too aweful-sounding: We need them to keep Government close to reasonable! We need them to keep those Washington fools semi-open and semi-transparent. We need the constant threat they provide, the threat to our societies' foundations, the threat to dramatically alter our way of life.
This may have been possible at the time your constitution was drafted (or was it one of the amendments), but how can a citizen's militia stand up to the power of the US army / national guard? I think citizens can overthrow their governments easily, of enough people participate, but not through force, but politics (not necessarily the type of politics that goes in suits, however)..
IMO, they would be better off judging closeness of friendship using clustering. Besides their direct link, how well linked are the pair? It is not the same thing, however, and it has some obvious biases.
Indeed, I don't think this would be a very good indicator. Cliques can have weak links, and strong links (good friendships) don't have to be cliquey at all.
Clustering importantly avoids the social clumsiness of rating. Ranking people is a social faux pas in many eyes, and a social networking site might do well to avoid offense.
Absolutely, but I doubt link strength can be induced from the rest of the 'social graph'. Maybe auxilary things, such as messages exchanged (and see if it's outside business hours a lot, how fast replies are, if anyone is consistently given priority in some order, what reply rate is each way - remember links aren't symmetrical..) But
this is all kinda spooky.
Whether they have the computing power to compute the clustering measures is another question.
I think that could be done very efficiently and incrementally..
slightly offtopic perhaps, but perhaps someone
here knows, speaking of improvements.. what i'd
really really like greatly is roaming profiles,
allowing me to share bookmarks, cookies, history
etc. with mozilla's on each of the systems i use..
It would be such a huge improvement to my browsing
usage, at least; currently I don't bother with bookmarks, for instance..
I know this feature has been talked about endlessly, i haven't read the full bugzilla bugs about it because they were so large:)
Anyone know what the status is of this?
And this is somehow better than we are thought of now? Already nobody likes us because of the semi-firm action we are taking against terrorists.
What? What terrorists? All I've seen is the US invading third-world countries and making a huge mess of it, then asking the rest of the world to bail them out so GWB might have a chance to be re-elected (God help us if that happens).
Please enlighten us. What "terrorists" have the US taken "action" against?
Get Congress to do something useful and mandate that an X-Spam tag be added to all unsolicited e-mail. Then just filter on that. Until that happens I'll let Spamassassin do it.
Hm, your spamassassin must be working better than mine is nowadays:(
Well, differentiating is a word for it too; but so is derive.. ("deriviative of f"..)
I hereby declare the poem to be in the public domain, so that everyone can change it as the see fit:)
In all seriousness, it is pretty impressive that Groove got their FIPS certification.
For everyone's info, a FIPS 140-2 certification is 'only' a security certification for systems that process data that's "sensitive but unclassified"
(what a strange classification!:)).
From http://www.rycombe.com/short140.htm :
Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2(FIPS 140-2) is a standard that describes US Federal government requirements that IT products should meet for Sensitive, but Unclassified (SBU) use.
The standard defines the security requirements that must be satisfied by a cryptographic module used in a security system protecting unclassified information within IT systems. There are four levels of security: from Level 1 (lowest) to Level 4 (highest). These levels are intended to cover the wide range of potential applications and environments in which cryptographic modules may be deployed. The security requirements cover areas related to the secure design and implementation of a cryptographic module.
No, indeed. All this protocol does is increase the rate at which a transport layer protocol (such as TCP) adjusts to available bandwidth over a very fast physical medium (without bumping into the congestion limit, otherwise it would be easy;)). Numbers such as 6000 and words such as DSL are crazy.
It is a transport-layer protocol, such as
TCP, making statements such as
"New protocol could speed Internet significantly"
(the title on the article page) a bit bogus, but "BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL" utterly clueless.
It addresses the problem that TCP connections over low latencies get to adjust their windows faster than their higher-latencies buddies sharing a link, causing the lower latency TCP connection to get more of the bandwidth before the link is filled up (and both TCP's back off due to their congestion window).
The window size is adjusted using binary search instead of an exponential increase; somehow this makes this new protocol able to adjust its window size to the maximum (representing optimum bandwidth utilisation) faster than regular TCP. Why this is remains puzzling, because both binary search and TCP (which uses a factor of the previous window size) should reach their windows sizes in logarithmic time, as both searches are exponentially fast.
"What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
This is very puzzling indeed, the article doesn't back it up in the least.
The rest of the article can be summarized as harmless fluff and clueless crud, as far as I'm concerned.
Being young and inexperienced, to them everything appears to be novel.
Looking at some of the granted BS patents, I doubt this is the full story.
The problem with the system seems to be that the burden of vetting a patent application has been shifted from the USPTO and the patenting process (a very slow and expensive process already) to the courts and lawyers when it becomes time to challenge patents..
Ability to "lock" the scheduler, so that the game gets 100% CPU until it unlocks (effectively
making it a single process OS like DOS while in this mode).
Possible, but not really worth it; you have to let the kernel run every now and again (especially if you want to have such luxuries as I/O, memory management, and network packets;)), and if you do that, you're only competing with processes. A nicer way to accomplish this would be to give your game a "veto" priority in the scheduler, running whenever it wants to; real-time hooks could do this too, i think linux has some real-time features.
Running the games in kernel space? Maybe this is just madness;-) Would it not help performance
if the CPU wasn't switching between contexts?
Not worth the can of worms, i think. The kernel and game would become confused about what states it would be leaving the hardware in, and the game would have a difficult time making use of the convenient features provided to processes by the kernel in a portable way..
Maybe games features in kernels aren't a bad idea, but i don't think these are the good ones.
Seriously, the OS doesn't *do* anything for a game. All a game really needs is a collection of APIs to transparently access low-level hardware. Threading is nice, but "green" thread libraries can be used in its stead. That's much the reason why MSDOS (save for the 640K barrier) was such a great gaming platform. The OS literally did nothing. It got the frick out of the way, and stayed there.
This is a terrible idea, because it basically says that games should talk to the hardware directly. Maybe a good idea in the C64 days, but nowadays it can't and shouldn't be done because there is an OS in the way; you know, the OS that is there so that you can talk to your hardware in an hardware-independant manner, giving you more than a prayer the game will run on a machine other than your own as well.
Hardware abstraction layers, such as OpenGL (and less game-specific ones), are good things.
3) Arrogant advocacy. This is the worst one. OS/2 died in part because most people in Team OS/2 were assholes. Linux advocates are no less impolite. Face it, no matter how much you argue the point, the average consumer will NEVER believe that Linux is the holy salvation of mankind. Yet you still continue to argue that. "Linux? Oh yeah, that's the OS with all the arrogant jerks..."
You could have a good point here.. I used to be a hardcore Amiga user, and I heard about how the image of Amiga was being tainted by the rabid defence Amiga users tended to give it.. See also:
The Jargon File entry for Amiga Persecution Complex, which also mentions linux:
Amiga Persecution Complex: n.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars, weenie, Get a life!.
A terrible solution. Why bother using linux at all, you may as throw out your PC and use a games console instead if you can put up with using 1 thing at a time and rebooting between things.
Window has shown that no matter what kernel you start with, you can still produce an unstable, insecure, and all around broken OS.
Of course. And it's a 0-value argument against microkernels or for monolithic ones.
Monolithic kernels have been made more flexible through the use of loadable modules.
Yes, but so what? Of course not all microkernels are created equal, but a major feature of one could be that the kernel runs as many processes, protected from each other just like processes are;
and, in the best case, they can be restarted when they crash and the system can continue to run. In the worst case they contain the bug to one subsystem. This in addition to features such as seperate upgradability of kernel components, and other microkernel benefits.
Loadable modules are a
pathetic kludge in comparison, the kernel runs just like it was linked statically in the first place, but it's edited to do so at runtime. If you think kernel modules gain a monolithic kernel the benefits of a microkernel, you are sadly mistaken.
Compared to some, much older operating systems, linux is a toy OS (multics, for example). Nothing wrong with that, really, but ast@ was right when he said (in so many words) linux is a huge step backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
slightly offtopic perhaps, but perhaps someone here knows, speaking of improvements.. what i'd really really like greatly is roaming profiles, allowing me to share bookmarks, cookies, history etc. with mozilla's on each of the systems i use.. It would be such a huge improvement to my browsing usage, at least; currently I don't bother with bookmarks, for instance.. I know this feature has been talked about endlessly, i haven't read the full bugzilla bugs about it because they were so large :)
Anyone know what the status is of this?
Please enlighten us. What "terrorists" have the US taken "action" against?
and other root passwords to the US constitution.
All you have to say for median to be the same as average, is that the distribution is symmetrical around the median..
Well, differentiating is a word for it too; but so is derive.. ("deriviative of f"..) I hereby declare the poem to be in the public domain, so that everyone can change it as the see fit :)
Roses are red
Violets are blue
While you're deriving me
I'll be integrating you
Nothing if you can run it off the CD as well as boot it :)
Indeed, but what if you could replace your home connection and phone? It'd be worth $80..
No, indeed. All this protocol does is increase the rate at which a transport layer protocol (such as TCP) adjusts to available bandwidth over a very fast physical medium (without bumping into the congestion limit, otherwise it would be easy ;)). Numbers such as 6000 and words such as DSL are crazy.
Not that I believe TCP is that bad to begin with..
- It is a transport-layer protocol, such as
TCP, making statements such as
"New protocol could speed Internet significantly"
(the title on the article page) a bit bogus, but "BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL" utterly clueless.
- It addresses the problem that TCP connections over low latencies get to adjust their windows faster than their higher-latencies buddies sharing a link, causing the lower latency TCP connection to get more of the bandwidth before the link is filled up (and both TCP's back off due to their congestion window).
- The window size is adjusted using binary search instead of an exponential increase; somehow this makes this new protocol able to adjust its window size to the maximum (representing optimum bandwidth utilisation) faster than regular TCP. Why this is remains puzzling, because both binary search and TCP (which uses a factor of the previous window size) should reach their windows sizes in logarithmic time, as both searches are exponentially fast.
The rest of the article can be summarized as harmless fluff and clueless crud, as far as I'm concerned."What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
This is very puzzling indeed, the article doesn't back it up in the least.
The problem with the system seems to be that the burden of vetting a patent application has been shifted from the USPTO and the patenting process (a very slow and expensive process already) to the courts and lawyers when it becomes time to challenge patents..
Maybe games features in kernels aren't a bad idea, but i don't think these are the good ones.
Hardware abstraction layers, such as OpenGL (and less game-specific ones), are good things.
A terrible solution. Why bother using linux at all, you may as throw out your PC and use a games console instead if you can put up with using 1 thing at a time and rebooting between things.
Loadable modules are a pathetic kludge in comparison, the kernel runs just like it was linked statically in the first place, but it's edited to do so at runtime. If you think kernel modules gain a monolithic kernel the benefits of a microkernel, you are sadly mistaken.
Compared to some, much older operating systems, linux is a toy OS (multics, for example). Nothing wrong with that, really, but ast@ was right when he said (in so many words) linux is a huge step backwards.
Yes, and don't forget how 16x16 pixel porn drove the revolution of WAP - oh wait..