Isn't it a design flaw if the machine acceps several thousand votes and dosn't display the warning until after the vote has been committed. Why not make it impossible to input a new vote once the limit has been reached? In that case it would not be possible to overlook or ignore the flashing message.
Of course I live in a country where we are still using pen and paper. Also, I guess we would have a more difficult task of creating a UI for electronic voting, since we have 10+parties and personal votes with several candidates per party.
Anyway, congrats to the winners, although I would rather have seen Kerry as your president.
Honey, which compression should I use to shrink this one, Rar, ace or 7z?
Sometimes i tend to think that some peoples genome has already been compressed and decompressed, although not with any of the above algorithms, but rather some kind of lossy compression scheme.
the number of genes isn't as crucial as how they are used
Compare to
the number of instructions isn't as crucial as how they are used
I think there are many similarities with machine code, and this in fact shows that it IS possible to spend thousands of years optimizing a piece of code.
I wonder what kind of debugger God uses? And if he ever reverse engineered someone elses code.
http://what-is-wrong-with-you-guys.nu/ . The.nu TLD have been using this for a couple of years now. It really screws things up a lot when you do not get a proper NXDOMAIN, but actually get a valig reply that dosn't run whatever service you were trying to connect to.
But the fact is that a lot of domains do this, just not on TLD. Is this less bad??
People were delivering similar reports on "discovery of room temperature superconductivity" in the past. The trouble is, they could not repeat their achievements. They were also from Croatia, which didn't give them that much publicity.
Well.. Did you consider the much lower room temperature common in Croatia at winter time?
My case does that, although not truecolor. I have 10 green and 10 blue leds illuminating the front of my case, controlled by a small uController, and interfaced by the serial port. So far I have it function as an averaging HDD-led. i.e. with heavy disc activity the light will fade in, then fade out again when disk becomes idle (this is all done in the uController). I also have a small application that can "stream" data to the uController to set the brightness-level to a certain value. Using this to monitor system load, network activity or something similar is trivial. A bit more tricky to implement is my idea of a visualisation plugin for XMMS or WinAmp. I haven't done it yet, but it is definitely doable.
I'm aware of that. And for other flash devices (like CF) that can interface to a standard IDE-bus, I believe that some of the data movement may be handled by the hardware underneath the filesystem. This should mean that the filesystem makes no difference, but even if you (via filesystem or hardware) write all sectors exactly the same number of times, how much (or little) is 10.000 writes. Maybe one should make some kernel-patch that keeps track of the most written sectors, and the count.
My question, however remains unanswered. How do 10.000 rewrites on flash compare to the the number of rewrites possible on regular harddisks? It seems that half of Slashdots posters were already aware that the number of writes on flash was a problem, but how big is the problem compared to normal drives?
I wonder if they have solved the problems with a limited number of writes to flash memory. Most flash-chips only have a 1000 or 10000 cycle write endurance. Sometimes this gets higher because virtual pages are used and the data shuffeled arround on the "disk" each time it is written. But that will still cause problems if you fill up the disk, say 90%, and then keep writing and rewriting the remaining 10%.
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.
Yeah, I do that all the time too. I must admit that although I use Linux for anything at home and work, I know some people (actually the majority of people I know) who do not want to have to compile everything themselves (even though it is as simple as typing emerge sync && emerge -uD world). Also, these people tend to receive al kinds of weird emails with anything from PowerPoint and Word documents to Excel sheets and viruses. Getting all this to work without spending some extra time tweaking and setting up the system is not possible with Linux.
Also, if every numbnut starts using Linux, I'm sure the average security of Linux will drop, simply because there are just too many persons who just don't care about security. I guess most of the people running Linux today are somewhat skilled in computers, hence more aware of security issues.
Although there are automatic updates available with many Linux-distributions (as well as Windows), I still think there will be some people disabling such features (although getting people to use automatic update of a Linux box might be easier since they do not have to be afraid of being caught with an illegal copy of Windows). So this takes care of some of the problem, but I really think we need to get back to having a conceptual difference between a computer administrator and the user (at least when the user is the average John Doe).
Damn, that was a long post. And after I recompiled Firefox, aparently my cursor-keys don't work in input-fields. My arm is starting to hurt from using the mouse to move the cursor all the time.;-)
Once the patents are sucessfully filed, the onus would be on to the challenger(s) to prove there is prior art. A patent holder with as much cash as Microsoft obviously has the fiscal endurance to survive many bouts of litigation...
Hmm.. So what we are looking at is Microsoft taking a lot of patents, although they know there is prior art, mainly because the system won't notice. And once the patent is issued, it gets much more difficult to prove that there was in fact prior art. Especially in the software business it can be hard to prove at what point in time you developed some feature. Backup on tapes and print out hardcopies with dates.;-)
But that's not the point. The point is that you are wasting a lot of resources, alhough it may be easier to manage.
I usually stop any services that are not needed, configure those that only need to work on the loopback interface to run only on that, and then setup the firewall. This way I'm not wasting resources on services that are not needed, while the firewall protects me from accidentally having a service running, that I was not aware of.
Somewhere in the install-script, the game seems to be chmod'ed setuid root. Who notices that before someone accdidently hits/boot/vmlinuz? And even then you won't notice until you try to reboot.
Also, remember to put swap partitions (if you are using files you are hopelessly fucked) on the end of the disk, so that they will be on the outer sectors where the transfer rate is fastest.
I have always thought that the sectors were numbered from the outside inwards. I remember this from some comments regarding dual-boot, and how having Windows on the first partition and Linux on the 2nd would make the Windows system a little faster and the Linux system slower (compared to Linux on the 1st partition and Windows on the 2nd).
Does anyone have any hard facts on this question. ie. will it be better to have the partition you want most performance from at the beginning or the end of the disk? Are there any filesystems that use the space from the other end (as in higher sector numbers)?
In regards to setting the priority on the swap partitions, this works very well. When I setup software RAID systems with linux, I always have a partition on each disk for swap. Depending on the needed stability I will let the swap-system handle the striping (with priority), or mirror the swap (if we need to be able to survive a disk crash without rebooting).
Coming back to the original post, I am wondering if Windows supports swapping to a partition? Wouldn't there always be some overhead in swapping to a file (eg. having a filesystem layer in between)?
I'm currently working on my PhD project involving location based services. From my research, I've discovered that a much more accurate location estimate is possible than the simple "strongest cell tower". Basically you meassure the signal strengths from all available towers (or access points), and do some calculations based on this information. Finally you find the best match in a database of location/signal-strengths, and interpolate a position.
I first saw this technology used on WLAN. Ehahau uses this technology to provide location based services on WLAN, and it works great. In our test setup at the university, we get arround 1 meter error in the position.
I've been in touch with a group of people at The IT-University of Denmark, who are working on using this technology on GSM cellphones. The biggest problem here is getting access to the data. The cellphone companies simply do not want to provide this information. Our collaborative guess was that they want to keep this information to themselves, probably to sell extra services.
The main drawback of this technology is that a huge amount of calibration is needed to make it work. On WLAN our buildings have been calibrated in a grid of 3x3 meters, which makes quite a lot of calibration points when we want coverage of the entire campus. But the cool thing about it is that it does not require any extra hardware to do the localization. A labtop or PDA with wireless will do the job.
In Denmark the subscription plans are not allowed to last more than 6 months.
After this period the phone company is required by law to remove any SIM-lock, allowing you to use the phone with any other phone company.
Of course you can also get the phone without getting locked into the subscription plans, but you have to pay a lot more to get it./Spiff
Hmm. And pretty soon everyone will have these helmets with HUDs, and to lower the prices they start having commercials in the middle of your field of vision.
"NOW - including animated commercials and sound".. ARGH!!
Slashdot Mirror
"We'll give you 9 years... in the electric chair... and then we will hang you..."
Of course I live in a country where we are still using pen and paper. Also, I guess we would have a more difficult task of creating a UI for electronic voting, since we have 10+parties and personal votes with several candidates per party.
Anyway, congrats to the winners, although I would rather have seen Kerry as your president.
Anything written in assembly language is self-documenting, because you can have comments on each line. Such as
Failure is not an option. It's hardcoded.
I thought it was "Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product."
Sometimes i tend to think that some peoples genome has already been compressed and decompressed, although not with any of the above algorithms, but rather some kind of lossy compression scheme.
Compare to
the number of instructions isn't as crucial as how they are used
I think there are many similarities with machine code, and this in fact shows that it IS possible to spend thousands of years optimizing a piece of code.
I wonder what kind of debugger God uses? And if he ever reverse engineered someone elses code.
http://what-is-wrong-with-you-guys.nu/ . The .nu TLD have been using this for a couple of years now. It really screws things up a lot when you do not get a proper NXDOMAIN, but actually get a valig reply that dosn't run whatever service you were trying to connect to.
But the fact is that a lot of domains do this, just not on TLD. Is this less bad??
Well.. Did you consider the much lower room temperature common in Croatia at winter time?
I'm aware of that. And for other flash devices (like CF) that can interface to a standard IDE-bus, I believe that some of the data movement may be handled by the hardware underneath the filesystem. This should mean that the filesystem makes no difference, but even if you (via filesystem or hardware) write all sectors exactly the same number of times, how much (or little) is 10.000 writes. Maybe one should make some kernel-patch that keeps track of the most written sectors, and the count.
My question, however remains unanswered. How do 10.000 rewrites on flash compare to the the number of rewrites possible on regular harddisks? It seems that half of Slashdots posters were already aware that the number of writes on flash was a problem, but how big is the problem compared to normal drives?
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.
Yeah, I do that all the time too. I must admit that although I use Linux for anything at home and work, I know some people (actually the majority of people I know) who do not want to have to compile everything themselves (even though it is as simple as typing emerge sync && emerge -uD world). Also, these people tend to receive al kinds of weird emails with anything from PowerPoint and Word documents to Excel sheets and viruses. Getting all this to work without spending some extra time tweaking and setting up the system is not possible with Linux.
Also, if every numbnut starts using Linux, I'm sure the average security of Linux will drop, simply because there are just too many persons who just don't care about security. I guess most of the people running Linux today are somewhat skilled in computers, hence more aware of security issues.
Although there are automatic updates available with many Linux-distributions (as well as Windows), I still think there will be some people disabling such features (although getting people to use automatic update of a Linux box might be easier since they do not have to be afraid of being caught with an illegal copy of Windows). So this takes care of some of the problem, but I really think we need to get back to having a conceptual difference between a computer administrator and the user (at least when the user is the average John Doe).
Damn, that was a long post. And after I recompiled Firefox, aparently my cursor-keys don't work in input-fields. My arm is starting to hurt from using the mouse to move the cursor all the time. ;-)
Hmm.. So what we are looking at is Microsoft taking a lot of patents, although they know there is prior art, mainly because the system won't notice. And once the patent is issued, it gets much more difficult to prove that there was in fact prior art. Especially in the software business it can be hard to prove at what point in time you developed some feature. Backup on tapes and print out hardcopies with dates. ;-)
But that's not the point. The point is that you are wasting a lot of resources, alhough it may be easier to manage.
/Spiff
I usually stop any services that are not needed, configure those that only need to work on the loopback interface to run only on that, and then setup the firewall. This way I'm not wasting resources on services that are not needed, while the firewall protects me from accidentally having a service running, that I was not aware of.
Hmm.
/boot/vmlinuz? And even then you won't notice until you try to reboot.
/Spiff
Somewhere in the install-script, the game seems to be chmod'ed setuid root. Who notices that before someone accdidently hits
I have always thought that the sectors were numbered from the outside inwards. I remember this from some comments regarding dual-boot, and how having Windows on the first partition and Linux on the 2nd would make the Windows system a little faster and the Linux system slower (compared to Linux on the 1st partition and Windows on the 2nd).
Does anyone have any hard facts on this question. ie. will it be better to have the partition you want most performance from at the beginning or the end of the disk? Are there any filesystems that use the space from the other end (as in higher sector numbers)?
In regards to setting the priority on the swap partitions, this works very well. When I setup software RAID systems with linux, I always have a partition on each disk for swap. Depending on the needed stability I will let the swap-system handle the striping (with priority), or mirror the swap (if we need to be able to survive a disk crash without rebooting).
Coming back to the original post, I am wondering if Windows supports swapping to a partition? Wouldn't there always be some overhead in swapping to a file (eg. having a filesystem layer in between)?
/Spiff
It does seem somewhat strange if Chase Manhattan Bank actually own that site. ;-)
/Spiff
I'm currently working on my PhD project involving location based services. From my research, I've discovered that a much more accurate location estimate is possible than the simple "strongest cell tower". Basically you meassure the signal strengths from all available towers (or access points), and do some calculations based on this information. Finally you find the best match in a database of location/signal-strengths, and interpolate a position.
/Spiff
I first saw this technology used on WLAN. Ehahau uses this technology to provide location based services on WLAN, and it works great. In our test setup at the university, we get arround 1 meter error in the position.
I've been in touch with a group of people at The IT-University of Denmark, who are working on using this technology on GSM cellphones. The biggest problem here is getting access to the data. The cellphone companies simply do not want to provide this information. Our collaborative guess was that they want to keep this information to themselves, probably to sell extra services.
The main drawback of this technology is that a huge amount of calibration is needed to make it work. On WLAN our buildings have been calibrated in a grid of 3x3 meters, which makes quite a lot of calibration points when we want coverage of the entire campus. But the cool thing about it is that it does not require any extra hardware to do the localization. A labtop or PDA with wireless will do the job.
In Denmark the subscription plans are not allowed to last more than 6 months. After this period the phone company is required by law to remove any SIM-lock, allowing you to use the phone with any other phone company. Of course you can also get the phone without getting locked into the subscription plans, but you have to pay a lot more to get it. /Spiff
Well, if one wants background noise, perhaps Boodler can help out. Just like buying those whitenoise boxes, except this runs on Linux ;-)
Hmm. And pretty soon everyone will have these helmets with HUDs, and to lower the prices they start having commercials in the middle of your field of vision.
"NOW - including animated commercials and sound".. ARGH!!
/Spiff