I read this claim again and again, and it still doesn't sit well with me. I worked on a vector-based rendering engine for awhile (in fact, the fastest vector-based rendering engine [begins with an f, ends with a lash]), and there are certain limitations that cannot be overcome.
When it ultimately gets down to it, a PNG file is a compressed bitmap. There is a fixed cost to rendering it, which can be expressed as an amortization of the dimensions of the image. Its just like fill-rate on a 3-D card.
When rendering any vector format, there are many dependencies. Is AA enabled? Which AA algorithm was used? Are they using a scanline renderer, or actually rasterizing each vector regardless of its impact?
The same reason which allows SVG to be faster than PNG rendering is the same reason that other cases will be radically slower: rendering each vector disregards the size of the image being rendered. How can this make it slower? Imagine an image filled dozens or hundreds of times with the same vectors that fill the image completely. Suddenly, we're not having to fill a rectangle, we're having to fill it multiple times in comparison to the png drawing in the same space. And the problem gets worse the larger the destination size.
Using a scanline renderer for vector based graphics has a much better cost comparison to png format, but it will always be slower as ultimately bitmaps can be embedded within vector formats.
As a simpler analogy; the vector graphics are to the transformation pipeline or a graphics card what bitmaps (and pngs) are to the rasterization on the video card. Transformation without rasterization is meaningless, and therefore always going to be slower.
Carmack mentioned this, and its important not to gloss over...
There's a big difference between the drivers theoretical output, and the actual acheived output.
In testing at my job, we found that the ATI drivers typically performed very poorly in comparison to those released by nVidia on similar hardware. In addition, we often had more serious issues with bugs in ATI drivers than nVidia. Although the next great thing from nVidia isn't likely to outright dethrone the 9700, nVidia is constantly improving their driver technology, constantly making the layer between software and hardware thinner and thinner.
There are a few flaws with the article that I'd also like to mention. I've worked on a handful of commercial shrinkwrap products, as well as a few video games. I do not speak for either of these companies. That being said...
Using Inodes, or anything else that doesn't allow the user to easily manipulate the document "seems like a good idea at the time(tm)," but in practice, it really sucks.
Consider Mac OS 9 Particularly when uninstalling and installing documents, it becomes obvious that this scheme is less than useful. It makes it *really* difficult to substitute a file for another file. In the case MacOS, you can delete the file, which conveniently winds up in the trashcan. After that, you replace the file with a new file of the same name that has some changes. However, because MacOS is "protecting you," it finds and uses the file in the trash can instead!
The same thing happens on MacOS 9 as well for programs. You can run entire programs from the trash, because it doesn't rely on the "pesky" filename to uniquely identify the app, taking power away from the user.
You mentioned this as well, but I wanted to add something... Another flaw of the article is how it discusses the necessity (or lack) of a quit button. While this might be true if we still ran applications that can fit in 64K of memory, it is not true with the powerhouse applications that we run today. The last commercial shrinkwrap application I worked on required 64 megs of RAM to run really well, and it was pushing the envelope when it came out. Similarly, the game I'm working on now requires approximately 128 megs, plus 32 megs of video ram. If we were to share nicely with other applications, the performance would suffer incredibly of both applications. Anyone who has ever fired up two copies of any application of a decent size would agree that the ability to quit applications is not a hindrance, its a necessity.
I'm a programmer at a large game company, and not long ago we got our first Radeon. I was astounded at how bad the performance was, and especially at how bad the drivers were.
In fact, the card is performing so badly that ATi has started shipping many Radeon 9700s out to game developers all over the place in an effort to get us to fix our software with their cards, as if it was our fault that they didn't write their drivers according to the DX8 spec.
One of the problems their driver had was that it constantly leaked memory. We couldn't run anything (including sample apps!) on it for more than 5 minutes without it leaking texture memory so badly that it would start paging its texture memory to disk!
I want to see competition for nVidia as badly as everyone else, but I just don't think ATi is it quite yet.
And the reason that people keep saying that this problem is a simple MST problem is because they are picturing a problem in which all nodes are known.
For this problem picture a three city setup, where each city is the vertex of a triangle. Then the solution to this problem is to have each city connect a road towards a fourth, unknown node somewhere in the middle of the triangle. The NP-edness of this problem comes from the fact that you do not know where the fourth node belongs, and the only way to prove where it belongs is to test all available placements.
The soap bubble will always yield the optimal solution to this because (as you state) of surface tension and energy minimization.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
...but there was one behavior that drove me crazy...
People would walk up behind someone else who was writing code, look at the screen for about 5 seconds, (which contained a for loop that was counting) and then say "Brilliant!" as though the code was a miracle cure for genital herpes.
I can honestly say that there are very few times when I'm trying to solve a large problem that anyone could look at less than 24 lines of my code (that goes on for 10,000+ lines) and say "Brilliance!"
Other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I t was entertaining, and Claire Forlani did very little of her annoying look that she does. (Anyone who's seen Joe Black knows exactly what I'm talking about). --
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
After all, nVidia has scheduled to release their next generation card in September. This is the card that supposedly uses the same chipset as the X-box (since nVidia is producing the chips for MS), which supposedly makes the PS2 look a bit like an 8-bit Nintendo.
Sure, the card would've been really cool 2 years ago when they said they were going to release it, but so would the Bitboys card. Personally I think its funny that 3dfx is going to be releasing a card that will barely beat the last rev from nVidia.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I believe the problem lies in (no offense) your understanding of what a physicist means when he states that asteroids and other goodness are made out of frozen rock.
Have you ever handled liquid nitrogen? It freezes object extremely quickly to very low temperatures, but is not water. When an astrophysicist refers to a comet or celestial body as being frozen, he doesn't mean that it contains ice, it simply means they are solid state of (insert composition here).
The formation of water has been thought to be a fairly rare event, one that distinguishes the earth (life-bearing) from virtually every other object in our solar system (non life-bearing).
This has been attributed to many different causes, ranging from the size of our planet to the distance from the sun. Why?
It is believed that the order of formation of the planets was determined by the mass of the particles that make up the planet. Thus Mercury is made of denser stuff than venus, than Earth, than Jupiter, etc. So in order to have the proper ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen (slightly less than 2-1 for earth), you must be approximately Earth-distanced from the Sun.
The size (mass) of the planet is important because it affects the speed of the reaction. This is important because for a body of water the size of the earth, a simple catalyst wouldn't suffice. (As a side, one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen in Chemistry was where a professor took 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part Oxygen, a little bit of platinum for a catalyst, put it all in a balloon and went on with his lecture. At the end of the class he popped the balloon and water fell out. Kinda cool.)
Anyways, I hope all this crap helps.:) -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
This Black hole is NOT blowing, as the headline suggests. The behavior of this black hole is exactly as expected, and is totally inline with other Black holes found to date.
There is an important distinction to be made here. The Black hole itself is still happily gravitating objects in towards its center, at incredible rates of speed. As these objects are brought in closer to the event horizon, they are both stretched and squeezed.
To visualize what is happening to the matter and energy a black hole feeds on, remember all the cartoons you've seen as a child (or last night) where a cartoon character is sucked into a bottle. As they enter into the bottle, their body is stretched ever so slightly. And because their hands are not being pulled directly downward, but to a point mass directly below their feet, they are squeezed towards their center of mass.
The squeezing causes light to be emitted in the form of X-Rays at increasing intensity the closer to the Event horizon the trapped particles are. Of course once the particles cross the event horizon, all light they emit in the form of X-rays are trapped within the black hole, never to be seen from again. (Except possibly from a white hole...)
Because of a unique property of Black Holes, the larger the black hole, the shorter the distance of space around the black hole is affected. This is a natural result of Universal Gravitation (Gmm/R^2), which again applies once outside the event horizon. This means that Gas and dust that are a significant distance away from the Black hole will not be drawn in towards the sucker as much as they are pushed away by the force of the collisions from the X-Rays. Kinda neat, huh?
Apologies to physicists if I oversimplified anything.. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Okay. Seriosuly. This has got to be the biggest load of BS I've yet to read that could somehow pass as "news."
Why am I so sure? Hacking a Windows box isn't like hacking a *NIX box. There's no magical login remote control console. These people would have to install insecure 3rd party software just to open the door to an attack that involves anything other than DOS attacks. And don't give me the "BackOrifice" or PCAnywhere bit. Both of these would have to be installed just like any other software|virus|trojan.
If these people were all running some form of *nix this would be an entirely different story. But at least he did a more or less good job of that; it is a pretty good story.
And lets look for a second at the varying degrees of intelligence these people have. They are intelligent enough to not use their own domain, intelligent enough to steal passwords from AOL users (addmittedly not hard) but then too stupid to realize that someone has been messing around on their box? Get real. "Gee, I installed that spam software yesterday, now where did it go?"
BS...BS...BS...BS... (The BS alarm)...BS...BS... -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I know it. I've used the argument dozens of times. "Its not my fault they didn't have their system configured properly."
But I don't know that it stands. I mean, personally I think that if a company has a severe security problem such as the one this company so obviously had (being able to relay to out-of-domain addresses), then I think they deserved what they got. And I don't see how a company can claim damages on something that wouldn't have happened if they'd been properly configured to begin with...
On the other hand, I take responsibility that if I get caught I'm pretty much going to twist in the wind. I think he got caught, and I think he deserves to twist in the wind.
There was something the article didn't mention. Was he simply using their e-mail servers, or did the man use that company as his ISP? I think its an entirely different argument if they were his ISP. (And I don't think they were...)
-- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Why are we still working on making computers FASTER? I mean there's no innovation there, we've had the same problem since the days of the ENIAC. And why would we want to make computers smaller? Same problem as we had with the ENIAC, and by your logic there would be no innovation there. In fact, until there is a revolution in the way we compute--according to your logic--via DNA, Quantam or another radically different form of computing there will be very little innovation. (Note that both of these new forms of computing come from Academia.)
Of course we both know that innovation doesn't require something so radical as Quantam computing. And age doesn't qualify something as being non-innovative.
The fact that a problem has been around for such a terribly long time doesn't mean that there cannot be any innovation involved in tracking down the solution. And in fact the longer a problem has been around, the more innovation that IS required to find the solution. Otherwise the problem would have been solved already.
Certainly you realize the importance of finding a solution to the Travelling Salesman problem. It would revolutionize the way processors and other severely time-dependant circuits were constructed. Back to the salt mines... -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
At University, software researchers aren't particularly interested in the pettiness that Microsoft is. They don't care about writing usable GUIs and they don't care about how some API behaves at the top level.
At my University, our software researchers are interested in software problems such as the dining philosopher problem (threads|deadlock), the lying general problem(tcp/ip|data security), and also software solutions to the travelling salesman problem (component design).
None of them claim to be able to write an OS better than Microsoft, why would they care? And the problems that they're working on Microsoft has no desire to solve.
To say that Software Research is unecessary is a very bigoted, ego-centric view. To say that Software Research insofar as high-level OS design is concerned would be much more appropriate. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Have you seen what DivX rips look like on a slow machine? Do you know what the difference is between the processor required to play DVD discs and DivX encoded movies is?
Sorry, but I'm not going to pay >$1000 US to have a DivX player when I'd really rather watch DVD to begin with. DivX is okay for a pirate format (it looks leaps and bounds better than VCD), but for a serious format its not so good. Plus the fact that it takes a rather large processor to handle the decoding.. This means that any kind of DivX player would require at least a fast Duron or Celeron to play Divx, which would be totally wasted for playing DVDs.
I think Sony and other DVD manufacturers are well aware of these facts, and I don't expect to see too many DivX players out. (MP3 has been out for well over two years, and only 1! manufacturer FINALLY has out some kind of CD-Mp3 car stereo.)
Perhaps when processors drop to the insanely cheap prices we'll see some DivX players.
Note to masochists: I shortened DivX;-) to DivX for my post. I'm Lazy. Its a terminal condition. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Hopefully, when MPEG-4's audio specification catches on in audiophile circles
So obviously you haven't done any DivX;-) ripping. The MPEG-4's audio is simply MP3, plain and simple. In fact, you can actually choose to do any kind of audio encoding you desire, its simply that MP3 is the most commonly used audio format in DivX;-).
MP4 would be redundant and stupid to say the least.
And please note that the DivX;-) codec contains a SMILEY FACE! Its not the DivX codec. Its the DivX;-) codec. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. What the hell are you talking about?
But even that isn't true bit-to-bit, since many CD-R drives make a few mistakes everytime the burn a copy (so after a dozen or so copies the quality quickly decreases).
This is one hundred percent incorrect! If a CD-Burner makes even a single bit error, the CD will not verify. Most CD-Burners have a failure rate of 1E-30 bit-error rates. This means that approximately 1 out of every 2^90 (!) bits will be miswritten, but in this case the CD will FAIL when verified. Note that 2^90 is a billion billion billion bytes.
The changing of even a single bit during burning changes the byte which the bit belongs to, and is very easily identifiable.
Corruption in copying or downloading them? Do you know what TCP/IP is? Do you know what it does? TCP/IP promises you almost the same failure rate as Hard Disk Drives and copy algorithms (1E-33 in IBM HDDs case). TCP/IP virtually guarentees that what you download is the same as what you started with. It does so using redundant checksums and resends. This is why TCP/IP is not used for games, because it has a high overhead.
Crappy quality in MP3s is 99.99999% of the time a result of someone using a shitty encoder, not the result of download or copy errors.
PS: To illustrate this point, let me offer this. The average MP3 is 4 megs. On average, 1/10 MP3s that I download will be in crappy condition. By this measure, I should NEVER be able to download software in the size of >50 megs, because I should be guarenteed that at least one bit somewhere will be screwed up. On that note, I tell you that I've download Redhat ISO images (size >630 Megs) with a success rate of about 99.9%. In fact I've never downloaded an image and had it not verify to the original on the server.
In the future, please check your facts before posting........ -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
If you configured your box properly, and you don't always run as root, then there's really little danger to linux and unix variants.
Plus, most e-mail viruses to date have been written in VB, which is not typically installed or used outside of x86-Windows platform. In order to have any effect, viruses would have to be written in C/C++ then compiled for *nix (and for each variant) or would have to be written in JAVA, which would require that the machine has the JVM, and even then the virus still has to follow the rules enforced by the OS.
In addition, the security model used by *nix disallows users the ability to write over files that they don't own and aren't [group|world]-writable, so the damage in such a situation would be minimized only to the user who downloaded and ran the virues. So long as you're not root, you only lose your stuff. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Umm.. I actually travel around the country quite frequently, but that's okay.
The fact is that there aren't geeks in concentrated numbers of significant size anywhere else in the US but in Dallas and NoCal. I apologize for lumping San Fran with Silicon Valley, but I was in a hurry.
As for your second point, I made no such assumption. As I said, Politicians are elected by vote, but that doesn't mean that they govern for their voters. Once PACs get their grubby little hands in, there's little that can be gained from a politician. -- "A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime... It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Slashdot Mirror
I read this claim again and again, and it still doesn't sit well with me. I worked on a vector-based rendering engine for awhile (in fact, the fastest vector-based rendering engine [begins with an f, ends with a lash]), and there are certain limitations that cannot be overcome.
When it ultimately gets down to it, a PNG file is a compressed bitmap. There is a fixed cost to rendering it, which can be expressed as an amortization of the dimensions of the image. Its just like fill-rate on a 3-D card.
When rendering any vector format, there are many dependencies. Is AA enabled? Which AA algorithm was used? Are they using a scanline renderer, or actually rasterizing each vector regardless of its impact?
The same reason which allows SVG to be faster than PNG rendering is the same reason that other cases will be radically slower: rendering each vector disregards the size of the image being rendered. How can this make it slower? Imagine an image filled dozens or hundreds of times with the same vectors that fill the image completely. Suddenly, we're not having to fill a rectangle, we're having to fill it multiple times in comparison to the png drawing in the same space. And the problem gets worse the larger the destination size.
Using a scanline renderer for vector based graphics has a much better cost comparison to png format, but it will always be slower as ultimately bitmaps can be embedded within vector formats.
As a simpler analogy; the vector graphics are to the transformation pipeline or a graphics card what bitmaps (and pngs) are to the rasterization on the video card. Transformation without rasterization is meaningless, and therefore always going to be slower.
Carmack mentioned this, and its important not to gloss over...
There's a big difference between the drivers theoretical output, and the actual acheived output.
In testing at my job, we found that the ATI drivers typically performed very poorly in comparison to those released by nVidia on similar hardware. In addition, we often had more serious issues with bugs in ATI drivers than nVidia. Although the next great thing from nVidia isn't likely to outright dethrone the 9700, nVidia is constantly improving their driver technology, constantly making the layer between software and hardware thinner and thinner.
is this.
Or get a sneakemail account. I think Sneakemail is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
...In my day, they were called drive bays, as in floppy drive bays. :-)
...Doesn't work. Ask NASA .
There are a few flaws with the article that I'd also like to mention. I've worked on a handful of commercial shrinkwrap products, as well as a few video games. I do not speak for either of these companies. That being said...
Using Inodes, or anything else that doesn't allow the user to easily manipulate the document "seems like a good idea at the time(tm)," but in practice, it really sucks.
Consider Mac OS 9
Particularly when uninstalling and installing documents, it becomes obvious that this scheme is less than useful. It makes it *really* difficult to substitute a file for another file. In the case MacOS, you can delete the file, which conveniently winds up in the trashcan. After that, you replace the file with a new file of the same name that has some changes. However, because MacOS is "protecting you," it finds and uses the file in the trash can instead!
The same thing happens on MacOS 9 as well for programs. You can run entire programs from the trash, because it doesn't rely on the "pesky" filename to uniquely identify the app, taking power away from the user.
You mentioned this as well, but I wanted to add something... Another flaw of the article is how it discusses the necessity (or lack) of a quit button. While this might be true if we still ran applications that can fit in 64K of memory, it is not true with the powerhouse applications that we run today. The last commercial shrinkwrap application I worked on required 64 megs of RAM to run really well, and it was pushing the envelope when it came out. Similarly, the game I'm working on now requires approximately 128 megs, plus 32 megs of video ram. If we were to share nicely with other applications, the performance would suffer incredibly of both applications. Anyone who has ever fired up two copies of any application of a decent size would agree that the ability to quit applications is not a hindrance, its a necessity.
I'm a programmer at a large game company, and not long ago we got our first Radeon. I was astounded at how bad the performance was, and especially at how bad the drivers were.
In fact, the card is performing so badly that ATi has started shipping many Radeon 9700s out to game developers all over the place in an effort to get us to fix our software with their cards, as if it was our fault that they didn't write their drivers according to the DX8 spec.
One of the problems their driver had was that it constantly leaked memory. We couldn't run anything (including sample apps!) on it for more than 5 minutes without it leaking texture memory so badly that it would start paging its texture memory to disk!
I want to see competition for nVidia as badly as everyone else, but I just don't think ATi is it quite yet.
As in, "What would Turing do?"
For the same reasons that we will never be able to say
if (program)
then return 1;
return 0;
we'll never have software that can design entire circuits or write entire programs automagically.
*sigh*
> Daikatana lost an immense amount of money.
As both a player and programmer of games, I can suggest four words that caused this: electric powered gas hands.
That's it.
And the reason that people keep saying that this problem is a simple MST problem is because they are picturing a problem in which all nodes are known.
For this problem picture a three city setup, where each city is the vertex of a triangle. Then the solution to this problem is to have each city connect a road towards a fourth, unknown node somewhere in the middle of the triangle. The NP-edness of this problem comes from the fact that you do not know where the fourth node belongs, and the only way to prove where it belongs is to test all available placements.
The soap bubble will always yield the optimal solution to this because (as you state) of surface tension and energy minimization.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
...but there was one behavior that drove me crazy...
People would walk up behind someone else who was writing code, look at the screen for about 5 seconds, (which contained a for loop that was counting) and then say "Brilliant!" as though the code was a miracle cure for genital herpes.
I can honestly say that there are very few times when I'm trying to solve a large problem that anyone could look at less than 24 lines of my code (that goes on for 10,000+ lines) and say "Brilliance!"
Other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I t was entertaining, and Claire Forlani did very little of her annoying look that she does. (Anyone who's seen Joe Black knows exactly what I'm talking about).
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
After all, nVidia has scheduled to release their next generation card in September. This is the card that supposedly uses the same chipset as the X-box (since nVidia is producing the chips for MS), which supposedly makes the PS2 look a bit like an 8-bit Nintendo.
Sure, the card would've been really cool 2 years ago when they said they were going to release it, but so would the Bitboys card. Personally I think its funny that 3dfx is going to be releasing a card that will barely beat the last rev from nVidia.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I believe the problem lies in (no offense) your understanding of what a physicist means when he states that asteroids and other goodness are made out of frozen rock.
:)
Have you ever handled liquid nitrogen? It freezes object extremely quickly to very low temperatures, but is not water. When an astrophysicist refers to a comet or celestial body as being frozen, he doesn't mean that it contains ice, it simply means they are solid state of (insert composition here).
The formation of water has been thought to be a fairly rare event, one that distinguishes the earth (life-bearing) from virtually every other object in our solar system (non life-bearing).
This has been attributed to many different causes, ranging from the size of our planet to the distance from the sun. Why?
It is believed that the order of formation of the planets was determined by the mass of the particles that make up the planet. Thus Mercury is made of denser stuff than venus, than Earth, than Jupiter, etc. So in order to have the proper ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen (slightly less than 2-1 for earth), you must be approximately Earth-distanced from the Sun.
The size (mass) of the planet is important because it affects the speed of the reaction. This is important because for a body of water the size of the earth, a simple catalyst wouldn't suffice. (As a side, one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen in Chemistry was where a professor took 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part Oxygen, a little bit of platinum for a catalyst, put it all in a balloon and went on with his lecture. At the end of the class he popped the balloon and water fell out. Kinda cool.)
Anyways, I hope all this crap helps.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
This Black hole is NOT blowing, as the headline suggests. The behavior of this black hole is exactly as expected, and is totally inline with other Black holes found to date.
There is an important distinction to be made here. The Black hole itself is still happily gravitating objects in towards its center, at incredible rates of speed. As these objects are brought in closer to the event horizon, they are both stretched and squeezed.
To visualize what is happening to the matter and energy a black hole feeds on, remember all the cartoons you've seen as a child (or last night) where a cartoon character is sucked into a bottle. As they enter into the bottle, their body is stretched ever so slightly. And because their hands are not being pulled directly downward, but to a point mass directly below their feet, they are squeezed towards their center of mass.
The squeezing causes light to be emitted in the form of X-Rays at increasing intensity the closer to the Event horizon the trapped particles are. Of course once the particles cross the event horizon, all light they emit in the form of X-rays are trapped within the black hole, never to be seen from again. (Except possibly from a white hole...)
Because of a unique property of Black Holes, the larger the black hole, the shorter the distance of space around the black hole is affected. This is a natural result of Universal Gravitation (Gmm/R^2), which again applies once outside the event horizon. This means that Gas and dust that are a significant distance away from the Black hole will not be drawn in towards the sucker as much as they are pushed away by the force of the collisions from the X-Rays. Kinda neat, huh?
Apologies to physicists if I oversimplified anything..
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Okay. Seriosuly. This has got to be the biggest load of BS I've yet to read that could somehow pass as "news."
...BS...BS...
Why am I so sure? Hacking a Windows box isn't like hacking a *NIX box. There's no magical login remote control console. These people would have to install insecure 3rd party software just to open the door to an attack that involves anything other than DOS attacks. And don't give me the "BackOrifice" or PCAnywhere bit. Both of these would have to be installed just like any other software|virus|trojan.
If these people were all running some form of *nix this would be an entirely different story. But at least he did a more or less good job of that; it is a pretty good story.
And lets look for a second at the varying degrees of intelligence these people have. They are intelligent enough to not use their own domain, intelligent enough to steal passwords from AOL users (addmittedly not hard) but then too stupid to realize that someone has been messing around on their box? Get real. "Gee, I installed that spam software yesterday, now where did it go?"
BS...BS...BS...BS... (The BS alarm)
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I know it. I've used the argument dozens of times. "Its not my fault they didn't have their system configured properly."
But I don't know that it stands. I mean, personally I think that if a company has a severe security problem such as the one this company so obviously had (being able to relay to out-of-domain addresses), then I think they deserved what they got. And I don't see how a company can claim damages on something that wouldn't have happened if they'd been properly configured to begin with...
On the other hand, I take responsibility that if I get caught I'm pretty much going to twist in the wind. I think he got caught, and I think he deserves to twist in the wind.
There was something the article didn't mention. Was he simply using their e-mail servers, or did the man use that company as his ISP? I think its an entirely different argument if they were his ISP. (And I don't think they were...)
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Why are we still working on making computers FASTER? I mean there's no innovation there, we've had the same problem since the days of the ENIAC. And why would we want to make computers smaller? Same problem as we had with the ENIAC, and by your logic there would be no innovation there. In fact, until there is a revolution in the way we compute--according to your logic--via DNA, Quantam or another radically different form of computing there will be very little innovation. (Note that both of these new forms of computing come from Academia.)
Of course we both know that innovation doesn't require something so radical as Quantam computing. And age doesn't qualify something as being non-innovative.
The fact that a problem has been around for such a terribly long time doesn't mean that there cannot be any innovation involved in tracking down the solution. And in fact the longer a problem has been around, the more innovation that IS required to find the solution. Otherwise the problem would have been solved already.
Certainly you realize the importance of finding a solution to the Travelling Salesman problem. It would revolutionize the way processors and other severely time-dependant circuits were constructed.
Back to the salt mines...
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
At University, software researchers aren't particularly interested in the pettiness that Microsoft is. They don't care about writing usable GUIs and they don't care about how some API behaves at the top level.
At my University, our software researchers are interested in software problems such as the dining philosopher problem (threads|deadlock), the lying general problem(tcp/ip|data security), and also software solutions to the travelling salesman problem (component design).
None of them claim to be able to write an OS better than Microsoft, why would they care? And the problems that they're working on Microsoft has no desire to solve.
To say that Software Research is unecessary is a very bigoted, ego-centric view. To say that Software Research insofar as high-level OS design is concerned would be much more appropriate.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Have you seen what DivX rips look like on a slow machine? Do you know what the difference is between the processor required to play DVD discs and DivX encoded movies is?
;-) to DivX for my post. I'm Lazy. Its a terminal condition.
Sorry, but I'm not going to pay >$1000 US to have a DivX player when I'd really rather watch DVD to begin with. DivX is okay for a pirate format (it looks leaps and bounds better than VCD), but for a serious format its not so good. Plus the fact that it takes a rather large processor to handle the decoding.. This means that any kind of DivX player would require at least a fast Duron or Celeron to play Divx, which would be totally wasted for playing DVDs.
I think Sony and other DVD manufacturers are well aware of these facts, and I don't expect to see too many DivX players out. (MP3 has been out for well over two years, and only 1! manufacturer FINALLY has out some kind of CD-Mp3 car stereo.)
Perhaps when processors drop to the insanely cheap prices we'll see some DivX players.
Note to masochists: I shortened DivX
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Hopefully, when MPEG-4's audio specification catches on in audiophile circles
;-) ripping. The MPEG-4's audio is simply MP3, plain and simple. In fact, you can actually choose to do any kind of audio encoding you desire, its simply that MP3 is the most commonly used audio format in DivX ;-).
;-) codec contains a SMILEY FACE! Its not the DivX codec. Its the DivX ;-) codec.
So obviously you haven't done any DivX
MP4 would be redundant and stupid to say the least.
And please note that the DivX
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Seems to me like this document is still in its early alpha stages.. Did anyone else make it all the way through and notice this:
"... see our full privacy policy at [Insert Privacy Policy Link]."
This was near the bottom, in the "Apogee Privacy Policy" section. Interesting.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. What the hell are you talking about?
But even that isn't true bit-to-bit, since many CD-R drives make a few mistakes everytime the burn a copy (so after a dozen or so copies the quality quickly decreases).
This is one hundred percent incorrect! If a CD-Burner makes even a single bit error, the CD will not verify. Most CD-Burners have a failure rate of 1E-30 bit-error rates. This means that approximately 1 out of every 2^90 (!) bits will be miswritten, but in this case the CD will FAIL when verified. Note that 2^90 is a billion billion billion bytes.
The changing of even a single bit during burning changes the byte which the bit belongs to, and is very easily identifiable.
Corruption in copying or downloading them? Do you know what TCP/IP is? Do you know what it does? TCP/IP promises you almost the same failure rate as Hard Disk Drives and copy algorithms (1E-33 in IBM HDDs case). TCP/IP virtually guarentees that what you download is the same as what you started with. It does so using redundant checksums and resends. This is why TCP/IP is not used for games, because it has a high overhead.
Crappy quality in MP3s is 99.99999% of the time a result of someone using a shitty encoder, not the result of download or copy errors.
PS: To illustrate this point, let me offer this. The average MP3 is 4 megs. On average, 1/10 MP3s that I download will be in crappy condition. By this measure, I should NEVER be able to download software in the size of >50 megs, because I should be guarenteed that at least one bit somewhere will be screwed up. On that note, I tell you that I've download Redhat ISO images (size >630 Megs) with a success rate of about 99.9%. In fact I've never downloaded an image and had it not verify to the original on the server.
In the future, please check your facts before posting........
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
If you configured your box properly, and you don't always run as root, then there's really little danger to linux and unix variants.
Plus, most e-mail viruses to date have been written in VB, which is not typically installed or used outside of x86-Windows platform. In order to have any effect, viruses would have to be written in C/C++ then compiled for *nix (and for each variant) or would have to be written in JAVA, which would require that the machine has the JVM, and even then the virus still has to follow the rules enforced by the OS.
In addition, the security model used by *nix disallows users the ability to write over files that they don't own and aren't [group|world]-writable, so the damage in such a situation would be minimized only to the user who downloaded and ran the virues. So long as you're not root, you only lose your stuff.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
Umm.. I actually travel around the country quite frequently, but that's okay.
The fact is that there aren't geeks in concentrated numbers of significant size anywhere else in the US but in Dallas and NoCal. I apologize for lumping San Fran with Silicon Valley, but I was in a hurry.
As for your second point, I made no such assumption. As I said, Politicians are elected by vote, but that doesn't mean that they govern for their voters. Once PACs get their grubby little hands in, there's little that can be gained from a politician.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."