Come to think of it, the recent Pearl Harbor movie had me going in a similar way. There was a point in that movie that I *really* hated the Japanese military of that era. I haven't been charged by a movie like that in ages. (Fortunately that disappeared quickly after leaving the theater..)
Why is that fortunate?
Why should you not hate both tyranny and the tyrants that seek [or sought] to impose it?
Like I indicated in another post, there is nothing to stop Microsoft from having their own "windows-only" forked version of Java.
Nothing but the Department of Justice & the Federal Criminal & Civil courts.
If I recall correctly, Sun sued Microsoft in Federal Civil court over the question of Windows-centric forks of Java, and the Clinton Justice Department probably filed a friend of the court brief in that civil case. Again, if I recall correctly, the question of Windows-centric forks in Java also played a role in the Clinton DOJ's so-called "anti-trust" lawsuit against MSFT [and Sun probably filed a friend of the court brief in that case].
Novell's Client32 never has and never will transmit the password without encryption by default.
Longtime CNI/CNE here [although I'm not part of the team that wrote the code itself, so understand that what follows is the standard Novell sermon that we'll all just have to accept as a matter of faith].
For years, bordering on decades, Novell has insisted that PASSWORDS NEVER TRAVEL THE WIRE!!! In the Novell-verse, only HASHES of passwords are allowed to travel the wire. When you say
Novell's Client32 never has and never will transmit the password without encryption by default
you mean to say
Novell's Client32 never has and never will transmit a hash of a password without encryption
[and never transmits "passwords" period - no ifs ands or buts allowed].
That's one of the reasons Novell gave up on NDS/eDirectory synchronization with NetBT/CIFS, LanManager, and NT Domain Controllers - to make the thing seamless to the end user, they would have had to follow Microsoft's lead and send encrypted passwords over the wire, rather than encrypted hashes of passwords. It's certainly the reason that Native File Sharing in NetWare 6 is such a bitch as to be useless - the end user has to remember both a NetBT/CIFS/LanManager password AND an NDS/eDirectory password precisely because Novell is scared to death that if they were to integrate a NetBT/CDFS/LanManager infrastructure [where passwords travel the wire] into the NDS/eDirectory infrastructure [where only hashes of passwords travel the wire], then they'd lose all their Red Book/Blue Book/Green Eggs & Ham Book certifications. In fact, it's also the reason that, in many scenarios, when you upgrade a server across the wire [e.g. replace an old NetWare 3.x box on 80386 hardware with a newer NetWare box on newer hardware], the user accounts created on the new box have no passwords - to get the passwords from the old box to the new box, Novell would have send passwords, rather than hashes of passwords, across the wire, and, as we've seen, the former is forbidden.
As for the grandparent's assertion that Novell stores "clear text passwords in RAM" - that might have been true circa 1987 and NetWare 2.x, but I can't imagine it's been that way in the last ten or fifteen years. Like some other posters, I'd ask for some documentation on that one.
To me eonophilia is like audiophilia. I like wine and music but I have better things to do with the little money I have to pursue these things.
Odd that you would mention audiophilia. I started college as a music major, but I don't give a damn what my speakers are like - just give me a 100W/channel amp & some honkin' big 15" woofers, and I'm happy. [I am a fanatic when it comes to recording artists, however. There are all of two or three fellas I will listen to: Carlo Maria Giulini, Glenn Gould, and maybe one or two others.]
And I will admit that lots of oenophiles behave like silly goons when it comes to their wines; indeed, people make a lot of fun of me and my interest in wine [and, as an aside, their "fun" tends to be more than a little degrading and humiliating].
But my experience has been that the derision and insults come to a screeching halt the moment I pour them something nice, at which point they're suddenly all "Whoa! That's the best wine I've ever had in my life! Where did you get it? How much did it cost? Pour me some more! Is the bottle empty already? Wanh wanh wanh!!!"
Besides this test being ridiculously comprehensive, did anybody else notice the stat differences between the P$ 3.0 Ghz - 3.4 Ghz?
3.4 - 3.0 = 0.4
is not so important here as is
3.4 / 3.0 = 1.1333...
which is a mere 13% increase.
I didn't bother to RTFA, so tell me: Did Intel achieve anywere near a 13% increase in performance? 10%? 6.5%? 5%?
Also, remember that early versions of the P4 were MUCH slower than the P3 at the same clock speeds [owing to all that increased pipelining]. And note also that the P3 continues to retain something of a cult status among hardcore skinflints; compare e.g. the PowerLeap PL-iP3T and PL-P3SMP. Finally, there is a persistent fascination with low-voltage, low-heat versions of the chip, which were originally marketed towards laptops, but are now drawing a lot of interest from embedded/blade/appliance manufacturers.
SCO, to their credit, is the only company who seems to be determined to cash in on some of that old Bell Labs Intellectual Property. [Understandably, SCO also harbors a deep, abiding grudge against IBM for the way they were betrayed in Project Monterey.]
But, in the world of oenophilia, Mondavi's Opus One is an utter and complete joke:
What Is The Most Over-Priced Wine On The Market Today???
First of all, you may NOT mention either Opus or Cask 23 because they are too easy of a target and it would just make you look like an RP ditto-head, so choose someone else.
If they want to configure their server to refuse to serve up pages if the Referrer: header contains something they don't approve of, that's certainly their right to do so.
Tim Berners-Lee [or whoever it was who authored the spec] goofed big time here: What the hell business is it of theirs to know who the hell acted as the referrer?
And why don't all web browsers set things like "referrer" and "browser" and "operating system" and "host name" to blank strings anyway? What the hell business is it of my browser to be disclosing information like that about me?
When you put a sniffer on an ethernet network, it is just appalling to see how much information about you is being divulged to complete strangers.
a 3GHz machine is way more than enough hardware to show large JPEGs at 3 frames a second
Obviously there's a going to be an argument as to what is meant by "large."
However, I'd take "large" to mean not a whole lot more than 10MB, but much less than 100MB [which would be getting into TIFF territory].
At 10MB, even on 3GHz machines, the overwhelming bottlenecks seem to be
1) The amount of time it takes to pull the image off the disk; ATA100 maxes at 100MB per second in theory, but, in practice, you're gonna get only a fraction of that [protocol overhead, slow seek times in combination with heads far from where they need to be, inadequate disk & Host Bus Adapter cache, etc.],
2) Inadequate system RAM [the moment you start throwing page files to disk, you can forget about responsiveness] - an awful lot of machines still ship with a mere 256MB, and
3) The presence of spyware, to include both classical Gator-ware crap, and even things like Web-browser generated Javascript blocking I/O pop-ups that are chowing away on CPU cycles waiting for an advertising agency to serve up some moronic Macromedia/Shockwave/Flash nonsense.
4) Poorly written graphics hardware drivers, which give you maybe an hour between crashes.
I've been doing a fair amount of this grunt-level imagery work lately [I'm the one who will eventually create the database back end for the archived images], and it's amazing how quickly you can turn a 3GHz machine into a glorified 80286.
These comments apply to both PC/Windows boxes and Apple/OSX boxes. Also, the file manager "preview" window on OSX takes an eternity to generate a thumbnail preview of e.g. a 10MB TIFF [at least Windows creates a thumbnail database to speed up the process on subsequent viewing].
Bottom line: Yeah, a 3GHz machine with 4GB of DDR 400 RAM, 1MB CACHE, a 64bit/66MHz Ultra 320 SCSI Host Bus Adapter with 64MB cache, and a 15000 RPM SCSI hard drive with 8MB cache MIGHT be able to do {3 X 10MB JPEG} / 1 SEC.
However, a 3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, 512KB CACHE, 32bit/33MHz ATA 100 controller, 5400 RPM ATA100 disk with 10ms SEEK and 512KB cache, Gatorware, RealAudioware, QuickTimeWare [why does QuickTime need to phone home to Apple umpteen times a second???], and Javascript pop-ups blocking on a download of a 800 X 600 Macromedia/Shockwave/Flash multimedia presentation of the latest British Airways/Mercedes Benz/Hummer H2 advertisement is gonna take about three or four seconds to load a single 10MB JPEG.
I've posted a website that has about 3600 'film' images for people to look at that want to see how different people approach a photo subject.
URL???
PS: My DNS server can't resolve "inorbit.com".
PPS: Are you serious about the film and the xray machines? The security dudes insist that xray machines pose no harm to e.g. 35mm film. Is this not true, or were you joking?
I logged on this morning and discovered that my brief reign as a moderator had come to a screeching halt, but if I still had the points I had yesterday, I'd be in a real dilemma as to whether I'd call you Informative, Insightful, Funny, or what.
They need to invent some uber-Adjective that means "All of the above."
I've often wondered why some companies choose to use Linux when they are unwilling to show their source code. It clearly has not been to the advantage of the companies involved to be exposed as not complying with the GPL. It is risky business decision to choose to ignore license issues.
Perhaps more attention will be given to the *BSD family with it's technically very good OS and a free license.
EVERY TIME I see a thread here about a company pushing a Linux-based product, I ask the same question: Is there ANY compiler/linker/library product I can purchase that is guaranteed by its manufacturer to be UN-contaminated by the GPL?
Does the Intel C/C++ "compiler" for Linux make such a claim?
Does the Metrowerks C/C++ "compiler" make such a claim?
Basically I set up a situation where I want to create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table, and ask people to write me the structure to do it.
I have [or have had] a fairly extensive knowledge of the J2EE Collections Framework, and I don't have a clue what that "sentence" is supposed to say. In fact, screw the "sentence"; let's concentrate on the clause create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table. What does this mean? "Numeric counters" of what? "Increment" what? "Keys" into whose "table" of what?
If I were the interviewee, and my prospective boss couldn't explain himself any better than that, then I'd give some serious thought to alternatives such as bagging groceries, hanging drywall, or pushing a mop.
PS: You can make upwards of $20/hr hanging drywall; of course, if you don't wear a mask, the dust might take its toll on your lungs, but hey, we're young and we're gonna live forever, right?
If novell chooses to open source their software, that's up to them.
Longtime Novell CNE/CNI here.
How does a company like Novell compile a product like NDS and not have it contaminated by the GPL? Or perhaps I should ask: Against whose libraries is something like NDS linked as [or after] it's compiled?
I got an alert about a new Groupwise on Linux seminar, and all I could think was, "Gee whiz, how can they do something like Groupwise without GPL contamination???"
Is the Intel C++ compiler shipped with contamination-free libraries? Is the Metrowerks compiler shipped with contamination-free libraries?
As a developer, I'd love to know the answers so that I could sell my own Linux software [confident in someone's assurance that their libraries are contamination-free].
The competition commisioner Mario Monti just made this statement in which he said: 'I'd just like to inform you that a settlement on the Microsoft case has not been possible. I therefore intend to propose to my colleagues in the Commission next Wednesday to adopt a decision, which has already received the unanimous backing of Member States.'
What a load of marxist-fascist doublespeak. There was a furious competion: Windows competed against Macintosh [Classic & OSX/NeXTSTEP], Amiga, OS2, NetWare, DrDOS, BeOS, Solaris, the BSDs [Free, Net, Open, et al], and a host of other operating systems too numerous to even contemplate.
And guess what? MICROSOFT WON THE COMPETITION!!! That's right, folks: The freedom to succeed is meaningless in the absence of the freedom to fail.
Of course, Europe, being in a headlong rush to bury itself in post-Christian marxist-fascist-existentialist nihilism, forces us to suffer through their tendentious, fatuous, doublespeak bullshit, like calling this little turd a "competition commissioner," when in fact he should be called "a prevention of competition commissioner." Frankly, my ears are offended.
PS: You think Microsoft ain't got competition? Then build a better mousetrap and compete with them. Or consider this thing called "Linux" that's eating their lunch in the mid-range server market.
I can't tell from your comments whether you're one of the musicians [e.g. the bass player], or whether a group of musicians has asked you to tour as their techie [the guy who mixes and/or records the music, and probably a lot of other things that aren't quite so glamorous].
If you're being asked to be the techie, how much math do you know? Do you know Fourier analysis? Sampling theory? Wavelet transforms?
I ask because there are some really cool, really affordable things you can do with analog to digital sampling these days, e.g. you can get state of the art, simultaneous sampling, 24-bit, 150KS/Sec PCI cards for under $1500 these days. [Specs like that didn't exist 10 years ago, but, if they had, the price tag would have been more like $150,000.] The math and the computer science involved with that stuff would be a heck of a lot more fun than cubicle-based VB/SQL programming.
You'd need some software to go with it; I'd recommend NI Labview at about $2000 + $500 for the sound package. Bottom line is that you can set up the sampling end of a state-of-the-art recording rig for well under $5000 [and the best part, or at least the part that should appeal to/.ers, is that it's 100% DIY].
Of course, recording-quality microphones are gonna set ya back some serious bucks...
I wish I could refute this, but IIRC, a series of I/O benchmarks were run on the major OS players a while ago and OBSD did pretty terribly.
The money quote from the Conclusion of Felix von Leitner's Benchmarking BSD and Linux:
OpenBSD 3.4 was a real stinker in these tests. The installation routine sucks, the disk performance sucks, the kernel was unstable, and in the network scalability department it was even outperformed by it's father, NetBSD. OpenBSD also gets points deducted for the sabotage they did to their IPv6 stack. If you are using OpenBSD, you should move away now.
It means that if the police *really* want to bug someone, like a mob boss, they can, but they can't just wildly run out and monitor huge swaths of society.
The Fourth Amendment is only as strong as the judges who are asked to approve the warrants.
If you have good and decent people serving as judges, you have nothing to worry about.
For that matter, if you have good and decent people serving as police, you have nothing to worry about.
Abstractions like the Fourth Amendment are only as good as the people who are sworn to uphold them, i.e. our constitution is really a state of heart, not a state of semantics.
PS: The FBI's request is available here, in PDF format:
Understandably, the FBI wants to get the ball rolling on CALEA compliance; most of the brief deals with timetables and enforcement penalties. The heart of the matter is addressed on document page 37 [PDF page 42], however:
One of the reasons that CALEA-compliant solutions for packet-mode technologies are perceived to be unavailable is that manufacturers have been reluctant to develop them until clear standards have emerged. This has permitted carriers to claim that their extension requests are based on an absence of technology, rather than the absence of an industry standard. As a result, carriers mistakenly qualify for extensions of time based on their own inaction in developing standardized and nonstandardized CALEA solutions. CALEA was never intended to countenance such trends of indefinite compliance. There are alternative solutions for packet-mode technologies currently available that would allow carriers to meet their CALEA Section 103 obligations. As the Commission has previously acknowledged in evaluating extension requests, the absence of standards versus the absence of technology are separable issues.
and again on document page 38 [PDF page 43]:
The CALEA implementation process (both with respect to packet-mode technologies and generally) is not working because there is no specific, concrete implementation and compliance plan.
I don't think the person [or people] who wrote the document realize quite how much more difficult it is to eavesdrop on and record a digital communication than it is to eavesdrop on and record an analog communication. We've had analog recording technologies since the time of Edison, and they're fairly well standardized, but we've got almost no standards whatsoever for recording a digital communication. I don't think the lawyers at the FBI realize how difficult it's going to be to decide on just what it is that will be required of the ISP's - most of the press reports I'm reading involve somebody or other [either the ISPs or the FBI themselves] whining about the implementation of the [as yet to be made] decision, but no one seems to have realized just how difficult it's going to be to make the decision in the first place.
I also don't think the lawyers at the FBI realize just how much larger digital communications are than analog communications. For instance, a child molester can sit at his computer and download several gigabytes of child porn every night - it's conceivable that he could be downloading on the order of several hundred gigabytes [i.e. non-trivial fractions of terabytes] of child porn every month. If an ISP is served with a warrant to monitor his activities, then somebody [the ISP? the FBI? the NSA/Echelon?] will have to have a repository to store those hundreds of gigabytes [terabytes?] of child porn that he's downloading. This is not at all a trivial problem in and of itself, especially when you think of the excess storage capacity that will be needed so as to have the capability to monitor this sort of activity in a nation of 300 million people.
Frankly, I don't think this is funny in the least.
The purposeful attempt to induce human-like intelligence in a lower species strikes me as one of the more vile and obscene pursuits a man of "science" [whatever that is] could possibly undertake. And, given the record of "scientists" and their truly vile and obscene pursuits throughout the ages, that's saying something.
You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?
Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.
To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xyz thingamabobs] cause a net decrease in productivity.
Right - it was probably just an impression made in the dust by the tire.
Nevertheless, it is a curious little impression, isn't it?
And remember, if there really is [or was] "life" on Mars, we do not necessarily have any clue what it [or its "fossilized" remnants] might be [or have been] made of. Hell, we might not even have an adequate definition of just what "it" is, or was [prions, anyone?].
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, the recent Pearl Harbor movie had me going in a similar way. There was a point in that movie that I *really* hated the Japanese military of that era. I haven't been charged by a movie like that in ages. (Fortunately that disappeared quickly after leaving the theater..)
Why is that fortunate?
Why should you not hate both tyranny and the tyrants that seek [or sought] to impose it?
Like I indicated in another post, there is nothing to stop Microsoft from having their own "windows-only" forked version of Java.
Nothing but the Department of Justice & the Federal Criminal & Civil courts.
If I recall correctly, Sun sued Microsoft in Federal Civil court over the question of Windows-centric forks of Java, and the Clinton Justice Department probably filed a friend of the court brief in that civil case. Again, if I recall correctly, the question of Windows-centric forks in Java also played a role in the Clinton DOJ's so-called "anti-trust" lawsuit against MSFT [and Sun probably filed a friend of the court brief in that case].
So much for freedom to innovate.
When I graduated in 2000, 100% of my friends had steady jobs. After the crash, 90% had lost their jobs and some had gotten new jobs.
1/2 = 50%
2/3 = 67%
3/4 = 75%
4/5 = 80%
5/6 = 83%
6/7 = 86%
7/8 = 88%
8/9 = 89%
Therefore you must have at least ten friends, at least nine of whom lost their jobs.
But no geek has ten friends; in fact, most geeks don't have any friends at all.
[Well, maybe Rosie, but I don't know if she counts...]
Novell's Client32 never has and never will transmit the password without encryption by default.
Longtime CNI/CNE here [although I'm not part of the team that wrote the code itself, so understand that what follows is the standard Novell sermon that we'll all just have to accept as a matter of faith].
For years, bordering on decades, Novell has insisted that PASSWORDS NEVER TRAVEL THE WIRE!!! In the Novell-verse, only HASHES of passwords are allowed to travel the wire. When you say
you mean to say [and never transmits "passwords" period - no ifs ands or buts allowed].That's one of the reasons Novell gave up on NDS/eDirectory synchronization with NetBT/CIFS, LanManager, and NT Domain Controllers - to make the thing seamless to the end user, they would have had to follow Microsoft's lead and send encrypted passwords over the wire, rather than encrypted hashes of passwords. It's certainly the reason that Native File Sharing in NetWare 6 is such a bitch as to be useless - the end user has to remember both a NetBT/CIFS/LanManager password AND an NDS/eDirectory password precisely because Novell is scared to death that if they were to integrate a NetBT/CDFS/LanManager infrastructure [where passwords travel the wire] into the NDS/eDirectory infrastructure [where only hashes of passwords travel the wire], then they'd lose all their Red Book/Blue Book/Green Eggs & Ham Book certifications. In fact, it's also the reason that, in many scenarios, when you upgrade a server across the wire [e.g. replace an old NetWare 3.x box on 80386 hardware with a newer NetWare box on newer hardware], the user accounts created on the new box have no passwords - to get the passwords from the old box to the new box, Novell would have send passwords, rather than hashes of passwords, across the wire, and, as we've seen, the former is forbidden.
As for the grandparent's assertion that Novell stores "clear text passwords in RAM" - that might have been true circa 1987 and NetWare 2.x, but I can't imagine it's been that way in the last ten or fifteen years. Like some other posters, I'd ask for some documentation on that one.
To me eonophilia is like audiophilia. I like wine and music but I have better things to do with the little money I have to pursue these things.
Odd that you would mention audiophilia. I started college as a music major, but I don't give a damn what my speakers are like - just give me a 100W/channel amp & some honkin' big 15" woofers, and I'm happy. [I am a fanatic when it comes to recording artists, however. There are all of two or three fellas I will listen to: Carlo Maria Giulini, Glenn Gould, and maybe one or two others.]
And I will admit that lots of oenophiles behave like silly goons when it comes to their wines; indeed, people make a lot of fun of me and my interest in wine [and, as an aside, their "fun" tends to be more than a little degrading and humiliating].
But my experience has been that the derision and insults come to a screeching halt the moment I pour them something nice, at which point they're suddenly all "Whoa! That's the best wine I've ever had in my life! Where did you get it? How much did it cost? Pour me some more! Is the bottle empty already? Wanh wanh wanh!!!"
Besides this test being ridiculously comprehensive, did anybody else notice the stat differences between the P$ 3.0 Ghz - 3.4 Ghz? is not so important here as is which is a mere 13% increase.
I didn't bother to RTFA, so tell me: Did Intel achieve anywere near a 13% increase in performance? 10%? 6.5%? 5%?
Also, remember that early versions of the P4 were MUCH slower than the P3 at the same clock speeds [owing to all that increased pipelining]. And note also that the P3 continues to retain something of a cult status among hardcore skinflints; compare e.g. the PowerLeap PL-iP3T and PL-P3SMP. Finally, there is a persistent fascination with low-voltage, low-heat versions of the chip, which were originally marketed towards laptops, but are now drawing a lot of interest from embedded/blade/appliance manufacturers.
SCO, to their credit, is the only company who seems to be determined to cash in on some of that old Bell Labs Intellectual Property. [Understandably, SCO also harbors a deep, abiding grudge against IBM for the way they were betrayed in Project Monterey.]
But, in the world of oenophilia, Mondavi's Opus One is an utter and complete joke:
If they want to configure their server to refuse to serve up pages if the Referrer: header contains something they don't approve of, that's certainly their right to do so.
Tim Berners-Lee [or whoever it was who authored the spec] goofed big time here: What the hell business is it of theirs to know who the hell acted as the referrer?
And why don't all web browsers set things like "referrer" and "browser" and "operating system" and "host name" to blank strings anyway? What the hell business is it of my browser to be disclosing information like that about me?
When you put a sniffer on an ethernet network, it is just appalling to see how much information about you is being divulged to complete strangers.
a 3GHz machine is way more than enough hardware to show large JPEGs at 3 frames a second
Obviously there's a going to be an argument as to what is meant by "large."
However, I'd take "large" to mean not a whole lot more than 10MB, but much less than 100MB [which would be getting into TIFF territory].
At 10MB, even on 3GHz machines, the overwhelming bottlenecks seem to be
I've been doing a fair amount of this grunt-level imagery work lately [I'm the one who will eventually create the database back end for the archived images], and it's amazing how quickly you can turn a 3GHz machine into a glorified 80286.These comments apply to both PC/Windows boxes and Apple/OSX boxes. Also, the file manager "preview" window on OSX takes an eternity to generate a thumbnail preview of e.g. a 10MB TIFF [at least Windows creates a thumbnail database to speed up the process on subsequent viewing].
Bottom line: Yeah, a 3GHz machine with 4GB of DDR 400 RAM, 1MB CACHE, a 64bit/66MHz Ultra 320 SCSI Host Bus Adapter with 64MB cache, and a 15000 RPM SCSI hard drive with 8MB cache MIGHT be able to do {3 X 10MB JPEG} / 1 SEC. However, a 3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, 512KB CACHE, 32bit/33MHz ATA 100 controller, 5400 RPM ATA100 disk with 10ms SEEK and 512KB cache, Gatorware, RealAudioware, QuickTimeWare [why does QuickTime need to phone home to Apple umpteen times a second???], and Javascript pop-ups blocking on a download of a 800 X 600 Macromedia/Shockwave/Flash multimedia presentation of the latest British Airways/Mercedes Benz/Hummer H2 advertisement is gonna take about three or four seconds to load a single 10MB JPEG.
I've posted a website that has about 3600 'film' images for people to look at that want to see how different people approach a photo subject.
URL???
PS: My DNS server can't resolve "inorbit.com".
PPS: Are you serious about the film and the xray machines? The security dudes insist that xray machines pose no harm to e.g. 35mm film. Is this not true, or were you joking?
I logged on this morning and discovered that my brief reign as a moderator had come to a screeching halt, but if I still had the points I had yesterday, I'd be in a real dilemma as to whether I'd call you Informative, Insightful, Funny, or what.
They need to invent some uber-Adjective that means "All of the above."
I've often wondered why some companies choose to use Linux when they are unwilling to show their source code. It clearly has not been to the advantage of the companies involved to be exposed as not complying with the GPL. It is risky business decision to choose to ignore license issues.
Perhaps more attention will be given to the *BSD family with it's technically very good OS and a free license.
EVERY TIME I see a thread here about a company pushing a Linux-based product, I ask the same question: Is there ANY compiler/linker/library product I can purchase that is guaranteed by its manufacturer to be UN-contaminated by the GPL?
Does the Intel C/C++ "compiler" for Linux make such a claim?
Does the Metrowerks C/C++ "compiler" make such a claim?
Novell/Mono/Ximian/C#/.NET???
ANYONE??????????
Basically I set up a situation where I want to create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table, and ask people to write me the structure to do it.
I have [or have had] a fairly extensive knowledge of the J2EE Collections Framework, and I don't have a clue what that "sentence" is supposed to say. In fact, screw the "sentence"; let's concentrate on the clause create a hashmap of numeric counters such that I am going to increment a million times, but only store 100k keys into the table. What does this mean? "Numeric counters" of what? "Increment" what? "Keys" into whose "table" of what?
If I were the interviewee, and my prospective boss couldn't explain himself any better than that, then I'd give some serious thought to alternatives such as bagging groceries, hanging drywall, or pushing a mop.
PS: You can make upwards of $20/hr hanging drywall; of course, if you don't wear a mask, the dust might take its toll on your lungs, but hey, we're young and we're gonna live forever, right?
Because only a geek could possibly type the following:
If novell chooses to open source their software, that's up to them.
Longtime Novell CNE/CNI here.
How does a company like Novell compile a product like NDS and not have it contaminated by the GPL? Or perhaps I should ask: Against whose libraries is something like NDS linked as [or after] it's compiled?
I got an alert about a new Groupwise on Linux seminar, and all I could think was, "Gee whiz, how can they do something like Groupwise without GPL contamination???"
Is the Intel C++ compiler shipped with contamination-free libraries? Is the Metrowerks compiler shipped with contamination-free libraries?
As a developer, I'd love to know the answers so that I could sell my own Linux software [confident in someone's assurance that their libraries are contamination-free].
The competition commisioner Mario Monti just made this statement in which he said: 'I'd just like to inform you that a settlement on the Microsoft case has not been possible. I therefore intend to propose to my colleagues in the Commission next Wednesday to adopt a decision, which has already received the unanimous backing of Member States.'
What a load of marxist-fascist doublespeak. There was a furious competion: Windows competed against Macintosh [Classic & OSX/NeXTSTEP], Amiga, OS2, NetWare, DrDOS, BeOS, Solaris, the BSDs [Free, Net, Open, et al], and a host of other operating systems too numerous to even contemplate.
And guess what? MICROSOFT WON THE COMPETITION!!! That's right, folks: The freedom to succeed is meaningless in the absence of the freedom to fail.
Of course, Europe, being in a headlong rush to bury itself in post-Christian marxist-fascist-existentialist nihilism, forces us to suffer through their tendentious, fatuous, doublespeak bullshit, like calling this little turd a "competition commissioner," when in fact he should be called "a prevention of competition commissioner." Frankly, my ears are offended.
PS: You think Microsoft ain't got competition? Then build a better mousetrap and compete with them. Or consider this thing called "Linux" that's eating their lunch in the mid-range server market.
I can't tell from your comments whether you're one of the musicians [e.g. the bass player], or whether a group of musicians has asked you to tour as their techie [the guy who mixes and/or records the music, and probably a lot of other things that aren't quite so glamorous].
If you're being asked to be the techie, how much math do you know? Do you know Fourier analysis? Sampling theory? Wavelet transforms?
I ask because there are some really cool, really affordable things you can do with analog to digital sampling these days, e.g. you can get state of the art, simultaneous sampling, 24-bit, 150KS/Sec PCI cards for under $1500 these days. [Specs like that didn't exist 10 years ago, but, if they had, the price tag would have been more like $150,000.] The math and the computer science involved with that stuff would be a heck of a lot more fun than cubicle-based VB/SQL programming.
You'd need some software to go with it; I'd recommend NI Labview at about $2000 + $500 for the sound package. Bottom line is that you can set up the sampling end of a state-of-the-art recording rig for well under $5000 [and the best part, or at least the part that should appeal to /.ers, is that it's 100% DIY].
Of course, recording-quality microphones are gonna set ya back some serious bucks...
I wish I could refute this, but IIRC, a series of I/O benchmarks were run on the major OS players a while ago and OBSD did pretty terribly.
The money quote from the Conclusion of Felix von Leitner's Benchmarking BSD and Linux:
It means that if the police *really* want to bug someone, like a mob boss, they can, but they can't just wildly run out and monitor huge swaths of society.
The Fourth Amendment is only as strong as the judges who are asked to approve the warrants.
If you have good and decent people serving as judges, you have nothing to worry about.
For that matter, if you have good and decent people serving as police, you have nothing to worry about.
Abstractions like the Fourth Amendment are only as good as the people who are sworn to uphold them, i.e. our constitution is really a state of heart, not a state of semantics.
PS: The FBI's request is available here, in PDF format:
Understandably, the FBI wants to get the ball rolling on CALEA compliance; most of the brief deals with timetables and enforcement penalties. The heart of the matter is addressed on document page 37 [PDF page 42], however: and again on document page 38 [PDF page 43]: I don't think the person [or people] who wrote the document realize quite how much more difficult it is to eavesdrop on and record a digital communication than it is to eavesdrop on and record an analog communication. We've had analog recording technologies since the time of Edison, and they're fairly well standardized, but we've got almost no standards whatsoever for recording a digital communication. I don't think the lawyers at the FBI realize how difficult it's going to be to decide on just what it is that will be required of the ISP's - most of the press reports I'm reading involve somebody or other [either the ISPs or the FBI themselves] whining about the implementation of the [as yet to be made] decision, but no one seems to have realized just how difficult it's going to be to make the decision in the first place.I also don't think the lawyers at the FBI realize just how much larger digital communications are than analog communications. For instance, a child molester can sit at his computer and download several gigabytes of child porn every night - it's conceivable that he could be downloading on the order of several hundred gigabytes [i.e. non-trivial fractions of terabytes] of child porn every month. If an ISP is served with a warrant to monitor his activities, then somebody [the ISP? the FBI? the NSA/Echelon?] will have to have a repository to store those hundreds of gigabytes [terabytes?] of child porn that he's downloading. This is not at all a trivial problem in and of itself, especially when you think of the excess storage capacity that will be needed so as to have the capability to monitor this sort of activity in a nation of 300 million people.
Frankly, I don't think this is funny in the least.
The purposeful attempt to induce human-like intelligence in a lower species strikes me as one of the more vile and obscene pursuits a man of "science" [whatever that is] could possibly undertake. And, given the record of "scientists" and their truly vile and obscene pursuits throughout the ages, that's saying something.
Frankly, it strikes me as an affront against God.
137 of which are non-spam
You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?
Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.
To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xyz thingamabobs] cause a net decrease in productivity.
Right - it was probably just an impression made in the dust by the tire.
Nevertheless, it is a curious little impression, isn't it?
And remember, if there really is [or was] "life" on Mars, we do not necessarily have any clue what it [or its "fossilized" remnants] might be [or have been] made of. Hell, we might not even have an adequate definition of just what "it" is, or was [prions, anyone?].
Check it out: Granted, it's probably just a tire track, or something, but, last I checked, they hadn't outlawed armchair quarterbacking...