User: gtwilliams

Article Difficult to Read

On: The Future of Computing

Wow, was this article hard to read. It looks like the author never read the first draft and merely ran a spell checker on it. There are scores of typos, missing commas, and improper homonyms. Here's just a few:

We have not really come back to good old centralized computing but rather to arrived at distributed computing model. Although a bulk of work may be done by centralized resources such as servers providing computational services, our desktop PCs and client workstations handle independently multitude of tasks.

As computer clock speed increased from kilohertz to gigahertz so did out imagination and understanding of what can be done with this computational power to serve our needs;

So on one had we have a habit (but rarely a need) for higher performance and on the other hand we have a looming fossil fuel crisis, global warming and rising energy prices.

Yet the only piece of evidence on AMD's involvement with speculative threading that so far surfaced is infamous U.S. patent # 6,574,725 that looks like hardware support for speculative threading in the vane of to Intel's Mitosis.

Still, with Itanium disappointment tarnishing commercial VLIW prospects perhaps permanently we are unlikely to see more general-purpose VLIW computers, but instead are likely to seem them in niece markets employed for solving a very limited set of special-purpose tasks.

(for example, new manufacturing technology in the vane of IBM's recent report of experimental SiGe chips running at 350 GHz at room temperature and at 500 GHz when chilled by liquid helium).

Further more we thought that a better CPU makes a better computer, which is no longer so.

Re:And Then Again, Maybe Not

On: Anna Konda, the Robotic Firefighter

to get from 99 to 100 takes... wait for it... 1400 calories. That is a LOT of heat.

Actually, that's too much. The heat of vaporization of water is 539 cal/g at 100 degrees C.
But, of course, the concept is dead on -- to remove a LOT of heat, turn water to steam.

Re:Line-item vetoes would make vetoing too easy.

On: Broadcast Flag Sneaking in the Back Door

I would argue, though, that filibusters are used for useful things

Not recently.

Re:Some bold statements from this article

On: Scientists Respond to Gore on Global Warming

If they have solid scientific evidence to refute the solid scientific evidence in support of global warming

I don't think "global warming" is the question. What's causing it is the question.
From the article:

In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.

Perhaps CO2 isn't the cause.

Re:dont really understand the problem.

On: Overconfidence in SSH Protection

Am I missing something?

Only if you have not considered the NOPASSWD tag in a sudoers file.

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Search Offer

On: Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Search Offer

This sounds familiar (Marc Andreessen).

Re:I won't waste a mod point on this

On: The 'Hairy Guys' Vs. Microsoft

MS put a media player into the OS. Big freeking deal.

Yes and now we're stuck with the proprietary codecs for lots of Web content.

Yet this is even MORE invasive than that. ANY bundled application could have to play by the same rules.

No. Only the company with a monopoly is barred from bundling.

Also where was it written that MS had to share its code with you?

No one is asking for code. Only interface specifications.

Re:Old news?

On: Alcatel and Lucent to Merge

Actually, that article was reporting on rumors. The actual announcement came out today in the WSJ.

Re:fp

On: Suing Google Over Pagerank

So don't look at the right-hand side.

Re:User friendly?

On: Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu

Except Windows's bootloader doesn't know how to load anything other than linux.

I guess your meant Windows.

But that's not true either. The windows boot loader is fully capable of loading another OS.

Take a look at

C:\boot.ini

Re:Spam Gestapo

On: January 2006 Virus and Spam Statistics

Actually, Gmail does a remarkably effective job of filtering spam from my in-box.

Re:the real biggest word

On: Massachusetts' CIO Defends Move to OpenDocument

I think you really meant:

perl -ne '$big=$_ if /^[qwertyuiop]+$/i && ' \
-e 'length($_)>length($big);END{print $big}' \
/usr/share/dict/words

Re:Did IETF change their mind?

On: IETF Approves SPF and Sender-ID

You may be interested in another point of view on this:

To: spf-announce@v2.listbox.com
From: wayne@schlitt.net
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:15:33 -0500
Subject: The IETF has accepted the SPF specification for RFC status!

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) News
by Wayne Schlitt, June 24, 2005

Greetings!

The IETF has accepted the SPF specification for RFC status!

A little over a month ago, we restarted this spf-announce mailing list
with a few updates of what had happened in the last year. Since
then, we have been hard at work on several things, and the first to
bear fruit is the SPF specification.

This SPF specification aims to clearly define the semantics of SPF,
based on the older SPF specifications from late 2003 and early 2004,
taking into account the state of SPF implementations and making
adjustments that have been requested by the IETF. This latest SPF
specification has undergone considerable review, not only by the SPF
community, but also by various IETF groups.

On June 6th, we submitted the completed draft for consideration by the
IETF, and today, the IETF has voted to accept the SPF specification as an
"Experimental" RFC[1]. The SPF specification still needs to go through the
RFC Editor, and this can take weeks or even months to complete.
(There are currently around 300 draft RFCs in the editor queue.)

We had asked for consideration as a "Standards Track" RFC rather than
"Experimental", but the IETF has informed us that they would only
consider "Experimental" status[2]. This was not a big surprise, but we
were surprised at some of the other actions that they took.

The IETF has decided that the SPF specification can not be made into
an RFC until the Sender ID specification is also ready. This appears
to be in order to be 'fair' to Microsoft[3]. Moreover, the IETF has
declared that the last 1.5 years of SPF deployment will not count
toward the two year requirement for experimental testing that they
have set. Again, this is to be 'fair' to Microsoft since their
testing has barely begun.

The Sender ID specifications call for the reuse of SPF version 1
records in incompatible ways in conflict with the SPF specification.[4]
We have made our objections clear to the IETF, but so far, the IETF
appears to be ready to bless this abuse of SPF records.[5] We will
continue to work to try and make SPF as reliable as possible.
__________________

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi ?command=view_id&dTag=12662&rfc_flag=0

[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spf.counci l/312

[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spf.counci l/314

[4] http://www.schlitt.net/spf/spf_classic/draft-schli tt-spf-classic-02.html#anchor6

[5] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spf.counci l/333

Re:and here's where...

On: HTTP Request Smuggling

Actually, according to TFA, Apache as a cache parses differently than Apache as a W/S thus allowing a form of the attack. And, according to TFA, IIS has a bug called the 48K bug where it arbitrarily cuts off certain requests (no Content-Type header) after 48K bytes.

Apache:

It should be noted that Apache's behavior is quite bizarre, since the request it creates by default lacks the Content-Length header, and thus will cause problems in most web servers (which assume Content-Length 0 in such case). That is, when a normal request with Transfer-Encoding: chunked is sent through Apache, it will arrive to the web server as a request with normal body, but without Content-Length, which will cause most web servers to ignore the body altogether.

IIS (5.0):

This makes it very easy to smuggle requests to IIS/5.0, because this behavior is non-standard and counter-RFC (and most likely, very little known).

Re:From inside the great firewall

On: China Forces Websites To Register

Way too much work.

perl -wlne 'print grep /[A-Z]/, split //' msg.txt