Patching is something where Firefox really needs to catch up on.
I disagree, I think patching should be handled by the OS, not each application. The last thing I want is every application in my system to upgrade itself spontaneously according to some independently implemented mechanism and policy.
I also don't think it's a good idea in general for applications to run in a context in which they are allowed to rewrite themselves.
(I'm a linux user - I don't know enough about Windows to know if a robust whole-system auto update mechanism is available to non-Microsoft applications. If not, I can see why such a feature would need to be implemented out of necesity.)
I do agree that we should be using binary diffs whenever possible rather than sending whole packages. Yum is an amazing resource hog, it would be great to reduce its bandwidth usage.
Googling around, I found these benchmarks published by litespeed (who apparently put out their own web server, which (big surprise) they found to beat most of the competitors in most of the tests). Interesting numbers. According to their results, apache really is slow. IIS did a bit better. TUX was extremely fast serving small static files. In one test, they have apache 2.0.52 serving 4673 files per second, compared to 33025 for IIS 6.0 and 53304 per second for TUX.
I don't know if these numbers are trustworthy, but at least its another datapoint.
I think this could be either a good or a bad thing, depending on implementation. I'm all for people being better educated about copyright/patent/trademark law, so long as they present the issues from all sides. Remember, copyright does serve a useful purpose, and even Lawrence Lessig doesn't advocate abolishing it completely, just limiting its scope to be more reasonable.
If you do not expose your child to something, the child is incapable of learning anything from it.
So, I'm an uneducated simpleton because I've never played GTA? What important life lesson have I missed?
And what we don't want our children to learn is primarily the things that we would be uncomfortable explaining.
Or anything we would be uncomfortable with them emulating.
You know what we really need? Parents who give a shit about their children.
That seems to be exactly what you are opposed to. Seriously, why shouldn't parents know and control what their kids are buying? Or more generally, why shouldn't consumers know what it is they're buying before they open the package and can't return it? This isn't some government plot to deprive you of fun games, this is consumer protection in the form of product labeling, self imposed by game companies.
From the article, it looks like they're manually stimulating the rods and cones on the retina with electrodes. So, if you stimulate a rod that would normally see red, the person will see a red dot.
I don't see why you couldn't use input from an infrared camera (or anything else - tv tuner, game console, hubble, etc..), but the person will see it in "normal" colors, if I understand correctly (and at a horrible resolution).
It's simple... Refuse to read PDFs that require the technology.
Better than that, refuse to use pdf viewers that implement this "feature". (Does anyone know which those are? Without knowing, I would assume Adobe acrobat reader probably does and xpdf probably does not. Does anyone have more specific/accurate information?)
Sensor networks have seen a lot of interesting research in recent years, as have ad-hoc wireless routing algorithms bringing us DSR and AODV. General networking and routing has advanced a lot as well. We understand congestion control much better than we did in the 80s. Peer to peer systems like chord, tapestry, and CAN are new. We understand databases much better than we did. We understand video streaming much better than we did. We know far more about cryptography than we did in the 80s. Programming languages are a bit nicer than they were.
Just because most of the foundations of computer science have been well understood for some time doesn't mean there aren't many problems worth solving that still exist.
Certainly, anyone implementing some sort of wireless communication system should exercise due diligence in encrypting and/or cryptographically signing traffic, using directional antennas to the maximum extent possible, and using some spread spectrum technology to avoid narrowband interference, but guess what? It will still be vulnerable to jamming. This is a fundamental characteristic of radio communication, and the only practical way to get around it is to make the person jamming your transmissions stop jamming, and many people would prefer frequency disputes to be resolved by a government agency than the alternatives, which include spectrum anarchy and/or vigilante justice.
Secure encryption does not prevent jamming by any malicious third party. This problem is one of the main reasons why the FCC exists in the first place.
And how is this different from: 'Hello random package from the repository (even if you are signed by the distro maintainers), here, overwrite any of my libraries you'd like, with whatever obscure or customised version (think distro-specific patches) you want. Oh, and while you're at it, do whatever you want to my/etc (from your postinstall script, running as root)...'
I think that's a good argument that rpm is broken, not that Windows is good. Personally, I think there should be two different types of rpm, with different file extensions: those that just install files that weren't there before (the common case for most libraries and applications) and those that require some special magic post install script. (Hopefully there wouldn't be many of the latter, and it should be glaringly obvious that they run arbitrary code - perhaps rpm should complain loudly, and/or require user confirmation)
I have worked for HP as a contractor before as well, and I didn't like some of the ways they treated their temps. It felt like a caste system. (It's been abolished in India, why not reintroduce it in corporate America!)
One of the relatively minor things that bothered me was that temps weren't invited to the annual HP picnic. Not that it was any big deal not to go, but it's like being told "go away, you're not one of us." I'm glad to hear you took their advice and went away.
Regardless of whether the case has any legal merit, creating an environment where a group of people who do a large part of the work doesn't feel like a part of the company is a lousy way to run a business.
Simpler than that, put the firewall at the ISP end of the connection so they can't get around it. (But I think users should still have the option of enabling incoming ports if they so choose.)
I looked it up in the timeline in the appendix B to the LOTR:
2931 Aragorn born (a year after Denethor)
2933 Arathorn II slain, Aragorn taken to Imladris
2941-2942 Bilbo's adventure (the Hobbit)
2951 Elrond tells Aragorn who he is, Arwen meets Aragorn in the woods of Imladris, Aragorn goes out into the wild
3018-3019 The Lord of the Rings
From this, it looks to me like Aragorn was in Imladris (Rivendell), and was 10 years old when Bilbo came through. In appendix A, though, it says:
But when Estel (Aragorn) was only twenty years of age, it chanced that he returned to Rivendell after great deeds in the company of the sons of Elrond...
So he grew up in Rivendell, but left at some uspecified point to do great deeds and then returned. It seems unlikely that he would have left before the age of ten, so I will assume he was in Rivendell when Bilbo came through unless you can prove otherwise.
I hate to break this to you, but Bilbo and Frodo are in fact *shock* non-existant fictional characters.
Note that I said:
within the tale, the Hobbit was written by Bilbo...
Of course it was written by Tolkien, but good fiction should be at least plausible to whatever extent is possible. One way to achieve this is to include some sort of explaination of how the story came to be written down within the fictional world, and hence (fictitiously) came to be in our own primary world.
Within the text of the Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's book "there and back again" (the Hobbit) is mentioned, as well as the written form of the Lord of the Rings, written in large part by Frodo.
I think Gandalf's narrative (which was intended to be part of the LOTR, but was removed to shorten its length) which I quoted before was a clever way for Tolkien to explain the difference in tone between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (and, in a way, to appologise to his readers for those aspects of the Hobbit that he would rather have written differently) without stepping out of the world in which it was written. Of course the Hobbit is a rather silly book, it was written by a rather silly Hobbit, who wrote things as he saw them based on his own limited understanding of the world.
It's a collection of background notes that were never meant by their author to be published,
Not true, Tolkien tried to get the Silmarillion published at the same time as the Lord of the Rings (though in a much different form than the version published by CJRT after Tolkien died), but it was rejected by the publisher.
I do agree that it wouldn't make a good movie. (Certainly a single movie couldn't cover more than a small fraction of the content.) Personally, I think the book is a great work of literature, but it usually doesn't appeal to casual readers (too many names to remember).
I really do hope that Jackson adopts a style that suits The Hobbit as the atmosphere in 'Lord of the Ringss' is much more serious than that in The Hobbit.
To some degree I agree with you, the Hobbit was not as serious a book as the LOTR, and had less serious themes, so it need not be as serious in tone as the LOTR. However, I don't think it need have as light a tone as the book, either. Remeber that within the tale, the Hobbit was written by Bilbo (in the 3rd person, but not an omniscient 3rd person), who wrote in a lighter tone than Frodo, who wrote most of the LOTR. The actual events were not necessarily as light in tone as Bilbo would have recorded them. The unreliability of Bilbo as a narrator can be seen to some extent in "The Quest for Erebor" from unfinished tales:
But you know how things went, at any rate as Bilbo saw them. The story would sound rather different, if I (gandalf) had written it. For one thing he ded not realize at all how fatuous the dwarves thought him, nor how angry they were with me. Thorin was much more indignant and contemptuous than he perceived. He was indeed contemptuous from the beginning, and thought then that I had planned the whole affair simply so as to make a mock of him. It was only the map and the key that saved the situation.
Also, later in life, Tolkien did not entirely approve of the way in which he had written the Hobbit:
When I published The Hobbit - hurriedly and without due consideration - I was still influenced by the convention that 'fairy-stories' are naturally directed to children (with or without the silly added waggery 'from seven to seventy'). And I had children of my own. But the desire to address children, as such, had nothing to do with the story as such in itself or the urge to write it. But it had some unfortunate effects on the mode of expression and narrative method, which if I had not been rushed, I should have corrected. Intelligent children of good taste (of which there seem quite a number) have always, I am glad to say, singled out the points in manner where the address is to children as blemishes. (draft of a letter to Walter Allen, April 1959, from _The_Letters_of_JRR_Tolkien)
I think it would be possible to make the movie in a more serious tone than the book without ruining the atmosphere or the story. I would be more concerned with any modifications that change the nature of Tolkien's characters (like they did to Faramir) or incompatibilities introduced between the events that occurred in the book and the events that occurred in the movie. Being given two irreconcilable accounts of a particular story is a quick way to destroy the imagined world a story tries so hard to create.
They do have an opportunity to introduce additional scenes, for instance from "the quest for Erebor" from Unfinished_Tales, or a brief encounter with a young Aragorn (if he was alive and in Rivendell at the time, I haven't checked) without doing any harm to the tale.
Rateitall.com does that stuff, to an extent, but their site isn't as polished as it could be.
That's cool, I hadn't heard of that site before. Do they use a reputation system to minimize the effects of astroturfing and ballot stuffing?
I want a site that categorizes every product under the sun by UPC and lets people comment on and rate them.
That would be very useful if there was some wireless-enabled bar code scanning device that people could take with them shopping. Next time you stand there at the grocery store wondering if Maruchan Ramen is better than Top Ramen or vice versa, you can scan both bar codes and see which one other like-minded people think is better. I would almost be convinced to get a cell phone if it would do that.
Epinions is a very interesting site worth looking at for those of you who haven't. Essentially, they're a forum for people to write reviews of products (i.e. to complain loudly).
I first heard of the site from reading this paper in www2004, which used epinions data as the basis for a reputation system. (I don't know if epinions uses that same system internally, but they at least do something similar.) The cool part is that you can rate individual reviewers as "trusted" or "untrusted". By examining the graph of trust and distrust relationships between users, they can come up with a reasonable guess for how much any user should trust any other user, and sort reviews accordingly.
I don't know what the motives are of the people who run the site. Perhaps they're just trying to grease the wheels of capitalism by giving people good information to make informed decisions about what products to buy (or, more formally, to avoid information asymmetry). Perhaps they're secretly tweaking the ratings to support companies that send them money. Perhaps they're just trying to generate ad banner revenue. Who knows.
WAP11 and the airport extreme are the only two consumer access points I know of that do that. A linux box with HostAP can be made to do the same. Unfortunately, they use the ethernet spanning tree protocol as their routing algorithm, which tends to produce extremely suboptimal routes for any reasonably sized mesh (like more than 2 or 3 access points). AODV and DSR are much better, especially if they use a route cost metric that takes reliability into account.
Have you ever installed one wireless access point, and wished you could install a second, within wireless range of the first, without running a second cable? Most access points can't do that, even though most people expect them to be able to before being told otherwise. Mesh networking would enable this sort of networking, and much more.
The performance will always be less than an "every AP has its own landline" topology, but networks will be much easier to build (and perhaps simpler to maintain).
An IEEE standard would be a good thing for real world deployment of meshes, provided they pick the right technology (like AODV or DSR and not WDS with STP routing).
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, I think patching should be handled by the OS, not each application. The last thing I want is every application in my system to upgrade itself spontaneously according to some independently implemented mechanism and policy. I also don't think it's a good idea in general for applications to run in a context in which they are allowed to rewrite themselves. (I'm a linux user - I don't know enough about Windows to know if a robust whole-system auto update mechanism is available to non-Microsoft applications. If not, I can see why such a feature would need to be implemented out of necesity.)
I do agree that we should be using binary diffs whenever possible rather than sending whole packages. Yum is an amazing resource hog, it would be great to reduce its bandwidth usage.
I don't know if these numbers are trustworthy, but at least its another datapoint.
i.. n-. C-.-. W.--
(S... o--- r.-. r.-. y-.-- a.- b-... o--- u..- t- t- h.... e. l.-.. a.- m-- e. j.--- o--- k-.- e. I.. c-.-. o--- u..- l.-.. d-.. n-. '.----. t- r.-. e. s... i.. s... t-)
jgraph is quite nice. It does most of the same things as gnuplot, and is (in my opinion) a bit easier to use.
Interesting project. It looks like apache supports compression, but not automatically (the user has to manually gzip the pages to be sent compressed).
I think this could be either a good or a bad thing, depending on implementation. I'm all for people being better educated about copyright/patent/trademark law, so long as they present the issues from all sides. Remember, copyright does serve a useful purpose, and even Lawrence Lessig doesn't advocate abolishing it completely, just limiting its scope to be more reasonable.
From the article, it looks like they're manually stimulating the rods and cones on the retina with electrodes. So, if you stimulate a rod that would normally see red, the person will see a red dot.
I don't see why you couldn't use input from an infrared camera (or anything else - tv tuner, game console, hubble, etc..), but the person will see it in "normal" colors, if I understand correctly (and at a horrible resolution).
Better than that, refuse to use pdf viewers that implement this "feature". (Does anyone know which those are? Without knowing, I would assume Adobe acrobat reader probably does and xpdf probably does not. Does anyone have more specific/accurate information?)
Just because most of the foundations of computer science have been well understood for some time doesn't mean there aren't many problems worth solving that still exist.
Certainly, anyone implementing some sort of wireless communication system should exercise due diligence in encrypting and/or cryptographically signing traffic, using directional antennas to the maximum extent possible, and using some spread spectrum technology to avoid narrowband interference, but guess what? It will still be vulnerable to jamming. This is a fundamental characteristic of radio communication, and the only practical way to get around it is to make the person jamming your transmissions stop jamming, and many people would prefer frequency disputes to be resolved by a government agency than the alternatives, which include spectrum anarchy and/or vigilante justice.
Secure encryption does not prevent jamming by any malicious third party. This problem is one of the main reasons why the FCC exists in the first place.
I have worked for HP as a contractor before as well, and I didn't like some of the ways they treated their temps. It felt like a caste system. (It's been abolished in India, why not reintroduce it in corporate America!)
One of the relatively minor things that bothered me was that temps weren't invited to the annual HP picnic. Not that it was any big deal not to go, but it's like being told "go away, you're not one of us." I'm glad to hear you took their advice and went away.
Regardless of whether the case has any legal merit, creating an environment where a group of people who do a large part of the work doesn't feel like a part of the company is a lousy way to run a business.
Simpler than that, put the firewall at the ISP end of the connection so they can't get around it. (But I think users should still have the option of enabling incoming ports if they so choose.)
- 2931 Aragorn born (a year after Denethor)
- 2933 Arathorn II slain, Aragorn taken to Imladris
- 2941-2942 Bilbo's adventure (the Hobbit)
- 2951 Elrond tells Aragorn who he is, Arwen meets Aragorn in the woods of Imladris, Aragorn goes out into the wild
- 3018-3019 The Lord of the Rings
From this, it looks to me like Aragorn was in Imladris (Rivendell), and was 10 years old when Bilbo came through. In appendix A, though, it says:So he grew up in Rivendell, but left at some uspecified point to do great deeds and then returned. It seems unlikely that he would have left before the age of ten, so I will assume he was in Rivendell when Bilbo came through unless you can prove otherwise.
Of course it was written by Tolkien, but good fiction should be at least plausible to whatever extent is possible. One way to achieve this is to include some sort of explaination of how the story came to be written down within the fictional world, and hence (fictitiously) came to be in our own primary world.
Within the text of the Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's book "there and back again" (the Hobbit) is mentioned, as well as the written form of the Lord of the Rings, written in large part by Frodo.
I think Gandalf's narrative (which was intended to be part of the LOTR, but was removed to shorten its length) which I quoted before was a clever way for Tolkien to explain the difference in tone between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (and, in a way, to appologise to his readers for those aspects of the Hobbit that he would rather have written differently) without stepping out of the world in which it was written. Of course the Hobbit is a rather silly book, it was written by a rather silly Hobbit, who wrote things as he saw them based on his own limited understanding of the world.
I do agree that it wouldn't make a good movie. (Certainly a single movie couldn't cover more than a small fraction of the content.) Personally, I think the book is a great work of literature, but it usually doesn't appeal to casual readers (too many names to remember).
Also, later in life, Tolkien did not entirely approve of the way in which he had written the Hobbit:
I think it would be possible to make the movie in a more serious tone than the book without ruining the atmosphere or the story. I would be more concerned with any modifications that change the nature of Tolkien's characters (like they did to Faramir) or incompatibilities introduced between the events that occurred in the book and the events that occurred in the movie. Being given two irreconcilable accounts of a particular story is a quick way to destroy the imagined world a story tries so hard to create.They do have an opportunity to introduce additional scenes, for instance from "the quest for Erebor" from Unfinished_Tales, or a brief encounter with a young Aragorn (if he was alive and in Rivendell at the time, I haven't checked) without doing any harm to the tale.
I first heard of the site from reading this paper in www2004, which used epinions data as the basis for a reputation system. (I don't know if epinions uses that same system internally, but they at least do something similar.) The cool part is that you can rate individual reviewers as "trusted" or "untrusted". By examining the graph of trust and distrust relationships between users, they can come up with a reasonable guess for how much any user should trust any other user, and sort reviews accordingly.
I don't know what the motives are of the people who run the site. Perhaps they're just trying to grease the wheels of capitalism by giving people good information to make informed decisions about what products to buy (or, more formally, to avoid information asymmetry). Perhaps they're secretly tweaking the ratings to support companies that send them money. Perhaps they're just trying to generate ad banner revenue. Who knows.
WAP11 and the airport extreme are the only two consumer access points I know of that do that. A linux box with HostAP can be made to do the same. Unfortunately, they use the ethernet spanning tree protocol as their routing algorithm, which tends to produce extremely suboptimal routes for any reasonably sized mesh (like more than 2 or 3 access points). AODV and DSR are much better, especially if they use a route cost metric that takes reliability into account.
The performance will always be less than an "every AP has its own landline" topology, but networks will be much easier to build (and perhaps simpler to maintain).
An IEEE standard would be a good thing for real world deployment of meshes, provided they pick the right technology (like AODV or DSR and not WDS with STP routing).