I recently had to upgrade friend's PC from Win2k to WinXP, and if you insert the WinXP install disk on a running Win2k system, it will detect and give you the option to upgrade instead of a fresh re-install. It kept most programs, registry entries, bookmarks and all user accounts intact. It was painless. MS actually got that 'right' in my opinion.
Not sure how a WinXP -> WinXP install would go, but if there's a 'repair' facility it probably will be nearly as painless.
I see lots of "open source" projects that only have source code buildable on Visual Studio. That kind of defeats the purpose, IMHO. I know one can now download simplified versions of VS for free, but it's still chaining the dev cycle to Microsoft. I think an open-source IDE should be used for open-source projects. sharpDevelop seems to be a great alternative to VS for small OSS C# or VB projects.
Agreed. As this site shows, artists may actually make slightly less per song on iTunes, the 'legal, moral' music download service, than if they sell a physical CD. Considering there's no CD case, physical disc, jacket art, or 'shrinkage' built into the price, it's pretty obvious that the big record companies (and Apple.. yes, beloved Apple) are trying to propagate the same rapacious terms forward into the new online music distribution model.
Say no to 'legal' download services like iTunes, Napster and this new Kazaa, unless they can prove that artists get substantially larger cuts of sales. There are lots of other distro models which give much bigger cuts, like cdbaby.com.
So either one must torture captured suspects, or do nothing and 'take it in the ass'. No middle ground, like standard police interrogation techniques, gathering intelligence via interviews, forensics, etc. Wow.
Ever thought of interviewing for Fox News or Crossfire? Oh wait, that one's gone now.. hah
It would be sad, yet somehow amusing in a black-humour kind of way, if people who argued as you do found themselves in an interrogation room someday themselves.
I am amazed at the stupidity of the UN for actually believing (or being duped to believe) that unilaterally taking a bunch of Muslim-occupied territory away and giving it to a jewish state would result in anything *but* our current situation. The world would be a more stable place today if, oh, I don't know, Canada or Argentina had just given a strip of land in northern Quebec or part of the NYT. to form a jewish homeland. There was a ton of land available (and still is) to form a state the size of Israel, far away from other contentious areas, at the end of WWII, if the will had just been there.
I (only half-jokingly) tell people the following when they get on the topic of the middle east:
1) Western powers need to stop *all* involvement in the area -- no aid, weapons, food, even diplomatic relations to *any* countries in the region;
2) Give one final ultimatum: fight as much as you want within your own borders, just leave the rest of the world the hell alone;
3) On the *first* violent incident occurring to foreign nationals anywhere, determined to be caused by Israeli or Palestinians, a six-month countdown will be initiated by the Western nations. All Israelis and Palestinians are free to move, during this six-month period, to new lands located in Northern Canada or Argentina (for Israelis and Palestinians, respectively); the West will commit resources to ensure all people who wish are transported, with their belongings, to their designated new homeland.
4) At the end of the countdown, one final 7-day warning is given to all people remaining to vacate Israel and Palestine.
5) The West begins a week-long tactical nuclear bombing campaign on the core of the Holy Land, rendering it uninhabitable for the next thousand years or or more.
If 5) seems too cruel, replace with an ongoing bombing campaign using bombs filled with pork rinds and bacon fat, rendering the Holy Land tainted for the foreseeable future.:-)
That would be truly awesome -- a picture of a guy in a spacesuit kicking back with a beer, sittin' on the Viking table and using the Pathfinder as an ottoman, big-screen TV in front with a live feed of the 2012 World Cup... suitably delayed of course (what is it, two light-minutes to Mars?):-)
It's a tough call when things which are unhealthy, yet kill very slowly, are allowed in our society. What if, instead of smoke, cigarettes shot out high-molar sulphuric acid? I think people would not tolerate second-hand acid burns. Hmm.
When I come home from my favourite local club, sometimes my nose feel stuffed up from the cigarette smoke others have put into the club's air. When one blows one's nose, and what comes out is a deep shade of grey, it's pretty obvious that second-hand smoke gets into my non-smoking lungs. It doesn't take a scientific study to tell me this is unhealthy. Thankfully, all clubs will be smoke-free in my area by 2008.
I tend to think that one person's freedom to put smoke in the air ends the moment that air goes past another person's nose without their permission.. but it's not a black/white decision.
Bad form to reply to my own post, but I want to clarify that I don't think Mr. Buffett's money is tainted (I don't know a tonne about him but I hear he's a good guy in general); it's Gates' cash that I have problems with.
Read the whole thing, it's interesting. But this is the most relevant chapter.
Granted, IBM had a large hand in the big mis-steps of the early PC era; but Microsoft's offering of DOS did in fact set back the general state of the PC for a decade, if not more.
Consider the fact that many other OSes were concurrently available that had multi-user/multi-tasking capabilities; real processes with fine-grained priority schedulers; unified I/O models; and proper division between the kernel, device drivers and userspace processes. I'm not going to do your research for you. Google for Desqview, OS-9, FLEX, etc. These were all available around the time of the PC's inception AFAIK and were far superior in design and capabilities to DOS.
These are not concepts that originated with Windows 95. So yes, Microsoft (with IBM) did a hell of a lot to set back the general state of computing. I suppose one could blame the public as well for accepting something they perceived as 'good enough', when it really wasn't good enough at all (why do people accept that PCs just crash naturally?) but that isn't really fair, as most people didn't have degrees in computing (and still don't).
I admire the charity work being done, but I think this is still 'blood money' that really wasn't worth what society has paid in terms of general progress.
With the size and opulence of the new Shaw cable building in my city, I can quite confidently call BS on your claim that broadband must be sold at a loss for $50/month. Hell, it's only $40 CDN here and Shaw is raking in the dough. OK, there's a chance that their cable TV subsidizes their internet, but they've always been perfectly willing to sell an internet connection *without* cable to me.
... and here in the North (Canada), we curse Seattle for exporting Starbucks coffee, the most disgusting, over-roasted crap beans every inflicted on man. I now avoid that chain like the plague due to the fact that *every* time I buy their coffee, light or dark roast, I get a raging stomache ache. I don't know if it's just the stores in this town, but they are TEH SUKC. >-(
.. but one way is definitely faster. Left, if I recall. You're running against the logs, but it saves time. Sad that I remember that (correctly?) Pitfall takes place in some wierd spacetime, where the route changes depending on what direction you run:-)
A slashdotter who did not build his own computer is like a jedi who did not build his own lightsaber.
Maybe that should read
A security programmer who did not build his own crypto is like a jedi who did not build his own lightsaber.
Doesn't make so much sense now (or does it?)
More programmers could do well do learn crypto -- at least where to get the tools and algorithms, and how to apply them. I'm no math whiz so I'd be reticent to devise my own S-boxes from scratch. But it's still a worthy exercise to study up on the subject.
If the people who aren't really Christians are so damn successful at making everyone think they're Christians, then what difference does it make if we're against "them"? The label they operate under isn't what people are fighting against; it's what they're doing. If they've completely co-opted a movement, then being against that movement is not materially different from being against the infiltrators.
Some would argue that we are better off without organized religion, due to its ready-made infrastructure of intolerance, dogma and authority hierarchies which are ripe to be taken over by just the sort of people you describe. It's like people advocating against Windows, because it's a haven for malware, spyware and worms. Sometimes an environment that fosters bad things, while itself neutral, must be rejected due to the high level of abuse.
Can EU-based companies then freely do work to interoperate/reverse-engineer things made by the (insane) US software industry? I hope to $DIETY so. This would force the US software industry to actually focus on quality and usefullness instead of paying lawyers to lock the latest trivial feature up in patents.
... but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating.
How is this different from biology? The poor moose in the herd who isn't immune to spongiform encephalopathy isn't protected by the diversity of his herd-mates.. but the herd as a whole is. The analogy does hold.
Your point about multiple architectures dividing the attention of the antivirus community might be true to some extent -- but on the other hand, there might just be more jobs for people writing antivirus programs for all those extra operating systems.
It isn't ludicrous that diversity protects us, as a whole community, from viruses. Some may be hit, but the rest can keep computing. That's the point.
This is nothing new, just a further encroachment of the existing ECHELON method of surveillance -- once of the primary reasons for ECHELON was so that allies could ask each other to spy on their citizens for them. Gets around all those pesky regulations that prevent various agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have worked with VxWorks quite a bit, and I would never call it a micro-kernel. For deployment everything is typically linked statically with the VxWorks kernel (kernel, drivers, user apps, everything). It's very scalable, but not really that modular; code dependencies tend to leak from one component to affect many others (as in, component A needs constants defined in component B, and an API change in component C means you have to futz with the source for component D, etc.). VxWorks does allow one to load.o and.a files at runtime from a filesystem, but it's really just a dynamic linker. I guess in the sense of scalability it is a micro-kernel, but in terms of isolating dependencies between different systems, not so much (as in, "configuration hell"). Just like Linux 'modules' by the way.. they're no better.
I'd say OS-9 fits the definition more, if one wants to talk about commercial micro-kernels. The nearly object-oriented module system allows great scalability as well as greater isolation between components. The only thing the kernel does is handle memory allocation, IPC and support for loading/unloading device drivers, filesystems etc. All of these can be replaced by user-written modules, and the device drivers and filesystem managers have a stable, opaque API which insulates internal changes from the rest of the system.
That's just from my (limited) experience of course..
I wish the Canadian gov't would grow some berries and just threaten to rip up NAFTA. Beef, lumber, those are just the big two examples. A treaty is just a fancy contract, right? That's what you do when the other side violates the contract repeatedly and unapologetically. And we should charge them a fair market price for our water.
Even if the original samples had Earth organisms in them, it's pretty amazing that they found something (whether it's Earth-made or not) that grows and reproduces at 300 deg. C boiling oil.
Read it, really. I'd like to hear from someone what else this could be, other than a really remarkable life form of some kind, alien or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently had to upgrade friend's PC from Win2k to WinXP, and if you insert the WinXP install disk on a running Win2k system, it will detect and give you the option to upgrade instead of a fresh re-install. It kept most programs, registry entries, bookmarks and all user accounts intact. It was painless. MS actually got that 'right' in my opinion.
Not sure how a WinXP -> WinXP install would go, but if there's a 'repair' facility it probably will be nearly as painless.
I see lots of "open source" projects that only have source code buildable on Visual Studio. That kind of defeats the purpose, IMHO. I know one can now download simplified versions of VS for free, but it's still chaining the dev cycle to Microsoft. I think an open-source IDE should be used for open-source projects. sharpDevelop seems to be a great alternative to VS for small OSS C# or VB projects.
Agreed. As this site shows, artists may actually make slightly less per song on iTunes, the 'legal, moral' music download service, than if they sell a physical CD. Considering there's no CD case, physical disc, jacket art, or 'shrinkage' built into the price, it's pretty obvious that the big record companies (and Apple.. yes, beloved Apple) are trying to propagate the same rapacious terms forward into the new online music distribution model.
Say no to 'legal' download services like iTunes, Napster and this new Kazaa, unless they can prove that artists get substantially larger cuts of sales. There are lots of other distro models which give much bigger cuts, like cdbaby.com.
So either one must torture captured suspects, or do nothing and 'take it in the ass'. No middle ground, like standard police interrogation techniques, gathering intelligence via interviews, forensics, etc. Wow.
Ever thought of interviewing for Fox News or Crossfire? Oh wait, that one's gone now.. hah
It would be sad, yet somehow amusing in a black-humour kind of way, if people who argued as you do found themselves in an interrogation room someday themselves.
I am amazed at the stupidity of the UN for actually believing (or being duped to believe) that unilaterally taking a bunch of Muslim-occupied territory away and giving it to a jewish state would result in anything *but* our current situation. The world would be a more stable place today if, oh, I don't know, Canada or Argentina had just given a strip of land in northern Quebec or part of the NYT. to form a jewish homeland. There was a ton of land available (and still is) to form a state the size of Israel, far away from other contentious areas, at the end of WWII, if the will had just been there.
:-)
I (only half-jokingly) tell people the following when they get on the topic of the middle east:
1) Western powers need to stop *all* involvement in the area -- no aid, weapons, food, even diplomatic relations to *any* countries in the region;
2) Give one final ultimatum: fight as much as you want within your own borders, just leave the rest of the world the hell alone;
3) On the *first* violent incident occurring to foreign nationals anywhere, determined to be caused by Israeli or Palestinians, a six-month countdown will be initiated by the Western nations. All Israelis and Palestinians are free to move, during this six-month period, to new lands located in Northern Canada or Argentina (for Israelis and Palestinians, respectively); the West will commit resources to ensure all people who wish are transported, with their belongings, to their designated new homeland.
4) At the end of the countdown, one final 7-day warning is given to all people remaining to vacate Israel and Palestine.
5) The West begins a week-long tactical nuclear bombing campaign on the core of the Holy Land, rendering it uninhabitable for the next thousand years or or more.
If 5) seems too cruel, replace with an ongoing bombing campaign using bombs filled with pork rinds and bacon fat, rendering the Holy Land tainted for the foreseeable future.
That would be truly awesome -- a picture of a guy in a spacesuit kicking back with a beer, sittin' on the Viking table and using the Pathfinder as an ottoman, big-screen TV in front with a live feed of the 2012 World Cup... suitably delayed of course (what is it, two light-minutes to Mars?) :-)
Hey, keep the USA out of this :-p /me ducks
Worked for the Mormons didn't it? :-)
It's a tough call when things which are unhealthy, yet kill very slowly, are allowed in our society. What if, instead of smoke, cigarettes shot out high-molar sulphuric acid? I think people would not tolerate second-hand acid burns. Hmm.
When I come home from my favourite local club, sometimes my nose feel stuffed up from the cigarette smoke others have put into the club's air. When one blows one's nose, and what comes out is a deep shade of grey, it's pretty obvious that second-hand smoke gets into my non-smoking lungs. It doesn't take a scientific study to tell me this is unhealthy. Thankfully, all clubs will be smoke-free in my area by 2008.
I tend to think that one person's freedom to put smoke in the air ends the moment that air goes past another person's nose without their permission.. but it's not a black/white decision.
Bad form to reply to my own post, but I want to clarify that I don't think Mr. Buffett's money is tainted (I don't know a tonne about him but I hear he's a good guy in general); it's Gates' cash that I have problems with.
Well, for a start:
http://www.sasktelwebsite.net/jbayko/cpu3.html
Read the whole thing, it's interesting. But this is the most relevant chapter.
Granted, IBM had a large hand in the big mis-steps of the early PC era; but Microsoft's offering of DOS did in fact set back the general state of the PC for a decade, if not more.
Consider the fact that many other OSes were concurrently available that had multi-user/multi-tasking capabilities; real processes with fine-grained priority schedulers; unified I/O models; and proper division between the kernel, device drivers and userspace processes. I'm not going to do your research for you. Google for Desqview, OS-9, FLEX, etc. These were all available around the time of the PC's inception AFAIK and were far superior in design and capabilities to DOS.
These are not concepts that originated with Windows 95. So yes, Microsoft (with IBM) did a hell of a lot to set back the general state of computing. I suppose one could blame the public as well for accepting something they perceived as 'good enough', when it really wasn't good enough at all (why do people accept that PCs just crash naturally?) but that isn't really fair, as most people didn't have degrees in computing (and still don't).
I admire the charity work being done, but I think this is still 'blood money' that really wasn't worth what society has paid in terms of general progress.
With the size and opulence of the new Shaw cable building in my city, I can quite confidently call BS on your claim that broadband must be sold at a loss for $50/month. Hell, it's only $40 CDN here and Shaw is raking in the dough. OK, there's a chance that their cable TV subsidizes their internet, but they've always been perfectly willing to sell an internet connection *without* cable to me.
... and here in the North (Canada), we curse Seattle for exporting Starbucks coffee, the most disgusting, over-roasted crap beans every inflicted on man. I now avoid that chain like the plague due to the fact that *every* time I buy their coffee, light or dark roast, I get a raging stomache ache. I don't know if it's just the stores in this town, but they are TEH SUKC. >-(
.. but one way is definitely faster. Left, if I recall. You're running against the logs, but it saves time. Sad that I remember that (correctly?) Pitfall takes place in some wierd spacetime, where the route changes depending on what direction you run :-)
A slashdotter who did not build his own computer is like a jedi who did not build his own lightsaber.
Maybe that should read
A security programmer who did not build his own crypto is like a jedi who did not build his own lightsaber.
Doesn't make so much sense now (or does it?)
More programmers could do well do learn crypto -- at least where to get the tools and algorithms, and how to apply them. I'm no math whiz so I'd be reticent to devise my own S-boxes from scratch. But it's still a worthy exercise to study up on the subject.
If the people who aren't really Christians are so damn successful at making everyone think they're Christians, then what difference does it make if we're against "them"? The label they operate under isn't what people are fighting against; it's what they're doing. If they've completely co-opted a movement, then being against that movement is not materially different from being against the infiltrators.
Some would argue that we are better off without organized religion, due to its ready-made infrastructure of intolerance, dogma and authority hierarchies which are ripe to be taken over by just the sort of people you describe. It's like people advocating against Windows, because it's a haven for malware, spyware and worms. Sometimes an environment that fosters bad things, while itself neutral, must be rejected due to the high level of abuse.
Stands to reason, any country that kills its own populace certainly would do something like this.
And how is any country with military and intelligence organizations running out of control any different?
(Couldn't resist.)
Oops. Mea culpa. Hmm, so much for 'i before e, except after c'.
Can EU-based companies then freely do work to interoperate/reverse-engineer things made by the (insane) US software industry? I hope to $DIETY so. This would force the US software industry to actually focus on quality and usefullness instead of paying lawyers to lock the latest trivial feature up in patents.
... but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating.
How is this different from biology? The poor moose in the herd who isn't immune to spongiform encephalopathy isn't protected by the diversity of his herd-mates.. but the herd as a whole is. The analogy does hold.
Your point about multiple architectures dividing the attention of the antivirus community might be true to some extent -- but on the other hand, there might just be more jobs for people writing antivirus programs for all those extra operating systems.
It isn't ludicrous that diversity protects us, as a whole community, from viruses. Some may be hit, but the rest can keep computing. That's the point.
Careful with those frozen Antarctic microbes from space.. they might infect all of your sled dogs.
This is nothing new, just a further encroachment of the existing ECHELON method of surveillance -- once of the primary reasons for ECHELON was so that allies could ask each other to spy on their citizens for them. Gets around all those pesky regulations that prevent various agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have worked with VxWorks quite a bit, and I would never call it a micro-kernel. For deployment everything is typically linked statically with the VxWorks kernel (kernel, drivers, user apps, everything). It's very scalable, but not really that modular; code dependencies tend to leak from one component to affect many others (as in, component A needs constants defined in component B, and an API change in component C means you have to futz with the source for component D, etc.). VxWorks does allow one to load .o and .a files at runtime from a filesystem, but it's really just a dynamic linker. I guess in the sense of scalability it is a micro-kernel, but in terms of isolating dependencies between different systems, not so much (as in, "configuration hell"). Just like Linux 'modules' by the way.. they're no better.
I'd say OS-9 fits the definition more, if one wants to talk about commercial micro-kernels. The nearly object-oriented module system allows great scalability as well as greater isolation between components. The only thing the kernel does is handle memory allocation, IPC and support for loading/unloading device drivers, filesystems etc. All of these can be replaced by user-written modules, and the device drivers and filesystem managers have a stable, opaque API which insulates internal changes from the rest of the system.
That's just from my (limited) experience of course..
Hear, hear! Oh, and the US has been covering up its own mad cow cases for years, pre-dating the Canadian cases. How's that for a nationalistic import policy?
I wish the Canadian gov't would grow some berries and just threaten to rip up NAFTA. Beef, lumber, those are just the big two examples. A treaty is just a fancy contract, right? That's what you do when the other side violates the contract repeatedly and unapologetically. And we should charge them a fair market price for our water.
A newer paper shows that they've determined a metabolism and life-cycle for these things.
. pdf
That's right, they grow and reproduce:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0312/0312639
Even if the original samples had Earth organisms in them, it's pretty amazing that they found something (whether it's Earth-made or not) that grows and reproduces at 300 deg. C boiling oil.
Read it, really. I'd like to hear from someone what else this could be, other than a really remarkable life form of some kind, alien or otherwise.