A laptop is a computer I can hold in my lap.
This is a gizmo that I can hold in my lap but which is useless without a host computer. It's a peripheral.
Not that I wouldn't mind having one... (Will it work with my powerbook too?)
You might be right about "Where's Waldo", but I think that's a special case.
I think most of these are books about which people are likely to disagree. For example, if I authored a dull and poorly written story that offended some thin-skinned fraction of the population, it would never make this list because nobody would want to see it in the library anyway.
Most of these books appeal strongly to a group that's large enough to create the demand for the book to appear in the library in the first place, but offend another.
This kind of disagreement is a natural part of a free society, but it shouldn't lead to banning books from the library. If you don't like a book, go ahead and ban it in your home but don't try to ban it from mine!
In one place it says 100TB and in another it says 10PB... Makes you wonder if any of these are right.
Interesting technology; this would sure make my backups easier, assuming the bits don't fly off the disk if someone turns on the TV in the next room. The major problem I foresee is that we'll need some new bus/interconnect technology in order to make this effective; this thing looks like a firewire drive. Filling/scanning a 100TB firewire drive is going to take a looong time.
Using the current CPU version of Moore's Law (CPUs double in speed every 18 months) 62 is just a tad less than 64 and so every character buys you a tad less than nine years. That sounds good...
The bad news is that brute-forcing passwords is a problem that is trivially parallelizable and therefore you don't really get 9 years. You get as long as it takes for someone to tie together 64 times more contemporary computers, which is getting easier and easier. Just imagine how many passwords seti@home could crack...
If it's all as simple as this guy makes it sound, then it makes you wonder why nobody has done an IPO this way before... It seems like the best way for the company to get as much of the money as possible.
Of course, if the reason is because then then Wall Street will ignore the stock and no institutions will recommend it, well, maybe that's a great reason not to do this. After all, it's not uncommon in other contexts to pay a 7% commission to someone who can get you a good price. I guess we'll have to wait and see whether not giving the Wall Street folk their usual vigorish is worth the risk.
What I would like to see is anti-malware that bites back, hard.
Me too.
We had this site going a while back that was going to test anti-trolling methods, like by taking a troll user and stuffing them in their own world....
A nice hack, but I don't see how this is biting back. It's more like ignoring them and hoping that they'll go away. Historically, they don't.
Even if we can ignore spammers (thank you, spamassassin!) that doesn't completely solve the problem; it takes resources to filter mail, and the victims are paying for those resources. I don't want to just stuff them into their own world, so to speak, if I have to pay for that world.
Maybe you don't hear about it as much, but it's still there! I heard an interview with some folks at Wood's Hole regarding Alvin's retirement (which they view as a logical step towards an upgrade, not necessarily a loss) and they sounded pretty fired up about it. And let's not forget these folks, who are finding all kinds of cool stuff.
I think it's a little less exciting now because it requires more infrastructure to do anything new. Unlike the days when you could discover something new with little more equipment than a scuba, nowadays it requires quite an investment.
Regarding this trade-off: what is that your clients need to do? Do they need to watch DVDs or do they just need to scribble some notes? How much processing power do they really need?
If all they need is simple stuff, it's hard to beat a good PDA with a keyboard attached. If they need basic stuff and DVDs, maybe it's best to get them one of those portable DVD player gizmos and a PDA with a keyboard...
Granted, most people just want a PC, never mind the details, but there might be another solution.
The problem isn't that particular laptops have odd hardware that linux doesn't support, it's that randomly selected laptops do. If you are given a choice of which laptop to buy, there are several that are quite well supported (i.e., the IBM ThinkPad). So, this doesn't really change anything, unless you prefer HPs for one reason or another.
The problem of linux running well on some random low-cost laptop that shows up on your desk one afternoon is still just as bad...
if this bug is a known bug, and it leads to file corruption, it should never have made it in -stable!
My point is, that if you read the documention, you'd know that this doesn't work. Not everything in -STABLE works. Just like Linux, for that matter...
Why would I spend money to get around a bug in the OS when there are other viable option out there -- e.g linux?
There's no reason, and yet, for some reason, you decided to use FreeBSD, and apparently didn't test the configuration or read the man page before making this decision.
I do not have enough disk space to copy the files off th drive, reformat it, and then copy them back.
Is this a particularly large volume? (How much free space do you have sitting around on the PCs that are accessing this thing?) It must be pretty big to make this futzing around worthwhile, which is a bit unexpected for a FAT32 file system (rather than NTFS). At a dollar a gigabyte, how many dollars would it take to make this problem vanish? Whoever is paying for this system might be willing to spring for a little slack space.
His boss probably has screenshots of him spending 70% of his time looking at screenshots of solitaire (and 20% of the time reading slashdot).
In all seriousness, by the time it got to this point, wouldn't have been easier, less time-consuming, and all-around saner to just go and get another job? After 21 years in IT, this guy should know how that world works.
... are nothing compared to the hardware requirements for hosting Doom3 downloads...
Sigh. The headline for this articles should read something like "There's a cool file available and the URL was posted on slashdot. Mark your calendar for next week, when the traffic dies down and you can actually download it."
The logic behind your math is incorrect... The months are not independent at all. In fact, they tend to nestle right up against each other.
There's no need to use probability here; enumeration will do quite nicely. It makes things a little easier if we approximate the lunar period as exactly 28 days and pretend that the year starts on March 1st (so that leap years are easier to deal with).
Starting at March 1st, there are 27 days on which the first full moon of the year can fall. It works out as:
March 1: Blue moons in March, January.
2: March, February (if the next year is a
leap year)
3: March
4,5: April
6,7,8: May
9,10: June
11,12,13: July
14,15,16: August
17,18: September
19,20,21: October
22,23: November
24,25,26: December
27: January
So blue moons are even less rare than you thought.
(Now someone with an almanac can check my memory...)
Let me make sure I understand what you're doing: you're creating a Fat32 file system on a disk that is physically connected to a FreeBSD host. Then you're using the FreeBSD host to export this to a bunch of windows machines via samba?
If that's right, then I can understand why other people aren't seeing this bug -- because most people would never think of doing this. I don't think anyone would claim that the msdos file system type (used for the FAT file systems) is appropriate for this, and if you're really talking about using NTFS instead of FAT32, it says right on the man page that this won't work.
Use the native file system. It is faster and more robust.
Couldn't someone hack together a javascript program that mimics the UI of IE/Safari/Opera/etc just as easily? Maybe XUL makes this easier but that's about it.
Hmmm... not sure what they're doing differently than you, but my former employer used FreeBSD to host the department samba server in a fairly vanilla configuration for years and they haven't seen problems. Is this bug triggered by some unusual situation or is it really that simple?
From what I recall, having mice live for two years before falling ill might be an achievement in and of itself.
On the other hand, we've now learned that a bunch of grad students with some time on their hands can synthesize an incurable, infectious, horrible disease. Yikes.
"Mutual assured lawsuits" is a pun on mutual assured destruction (aka MAD), which was the cold war doctrine that if someone nukes us, we'll nuke them back. Nobody can win a nuclear war if both sides have nukes and thus it would be MAD to start one.
If you want to be fussy, it should be "assured mutual destruction", but AMD just doesn't sound as crazy as MAD.
I agree... there's no way I'll trade a good camera, a high-fidelity (and high capacity) music player, etc, for the crappy counterparts that are in phones nowadays. (The only area in which they come close is PDAs, as you wrote; I'm almost ready to trade in my original Palm Pilot for a tiny phone -- but I am not quite ready to trade graffiti for keying in text on a telephone keypad!)
Unfortunately, we might not have much choice. If the cell phone gadget market kills the other markets and then is squeezed itself by vanishing profit margins, then we'll all pay the price for getting "free" phones many times over. Unfortunately, short-term price always seems to trump long-term quality in commodity markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I wouldn't mind having one... (Will it work with my powerbook too?)
I think most of these are books about which people are likely to disagree. For example, if I authored a dull and poorly written story that offended some thin-skinned fraction of the population, it would never make this list because nobody would want to see it in the library anyway.
Most of these books appeal strongly to a group that's large enough to create the demand for the book to appear in the library in the first place, but offend another.
This kind of disagreement is a natural part of a free society, but it shouldn't lead to banning books from the library. If you don't like a book, go ahead and ban it in your home but don't try to ban it from mine!
Interesting technology; this would sure make my backups easier, assuming the bits don't fly off the disk if someone turns on the TV in the next room. The major problem I foresee is that we'll need some new bus/interconnect technology in order to make this effective; this thing looks like a firewire drive. Filling/scanning a 100TB firewire drive is going to take a looong time.
The bad news is that brute-forcing passwords is a problem that is trivially parallelizable and therefore you don't really get 9 years. You get as long as it takes for someone to tie together 64 times more contemporary computers, which is getting easier and easier. Just imagine how many passwords seti@home could crack...
Of course, if the reason is because then then Wall Street will ignore the stock and no institutions will recommend it, well, maybe that's a great reason not to do this. After all, it's not uncommon in other contexts to pay a 7% commission to someone who can get you a good price. I guess we'll have to wait and see whether not giving the Wall Street folk their usual vigorish is worth the risk.
Me too.
We had this site going a while back that was going to test anti-trolling methods, like by taking a troll user and stuffing them in their own world. ...
A nice hack, but I don't see how this is biting back. It's more like ignoring them and hoping that they'll go away. Historically, they don't.
Even if we can ignore spammers (thank you, spamassassin!) that doesn't completely solve the problem; it takes resources to filter mail, and the victims are paying for those resources. I don't want to just stuff them into their own world, so to speak, if I have to pay for that world.
Maybe you don't hear about it as much, but it's still there! I heard an interview with some folks at Wood's Hole regarding Alvin's retirement (which they view as a logical step towards an upgrade, not necessarily a loss) and they sounded pretty fired up about it. And let's not forget these folks, who are finding all kinds of cool stuff.
I think it's a little less exciting now because it requires more infrastructure to do anything new. Unlike the days when you could discover something new with little more equipment than a scuba, nowadays it requires quite an investment.
If all they need is simple stuff, it's hard to beat a good PDA with a keyboard attached. If they need basic stuff and DVDs, maybe it's best to get them one of those portable DVD player gizmos and a PDA with a keyboard...
Granted, most people just want a PC, never mind the details, but there might be another solution.
The problem of linux running well on some random low-cost laptop that shows up on your desk one afternoon is still just as bad...
RTFA... The screen is 11.7' diagonally. It doesn't matter what the smallest dimension is, if the largest is the size of my garage door.
I guess I'll have to play life-sized doom3 in the garage...
Not too surprising, because JDS is intended for the desktop, and Sun already has a server OS...
My point is, that if you read the documention, you'd know that this doesn't work. Not everything in -STABLE works. Just like Linux, for that matter...
Why would I spend money to get around a bug in the OS when there are other viable option out there -- e.g linux?
There's no reason, and yet, for some reason, you decided to use FreeBSD, and apparently didn't test the configuration or read the man page before making this decision.
I do not have enough disk space to copy the files off th drive, reformat it, and then copy them back.
Is this a particularly large volume? (How much free space do you have sitting around on the PCs that are accessing this thing?) It must be pretty big to make this futzing around worthwhile, which is a bit unexpected for a FAT32 file system (rather than NTFS). At a dollar a gigabyte, how many dollars would it take to make this problem vanish? Whoever is paying for this system might be willing to spring for a little slack space.
In all seriousness, by the time it got to this point, wouldn't have been easier, less time-consuming, and all-around saner to just go and get another job? After 21 years in IT, this guy should know how that world works.
Sigh. The headline for this articles should read something like "There's a cool file available and the URL was posted on slashdot. Mark your calendar for next week, when the traffic dies down and you can actually download it."
There's no need to use probability here; enumeration will do quite nicely. It makes things a little easier if we approximate the lunar period as exactly 28 days and pretend that the year starts on March 1st (so that leap years are easier to deal with).
Starting at March 1st, there are 27 days on which the first full moon of the year can fall. It works out as: March 1: Blue moons in March, January. 2: March, February (if the next year is a leap year) 3: March 4,5: April 6,7,8: May 9,10: June 11,12,13: July 14,15,16: August 17,18: September 19,20,21: October 22,23: November 24,25,26: December 27: January So blue moons are even less rare than you thought. (Now someone with an almanac can check my memory...)
If that's right, then I can understand why other people aren't seeing this bug -- because most people would never think of doing this. I don't think anyone would claim that the msdos file system type (used for the FAT file systems) is appropriate for this, and if you're really talking about using NTFS instead of FAT32, it says right on the man page that this won't work.
Use the native file system. It is faster and more robust.
Hmmm... not sure what they're doing differently than you, but my former employer used FreeBSD to host the department samba server in a fairly vanilla configuration for years and they haven't seen problems. Is this bug triggered by some unusual situation or is it really that simple?
From what I recall, having mice live for two years before falling ill might be an achievement in and of itself.
On the other hand, we've now learned that a bunch of grad students with some time on their hands can synthesize an incurable, infectious, horrible disease. Yikes.
If you want to be fussy, it should be "assured mutual destruction", but AMD just doesn't sound as crazy as MAD.
Unfortunately, we might not have much choice. If the cell phone gadget market kills the other markets and then is squeezed itself by vanishing profit margins, then we'll all pay the price for getting "free" phones many times over. Unfortunately, short-term price always seems to trump long-term quality in commodity markets.