I too used to be a limp-fingered effete typist, pussyfied by the zero-resistance keys of modern laptops. And then, five years ago, by chance I found salvation. My baby was an ancient, grime-encrusted Fujitsu 4700 -- a genuine steel-spring keyboard from the dawn of the computing age, lying dejected in the used-parts bin. I brought it home, cleaned it up, plugged it in, and discovered that it took the force of my whole arm to depress a key. Typing "hello world" tired me out. But I knew that I would master the keyboard if I was to preserve my self-respect. So I began my training. The first month was a haze of pain. The first year, I felt I would develop carpal tunnel. The second year, the pain started to fade. And now? Now, I type in ecstasy, as the metal-on-metal racket of the 4700's keys thunders through the rooms of my house and scares my neighbors' pets. And with every key press of that hoary input device, I broadcast to the world: "I am a man, and I am alive!"
Anyway: my point is, no pain, no gain. If typing on a buckling-spring keyboard does not train your finger muscles, then why would you want to buy one?
If (when?) SUP starts actively censoring livejournal (thus far, its moves have been restricted to wordfiltering dpni), all the interesting people will simply migrate to any one of dozens of lj clones, and the less-interesting people will gradually follow. The internet interprets censorship as damage etc. It's not like television, where the opposition eventually ran out of channels. The only real way for Putin to restrict the freedom of blogging is with a China-style filtering setup - and AFAIK, no Russian official has mentioned any plans to do anything of the sort. So far.
If you look at the backstory for the rise of SUP, the whole thing started when the abuse team tried to apply American standards to Russian bloggers. You see, the Russian internets culture is different. You post whatever you want to post. For example, if you feel that you want to personally execute every member of [insert group of people here], burn the corpses in a fire, and piss in the ashes, then you should definitely blog about it. Self-censorship is for wimps and politicians. A few years ago, American lj abuse members attempted to ban some Russian bloggers (for posting something about murdering NATO soldiers, iirc). The Russian blogosphere exploded in indignation, and the lj management decided that the only way to sort out what was going on with its Russian-speaking users was to offload them to a Russian company. Hence, SUP, which acquired the rights to the Russian-speaking part of lj last year - and now, has bought the whole service.
If the behavior that SUP has found acceptable in its segment of lj is anything to go by, lj filtering and censorship may be set to disappear entirely.
Over the past 15 years, Russia has achieved a great transformation. It has become a modern capitalist society with a Western-style consumerist culture, a rapidly growing economy, and a stable political system. But at the same time it has lost much; among other things, it no longer has the capacity to do any serious space exploration.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's industrial and scientific capacity has been decimated. The criminal oligarchs who took over Russian industries invested in yachts and London real estate, but never in their factories. The corrupt and incompetent officials of the Yeltsin era let world-leading research institutes fade into shadows from underfunding and brain drain. During the era of economic collapse and hyperinflation, when state-owned enterprises routinely delayed salaries for months, most intelligent or enterprising people went into commerce, crime, or simply left the country. The scientists, engineers, and skilled workers who remained are, alas, too few and too old to sustain Putin's vision for Russia's development.
This is precisely the quality of Russian cars fell after the collapse of the USSR. This is why the Clipper spaceship exists only as a mockup. This is why the lead Project 677 submarine is still not ready after 10 years of construction work. This is why Russia still doesn't have a 5th generation fighter jet.
If Russia wants to become a great power again, it needs a new era of massive investment in infrastructure, science, and the industrial complex, like in the 1700s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. Otherwise, it risks degenerating into an American or Chinese oil-producing satellite, a frozen and shabby Saudi Arabia. But even if the next president pursues such a program, which is not at all certain, it will take a decade for results to be felt. Realistically, I fear Putin's plan for space development is a dream that would be realized many years behind schedule, if at all.
The article (which is actually a PDF, thanks for the warning) uses proprietary fonts (LucidaBright). While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided.
Oh, where to begin...
1. The only reason you would need a "PDF warning" is that you use an operating system with poor support for the format (i.e. Windows). Switching to a real OS, among other benefits, will make reading math papers (which are almost always in PDF format) a pleasure.
2. PDF is an open standard, which has been implemented by many different parties: Adobe and Apple have closed-source implementations; freedesktop.org's poppler and cairo libraries are Free software.
3. The fontface chosen by AMS is orthogonal to the content of the paper - you can easily copy-paste the text and use Computer Modern, Dejavu, Liberation or any other open-source font of your choice. Why would a proprietary font embedded in a PDF file bother you any more than the proprietary fontface of a book?
4. First of all, PDF iseditable. And second, why would you want to edit this particular document? Remember, it's copyrighted by AMS - if you can't prove fair use, you do not have the right to distribute a modified version.
I'm using Firefox on Linux, and I too had some trouble with the site (the flash navigation didn't work). Fortunately, View -> Page Source revealed Radiohead's secrets. Firefox users, just click here: http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm
Apparently, if within 48 hours of receiving the notice, the student responds to the Stanford Information Security Office and explains that he has a right to host the content, there is no disconnection and no $100 fee.
Everyone on this site says Bush is the ultimate evil but a Clinton policy is one of the worst laws ever.
Where is the contradiction? Bush is an evil* president. Before that, Clinton tried his best to be evil**, and often succeeded, but fortunately he was stuck with a Republican Congress so he couldn't do as much damage as he might have liked. The fact that one president sucks does not exonerate the other.
*Iraq, PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, "unlawful combatants", wiretapping, national security letters, the budget, Kyoto, stem cell research
**Clipper, DMCA, Copyright Extension Act, CDA, COPA, extraordinary renditions, bombing random countries to distract Congress, assault weapons ban
See http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-30-1; something like 7 vulnerabilities were found in the kernel's smbfs driver which could be used for remote DoS and potentially for remote root, at least on some configurations (the Linux community decided to fix the bugs instead of waiting for exploit code to appear). There may have been other remote root exploits since then -- I haven't been keeping track.
In short, Zalewski seems to believe in full disclosure instead of responsible disclosure.
So do most of us here at/. when it comes to bugs in Windows or IE or Java VM. Why not Firefox?
No. I would venture to say that most people here believe in giving Windows/IE/Java/Firefox devs a couple of weeks to fix a bug before going public. Coming up with a patch is the easy part. Any large project will need to look for related issues in the rest of the code, to do QA work to make sure the patch doesn't introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities, and to package the updates for all the different architectures and products that happen to be vulnerable. That process takes time; it is physically impossible for the Windows/IE/Java/Firefox team to release an update the same day you informed them about the issue. If you go public on the first day, you are just being an asshole.
First, yeah, Dave Girard knows and uses Aperture. Second, the algorithm CoreImage uses to choose its rendering path might be suboptimal. Or perhaps the non-CoreImage parts of Aperture are just badly written. Whatever the reason, by all accounts Aperture is a pretty slow piece of software.
.su is designated as the TLD for companies and organizations that have a presence in many of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Basically, the same sort of role that.eu is supposed to play for Europe.
IMHO, the constant attempts to get rid of.su are pure politics: "the Soviet Union was eeevil, so we must erase all traces of it from the DNS system". Blergh. These people are trying to steamroll over numerous legitimate users of.su.
First, the relationship between energy and wealth is very complex. Say you consume 2500 kcal in 24 hours. You can spend that energy by sitting on your ass (which creates no wealth), or by improving the Linux kernel (which creates a fair bit of wealth), or by working on a botnet (which would probably decrease the amount of wealth in the economy). In other words, saying that an economic system has X kilojoules in it tells you nothing about the size of the economy.
And second, you forget that humans continuously invent new and more efficient ways to make use of the energy and raw materials on Earth. A useless chunk of rock underground contributes nothing to the economy. But when human science discovers that you can use the rock to make stone axes/town walls/valuable ore/microchips, the rock begins to be worth something, and the amount of wealth in the economy increases. So the size of the economy tends to increase over time, simply because we discover more valuable ways of using the stuff we already have.
IMHO, the difference in building materials can mostly be explained by the differences in the buildings.
Americans typically live in small, freestanding, single-family houses. For such small buildings, a wood+drywall construction is probably the most cost-efficient, especially considering North America's plentiful supplies of lumber. On the other hand, Europeans tend to live in apartment buildings, which require the use of stronger materials like brick, cinder block, and reinforced concrete.
Unfortunately, these rational choices of construction materials have become cultural values. Thus wealthy Americans are happy to buy enormous mansions made of toothpicks and cardboard, while some Russians I know are spending their meager resources on building small single-family homes out of concrete.
The JSF is a product that is being developed for the military by Lockheed Martin and major partners BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman.
Precisely. And you do realize that BAE is a British company, right? (The B in the name used to stand for British) In other words, America is not telling a British company that it's not allowed to sell the source code it co-developed to its own government...
But let's extend it. Pirate IP addresses! I should poison the arp cache on the router and redirect fileserver requests to my own workstation. After all, I am not stealing anything -- I have a natural right to use 172.16.20.104! And if some other users can't get their work done, well, tough luck. Haha, look at these silly network admins trying to track down the problem! They'll are overhelmed and unable to respond! Ooh, now how about pirate license plates. I like my professor's. It has a good ring to it. Yeah, he might be inconvenienced when I get caught by that red light camera -- but I am not stealing anything! And next day, I will just paint a new set of numbers on the plate! No way will they cops ever catch me! Hm, what else. Oh, let's try pirate usernames. Let's hack the forum and get a username I like. Yeah, someone else might be using it already. But who cares, it's not like I am stealing anything... And if the admin blocks me, I'll just go through to the backdoor I installed and get myself another username! They will never shut me down!
I need to be able to turn NumLock on to enter a bunch of numbers. When I am doing serious numerical data entry -- 4x4 matrices to far too many decimal places, for example -- using the numeric keypad is several times faster than the dedicated number keys.
On the other hand, I need to be able to turn NumLock off for games. If NumLock is on, a key on the keypad and a dedicated number key will bind to the same action, which is frankly too constrictive.
Interesting. I had thought that Core Duos were all for Socket 479 BGA -- but it looks like Intel also released a Socket 478 PGA version. In any case, Core2 does not use Socket 478 (only 479, 771, 775, and Socket P).
The Duo is on Intel's ancient 478/775 sockets whereas X2 is on AMD's new AM2 socket. How many more processors can Intel jimmy into those tight little PGAs?
None. Intel decided years ago that PGA wasn't cutting it for desktop parts. This is why socket 775 and socket 771, which you call "ancient", are actually LGA. And I don't understand why you bring up Socket 478, considering that no Core2-branded processors or even recent Pentiums use it...
I think that the flaw they are talking about is CVE-2006-2198, which was fixed in OOo-2.0.3. It was pretty nasty, executes arbitray macro without alerting or prompting the user. However, given that the mistake was already found and fixed, what else does the French Ministry of Defence have to complain about?
Re:without HyperTransport, AMD would be dead
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 1
how is cache coherency handled? And how will the pricing of a 2-socket Woodcrest system compare to that of a two-socket dual-core Opteron system?
Cache coherence between the cores on one Woodcrest chip is ensured automatically using some sort of internal intercore bus (in fact, the two cores actually share the same pool of L2 cache). However, for cache coherence between sockets, Woodcrest does have to pass a message down the FSB, to the northbridge, and up the second FSB to the other socket, which is no the most efficient way of doing things.
As for pricing:
A Xeon 5130 generally performs better than an Opteron 275.
The guts of a dual 5130 system will cost 2 x $350 + $500 motherboad = $1200.
For a dual 275, you will pay 2 x $600 + $300 motherboard = $1500.
Even though Intel's pushing-obsolete-FSB-to-the-limit northbridge makes their motherboards ludicrously expensive, a Woodcrest system is still cheaper and has better performance. I would expect AMD to slash Opteron prices in the near future.
One factor you might consider though is overclocking. If you don't mind voiding your warranty, several Opteron motherboards allow (software-only) overclocking. As far as I know, Woodcrest motherboards can't be overclocked at all, neither in software nor in hardware, although that might change as newer BIOS revisions come out.
Slashdot Mirror
I too used to be a limp-fingered effete typist, pussyfied by the zero-resistance keys of modern laptops. And then, five years ago, by chance I found salvation. My baby was an ancient, grime-encrusted Fujitsu 4700 -- a genuine steel-spring keyboard from the dawn of the computing age, lying dejected in the used-parts bin. I brought it home, cleaned it up, plugged it in, and discovered that it took the force of my whole arm to depress a key. Typing "hello world" tired me out. But I knew that I would master the keyboard if I was to preserve my self-respect. So I began my training. The first month was a haze of pain. The first year, I felt I would develop carpal tunnel. The second year, the pain started to fade. And now? Now, I type in ecstasy, as the metal-on-metal racket of the 4700's keys thunders through the rooms of my house and scares my neighbors' pets. And with every key press of that hoary input device, I broadcast to the world: "I am a man, and I am alive!"
Anyway: my point is, no pain, no gain. If typing on a buckling-spring keyboard does not train your finger muscles, then why would you want to buy one?
Guess what, the latest (2008-02-09) Minefield build is also vulnerable to the exploit proof of concept...
It looks like Firefox 3 Beta 2 is vulnerable. The proof of concept from the article works on FF3b2 on my machine (Linux i686).
If (when?) SUP starts actively censoring livejournal (thus far, its moves have been restricted to wordfiltering dpni), all the interesting people will simply migrate to any one of dozens of lj clones, and the less-interesting people will gradually follow. The internet interprets censorship as damage etc. It's not like television, where the opposition eventually ran out of channels. The only real way for Putin to restrict the freedom of blogging is with a China-style filtering setup - and AFAIK, no Russian official has mentioned any plans to do anything of the sort. So far.
If you look at the backstory for the rise of SUP, the whole thing started when the abuse team tried to apply American standards to Russian bloggers. You see, the Russian internets culture is different. You post whatever you want to post. For example, if you feel that you want to personally execute every member of [insert group of people here], burn the corpses in a fire, and piss in the ashes, then you should definitely blog about it. Self-censorship is for wimps and politicians. A few years ago, American lj abuse members attempted to ban some Russian bloggers (for posting something about murdering NATO soldiers, iirc). The Russian blogosphere exploded in indignation, and the lj management decided that the only way to sort out what was going on with its Russian-speaking users was to offload them to a Russian company. Hence, SUP, which acquired the rights to the Russian-speaking part of lj last year - and now, has bought the whole service.
If the behavior that SUP has found acceptable in its segment of lj is anything to go by, lj filtering and censorship may be set to disappear entirely.
Over the past 15 years, Russia has achieved a great transformation. It has become a modern capitalist society with a Western-style consumerist culture, a rapidly growing economy, and a stable political system. But at the same time it has lost much; among other things, it no longer has the capacity to do any serious space exploration.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's industrial and scientific capacity has been decimated. The criminal oligarchs who took over Russian industries invested in yachts and London real estate, but never in their factories. The corrupt and incompetent officials of the Yeltsin era let world-leading research institutes fade into shadows from underfunding and brain drain. During the era of economic collapse and hyperinflation, when state-owned enterprises routinely delayed salaries for months, most intelligent or enterprising people went into commerce, crime, or simply left the country. The scientists, engineers, and skilled workers who remained are, alas, too few and too old to sustain Putin's vision for Russia's development.
This is precisely the quality of Russian cars fell after the collapse of the USSR. This is why the Clipper spaceship exists only as a mockup. This is why the lead Project 677 submarine is still not ready after 10 years of construction work. This is why Russia still doesn't have a 5th generation fighter jet.
If Russia wants to become a great power again, it needs a new era of massive investment in infrastructure, science, and the industrial complex, like in the 1700s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. Otherwise, it risks degenerating into an American or Chinese oil-producing satellite, a frozen and shabby Saudi Arabia. But even if the next president pursues such a program, which is not at all certain, it will take a decade for results to be felt. Realistically, I fear Putin's plan for space development is a dream that would be realized many years behind schedule, if at all.
1. The only reason you would need a "PDF warning" is that you use an operating system with poor support for the format (i.e. Windows). Switching to a real OS, among other benefits, will make reading math papers (which are almost always in PDF format) a pleasure.
2. PDF is an open standard, which has been implemented by many different parties: Adobe and Apple have closed-source implementations; freedesktop.org's poppler and cairo libraries are Free software.
3. The fontface chosen by AMS is orthogonal to the content of the paper - you can easily copy-paste the text and use Computer Modern, Dejavu, Liberation or any other open-source font of your choice. Why would a proprietary font embedded in a PDF file bother you any more than the proprietary fontface of a book?
4. First of all, PDF is editable. And second, why would you want to edit this particular document? Remember, it's copyrighted by AMS - if you can't prove fair use, you do not have the right to distribute a modified version.
http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm
The term "frozen star" has not been used since the 1970s; everyone refers to black holes as black holes. See http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7%D1%91%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B4%D1%8B%D1%80%D0%B0
Apparently, if within 48 hours of receiving the notice, the student responds to the Stanford Information Security Office and explains that he has a right to host the content, there is no disconnection and no $100 fee.
Everyone on this site says Bush is the ultimate evil but a Clinton policy is one of the worst laws ever.
Where is the contradiction? Bush is an evil* president. Before that, Clinton tried his best to be evil**, and often succeeded, but fortunately he was stuck with a Republican Congress so he couldn't do as much damage as he might have liked. The fact that one president sucks does not exonerate the other.
*Iraq, PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, "unlawful combatants", wiretapping, national security letters, the budget, Kyoto, stem cell research
**Clipper, DMCA, Copyright Extension Act, CDA, COPA, extraordinary renditions, bombing random countries to distract Congress, assault weapons ban
See http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-30-1; something like 7 vulnerabilities were found in the kernel's smbfs driver which could be used for remote DoS and potentially for remote root, at least on some configurations (the Linux community decided to fix the bugs instead of waiting for exploit code to appear). There may have been other remote root exploits since then -- I haven't been keeping track.
No. I would venture to say that most people here believe in giving Windows/IE/Java/Firefox devs a couple of weeks to fix a bug before going public. Coming up with a patch is the easy part. Any large project will need to look for related issues in the rest of the code, to do QA work to make sure the patch doesn't introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities, and to package the updates for all the different architectures and products that happen to be vulnerable. That process takes time; it is physically impossible for the Windows/IE/Java/Firefox team to release an update the same day you informed them about the issue. If you go public on the first day, you are just being an asshole.
First, yeah, Dave Girard knows and uses Aperture. Second, the algorithm CoreImage uses to choose its rendering path might be suboptimal. Or perhaps the non-CoreImage parts of Aperture are just badly written. Whatever the reason, by all accounts Aperture is a pretty slow piece of software.
.su is designated as the TLD for companies and organizations that have a presence in many of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Basically, the same sort of role that .eu is supposed to play for Europe.
.su are pure politics: "the Soviet Union was eeevil, so we must erase all traces of it from the DNS system". Blergh. These people are trying to steamroll over numerous legitimate users of .su.
IMHO, the constant attempts to get rid of
Indeed. At this point, I have basically decided never to install a 2.6.x.y kernel until y >= 2. Losing data ain't worth it.
First, the relationship between energy and wealth is very complex. Say you consume 2500 kcal in 24 hours. You can spend that energy by sitting on your ass (which creates no wealth), or by improving the Linux kernel (which creates a fair bit of wealth), or by working on a botnet (which would probably decrease the amount of wealth in the economy). In other words, saying that an economic system has X kilojoules in it tells you nothing about the size of the economy.
And second, you forget that humans continuously invent new and more efficient ways to make use of the energy and raw materials on Earth. A useless chunk of rock underground contributes nothing to the economy. But when human science discovers that you can use the rock to make stone axes/town walls/valuable ore/microchips, the rock begins to be worth something, and the amount of wealth in the economy increases. So the size of the economy tends to increase over time, simply because we discover more valuable ways of using the stuff we already have.
IMHO, the difference in building materials can mostly be explained by the differences in the buildings.
Americans typically live in small, freestanding, single-family houses. For such small buildings, a wood+drywall construction is probably the most cost-efficient, especially considering North America's plentiful supplies of lumber. On the other hand, Europeans tend to live in apartment buildings, which require the use of stronger materials like brick, cinder block, and reinforced concrete.
Unfortunately, these rational choices of construction materials have become cultural values. Thus wealthy Americans are happy to buy enormous mansions made of toothpicks and cardboard, while some Russians I know are spending their meager resources on building small single-family homes out of concrete.
The JSF is a product that is being developed for the military by Lockheed Martin and major partners BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman.
Precisely. And you do realize that BAE is a British company, right? (The B in the name used to stand for British) In other words, America is not telling a British company that it's not allowed to sell the source code it co-developed to its own government...
But let's extend it. Pirate IP addresses! I should poison the arp cache on the router and redirect fileserver requests to my own workstation. After all, I am not stealing anything -- I have a natural right to use 172.16.20.104! And if some other users can't get their work done, well, tough luck. Haha, look at these silly network admins trying to track down the problem! They'll are overhelmed and unable to respond! Ooh, now how about pirate license plates. I like my professor's. It has a good ring to it. Yeah, he might be inconvenienced when I get caught by that red light camera -- but I am not stealing anything! And next day, I will just paint a new set of numbers on the plate! No way will they cops ever catch me! Hm, what else. Oh, let's try pirate usernames. Let's hack the forum and get a username I like. Yeah, someone else might be using it already. But who cares, it's not like I am stealing anything... And if the admin blocks me, I'll just go through to the backdoor I installed and get myself another username! They will never shut me down!
I need to be able to turn NumLock on to enter a bunch of numbers. When I am doing serious numerical data entry -- 4x4 matrices to far too many decimal places, for example -- using the numeric keypad is several times faster than the dedicated number keys.
On the other hand, I need to be able to turn NumLock off for games. If NumLock is on, a key on the keypad and a dedicated number key will bind to the same action, which is frankly too constrictive.
Interesting. I had thought that Core Duos were all for Socket 479 BGA -- but it looks like Intel also released a Socket 478 PGA version. In any case, Core2 does not use Socket 478 (only 479, 771, 775, and Socket P).
I think that the flaw they are talking about is CVE-2006-2198, which was fixed in OOo-2.0.3. It was pretty nasty, executes arbitray macro without alerting or prompting the user. However, given that the mistake was already found and fixed, what else does the French Ministry of Defence have to complain about?
As for pricing:
A Xeon 5130 generally performs better than an Opteron 275.
The guts of a dual 5130 system will cost 2 x $350 + $500 motherboad = $1200.
For a dual 275, you will pay 2 x $600 + $300 motherboard = $1500.
Even though Intel's pushing-obsolete-FSB-to-the-limit northbridge makes their motherboards ludicrously expensive, a Woodcrest system is still cheaper and has better performance. I would expect AMD to slash Opteron prices in the near future.
One factor you might consider though is overclocking. If you don't mind voiding your warranty, several Opteron motherboards allow (software-only) overclocking. As far as I know, Woodcrest motherboards can't be overclocked at all, neither in software nor in hardware, although that might change as newer BIOS revisions come out.