In my opinion, tuning a Javascript laden website for speed is an exercise in futility. The Web's great difference is user-extensibility; practically anyone can throw together some HTML and make a website. It may be a MySpace page, but hey, it's something, and it contributes to the culture of the Internet. Speed, however, is not a feature of the HTML/Javascript/CSS world.
Were I to be developing a new AJAX-driven Web application I would focus first on simplicity. I feel that if you have so much AJAX stuff going on that you need to resort to crazy tricks you have already lost. Take the following, quoted from the review:
In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser.
While good advice, something like this should be implemented as a natural part of the specification, or not at all. This rings to me as an attempt to manhandle HTML/Javascript/CSS into a use case for which it is not intended.
I want to see a real protocol for webpages - something between Postscript (except less document-oriented; and yes I know about NeXT's work) and a windowing environment (except more constrained). Then, to preserve the ease of user-input, a simple HTML/XML-like layer. For 99% of the sites that are constructed directly by the user, original HTML with italics, colors, fonts, etc. is sufficient. For projects beyond the scope of Joe Facebook, a true system is needed that allows seperation of design and content. But all attempts thus far to do both, frankly, suck.
Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.
Microsoft is a corporation, after all, and I would be very surprised to see them expending resources working on open source projects that they do not actually use. This could be a gateway, a toe in the water, to starting open source projects, which then of course they would contribute to. But unlike IBM, (former) Sun, etc, Microsoft has no ties to existing open source software, so not contributing to the same isn't too surprising.
It's good to see a willingness to do even this much, but hardly a staggering change of heart. They've a long way to go yet.
I suppose you could say that. I think the point here is not that Microsoft is releasing something under an open source license, but that Microsoft sees open source as a viable approach to softare development and a real business force. Typically we expect the company to brush off open source as "anti-American" and offer pricey, Windows-only alternatives to whatever the demand might be. But now they are admitting, in a business sense, that the open source market exists and is worth working with. Sure, they're doing this to increase interoperability with their existing, closed-source projects... but that's more than just a token move.
Theoretically speaking, if we could get, say, an entire ship and all of its inhabitants to do this "quantum walk"...
Ah, but you can't. Quantum mechanics applies only to quantum particles, not big honking spaceships. Of course nobody has integrated quantum mechanics with classical mechanics yet, so you never know;)
The thing is, quantum mechanics is just a mathematical system that seems to work pretty well. As in, it predicts what really tiny things will do extremely well. When a quantum particle takes on different states at a time, that is a mathematical concept that, when applied, produces a result that agrees with what we actually see. It involves complex numbers, high dimensions (that don't necessarily agree with what we consider "dimensions") and other mathematical constructions. The math works great... but you have to be careful about extrapolating too far and assuming the math is the reality.
As far as I know it, we have three main instruction sets. Integer, Floating Point, and Vector (SSE, MMX..etc). Would it more likely be that we would end up with the forth set being Quantum? Or, would it be possible to have an entire CPU quantum based?
Quantum computation is unlikely to replace classical computation. There are certain problems at which quantum computation excels (problems that involve period-finding in some way, shape, or form) and many problems that it doesn't excel at (anything else).
A quantum encryption co-processor is most likely the first way in which quantum computation will reach the classical computing world, and for physical reasons (you need an actual quantum communication channel to attach to) I wouldn't expect it on your Dell any time soon.
Nobody is talking about merging Firefox and Mutter. In general, squeezing security problem-prone applications into a window manager is a Bad Thing, whether it's IE and Windows Explorer, Firefox and Gnome, or sendmail and anything.
This article is talking about using WebKit, a rendering engine as a themeing system in Mutter. While using Trident to render themes in Windows Explorer would certainly bring out some cheap laughs at IE's expense, security is not really the predominant concern.
An amateur astronomer puts up pictures on his blog and we're comparing it to Shoemaker-Levy?
Bad Astronomy says "it's jumping the gun to call it an impact event before we get more observations". I've got an idea for the next Slashdot article: "Asteroid heading towards earth - or maybe just spot on lense".
CSS barely functions on the platform for which it was intended, and now you want to bring it to a platform that has well-established, functional, themeable rendering engines already in existence?
CSS was intended to let designers seperate from function from form - how is that lacking in current themeing environments? The linked blog contains a laundry list of features that are in CSS that are not applicable to desktop themes and features that are not in CSS that are necessary for desktop themes. What I don't see is a list of features that CSS brings to desktop themes that are impractical in existing systems.
Let's see: a system that barely works on its intended platform that contains functionality not applicable to the new, suggested platform and is missing functionality necessary on the new, suggested platform. Gee, sounds like the right technology for the job!
Just how DO you teach a (practically) stone-age tribesman to use a computer?
Stone age tribesman? Take a look at the questions they're asking: who is on top on football, popular NBA players, info on the Obamas, quality of life in different regions of Uganda, the causes of sexual health problems, transmission of diseases, etc. They live in an underdeveloped country, but that doesn't mean they're underdeveloped people.
If a service like this could be sustained long-term and made accessible to more people, I think this could be a great tool. In particular, the questions about conflicting religions and sexual health are striking - there's a lot of ignorance about health, religion, and science in Africa... but that ignorance is a reflection of the state of region, not the willfull behavior of the people. Access to the Internet can provide an "out" for those that want to learn but have limited options in their village.
First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall.
While it is true that whether or not a particular packet will be discarded is the result of a probabilistic process, it is unfair to call it "random". Based on a model of the queue within the router and estimation of the input parameters the probability of a packet being discarded can be calculated. In fact, that's how they design routers. You pick a bunch of different situations and decide how often you can afford to drop packets, then design a queueing system to meet those requirements. Queueing theory is a well-established field (the de-facto standard textbook was written in 1970!) and networking is one of the biggest applications.
Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays
You wouldn't expect uniform delays. A queueing system with a uniform distribution on expected number of customers in the queue is a very strange system indeed. Those sorts of systems are usually related to renewal processes and don't often show up in networking applications. That's actually a good thing, because systems with uniform distributions on just about anything are much more difficult to solve or approximate than most other systems.
"Substantial" is the key word here. Effectively the concept of managing "flows" just means that the router is caching destinations based on fields like source port, source IP address, etc. By using the cache rather than recomputing the destination the latencies can be reduced, thus reducing the number of times you need to use the queue. In queueing theory terms you are decreasing mean service time to increase total service rate. Note however that this can backfire: if you increase the variance in the service time distribution too much (some delays will be much higher when you eventually do need to use the queue) you will actually decrease performance. Of course assumedly they've done all of this work. In essence "flow management" seems to be the replacement of a FIFO queue with a priority queue in a queueing system, with priority based on caching.
Personally, I'm not sure how much of a benefit this can provide. Does it work with NAT? How often do you drop packets based on incorrect routing as compared to those you would have dropped if you had put them in the queue? If this was a truly novel queueing theory application I would have expected to see it in a IEEE journal, not Spectrum.
And of course, any time someone opens with "The Internet is broken" you have to be a little skeptical. Routing is a well-studied and complex subject; saying that you've replaced "packets" with "flows" ain't gunna cut it in my book.
Equal consideration is all that is needed. Unequal consideration means that an open source solution is considered a better choice than a closed source solution, before the individual merits of each solution are examined.
When you put open source and closed source solutions side-by-side on equal footing, you can make comparisons such as TCO, vendor lock-in, support options, timeliness of updates/upgrades, and so on. If you simply assume that open source should be preferential you're making as big a mistake as assuming that closed source should be preferential and you'll end up picking some forked project with a fading community and no documentation simply because "nobody ever got fired for choosing open source".
An equal footing is necessary - no preference either way until all the cards are laid out.
It depends what you're worried about. If you're concerned about it being proven that you were part of the distribution of the document, then any of the suggestions posed so far will work. Buy a new hard drive, encrypt it, receive the document to it from a USB device (destroy the USB device afterwards). Upload to Wikileaks from the encrypted drive. Destroy the drive.
However if you are more concerned with being thought to have been part of the distribution (as that is, after all, what's going to get you raided) then you have a bigger problem. You don't care so much whether in 5 years anybody can show you were involved, you only care about right now, can you stay under the radar.
I would build a suitable alibi (get out of town) and then receive the document from the source. Afterwards, have a change of heart, convince the source that you are NOT going to host it anywhere, convince them you have destroyed the media, and lay low for a while.
Then upload it to WikiLeaks at your leisure. If your source is convinced that you didn't upload it the Man hopefully won't think so either.
For the record, replacing memcpy with memcpy_s isn't going to magically fix any code.
For instance, let's say you wanted to do memcpy(target, src, 100), but copying 100 bytes from src to target would cause a buffer overflow. So instead you use memcpy_s(target, 100, src, 100) and cause your buffer overflow anyway.
memcpy_s makes it easier to do the right thing, but doesn't make it harder to do the wrong thing. Therefore this is a good change to C/C++.
Sure, they "make nothing" from the sale of the books at our particular college, but they still make plenty with a decently sizable advance, and since they can guarantee a captive market, the "advance" for the next edition is pretty much assured.
To be honest, a single semester's worth of students at the author's own school isn't going to convince a nation-wide publisher of anything. Professors use their own texts because they think they're the best, naturally.
You're saying that in every course you've taken, each professor made you buy a $250 textbook written by himself/herself, updated every year with insignificant changes? I find that hard to believe.
In many fields there are established texts; if you find yourself in a school in which every professor writes his/her own texts and each text costs $250, you are being scammed.
That said, there is definitely a policy of "changing the figure numbers" and frequent new editions, and textbooks are often priced extremely high. But at any serious institution professors are (when appropriate) willing to let students use older editions, provide free, supplementary material, and stick to established texts.
The new edition may cost $250 the year it came out but the old edition, used and bought online, will cost you $30. I've never had a professor who wouldn't allow you to use an older edition if money was a problem, and I wouldn't take a course with one who wouldn't.
Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.
While certainly interesting, that would probably not be discussed in a textbook on data compression.
I would say that the biggest change in the past 10 years is that technology made available algorithms that previously were untenable. For instance (this is from communication and not data compression, but that's lemons to limes) LDPC codes were discovered/invented back in the 70s, and while they were theoretically the Best Thing Evar they were practically useless. Come the 90s they were rediscovered and hey presto, they're the Best Thing Evar.
Many fields move slowly, if at all - especially for the content that would be presented in a first or second text. I mentioned in another post that the standard textbook for queueing theory is a first (and only) edition of a book published in 1975! The only difference between then and now is that the companion textbook, on implementing queueing systems on "state of the art" technology, is no longer used.
It's very reasonable to assume, in the lack of contradictory evidence (which yours is not) that the textbook is still relevant.
Anecdotal to be sure, but I started reading MacKay's book online, found that it was excellent, and ordered a copy (it's a very well made hard-cover at a reasonable price).
I don't think the "10 year old" part of Wayner's book is the big deal - theoretical information theory hasn't changed too much in 10 years. Many areas of study are well-established and (for a first or second course) don't need to be terribly modern. Kleinrock's de facto standard textbook for queueing theory was published in 1975!
To me this is an issue of "would they have paid for it otherwise?" There are a lot of choices out there for textbooks in that field. With MacKay's book, I could use it first before deciding if I wanted/needed a hard copy. I'd be inclined to purchase a hard copy of a book I already knew rather than risk it with a book I have no knowledge of, even if the latter might be better than the former.
Anyway, the submitter asks " Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell?"
Easy answer: (2). (1) is assumedly facetious and (3) will probably turn you into a toad instead.
He also asks "Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything?"
This is a stupid question, posed in frustration. Obviously society will support those who synthesize knowledge or there would be no knowledge to post on Wikipedia. Assuming that people want knowledge (maybe a dubious assumption!) there will be support for research.
A better question is "can I expect to make a living off of sales and royalties from a single textbook?" The answer there is "sorry, no, technology makes it too easy to pirate your work to make this a viable option anymore." That's just the way things go. Most textbook writers are paid university employees. Maybe you make a lot of extra cash from a textbook... or maybe it gets pirated and you don't make much at all... but you get paid by your employer.
Typically contraceptive drug trials require test subjects in stable, long-term relationships that have at least one child and are interested in another. The idea being that if the drug doesn't work, you're ok with a "mistake".
It's not terribly surprising that after 2.5 years a third of these couples might decide that they actively want a child, and (if the drug works) decide to stop.
And software as a service is here to stay. When would RMS realize that?
I'm sure he realizes it, he just feels that it's at odds with how the world should work.
I think software-as-a-service is just one of the many difficulties that are going to be facing RMS and his black-and-white world (software) view in the near future (software-as-a-service has been around forever of course).
How is RMS going to handle on-board FPGAs for runtime code offloading into hardware? Your software, let's say it's Free, cranks through some possibly non-Free algorithm to produce (assumedly non-Free) hardware description language (softare? hardware?) which then turns into actual hardware on a non-Free device. Is it ok to use such a feature?
Let's say he answers that question in the affirmative. Now let's put that FPGA on each board in a cluster half-way around the world and let's pay for monthly access. How about now? Are we paying for software-as-a-service or hardware-as-a-service? Is it ok to use?
Again, let's say he answers in the affirmative. Now let's say the company has a phone system I can use to dial in and reboot the cluster. The software that runs the phone system is non-Free. Can I use the cluster? If my software requires a reboot as a part of its nature (and can only run on this particular system) is my software now non-Free?
Software, hardware, software-as-a-service, and other related concepts are only going to get more muddled as time goes on. The questions are going to get harder.
Free software has many practical benefits; I'm an everyday user thereof... but I'm not sure there's any moral rightness about it. As the questions get harder, if we stick to thinking of software as a moral question, as RMS tends to, we're going to elevate computer programming to a religion. When there's a desire for Free software (the open source community, for example) the need will be met (home-brew projects, Sun, IBM, Red Hat sponsored projects, etc). But is there some innate need for ALL software to be Free? I don't think so.
(Note that here I'm talking only about RMS's desire to classify each and every computing model as Free or non-Free - I'm not addressing the concept of IP ownership in general.)
And how do you explain to the authorities why you are paying for an overseas VPN account with a fake name and a pre-paid Visa? Granted, none of those things are technically illegal in the US [...]
What, is the US government my mom? I don't have to explain myself. It's none of the US government's business if I want to have candy after dinner and stay up late on a school night.
I think part of The Problem is that people are beginning to think how you are thinking: "But how will you justify your legal actions to the government?" The proper sentiment is "Why on earth does the government care why I'm doing perfectly legal things?"
I pay my taxes. I am not a felon. I've paid my "rent" so to speak and in return I get a handful of rights, a secure nation to live in, and (theoretically) a solid economy to base my finances on. And that is where my relationship with the government ends.
(Though as a side-note: no affordable health care, no decent public transportation, poor economy, limited social rights, and a questionable education system... I'm not sure I'm getting my money's worth anymore!)
they are to greedy to understand that they would make a lot more delivering something that people want that they could own than trying to squeeze a nickel out of everything even if it costs most of it to try make it work and have a draconian DRM system. I think a lot of this is driven by egos, control, and middle manager charts that are out of touch with the real world.
I've never really understood this. The MPAA and RIAA (and every company ever) employ people whose job it is to figure out how to maximize profit. The MPAA and RIAA, however, just keep pushing the same tune. They're searching for the peak of the parabola but they're already too far to the right - rather than backtrack they just keep going further: "maybe if we just push the same idea a little harder... the slope has to change sometime!"
The parent blames it on "egos, control, and middle manager charts that are out of touch with the real world" but to have two cartels that are from the top down completely lost? At any legitimate company that's when the board fires the CEO or the CEO shuffles the board and you hire a consultant to tell you "you're idiots, the money is all over there!" (Granted these organizations are structured differently but the concept still applies).
With every further lawsuit and lobbying attempt, I get the idea that the MPAA and RIAA just hate movies and music, and they don't want anybody else to enjoy it either. After all, that's about the only goal they're achieving.
The bots described do sound impressive, but the questions asked are mostly trivial ("How is the weather?") or predictable ("Are you the human or the computer?").
A good bot-killer should be linguistically simple, culturally independent, but require analysis of human concepts based on personal feelings.
Some bot-killers:
How do you feel about your father's relationship with his mother?
As a child, did you ever wonder what sort of parent you would make?
Do you think you could ever change your opinion of economic policy?
Ick.. who mods this stuff up? Since when is "quit unless you get your way" a good policy? Maybe the parent is filthy rich, hasn't read the news in 6 months, or is a child, but right now is not exactly the best economic climate in which to be clearing out your desk. There are requests a boss could make that might be so morally appalling that you feel the need to quit on the spot... but imposing throttling on some customers? Probably not one of those requests.
Second, what's so evil or innately wrong about throttling? So long as you don't violate your contract - and ethically, in my mind, don't violate the spirit of your contract either (i.e. tiny print doesn't make it ok) - then what's the problem? The parent is acting like the act of throttling is a "sin"; it's just a technology.
Students find that the real world does not match their ideals and expectations!
I think no matter what age bracket you fit into, you or someone you knew as a post-student entering the workforce for the first time had their expectations shattered.
It's neither shocking nor news, and it certainly doesn't make you narcissistic. It makes you inexperienced, which is kind of the whole thing, isn't it?
On the other hand, there are more young people succeeding that do make it that far that quickly nowadays, so maybe you could say that the variance is increasing - more people expecting greatness and being shocked, but also more people going directly to greatness.
Furthermore, the example of one prospective employee thinking that what were in reality fairly standard and expected skills made him a unique snowflake doesn't mean he and every other post-student is narcissistic. More likely, in school he WAS cream of the crop, teaching himself new skills and so on. What he doesn't realize is that the people he's comparing himself to are now working at McDonald's; he now needs to compete against the much smaller group of people like himself. Depending on the school, he may have never met anyone else from this group.
Anyway, not narcissism, not egotism... just a mix of inexperience, naivete, and optimism/idealism.
Agreed. My personal strategy is to get the Netflix DVDs (4 a week) and rip them immediately for watching later on the weekends. I am unsure of the legality of this (since it's useful, it's probably illegal) but I am much more comfortable with the ethics than downloading directly.
For me, Netflix makes it as easy or maybe easier to consume media than piracy does, and the price is low enough that it's worth it. This is the perfect example of "the way forward" for media cartels - you will not beat piracy unless you can provide media that is of better quality, cheaper, or easier to consume than piracy can. At the very least you need to hit one of those three! In my mind, Netflix hits two (ease of use and price - while not free, it's well within what I'm willing to pay).
Now if they'd only get rid of that stupid DRM... I currently run (pirated!) Windows virtualized so I can watch streaming Netflix media. What with several big players getting rid of DRM for music, I can only hope that movies are next; when Netflix grows the backbone (and buys the lawyers) to shove DRM-free streams down the throats of the media providers, I'll be recommending Netflix to everyone.
As to the actual "article"... your connection to Netflix's servers is slow.. it happens. Could be your ISP, could be Netflix. Probably not throttling. This is the kind of thing you call your buddy about and say "hey is your Netflix slow too?", not post to Slashdot.
Left wing leaders don't care about the spying. They just want another set of excuses to try and destroy the American economy even more than all their environmental regulation already has.
Ah yes, because all those career Democrat politicians are spending their lives working for a government that they are secretly trying to destroy via an economic collapse. Sounds reasonable to me! Seriously, drop the conspiracy theories and realize that everybody thinks they're doing the Right Thing. The problem is that, like practically anybody who has nothing else to do but talk about politics all day, they're idiots and have no idea what they're doing. But there's no vast left-wing conspiracy to take down the American economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Were I to be developing a new AJAX-driven Web application I would focus first on simplicity. I feel that if you have so much AJAX stuff going on that you need to resort to crazy tricks you have already lost. Take the following, quoted from the review:
In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser.
While good advice, something like this should be implemented as a natural part of the specification, or not at all. This rings to me as an attempt to manhandle HTML/Javascript/CSS into a use case for which it is not intended.
I want to see a real protocol for webpages - something between Postscript (except less document-oriented; and yes I know about NeXT's work) and a windowing environment (except more constrained). Then, to preserve the ease of user-input, a simple HTML/XML-like layer. For 99% of the sites that are constructed directly by the user, original HTML with italics, colors, fonts, etc. is sufficient. For projects beyond the scope of Joe Facebook, a true system is needed that allows seperation of design and content. But all attempts thus far to do both, frankly, suck.
Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.
Microsoft is a corporation, after all, and I would be very surprised to see them expending resources working on open source projects that they do not actually use. This could be a gateway, a toe in the water, to starting open source projects, which then of course they would contribute to. But unlike IBM, (former) Sun, etc, Microsoft has no ties to existing open source software, so not contributing to the same isn't too surprising.
It's good to see a willingness to do even this much, but hardly a staggering change of heart. They've a long way to go yet.
I suppose you could say that. I think the point here is not that Microsoft is releasing something under an open source license, but that Microsoft sees open source as a viable approach to softare development and a real business force. Typically we expect the company to brush off open source as "anti-American" and offer pricey, Windows-only alternatives to whatever the demand might be. But now they are admitting, in a business sense, that the open source market exists and is worth working with. Sure, they're doing this to increase interoperability with their existing, closed-source projects... but that's more than just a token move.
Theoretically speaking, if we could get, say, an entire ship and all of its inhabitants to do this "quantum walk"...
Ah, but you can't. Quantum mechanics applies only to quantum particles, not big honking spaceships. Of course nobody has integrated quantum mechanics with classical mechanics yet, so you never know ;)
The thing is, quantum mechanics is just a mathematical system that seems to work pretty well. As in, it predicts what really tiny things will do extremely well. When a quantum particle takes on different states at a time, that is a mathematical concept that, when applied, produces a result that agrees with what we actually see. It involves complex numbers, high dimensions (that don't necessarily agree with what we consider "dimensions") and other mathematical constructions. The math works great... but you have to be careful about extrapolating too far and assuming the math is the reality.
As far as I know it, we have three main instruction sets. Integer, Floating Point, and Vector (SSE, MMX..etc). Would it more likely be that we would end up with the forth set being Quantum? Or, would it be possible to have an entire CPU quantum based?
Quantum computation is unlikely to replace classical computation. There are certain problems at which quantum computation excels (problems that involve period-finding in some way, shape, or form) and many problems that it doesn't excel at (anything else).
A quantum encryption co-processor is most likely the first way in which quantum computation will reach the classical computing world, and for physical reasons (you need an actual quantum communication channel to attach to) I wouldn't expect it on your Dell any time soon.
Nobody is talking about merging Firefox and Mutter. In general, squeezing security problem-prone applications into a window manager is a Bad Thing, whether it's IE and Windows Explorer, Firefox and Gnome, or sendmail and anything.
This article is talking about using WebKit, a rendering engine as a themeing system in Mutter. While using Trident to render themes in Windows Explorer would certainly bring out some cheap laughs at IE's expense, security is not really the predominant concern.
An amateur astronomer puts up pictures on his blog and we're comparing it to Shoemaker-Levy?
Bad Astronomy says "it's jumping the gun to call it an impact event before we get more observations". I've got an idea for the next Slashdot article: "Asteroid heading towards earth - or maybe just spot on lense".
CSS barely functions on the platform for which it was intended, and now you want to bring it to a platform that has well-established, functional, themeable rendering engines already in existence?
CSS was intended to let designers seperate from function from form - how is that lacking in current themeing environments? The linked blog contains a laundry list of features that are in CSS that are not applicable to desktop themes and features that are not in CSS that are necessary for desktop themes. What I don't see is a list of features that CSS brings to desktop themes that are impractical in existing systems.
Let's see: a system that barely works on its intended platform that contains functionality not applicable to the new, suggested platform and is missing functionality necessary on the new, suggested platform. Gee, sounds like the right technology for the job!
Just how DO you teach a (practically) stone-age tribesman to use a computer?
Stone age tribesman? Take a look at the questions they're asking: who is on top on football, popular NBA players, info on the Obamas, quality of life in different regions of Uganda, the causes of sexual health problems, transmission of diseases, etc. They live in an underdeveloped country, but that doesn't mean they're underdeveloped people.
If a service like this could be sustained long-term and made accessible to more people, I think this could be a great tool. In particular, the questions about conflicting religions and sexual health are striking - there's a lot of ignorance about health, religion, and science in Africa... but that ignorance is a reflection of the state of region, not the willfull behavior of the people. Access to the Internet can provide an "out" for those that want to learn but have limited options in their village.
First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall.
While it is true that whether or not a particular packet will be discarded is the result of a probabilistic process, it is unfair to call it "random". Based on a model of the queue within the router and estimation of the input parameters the probability of a packet being discarded can be calculated. In fact, that's how they design routers. You pick a bunch of different situations and decide how often you can afford to drop packets, then design a queueing system to meet those requirements. Queueing theory is a well-established field (the de-facto standard textbook was written in 1970!) and networking is one of the biggest applications.
Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays
You wouldn't expect uniform delays. A queueing system with a uniform distribution on expected number of customers in the queue is a very strange system indeed. Those sorts of systems are usually related to renewal processes and don't often show up in networking applications. That's actually a good thing, because systems with uniform distributions on just about anything are much more difficult to solve or approximate than most other systems.
"Substantial" is the key word here. Effectively the concept of managing "flows" just means that the router is caching destinations based on fields like source port, source IP address, etc. By using the cache rather than recomputing the destination the latencies can be reduced, thus reducing the number of times you need to use the queue. In queueing theory terms you are decreasing mean service time to increase total service rate. Note however that this can backfire: if you increase the variance in the service time distribution too much (some delays will be much higher when you eventually do need to use the queue) you will actually decrease performance. Of course assumedly they've done all of this work. In essence "flow management" seems to be the replacement of a FIFO queue with a priority queue in a queueing system, with priority based on caching.
Personally, I'm not sure how much of a benefit this can provide. Does it work with NAT? How often do you drop packets based on incorrect routing as compared to those you would have dropped if you had put them in the queue? If this was a truly novel queueing theory application I would have expected to see it in a IEEE journal, not Spectrum.
And of course, any time someone opens with "The Internet is broken" you have to be a little skeptical. Routing is a well-studied and complex subject; saying that you've replaced "packets" with "flows" ain't gunna cut it in my book.
Equal consideration is all that is needed. Unequal consideration means that an open source solution is considered a better choice than a closed source solution, before the individual merits of each solution are examined.
When you put open source and closed source solutions side-by-side on equal footing, you can make comparisons such as TCO, vendor lock-in, support options, timeliness of updates/upgrades, and so on. If you simply assume that open source should be preferential you're making as big a mistake as assuming that closed source should be preferential and you'll end up picking some forked project with a fading community and no documentation simply because "nobody ever got fired for choosing open source".
An equal footing is necessary - no preference either way until all the cards are laid out.
It depends what you're worried about. If you're concerned about it being proven that you were part of the distribution of the document, then any of the suggestions posed so far will work. Buy a new hard drive, encrypt it, receive the document to it from a USB device (destroy the USB device afterwards). Upload to Wikileaks from the encrypted drive. Destroy the drive.
However if you are more concerned with being thought to have been part of the distribution (as that is, after all, what's going to get you raided) then you have a bigger problem. You don't care so much whether in 5 years anybody can show you were involved, you only care about right now, can you stay under the radar.
I would build a suitable alibi (get out of town) and then receive the document from the source. Afterwards, have a change of heart, convince the source that you are NOT going to host it anywhere, convince them you have destroyed the media, and lay low for a while.
Then upload it to WikiLeaks at your leisure. If your source is convinced that you didn't upload it the Man hopefully won't think so either.
For the record, replacing memcpy with memcpy_s isn't going to magically fix any code.
For instance, let's say you wanted to do memcpy(target, src, 100), but copying 100 bytes from src to target would cause a buffer overflow. So instead you use memcpy_s(target, 100, src, 100) and cause your buffer overflow anyway.
memcpy_s makes it easier to do the right thing, but doesn't make it harder to do the wrong thing. Therefore this is a good change to C/C++.
Sure, they "make nothing" from the sale of the books at our particular college, but they still make plenty with a decently sizable advance, and since they can guarantee a captive market, the "advance" for the next edition is pretty much assured.
To be honest, a single semester's worth of students at the author's own school isn't going to convince a nation-wide publisher of anything. Professors use their own texts because they think they're the best, naturally.
You're saying that in every course you've taken, each professor made you buy a $250 textbook written by himself/herself, updated every year with insignificant changes? I find that hard to believe.
In many fields there are established texts; if you find yourself in a school in which every professor writes his/her own texts and each text costs $250, you are being scammed.
That said, there is definitely a policy of "changing the figure numbers" and frequent new editions, and textbooks are often priced extremely high. But at any serious institution professors are (when appropriate) willing to let students use older editions, provide free, supplementary material, and stick to established texts.
The new edition may cost $250 the year it came out but the old edition, used and bought online, will cost you $30. I've never had a professor who wouldn't allow you to use an older edition if money was a problem, and I wouldn't take a course with one who wouldn't.
Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.
While certainly interesting, that would probably not be discussed in a textbook on data compression.
I would say that the biggest change in the past 10 years is that technology made available algorithms that previously were untenable. For instance (this is from communication and not data compression, but that's lemons to limes) LDPC codes were discovered/invented back in the 70s, and while they were theoretically the Best Thing Evar they were practically useless. Come the 90s they were rediscovered and hey presto, they're the Best Thing Evar.
Many fields move slowly, if at all - especially for the content that would be presented in a first or second text. I mentioned in another post that the standard textbook for queueing theory is a first (and only) edition of a book published in 1975! The only difference between then and now is that the companion textbook, on implementing queueing systems on "state of the art" technology, is no longer used.
It's very reasonable to assume, in the lack of contradictory evidence (which yours is not) that the textbook is still relevant.
Anecdotal to be sure, but I started reading MacKay's book online, found that it was excellent, and ordered a copy (it's a very well made hard-cover at a reasonable price).
I don't think the "10 year old" part of Wayner's book is the big deal - theoretical information theory hasn't changed too much in 10 years. Many areas of study are well-established and (for a first or second course) don't need to be terribly modern. Kleinrock's de facto standard textbook for queueing theory was published in 1975!
To me this is an issue of "would they have paid for it otherwise?" There are a lot of choices out there for textbooks in that field. With MacKay's book, I could use it first before deciding if I wanted/needed a hard copy. I'd be inclined to purchase a hard copy of a book I already knew rather than risk it with a book I have no knowledge of, even if the latter might be better than the former.
Anyway, the submitter asks " Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell?"
Easy answer: (2). (1) is assumedly facetious and (3) will probably turn you into a toad instead.
He also asks "Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything?"
This is a stupid question, posed in frustration. Obviously society will support those who synthesize knowledge or there would be no knowledge to post on Wikipedia. Assuming that people want knowledge (maybe a dubious assumption!) there will be support for research.
A better question is "can I expect to make a living off of sales and royalties from a single textbook?" The answer there is "sorry, no, technology makes it too easy to pirate your work to make this a viable option anymore." That's just the way things go. Most textbook writers are paid university employees. Maybe you make a lot of extra cash from a textbook... or maybe it gets pirated and you don't make much at all... but you get paid by your employer.
Typically contraceptive drug trials require test subjects in stable, long-term relationships that have at least one child and are interested in another. The idea being that if the drug doesn't work, you're ok with a "mistake".
It's not terribly surprising that after 2.5 years a third of these couples might decide that they actively want a child, and (if the drug works) decide to stop.
And software as a service is here to stay. When would RMS realize that?
I'm sure he realizes it, he just feels that it's at odds with how the world should work.
I think software-as-a-service is just one of the many difficulties that are going to be facing RMS and his black-and-white world (software) view in the near future (software-as-a-service has been around forever of course).
How is RMS going to handle on-board FPGAs for runtime code offloading into hardware? Your software, let's say it's Free, cranks through some possibly non-Free algorithm to produce (assumedly non-Free) hardware description language (softare? hardware?) which then turns into actual hardware on a non-Free device. Is it ok to use such a feature?
Let's say he answers that question in the affirmative. Now let's put that FPGA on each board in a cluster half-way around the world and let's pay for monthly access. How about now? Are we paying for software-as-a-service or hardware-as-a-service? Is it ok to use?
Again, let's say he answers in the affirmative. Now let's say the company has a phone system I can use to dial in and reboot the cluster. The software that runs the phone system is non-Free. Can I use the cluster? If my software requires a reboot as a part of its nature (and can only run on this particular system) is my software now non-Free?
Software, hardware, software-as-a-service, and other related concepts are only going to get more muddled as time goes on. The questions are going to get harder.
Free software has many practical benefits; I'm an everyday user thereof... but I'm not sure there's any moral rightness about it. As the questions get harder, if we stick to thinking of software as a moral question, as RMS tends to, we're going to elevate computer programming to a religion. When there's a desire for Free software (the open source community, for example) the need will be met (home-brew projects, Sun, IBM, Red Hat sponsored projects, etc). But is there some innate need for ALL software to be Free? I don't think so.
(Note that here I'm talking only about RMS's desire to classify each and every computing model as Free or non-Free - I'm not addressing the concept of IP ownership in general.)
And how do you explain to the authorities why you are paying for an overseas VPN account with a fake name and a pre-paid Visa? Granted, none of those things are technically illegal in the US [...]
What, is the US government my mom? I don't have to explain myself. It's none of the US government's business if I want to have candy after dinner and stay up late on a school night.
I think part of The Problem is that people are beginning to think how you are thinking: "But how will you justify your legal actions to the government?" The proper sentiment is "Why on earth does the government care why I'm doing perfectly legal things?"
I pay my taxes. I am not a felon. I've paid my "rent" so to speak and in return I get a handful of rights, a secure nation to live in, and (theoretically) a solid economy to base my finances on. And that is where my relationship with the government ends.
(Though as a side-note: no affordable health care, no decent public transportation, poor economy, limited social rights, and a questionable education system... I'm not sure I'm getting my money's worth anymore!)
they are to greedy to understand that they would make a lot more delivering something that people want that they could own than trying to squeeze a nickel out of everything even if it costs most of it to try make it work and have a draconian DRM system. I think a lot of this is driven by egos, control, and middle manager charts that are out of touch with the real world.
I've never really understood this. The MPAA and RIAA (and every company ever) employ people whose job it is to figure out how to maximize profit. The MPAA and RIAA, however, just keep pushing the same tune. They're searching for the peak of the parabola but they're already too far to the right - rather than backtrack they just keep going further: "maybe if we just push the same idea a little harder... the slope has to change sometime!"
The parent blames it on "egos, control, and middle manager charts that are out of touch with the real world" but to have two cartels that are from the top down completely lost? At any legitimate company that's when the board fires the CEO or the CEO shuffles the board and you hire a consultant to tell you "you're idiots, the money is all over there!" (Granted these organizations are structured differently but the concept still applies).
With every further lawsuit and lobbying attempt, I get the idea that the MPAA and RIAA just hate movies and music, and they don't want anybody else to enjoy it either. After all, that's about the only goal they're achieving.
A good bot-killer should be linguistically simple, culturally independent, but require analysis of human concepts based on personal feelings.
Some bot-killers:
Ick.. who mods this stuff up? Since when is "quit unless you get your way" a good policy? Maybe the parent is filthy rich, hasn't read the news in 6 months, or is a child, but right now is not exactly the best economic climate in which to be clearing out your desk. There are requests a boss could make that might be so morally appalling that you feel the need to quit on the spot... but imposing throttling on some customers? Probably not one of those requests.
Second, what's so evil or innately wrong about throttling? So long as you don't violate your contract - and ethically, in my mind, don't violate the spirit of your contract either (i.e. tiny print doesn't make it ok) - then what's the problem? The parent is acting like the act of throttling is a "sin"; it's just a technology.
Students find that the real world does not match their ideals and expectations!
I think no matter what age bracket you fit into, you or someone you knew as a post-student entering the workforce for the first time had their expectations shattered.
It's neither shocking nor news, and it certainly doesn't make you narcissistic. It makes you inexperienced, which is kind of the whole thing, isn't it?
On the other hand, there are more young people succeeding that do make it that far that quickly nowadays, so maybe you could say that the variance is increasing - more people expecting greatness and being shocked, but also more people going directly to greatness.
Furthermore, the example of one prospective employee thinking that what were in reality fairly standard and expected skills made him a unique snowflake doesn't mean he and every other post-student is narcissistic. More likely, in school he WAS cream of the crop, teaching himself new skills and so on. What he doesn't realize is that the people he's comparing himself to are now working at McDonald's; he now needs to compete against the much smaller group of people like himself. Depending on the school, he may have never met anyone else from this group.
Anyway, not narcissism, not egotism... just a mix of inexperience, naivete, and optimism/idealism.
Agreed. My personal strategy is to get the Netflix DVDs (4 a week) and rip them immediately for watching later on the weekends. I am unsure of the legality of this (since it's useful, it's probably illegal) but I am much more comfortable with the ethics than downloading directly.
For me, Netflix makes it as easy or maybe easier to consume media than piracy does, and the price is low enough that it's worth it. This is the perfect example of "the way forward" for media cartels - you will not beat piracy unless you can provide media that is of better quality, cheaper, or easier to consume than piracy can. At the very least you need to hit one of those three! In my mind, Netflix hits two (ease of use and price - while not free, it's well within what I'm willing to pay).
Now if they'd only get rid of that stupid DRM... I currently run (pirated!) Windows virtualized so I can watch streaming Netflix media. What with several big players getting rid of DRM for music, I can only hope that movies are next; when Netflix grows the backbone (and buys the lawyers) to shove DRM-free streams down the throats of the media providers, I'll be recommending Netflix to everyone.
As to the actual "article"... your connection to Netflix's servers is slow.. it happens. Could be your ISP, could be Netflix. Probably not throttling. This is the kind of thing you call your buddy about and say "hey is your Netflix slow too?", not post to Slashdot.
Ah yes, because all those career Democrat politicians are spending their lives working for a government that they are secretly trying to destroy via an economic collapse. Sounds reasonable to me! Seriously, drop the conspiracy theories and realize that everybody thinks they're doing the Right Thing. The problem is that, like practically anybody who has nothing else to do but talk about politics all day, they're idiots and have no idea what they're doing. But there's no vast left-wing conspiracy to take down the American economy.