I can get more work done between 8am and 10am some days than I can get done in the *entire* rest of the day. I realise some people here will be saying "Oh my god! How can you even get up before 6pm? I can only code at night, etc etc.", and that's rather my point - I'm not one of those people, and if I was, I'd be working different hours. If I couldn't start work until 9 (hey, if I dont get to go home until 5.30 I'm *not* starting early, except for special events of course) - then I've lost a lot of productive time. By the afternoon, I've had lunch, some days I might as well just take a nap, because I can't get anything clever done. Afternoon is when I surf the web, patch up documentation, and play with new software.
I can "work" all day - I can sit at my desk and do stuff, but when it comes to those insightful rushes of productive time, when the ideas are flowing, and code is pouring from my fingertips - those times I can't just decide to produce "on demand". If my employer wants them (and of course they do), they better be letting me work so that I'm here when the muse visits. Otherwise I'm just another drone, plodding along...
You have to remember, porn sites (and most other sites) only need a DNS name for the frontpage. Once the site has you "there", you're just clicking on links. Whenever you bookmark something, it's done, you dont need to remember it.
Why is this relevant? Because once a user is on a porn site (or any other site), you dont need DNS, it doesn't matter if you're looking at http://www.sexytables.xxx/fetish/woody or at http://1.2.3.4/fetish/woody.
So to get to my point: porn sites only need DNS for the front page, and for indexing. They can put all the content up on something with only an ip address, and nobody will care. This means that even if.xxx went through, *and* (even more unlikely) the right wingers started enforcing this all-porn-in-.xxx rule, it wouldn't make any difference: all the porn would be on IP only servers, and the front door would get you to it. It wouldn't matter if people blocked.xxx or not. If the front page was in.xxx, that would be blocked, but with no porn actually on the page, it could be in.com or whatever. I guess you could even customise front pages for different domains...
How to get round this? You ban linking. Now there's a thought...
> But you can't outrun native code, no matter how good your universal language is.
there's so many corrections to your post that I suspect this'll get lost in the noise, but...
JAVA PROGRAMS ARE NATIVE CODE.
I can't beleive how many people think Java programs are interrpreted - they aren't [0]. *EVERY* java program is converted to native code when it runs - it doesn't have to be, and they didn't used to be (years ago), but they all are now.
Heard the phrase JIT? Just In Time... COMPILER!
It compiles your java bytecode to native instructions as the program runs. In the case of the modern systems (ie HotSpot), it performs runtime analysis and optimisation as well.
Mike.
[0] I'm talking about normal desktop/server usage here. Things are different in embedded devices and such...
> I suggest visiting a good online job search site but be warned, if you've been languishing at Uni for too long you'll be considered damaged goods. Get out while you still can.
LOL! I've been in Uni for almost 10 years, so I must be "damaged goods". Ironically, *I* dont need to go looking for a job, because I get job offers quite frequently from companies, who are very keen to employ me.
It isn't surprising that these companies don't share your bigoted and bizarre opinion of research. You sound bitter, did you fail to make the grade for graduate school?;-)
> Then get the hell out of University.
> Go get a real job and the salary that goes with it, IF you can handle the the work.
Not to mention if you can handle the stupidity of "company practices", halfwit managers, and bizarre political decisions from 'on-high' etc.
There's a reason why people dont get paid much to be graduate students - it's an opportunity that money can't buy. If you can cope without the cash (and in the UK most graduates won't have worked full time, so are used to near poverty), then it's a real chance to do something cool. Of course, if you just want the money, get the hell out of uni., it's rarely worth it.
As the "IF" jibe, I doubt you have a PhD. Putting in ten hours a day in industry is one kind of work, as is stacking boxes in a warehouse. Having your brain almost explode from the constant 24 hour a day pressure of thinking at the limit of your intellect is also work, and probably a lot harder than you think.
The majority of grad students are paid through the research councils (ie EPSRC), and get (IIRC) about
£5500 a year, so just more than half an RA.
As a funded graduate student your "job" is to do your research - nothing more, no marking, no helping your supervisor prepare his papers, just do your own thing. Of course, you can generally pick up extra money doing those things...
As a RA (Research *Assistent*) you are payed to *assist* your supervisor. Exactly how bad that is depends on your supervisor, but it's a noticable difference.
Perhaps you should find out a little more about the history of the HURD. It was always (and still is) a fundamentally more ambitious project than Linux - perhaps too much so for the time (time when it was started;). IIRC waiting for Mach4 wasted a lot of time, and I suspect there were many other problems.
To suggest that "Stallmann and his crazy comrades have produced little more than hype" shows just how ignorant you are (gosh, I wonder why you're an AC;). RMS wrote GCC and EMACS himself. I doubt you have any comprehension of how hard he, and his "crazy comrades" have worked, although you almost certainly reap the rewards of their labour.
> Starting the HURD just seems more like sour-grapes on the part of Stalman to be honest. When he realised how popular Linux and Linus were becoming, he decided to try and steal their thunder.
Ah, there's nothing like the smell of revisionist bullshit in the afternoon.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html Announced in 1983.
How exactly does that square with your little theory when Linus didn't post the first Linux sources until around 1991 (v0.02)?
How exactly do you know this? It amazes me (yes, even after all this time), how people will say things like this on the net. Do you accuse random people you meet in the street of being a liar and a thief? Presumably only if they say that they use Napster...
I can't imagine *any* civilised country agreeing to this.
Partly because it's inherently uncivilised, but just as much because of my origional point: there is no *global* agreement on a definition of porn.
Even with a catch-call bound (I guess most countries could agree on a definition of hardcore porn). What good would that do? The servers can still be hosted in these "civilised" countries, and registered under the.sex domain, whilst the same company sets up a www.noporn-really.com site in some ""uncivilised"" country that is nothing but links into the main server - so no bandwidth problem.
If the previous suggestion of forcing all porn into a certain domain didn't sound like a world police state to you, how about making it illegal to link to porn from a nonporn domain?
Even the USA wouldn't pass that law! Probably;-)
0.02
Mike, posting without +1 'cause this is waaaayyy offtopic;)
> Why not _force_ all pr0n sites to have a.xxx TLD?
Same reason as ever. Who gets to decide what's a porn site, and must go into.xxx?
Take for example these categories:
www.tightskirtspage.com, appears to be dead (might have been a while). It used to be a free site for people that had a thing about tight skirts. Porn?
Feet. Lots of people into feet. Porn?
Lingerie/Swimwear sites. Porn? Are shops that sell this stuff not porn?
Actress of the month-fan-site. Porn? What if they'd done some porn in their "previous career" prior to getting to be a famous actress. Those shots will always appear on fan sites. Does the fan site then have to move to.xxx?
And last, but not least: Who gets to chose? Some wacky Christian/Whatever fundie? Some drooling pervert?
Sure, it's a nice idea. I'm all for honesty in web pages, death to pop-up windows, and dont lie in your META tags, but you can't enforce it.
These are the same people that make the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" - *THE* crypto book (for doing real work) available on the web:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
That's the *whole* book. I know everyone will flame CRC for this, on the assumption that if they do this one thing that looks pretty stupid, they must be entirely clueless, but here is at least one example of them not being the embodyment of evil.
Only if you dont trust the person you're getting the content from. This is a shameless plug, but I'm working on a P2P program that removes this problem. As every user is identified by their RSA public key, you can be sure who you're getting the file from, and assign trust based upon that identity.
A simpler solution in this case is just to sign the virus definitions, but that's less interesting;)
(IMHO). I routinely take *groups* of people into a CAVE, I can't see myself being able to do that with this thing (8 people all trying to walk in different directions?). The other advantage is that you can leave one side of a CAVE open, and people outside can look in and see stuff (kind of like a big bent powerwall), so you can be showing VR to say 20 people. You can't do that with this device.
OTOH, it looks pretty cool, and has definate new-and-funky appeal.
Xemacs was born from a problem enhancing GNU Emacs, and although it *is* a shame to have two versions of a very similar program, it is also good to have the choice.
I guess sometimes a fork is good (especially eating peas)
I get this type of question quite a lot (being a VR researcher). It often comes with it's "practicality" counterpart: "what can you do with VR that you can't do with conventional 3D rendering?"
My answer is always the same: If the genie of the magc lamp would give you a UI-wish, what interface would you go for:
a) exactly what we have now?
b) The Holodeck?
choose b. That's what we're working towards;)
As for compilation on the client: despite the fact that everyone seems to flame Java on slashdot all the time, I find Java's compilation *on the client* to be a good thing. I dont see why this should be any different...
It's completely irrelevant how biased they are - I wasn't referencing their work as a groundless opinion. I was reference their paper "The Twofish Team's Final Comments on AES Selection" submitted in the round 2 comments stage which you should read. This isn't a question of the Blowfish team saying "la la la - Rijndael sucks", it's a case of them doing the analysis and showing why they think it has problems and publishing the results and the reasoning.
I agree that with modifications Rijndael can be made more secure. In fact, why not just scrap all the entries and say "let's start all over again with more secure versions"? it could go on forever. I think NIST should be choosing the most secure algorithms *entered*, and that isn't Rijndal.
Leaving aside the bizarre notion of calling an area of the *moon* a "*National* Historical Site"...
The article continues...
> There seems to be no doubt the artifacts are clearly U.S. property. Even NASA says the stuff left behind by the Apollo astronauts was "not abandoned," according to documents collected by the researchers.
Not abandoned? "Oh no, we really were intending to come back for it (in a few hundred years)." We weren't really littering on the moon Sir...
Anyway, *I* have some doubt, even if nobody else does. I think the Chinese should get up there quick and grab it and then auction it off to the US administration if they really think it's theirs;)
Well, not really. I'm not a fan of MARS because I think it's big and slow. I don't mind the slow too much, but the *big* I do mind. IIRC the sample hgardware implementation of MARS was like 2x the size of the other candiates.
I guess this is mainly an aesthetic complaint: I dont like MARS because it looks ugly to me, but the uglyness is actually based upon a real property of the algorithm. At the end of the day, the simpler algorithm will be more likely to be correctly implemented. I like clear and simple - MARS seems to be the least clear and simple of all the 2nd round algorithms.
That being said, if MARS wins, I'll use it: I don't think it's without merit, it just seems worse than the other finalists.
Slashdot Mirror
#include "std_disclaimer.h"
I can get more work done between 8am and 10am some days than I can get done in the *entire* rest of the day. I realise some people here will be saying "Oh my god! How can you even get up before 6pm? I can only code at night, etc etc.", and that's rather my point - I'm not one of those people, and if I was, I'd be working different hours. If I couldn't start work until 9 (hey, if I dont get to go home until 5.30 I'm *not* starting early, except for special events of course) - then I've lost a lot of productive time. By the afternoon, I've had lunch, some days I might as well just take a nap, because I can't get anything clever done. Afternoon is when I surf the web, patch up documentation, and play with new software.
I can "work" all day - I can sit at my desk and do stuff, but when it comes to those insightful rushes of productive time, when the ideas are flowing, and code is pouring from my fingertips - those times I can't just decide to produce "on demand". If my employer wants them (and of course they do), they better be letting me work so that I'm here when the muse visits. Otherwise I'm just another drone, plodding along...
my 0.02,
Mike.
You have to remember, porn sites (and most other sites) only need a DNS name for the frontpage. Once the site has you "there", you're just clicking on links. Whenever you bookmark something, it's done, you dont need to remember it.
.xxx went through, *and* (even more unlikely) the right wingers started enforcing this all-porn-in-.xxx rule, it wouldn't make any difference: all the porn would be on IP only servers, and the front door would get you to it. It wouldn't matter if people blocked .xxx or not. If the front page was in .xxx, that would be blocked, but with no porn actually on the page, it could be in .com or whatever. I guess you could even customise front pages for different domains...
Why is this relevant? Because once a user is on a porn site (or any other site), you dont need DNS, it doesn't matter if you're looking at http://www.sexytables.xxx/fetish/woody or at http://1.2.3.4/fetish/woody.
So to get to my point: porn sites only need DNS for the front page, and for indexing. They can put all the content up on something with only an ip address, and nobody will care. This means that even if
How to get round this? You ban linking. Now there's a thought...
Mike.
> But you can't outrun native code, no matter how good your universal language is.
... COMPILER!
there's so many corrections to your post that I suspect this'll get lost in the noise, but...
JAVA PROGRAMS ARE NATIVE CODE.
I can't beleive how many people think Java programs are interrpreted - they aren't [0]. *EVERY* java program is converted to native code when it runs - it doesn't have to be, and they didn't used to be (years ago), but they all are now.
Heard the phrase JIT? Just In Time
It compiles your java bytecode to native instructions as the program runs. In the case of the modern systems (ie HotSpot), it performs runtime analysis and optimisation as well.
Mike.
[0] I'm talking about normal desktop/server usage here. Things are different in embedded devices and such...
> I suggest visiting a good online job search site but be warned, if you've been languishing at Uni for too long you'll be considered damaged goods. Get out while you still can.
;-)
LOL! I've been in Uni for almost 10 years, so I must be "damaged goods". Ironically, *I* dont need to go looking for a job, because I get job offers quite frequently from companies, who are very keen to employ me.
It isn't surprising that these companies don't share your bigoted and bizarre opinion of research. You sound bitter, did you fail to make the grade for graduate school?
Mike.
> Then get the hell out of University.
> Go get a real job and the salary that goes with it, IF you can handle the the work.
Not to mention if you can handle the stupidity of "company practices", halfwit managers, and bizarre political decisions from 'on-high' etc.
There's a reason why people dont get paid much to be graduate students - it's an opportunity that money can't buy. If you can cope without the cash (and in the UK most graduates won't have worked full time, so are used to near poverty), then it's a real chance to do something cool. Of course, if you just want the money, get the hell out of uni., it's rarely worth it.
As the "IF" jibe, I doubt you have a PhD. Putting in ten hours a day in industry is one kind of work, as is stacking boxes in a warehouse. Having your brain almost explode from the constant 24 hour a day pressure of thinking at the limit of your intellect is also work, and probably a lot harder than you think.
Mike.
Kind of, RA's are *well paid* grad students!
The majority of grad students are paid through the research councils (ie EPSRC), and get (IIRC) about
£5500 a year, so just more than half an RA.
As a funded graduate student your "job" is to do your research - nothing more, no marking, no helping your supervisor prepare his papers, just do your own thing. Of course, you can generally pick up extra money doing those things...
As a RA (Research *Assistent*) you are payed to *assist* your supervisor. Exactly how bad that is depends on your supervisor, but it's a noticable difference.
Mike.
It *may* invalidate it?! LOL!
;). IIRC waiting for Mach4 wasted a lot of time, and I suspect there were many other problems.
;). RMS wrote GCC and EMACS himself. I doubt you have any comprehension of how hard he, and his "crazy comrades" have worked, although you almost certainly reap the rewards of their labour.
Perhaps you should find out a little more about the history of the HURD. It was always (and still is) a fundamentally more ambitious project than Linux - perhaps too much so for the time (time when it was started
To suggest that "Stallmann and his crazy comrades have produced little more than hype" shows just how ignorant you are (gosh, I wonder why you're an AC
best wishes,
Mike.
> Starting the HURD just seems more like sour-grapes on the part of Stalman to be honest. When he realised how popular Linux and Linus were becoming, he decided to try and steal their thunder.
l
Ah, there's nothing like the smell of revisionist bullshit in the afternoon.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.htm
Announced in 1983.
How exactly does that square with your little theory when Linus didn't post the first Linux sources until around 1991 (v0.02)?
Mike.
> bullshit man, you are just a fraud.
How exactly do you know this? It amazes me (yes, even after all this time), how people will say things like this on the net. Do you accuse random people you meet in the street of being a liar and a thief? Presumably only if they say that they use Napster...
Mike
I can't imagine *any* civilised country agreeing to this.
.sex domain, whilst the same company sets up a www.noporn-really.com site in some ""uncivilised"" country that is nothing but links into the main server - so no bandwidth problem.
;-)
;)
Partly because it's inherently uncivilised, but just as much because of my origional point: there is no *global* agreement on a definition of porn.
Even with a catch-call bound (I guess most countries could agree on a definition of hardcore porn). What good would that do? The servers can still be hosted in these "civilised" countries, and registered under the
If the previous suggestion of forcing all porn into a certain domain didn't sound like a world police state to you, how about making it illegal to link to porn from a nonporn domain?
Even the USA wouldn't pass that law! Probably
0.02
Mike, posting without +1 'cause this is waaaayyy offtopic
> As far as determining what is pr0n and what not, this could be rated the same way movies/computer games are.
Those things that are rated completely differently all over the world? How would this work with the internet (or the *WORLD* *WIDE* web) again?
Which global internet police-force is going to enforce this? None, thank goodness!
best wishes,
Mike.
> Why not _force_ all pr0n sites to have a .xxx TLD?
.xxx?
.xxx?
Same reason as ever. Who gets to decide what's a porn site, and must go into
Take for example these categories:
www.tightskirtspage.com, appears to be dead (might have been a while). It used to be a free site for people that had a thing about tight skirts. Porn?
Feet. Lots of people into feet. Porn?
Lingerie/Swimwear sites. Porn? Are shops that sell this stuff not porn?
Actress of the month-fan-site. Porn? What if they'd done some porn in their "previous career" prior to getting to be a famous actress. Those shots will always appear on fan sites. Does the fan site then have to move to
And last, but not least: Who gets to chose? Some wacky Christian/Whatever fundie? Some drooling pervert?
Sure, it's a nice idea. I'm all for honesty in web pages, death to pop-up windows, and dont lie in your META tags, but you can't enforce it.
0.02,
Mike.
The P2P system in my sig encourages users to share by use of a distributed karma system (a little bit like a certain web news site ;)
The release this Sunday will have file sharing enabled.
0.02,
Mike.
These are the same people that make the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" - *THE* crypto book (for doing real work) available on the web:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
That's the *whole* book. I know everyone will flame CRC for this, on the assumption that if they do this one thing that looks pretty stupid, they must be entirely clueless, but here is at least one example of them not being the embodyment of evil.
my 0.02,
Mike.
Only if you dont trust the person you're getting the content from. This is a shameless plug, but I'm working on a P2P program that removes this problem. As every user is identified by their RSA public key, you can be sure who you're getting the file from, and assign trust based upon that identity.
;)
A simpler solution in this case is just to sign the virus definitions, but that's less interesting
Mike
(IMHO). I routinely take *groups* of people into a CAVE, I can't see myself being able to do that with this thing (8 people all trying to walk in different directions?). The other advantage is that you can leave one side of a CAVE open, and people outside can look in and see stuff (kind of like a big bent powerwall), so you can be showing VR to say 20 people. You can't do that with this device.
OTOH, it looks pretty cool, and has definate new-and-funky appeal.
Mike.
Gnu Emacs vs. XEmacs.
Xemacs was born from a problem enhancing GNU Emacs, and although it *is* a shame to have two versions of a very similar program, it is also good to have the choice.
I guess sometimes a fork is good (especially eating peas)
Mike
I find VRML can do only one thing well - act as a common fileformat between applications.
;)
It's not general enough to be a major format, and it's not fast/cool/whatever enough to be a niche format.
0.02,
Mike.
ps) Of course it's slower than Java - everything is
> Didn't we outgrow the term "VR" 2 years ago?
;)
I get this type of question quite a lot (being a VR researcher). It often comes with it's "practicality" counterpart: "what can you do with VR that you can't do with conventional 3D rendering?"
My answer is always the same: If the genie of the magc lamp would give you a UI-wish, what interface would you go for:
a) exactly what we have now?
b) The Holodeck?
choose b. That's what we're working towards
As for compilation on the client: despite the fact that everyone seems to flame Java on slashdot all the time, I find Java's compilation *on the client* to be a good thing. I dont see why this should be any different...
0.02,
Mike.
> That's not exactly an unbiased source.
It's completely irrelevant how biased they are - I wasn't referencing their work as a groundless opinion. I was reference their paper "The Twofish Team's Final Comments on AES Selection" submitted in the round 2 comments stage which you should read. This isn't a question of the Blowfish team saying "la la la - Rijndael sucks", it's a case of them doing the analysis and showing why they think it has problems and publishing the results and the reasoning.
I agree that with modifications Rijndael can be made more secure. In fact, why not just scrap all the entries and say "let's start all over again with more secure versions"? it could go on forever. I think NIST should be choosing the most secure algorithms *entered*, and that isn't Rijndal.
my 0.02,
Mike.
Do you? Why?
Mike.
Leaving aside the bizarre notion of calling an area of the *moon* a "*National* Historical Site"...
;)
The article continues...
> There seems to be no doubt the artifacts are clearly U.S. property. Even NASA says the stuff left behind by the Apollo astronauts was "not abandoned," according to documents collected by the researchers.
Not abandoned? "Oh no, we really were intending to come back for it (in a few hundred years)." We weren't really littering on the moon Sir...
Anyway, *I* have some doubt, even if nobody else does. I think the Chinese should get up there quick and grab it and then auction it off to the US administration if they really think it's theirs
Mike.
> migrating my come server to it
;)
You must have some really valuable pr0n to need a journaling FS for it
Mike.
Totally irrational reasons ;)
Well, not really. I'm not a fan of MARS because I think it's big and slow. I don't mind the slow too much, but the *big* I do mind. IIRC the sample hgardware implementation of MARS was like 2x the size of the other candiates.
I guess this is mainly an aesthetic complaint: I dont like MARS because it looks ugly to me, but the uglyness is actually based upon a real property of the algorithm. At the end of the day, the simpler algorithm will be more likely to be correctly implemented. I like clear and simple - MARS seems to be the least clear and simple of all the 2nd round algorithms.
That being said, if MARS wins, I'll use it: I don't think it's without merit, it just seems worse than the other finalists.
best wishes,
Mike.
I've just looked at the Hitatchi documents again. They claim that they are used in MARS, RC6, Serpent and Blowfish.
OTOH, I expect whatever wins to be attacked by anyone that has a vaguely related patent. It'll be worth a lot of money...
best wishes,
Mike.