Sigh. Steve Ballmer jumps up and down and shouts "Developers! Developers! Developers!", Raymond Chen writes about the heroic efforts Microsoft make to make sure broken third party applications designed for Windows version n still work on Windows version n+5. Some dude explains all the obscure binary applications that some business depends on, and how he never sees Linux used at work. In each case, Linux advocates criticise, but they never spot the thread linking them all together.
Microsoft marketing may have done some nasty stuff to Digital Research, Netscape and Real Networks, but the Microsoft techies did their damnedest to make sure that the Win32 interface stayed stable enough that all these obscure and ususally badly coded third party Win32 applications that people bought/wrote for Windows 95 still work on Windows Vista.
Now if I tried to port one of these application to "Linux" I'd be pretty much forced to distribute it as source code to cover all the distributions. All to target an OS that has zero market share amongst my non CS users. Whereas if I build for Windows, even if I make some mistakes, Microsoft will put a app compatibility shim into Vista so my customers can use my binary after they upgrade without calling me. And Windows has 100% market share in the businesses I want to sell my code too. So the amount of effort per % market share is much, much lower.
It's called a fucking Suzuki Swift. Fuck your Sega Genesis too by the way, it's a Megadrive. And you can shove your fucking Twixes up your asses, I want my Raiders back.
Ouch! I think my comment was way too subtle for the mods.
Umm, no. This is slashdot here's how it works.
People here like Linux and hate Windows. But they know that the selection of games for Linux is much worse than that for Windows. When they suggest Linux to the first person shooter obsessed jocks at school, the jocks point this out before giving them an atomic wedgie.
Now someone posts a well crafted piece of sophistry to explain why this weekness is actually a strength, which is severly flawed in that it could also be used to explain why disability is a good thing. E.g. "Since I went deaf, dumb and blind, I've had far more time to work on my open source, terminal based, pinball game".
The sophistry is Informative, because it gives them a snappy comeback. They can savour the memory of it when they're hanging from a baseball hoop by their tighty whities. It's Insightful since no one posted it before. But someone like you arguing with them is a Troll because it makes most of the audience angry. Of course, some percentage of the audience gets annoyed with this every so often and leaves, but that just makes the problem worse.
In many ways, individuals doing this sort of thing in their free time are far worse than employees doing PR for a company. The employees are getting paid to reclassify weakness as strength and so on, Newspeak style. Once they leave the office or change jobs, they hopefully stop believing in it. But if you're doing for free, your free time and modding down the opposition, you must have actually brainwashed yourself so completely that you can't accept any argument, no matter how valid, that doesn't match your worldview. That's plain scary.
Must say, the guy sounds thoroughly unpleasant. He was obviously very smart at least as measured on an IQ test, but not so smart in other ways. He was also a raving elitist, to the point of believing in eugenics, i.e. sterlising people who don't do so well on IQ tests.
Apart from the obvious Wargames reference, that would be clever on another level, since Shockley believed in Dysgenics, and some people believe that dysgenic effects are cancelled out by the Flynn effect.
The damage done by Shockley's IQ assertions was immeasurable. Even if it turns out someday that - say - people with large index fingers are smarter than people with small index fingers, on average - is this a useful result? What should we then do, measure index fingers during job interviews? One can draw no conclusion about an individual from an average. "Research" of this nature simply creates prejudice and encourages discrimination.
The idea that some identifiable groups might have a lower IQ than average is sort of Gödel sequence for modern multicultural societies I think.
Conservatism is the tendency to keep things as they are unless a proven better alternative shows up
That doesn't sound too bad to me. But it also doesn't capture current conservatism very well. Democratising the middle east doesn't fit into that definition and yet current conservatives support it.
Right now, striving for a small government in the USA is not conservative because the current US government is nto small and hasn't been small for a long time. Wanting to reduce the size of government would better be called progressive, because it is quite a change from the current situation.
That's actually one of the things I'd expect to change. If the Republicans run on a small government ticket, socially liberal ticket they'd do a lot better. E.g, they could let The Economist editorial staff design their policies.
Hmm, come to think of it, that's wishful thinking. Still I think the next Republican administration will distance itself from a lot of the Bush II policies in some way, in much the same way that Clinton distanced himself from lots of Democrat conventional wisdom that had become very unpopular in the country at large.
Yeah, but you're not a celebrity like Bruce is. He might just have been too busy with his public to shake your hand. But Theo should have found time to shake his.
Anyhow celebrities have entourages. The purpose of these is twofold, one to keep non celebrities like you away. The other is so that other celebrities can sense that the person at the middle is someone who's hand is worth shaking.
I don't really buy this any more. I do lots of work with customers, and introversion would be suicidal for me career-wise. I'm not too social by default, I basically taught myself to fake it. But I've met a lot of people who are basically lazy and rationalize it with the old line about how they're "probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum". But guess what, they end up earning a shitty salary and being put somewhere in the basement doing tech support, badly. In my current company, most of those guys got the boot when internal tech support got outsourced. And then they moaned about how the management never understood how valuable to the company they were. Truly autistic people are seriously disabled, and these people just weren't.
It's a free country and it's your choice, unless you really have some kind of disability. But humans are social animals and if you choose not to play the game, don't be too surprised if you lose by default.
"Conservatism is a failed ideology which has joined communism in the trash heap of history"
Communism was a totalitarian ideology which staid in power by force. Once it lost power it ceased to exist. In a democracy, "conservatism" is whatever the right of centre party does when they are in government. If it becomes unpopular, they spend a period out of office until they can reinvent it is something enough people agree with to get back in power to win again. So in a paradoxical sort of way conservatism is immortal - so long as you have alternation of power between two parties, you'll always have conservatism.
That's not to say that current conservatism has much in common with 50's conservatism though, or will have much in common with conservatism in fifty years time.
The S1A1 remote controlled great white shark has a secondary offensive capability based on 1) rows of sharp teeth and 2) neural implant boosted hunger, all guided by a keen sense of smell. Obviously, we planned for Chinese frogmen in invisibility suits.
This is all classified info BTW, please kill yourself after reading it, unless you happen to have SPECOPS/JAWS clearance.
Every time I see a bunch of blowhard diatribe against PETA, I wonder, "What's the problem here?"
Yeah, I wondered that too - I figured they were just obnoxious carnivores and they liked winding up Peta, which seemed to be composed of cute but naive teenage girls. But then I saw the Penn and Teller episode and read the wiki pages.
If PETA IS just a bunch of clowns, why are you so upset then?
Did you read what I posted? They supported some ALF psycho who firebombed laboratories that did animal research. My dad worked in a lab, close to one that did animal research. The ALF actually threatened his university, and the police took it sufficiently seriously that they were advised to spend a load of money on increasing security.
Using or threatening violence against civilians to further a political agenda makes them terrorists not clowns.
Do you have... ummm, some sort of problem?
Yeah, I don't like organisations that take money from well meaning but naive people and hand it over to terrorists who target my family. That's kind of an issue to me.
However, if you want to debug models that have failed in the field, then you need to at ship them with the secure JTAG cranked down to a not-totally-disabled (by e-fuses, no way back) setting
Can't you just require signing something with a very secret key - one that even the original developers don't know - to re enable JTAG? I don't know all the details of the solution, and I wouldn't want to post them if I did, but I know at least some embedded systems ship in a state where both the factory/service centre and the original developers need to be involved to unlock JTAG.
Exactly. Physical access to a cellphone will do you absolutely no good when it comes to hacking the device. Even if you took the flash chips off the board, changed a few bytes in a programmer and put them back, the phone will detect it and refuse to boot.
The solution is to have a JTAG disable bit, which software can set but not clear. The bootrom can check for a signed software in flash and set the bit unless it was signed with a debug signature. So when you're in development, you sign with the debug enabled key. When you ship, you sign that with the non debug one. You can use the same trick so that any debug printouts you didn't get a chance to strip out don't actually come out of the pins on the chip too, even though they go almost all the way there so that flipping the bit doesn't change timing.
This is a simple scheme, but you can see it's already quite hard to hack. The bootrom only needs to know the public part of the key to verify a signature, so the private part can be kept secret. In practice, you'd do something more complex, since you don't trust the developers not to lose USB sticks with the development signed code.
If Ananda Mahidol did not kill himself, he must have been murdered. It must therefore be asked who stood to benefit from his death. The most obvious beneficiary was his brother Bhumibol, who was next in line to the throne. The possibility that the current King murdered his brother is so shocking as to be unthinkable, let alone mentionable, in modern Thailand, but it was commonly rumoured during the 1950s. However, the possibility can be dismissed on several grounds. First, if, as seems clear, the King's own pistol was not the murder weapon, Bhumibol would have had to obtain and use another gun, then successfully conceal it in the few seconds before other witnesses arrived on the scene. Secondly, all accounts agree that Bhumibol was summoned to the King's bedchamber by their mother, who was first on the scene. Third and most importantly, Ananda Mahidol and Bhumibol were very close, and Bhumibol had absolutely no desire to be King (according to some accounts, he still does not have).[citation needed] His only desire was to return to his quiet life in Switzerland.
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My experience of jobs like that is that you pay them, since they pay you a lower salary than a real job.
Unkillable processes usually mean you have badly written driver loaded that won't allow IRPs to be cancelled -
/ 23/192531.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07
Get rid of any non Microsoft drivers, and the machine will usually work much better.
Sigh. Steve Ballmer jumps up and down and shouts "Developers! Developers! Developers!", Raymond Chen writes about the heroic efforts Microsoft make to make sure broken third party applications designed for Windows version n still work on Windows version n+5. Some dude explains all the obscure binary applications that some business depends on, and how he never sees Linux used at work. In each case, Linux advocates criticise, but they never spot the thread linking them all together.
Microsoft marketing may have done some nasty stuff to Digital Research, Netscape and Real Networks, but the Microsoft techies did their damnedest to make sure that the Win32 interface stayed stable enough that all these obscure and ususally badly coded third party Win32 applications that people bought/wrote for Windows 95 still work on Windows Vista.
Now if I tried to port one of these application to "Linux" I'd be pretty much forced to distribute it as source code to cover all the distributions. All to target an OS that has zero market share amongst my non CS users. Whereas if I build for Windows, even if I make some mistakes, Microsoft will put a app compatibility shim into Vista so my customers can use my binary after they upgrade without calling me. And Windows has 100% market share in the businesses I want to sell my code too. So the amount of effort per % market share is much, much lower.
It's called a fucking Suzuki Swift. Fuck your Sega Genesis too by the way, it's a Megadrive. And you can shove your fucking Twixes up your asses, I want my Raiders back.
It's spelled arses HTH!
Yes it does! Everyone knows the web browser is an integral part of the OS.
Ouch! I think my comment was way too subtle for the mods.
Umm, no. This is slashdot here's how it works.
People here like Linux and hate Windows. But they know that the selection of games for Linux is much worse than that for Windows. When they suggest Linux to the first person shooter obsessed jocks at school, the jocks point this out before giving them an atomic wedgie.
Now someone posts a well crafted piece of sophistry to explain why this weekness is actually a strength, which is severly flawed in that it could also be used to explain why disability is a good thing. E.g. "Since I went deaf, dumb and blind, I've had far more time to work on my open source, terminal based, pinball game".
The sophistry is Informative, because it gives them a snappy comeback. They can savour the memory of it when they're hanging from a baseball hoop by their tighty whities. It's Insightful since no one posted it before. But someone like you arguing with them is a Troll because it makes most of the audience angry. Of course, some percentage of the audience gets annoyed with this every so often and leaves, but that just makes the problem worse.
In many ways, individuals doing this sort of thing in their free time are far worse than employees doing PR for a company. The employees are getting paid to reclassify weakness as strength and so on, Newspeak style. Once they leave the office or change jobs, they hopefully stop believing in it. But if you're doing for free, your free time and modding down the opposition, you must have actually brainwashed yourself so completely that you can't accept any argument, no matter how valid, that doesn't match your worldview. That's plain scary.
Every time someone mods satire as Troll, Baby Jesus cries.
Safety is only one part of the Li-ion chemistry equation
o n )
Jesus Christ, it's a Li-ion. Get it in the car!
( http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Li
Charles invented Hungarian Notation, so he can probably pronounce things like "lpsz"
Actually "sz" is pronounced "s" in Hungarian - "s" is more like "sh". So maybe he does say "ell pee sess"
Fucksocks.
Must say, the guy sounds thoroughly unpleasant. He was obviously very smart at least as measured on an IQ test, but not so smart in other ways. He was also a raving elitist, to the point of believing in eugenics, i.e. sterlising people who don't do so well on IQ tests.
Apart from the obvious Wargames reference, that would be clever on another level, since Shockley believed in Dysgenics, and some people believe that dysgenic effects are cancelled out by the Flynn effect.
The damage done by Shockley's IQ assertions was immeasurable. Even if it turns out someday that - say - people with large index fingers are smarter than people with small index fingers, on average - is this a useful result? What should we then do, measure index fingers during job interviews? One can draw no conclusion about an individual from an average. "Research" of this nature simply creates prejudice and encourages discrimination.
The idea that some identifiable groups might have a lower IQ than average is sort of Gödel sequence for modern multicultural societies I think.
To be fair to the guy he was actually a looney tunes Yellow Power fanatic, since he believed Asian > Whites > Blacks.
He also invented race based trolling. So without him not only we have no computers or internet, we'd have no GNAA or most of Encylopedia Dramatica.
"And I want three graduate students. At least two of them Asian"
Some mad professor in Futurama, or maybe the Simpsons.
Conservatism is the tendency to keep things as they are unless a proven better alternative shows up
That doesn't sound too bad to me. But it also doesn't capture current conservatism very well. Democratising the middle east doesn't fit into that definition and yet current conservatives support it.
Right now, striving for a small government in the USA is not conservative because the current US government is nto small and hasn't been small for a long time. Wanting to reduce the size of government would better be called progressive, because it is quite a change from the current situation.
That's actually one of the things I'd expect to change. If the Republicans run on a small government ticket, socially liberal ticket they'd do a lot better. E.g, they could let The Economist editorial staff design their policies.
Hmm, come to think of it, that's wishful thinking. Still I think the next Republican administration will distance itself from a lot of the Bush II policies in some way, in much the same way that Clinton distanced himself from lots of Democrat conventional wisdom that had become very unpopular in the country at large.
Yeah, but you're not a celebrity like Bruce is. He might just have been too busy with his public to shake your hand. But Theo should have found time to shake his.
Anyhow celebrities have entourages. The purpose of these is twofold, one to keep non celebrities like you away. The other is so that other celebrities can sense that the person at the middle is someone who's hand is worth shaking.
I don't really buy this any more. I do lots of work with customers, and introversion would be suicidal for me career-wise. I'm not too social by default, I basically taught myself to fake it. But I've met a lot of people who are basically lazy and rationalize it with the old line about how they're "probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum". But guess what, they end up earning a shitty salary and being put somewhere in the basement doing tech support, badly. In my current company, most of those guys got the boot when internal tech support got outsourced. And then they moaned about how the management never understood how valuable to the company they were. Truly autistic people are seriously disabled, and these people just weren't.
It's a free country and it's your choice, unless you really have some kind of disability. But humans are social animals and if you choose not to play the game, don't be too surprised if you lose by default.
Your sig
"Conservatism is a failed ideology which has joined communism in the trash heap of history"
Communism was a totalitarian ideology which staid in power by force. Once it lost power it ceased to exist. In a democracy, "conservatism" is whatever the right of centre party does when they are in government. If it becomes unpopular, they spend a period out of office until they can reinvent it is something enough people agree with to get back in power to win again. So in a paradoxical sort of way conservatism is immortal - so long as you have alternation of power between two parties, you'll always have conservatism.
That's not to say that current conservatism has much in common with 50's conservatism though, or will have much in common with conservatism in fifty years time.
BUT I WOULDNT BE ABLE TO POST ON THE INTERWEB IF IT WAZNT FOR AOL!!!1
The S1A1 remote controlled great white shark has a secondary offensive capability based on 1) rows of sharp teeth and 2) neural implant boosted hunger, all guided by a keen sense of smell. Obviously, we planned for Chinese frogmen in invisibility suits.
This is all classified info BTW, please kill yourself after reading it, unless you happen to have SPECOPS/JAWS clearance.
Every time I see a bunch of blowhard diatribe against PETA, I wonder, "What's the problem here?"
Yeah, I wondered that too - I figured they were just obnoxious carnivores and they liked winding up Peta, which seemed to be composed of cute but naive teenage girls. But then I saw the Penn and Teller episode and read the wiki pages.
If PETA IS just a bunch of clowns, why are you so upset then?
Did you read what I posted? They supported some ALF psycho who firebombed laboratories that did animal research. My dad worked in a lab, close to one that did animal research. The ALF actually threatened his university, and the police took it sufficiently seriously that they were advised to spend a load of money on increasing security.
Using or threatening violence against civilians to further a political agenda makes them terrorists not clowns.
Do you have... ummm, some sort of problem?
Yeah, I don't like organisations that take money from well meaning but naive people and hand it over to terrorists who target my family. That's kind of an issue to me.
However, if you want to debug models that have failed in the field, then you need to at ship them with the secure JTAG cranked down to a not-totally-disabled (by e-fuses, no way back) setting
Can't you just require signing something with a very secret key - one that even the original developers don't know - to re enable JTAG? I don't know all the details of the solution, and I wouldn't want to post them if I did, but I know at least some embedded systems ship in a state where both the factory/service centre and the original developers need to be involved to unlock JTAG.
Exactly. Physical access to a cellphone will do you absolutely no good when it comes to hacking the device. Even if you took the flash chips off the board, changed a few bytes in a programmer and put them back, the phone will detect it and refuse to boot.
The solution is to have a JTAG disable bit, which software can set but not clear. The bootrom can check for a signed software in flash and set the bit unless it was signed with a debug signature. So when you're in development, you sign with the debug enabled key. When you ship, you sign that with the non debug one. You can use the same trick so that any debug printouts you didn't get a chance to strip out don't actually come out of the pins on the chip too, even though they go almost all the way there so that flipping the bit doesn't change timing.
This is a simple scheme, but you can see it's already quite hard to hack. The bootrom only needs to know the public part of the key to verify a signature, so the private part can be kept secret. In practice, you'd do something more complex, since you don't trust the developers not to lose USB sticks with the development signed code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Mahidol