It is funny that you mention Google Suggest as an unfinished beta, seeing as Mozilla finds it to be complete enough to include as the default search tool in Firefox 2.0.
Oh damn! I meant Google Sets:) http://labs.google.com/sets Google Suggest an awesome display of information retrieval and AJAX at their best!!
Thanks for catching that. I with there was an edit button...
This is why we "first world countries like America, Canada, most of Europe, etc. should restrict trade with countries that don't provide for the same level of labour and environmental laws as us. Most of the problems encountered by "third world" workers is due to the greed for *cheap* gadgets in the first world. So much greed that we turn a blind eye to where our goods come from. e.g. the ubiquitus example of the $100.00 tennis shoe that cost $0.50 to make in some Indonesian sweat shop by child labour.
Clearly you have missed the subtle point I was trying to convey. Your solution - restrict trade with the third world - will only start a dominoe effect that will make things worse. Depriving those who already so deprived accomplishes nothing but keeping MORE wealth in those nations above the third world. Closing all the "cheap labor" factories that don't live up to American-style work ethics and environmental regulations will not help. Most of such industry can not afford to compete on the same level as American industry. They only have our bussiness because they are so, oh so, much cheaper. Maintaining a higher minimum wage, complying with international safety/pollution regulations and providing 40 hour+ overtime (instead of 50...60...) is just not possible without significantly raising costs to a degree at which it is no longer much finaincially feasable.
I don't disagree that greed is a part of the problem. However, I believe greed is but a small, nominal, factor in this issue. Once the first manufacturer moved its plants to China, all the rest HAD to follow. As an example, look how long U.S. steel companies and clothing manufacturers tried to keep their north american plants open. It took a decade or so until the 1st world companies had no choice but to close down their domestic plants and move abroad.
Back to the point. Imposing restrictions on a commodity resource industry in which there are almost no barriers to entry would work only domestically (and then just force companies to go abroad).
What a laughable suggestion: 100 is merely 0.01 percent of one million.
Excuse me, sometimes I don't proofread. That should read p(.9999), which I think should be obvious as p(.99) is not something I would like to see on a medication bottle.
Anybody who has taken a statistics course should have laughed at the (wording of the) claim in this post. A 49 person sample isnt supposed to prove that a drug is safe. It's meant to prove that it didnt kill or severly damage 49 people. Think about if one of these people had died as a direct result of taking this vaccine. It would be stopped the research right there with *minimal* loss of life. Now if the first test was on 800 people (like the second test will be), it might have killed 16 people. The sample size will continue to increase methodically in conjunction with the researchers statictical confidence level.
This is also why some drugs get through the testing hurdles and still manage to kill/harm thousands of people. Even when the statistical formulae work out, there is still the chance that the result was due, in part, to randomness in the population. Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...
One of my friends worked for Google up until a few weeks ago. We discussed this issue a few times as I would criticize the big G for not supporting sarafi/konquerer as fast as IE/FF. If you remember Google Maps initial beta, you should recall that it had pretty poor browser support. In, fact this has been a theme throughout many Google betas. The truth is that when Google says "beta" they really mean "proof of concept." I guess people would rather use Betas than POCs for the obvious reasons.
You and I say "why can't this support safari,oper,konquerer?" The whole cross-platform concept is very very expensive. It requires developers, testers, a qa qualification process, time, etc. All that is waaay to much (even for a rich company) to invest in every project. Add into this mix the fact that most of Google Labs' ambitious projects... well... fade gracefully into the night... it's just not worth it.
We're all familiar with the process by now. Google releases a new Beta. People use it, or they don't. After a few months, if enough interest remains, Google will start putting some muscle behind its beta. Other ideas don't get so popular and never escape the Google Labs page. (though they don't exactly die either... more like a deep sleep) There are many examples of underdeveloped proof of concept projects at http://labs.google.com/ like the really cool Google Ride Finder. The world just isnt ready for that yet.
Also see Google Suggest, the oldest remaining beta (4 years!!). It's downright crappy webpage is a front for an underdeveloped topic detection algorithm. I wish they'd finish it or open the source:)
"The music industry now considers so-called 'schoolyard' piracy a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA."
Attention Parents: This is a warning! You must teach your children not to accept CDs or DVDs from strangers in schoolyard. RIAA is going to start deploying 'undercover' agents into schoolyards to catch these 'DVD dealers'. I predict the next round of law suits will be directed at little Timmy and his grade school friends.
It might not be fair, but you have to think about the reprecussions of forcing American companies to increase foreign wages. Have you thought about why the governments of these countries do not impose their own strict laws? It's because they don't want to push the foreign investors out. These 'long hours' might not seem like a good deal to us spoiled 1st worlders, but for some, its the best they can hope for. Apple (and every other manufacturer) are not going to suddenly bring low-skill jobs back to the U.S... Rather they would move the factories to some other 3rd world area. The end result is that the original people who we feel so bad for are now really unemployed and in real trouble because of our compassion.
The bottom line is: Yes we need to fix this situation, BUT we also need to do it very carefully as it is a very complex issue. Just shouting "mercy!" at Apple or the Government will force them to react. That reaction -- whatever it might be -- would likely be something to help us sleep at night and will certinely just make things worse in the big picture.
I highly recommend that you all to watch these two television commercials by the Ad Council here is the U.S. They are to encourage blood donation, but worth a watch to understand what I mean. See them here: http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=40
I agree with your post, except for the following statement
Does anyone else remember back in the day when the United States was a government of the people, by the people and for the people?
Honestly, I don't see these recent events as anything different than has happened in the past. From the view of the NSA, knowing everything you that everybody does helps to protect the masses. You should have no doubt that the NSA was, in fact, really trying to combat national security threats with these wiretaps. You should also have no doubt that this information has been used for that purpose. Though we are more worried about the OTHER, less acceptable, ways it can/will be used.
The bottom line is that despite how helpful it can be for *them*, it is still a blatent violation of American civil rights and liberties. The NSA needs to do its job, but it needs to do it within the bounds of the law. Expect the NSA and every other government agency right down to the local sheriff to *always* try to push the limits. That includes altering/creating law, as was done here. The masses do the same. It's this endless struggle that makes this country special. The Executive branch stepped (jumped) over the line. The people found out, organized and went to the courts. The courts smacked the executive and the bussinesses involved. That's how America works.
If you don't believe me, just look back to the communist witch hunts during the cold war. Look at the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Im sure it'd be easy to look back further than that.
But Vmware's agitation is understandable. They're about to lose it all to an open source project. Where have I seen this before?
Reports of VMWares demise have been greatly exaggerated. They're just reacting to a new threat. VMWare is an EMC company, and I doubt EMC is going to let virtualization die. The future of EMC's 23.9 billion dollar empire depends on their ability to virtualize and cluster their machines. This is the quiet before the storm in the storage market...
1. Ajax does NOT eliminate the round trip between client and server. It just lends the ILLUSION of doing so. Sure it looks cool and wonderful, but requests still have to go to the server, and responses still have to come back over the wire. It only *looks* seamless if you've a broadband connection, which lots of folks still don't.
While this is completely true, in many instances, it does significantly reduce the quantity of data transferred. This is especially true in systems like Amazon.com where lots of analysis is done on every page to present users with relevent information. That information no longer needs to be recomputed all the time.
2. Ajax is NOT new. The technology has been around for a while now. For that matter, it's not even really dependent on XmlHttpRequest - you could do much the same thing with IFRAME elements, at least on your own site.
Excellent! You're so close, now dig deeper.
We don't really care about "AJAX," do we? No... its the idea that excites any web developer. The concept of highly dynamic -- almost application like -- web pages without relying on any third party modifications (see: Java Applets, see: Flash). Is Ajax a fad? Probably. But its more than that. It's an evolutionary step in interactive web design.
The software industry has been focused QA for pretty much its entire existance. This software they are using is just a testing framework, albeit an intricite one. Unit testing, code coverage, black box, system tests... all marketing buz words for excersizing your software. If you are'nt familiar with the software dev qa process, here is how it generally works in production:
Hiring dozens of QA people to discover discover a broken error path that a developer could have fixed in 5 minutes is inefficant and slow. Instead, developers can find many bugs quickly by excerising the data paths of their own code. After (or even better, before) writing a new snippet of code, a motivated developer writes a unit test for it. The test is simple: given certain specific conditions, your code should return some predictable result.
Example- I need to write code that tell me which of two numbers between 1 and 10 is larger. I would need to write at least 6 simple tests that would guarantee this code will work in virtually every scenario. I would need to three tests to make sure it works when the input in valid, and another 3 tests to make sure it works when the input is invalid. Sample inputs:
3 and 8, valid(8)
7 and 4, valid(7)
0 and 7, invalid(0 lt 1)
11 and 5, invalid(11 gt 10)
12 and -12, invalid(range)
After a while there will be dozens, hundreds of even thousands of these simple tests. They will not mean much alone, but chained together they can provide a very stable testing bed. By running all the tests every time you release another version, developers can be pretty sure that everything that worked in the past will still work. (see regression testing).
Anyway, I didn't mean to start a lecture on basic testing principles... This post was motivated by the claims in the article regarding code quality. I would take the claim that 'XMMS is the most bug free software' with a grain of salt; a big grain. The results of any testing procedures are only as good as the individual tests. Lets say that the above example was one of the tests that Coverity was using in XMMS. Maybe it passed, great! But what where to happen if a user input -13 instead of 12? or maybe -5,000,000,000 and 1? How about the letter A as an argument?
They don't even give us code coverage numbers, or a count of tests... just a claim. I would bet that the AMANDA project had 10 times as many tests per line of code as XMMS. That would make AMANDA the most bug free software. Oh, and on another note, i noticed some comments about IE testing. I don't use IE, but I am 100% certain that Microsoft has an internal testing framework that puts this one to shame.
I doubt Jobs would ever see it this way. But turning a blind eye to piracy is away to get huge market share. Did you hear MS complain loudly about piracy during their climb to monopoly status? Not really, it worked to their advantage.
Exactly. Microsoft just has too much money now. Maybe they should forget about tightening XP against pirates and concentrate on Vista... Seriously, its the nature of the industry. Any security they can think of can and will be cracked (and fast).
Anyway many other posters seem to no understand that no going crazy with anti-piracy measures can be a great way to suck people in.
Of course that's logical and probably correct... in which case you have to ask yourself what the real point is to these threat levels. If you can't post them before the threat is removed for fear of tipping your hand, then how do they possibly assist the public? Yesterday would've been a time when the public deserved to be on "critical threat" notification since there was a very high risk of something happening (assuming that this isn't trumped up for some reason).
What if the attacks had gone a day early? What use would the 'terror' scale be? It is clearly completely useless and serves only to panic the public. That it was put up after the threat was addressed raises two possibilities. 1) That they're worried about those that have inevitably slipped through the nets. 2) That there is some political capital to be gained from citizens who feel threatened, perhaps from impending and inherently unpopular policy change.
Don't get me wrong, the alert level do serve a purpose. They reassure people that the government is doing something, sure, but in reality they mean much more. Security at airports is massively increased. The national guard is all over the place in cities like New York and Washington. Everybody is a little bit more alert. I understand this. The point I want to make is that the way they work now is not very helpful in avoiding immediate terror threats.
I think the REAL reason for the terror alert levels is so that the government can periodically raise and lower them. That at least gets mentioned on most local news stations. It keeps the thought of an attack in everybody's mind. That's a good, if not scary thing. Growing up, I never would have thought that I would worry about terrorists when I get on a subway car... bus... plane... train... tunnel... bridge... I think this terror scale has benefitted us all. Comapanies now take disaister recovery very seriously. Its amazing to see how important colocation and site security has become to firms that never really gave it a second thought only 6 years ago.
Paul Thurrott makes a good argument, but I think his point is just as childish as chastizing Jobs for poking fun at Microsoft.
If this were a patent case, we would look at who had each idea first. This isnt about patents... it is about implementation. I don't care if Microsoft came up with the "Windows Search" idea in 2000... or 1995... or 1985. The bottom line is that while Microsoft has been talking about desktop search for years, Apple went and actually did it a few (two?) years ago.
Lets look at another example. The Microsoft PowerToy for virtual desktop's dates back a decade (all the way to NT 4). I've used it a few times over the years and I have to say that it sucks. It works... but it sucks. If the MS people had just updated and integrated it into Windows with XP, Apple would not have been able to make such a big deal. What was stopping them? Its an excellent bussiness tool. Frankly I am annoyed that Apple too SO long to come out with virtual desktops. Linux has had them for what seems like forever, and there are already several (free) third-party virtual desktop solutions for the Mac.
Aqua vs. Aero?? Who cares. Maybe Aero was "thought of" first... Aqua has been in production for half a decade (something like that). If Aero was first, them congradulation to Apple on a great preemptive marketing strike.
Widgets and Gadgets. This is pure evil on both sides. Apple ripped the Widgets from Konfabulator. That program was GREAT, I even purchased a license. I was pretty annoyed that Apple did'nt even compensate the original innovator. Microsoft ripped it off of Apple... so I guess Apple deserved that.
The point I am trying to make is that in the end it doesnt really matter who came up with what idea first. The credit goes to the first to market. Welcome to economics... companies release NEW products, or BETTER products. Anything else is just market saturation. On another note, maybe Microsoft will wise up and stop discussing new enchancements 5-10 years before they go to market. Any other company would go out of bussiness by laying their cards face up on the table like that!
Also, you forgot to mention that they raised the alert level to "Critical" only *after* the 21 terrorists were captured... Should'nt it have been raised before? In short, no. Why? Because it means absolutely nothing. Security at airports, seaports and sensitive buildings remains in alert mode all the time (or at least its supposed to). It makes little sense to have heightened security only after we know something was going to happen. Like you said, the alert levels are more of a publicity-political thing than a real preventive measure.
Third parties can't really do this, as it would require cracking OS X's copy protection and violating OS X's license agreement.
Unless something has changed, I don't believe there is any copy-protection for OSX. The last few times i've installed/upgraded OSX, there was never any key required, nor did the DVD ever resist duplication.
To be honest, I would be suprised if Apple did NOT turn a blind eye to pirating of OSX. It happens to be a great way to get Windows users to *try* OSX. Assuming Windows-to-Mac converts will buy at least one Mac computer after trying OSX, the payoff would be substantial. (not to mention that it could be made into a bait-and-switch scenario, in which Apple hooks people with the OS and then forces them to get a Mac or license).
Will overlook the Christian Monk scrubbing scientific things away for religion to say this is really cool. I wonder how many other documents were similarly reused for $whatever. Wonder what it all says...
Actually paper was not always as plentiful as it is now. In fact, as recently as the 1800's, paper was a valuable commodity. (reference: history of paper) It's unfortunate, but likely, that countless important works have been erased and resued. Heck, even most of Leonardo DiVinici paintings were created on reused canvases.
Of course as the story illustrates, there is no absolute security. Your house may burn down, an asteroid may obliterate your region
Offsite backups...
Mmmm i'm pretty sure that "offsite backups" was what the OP was hinting at when he said "an asteroid may obliterate your region." I might be wrong, but I think its safe to say that you missed the point. Only a fool would state - with absolute certinty - that his/her data can never be lost.
Well, on Google I usually stay signed in with my Gmail account so that Google can record my search queries. Quite a useful thing, I use it to look up what I was doing or thinking some time ago.
Me too, but I think the that OP was being sarcastic. I chuckled.
Because the first thing that's going to happen when your clot's not big enough is that it's going to go to your lung. Or heart. Or brain.
You can expect the statistics of soldiers having strokes for no apparent reason to go WAY up.
Sure there are many serious risks involved with creating blood clots. Small clots are forced though your blood stream... not directly to the brain or heart, etc.
A clot can become lodged in an artery near soldiers foot, resulting in no bloodflow to - and subsequent loss of - that limb as well.
If it hits the heart, it can again become lodged in an artery. At best that could kill part of the heart muscle.
If a clot gets into your brain, same story. At worst brain death. At best transient ischemic stroke with no life-altering side effects.
Bottom line is that if I were lying on the battlefield and bleeding out from the femural artery - with seconds to live - I would want the medic to take that chance. Who knows, maybe this thing will really work. I can see the modern ambulance equiped with 'ultasonic turnaquets'.
"We rent TV series on DVD and we easily go through 10 disks in a two weeks, thereby hitting the limit quickly."
You're definitely in the front-end of their customer usage bell curve... " 2.5%". I use Netflix primary for TV series as well. It comes out to like 30 cents per episode for me, definitely worth it. By some quick math you and your wife plow through ((10*4)/14)*7) = 20 episodes per week, or 20*4 = 80 episodes a month.
In the U.S., TV series generally last 5 or 6 seasons (just enough pass 100 episodes and enter syndication... figures). So at 125 episodes for a series, you can clear from premier to finale in 125/80 =~ 1.5 months or 8 complete series a year (1040 episodes). Anyway the whole point of this excersize is to show you that Netflix is helping you out by limiting your annual TV episode consumption to around 2^10 episodes/year. Why is this a help??
a) I think most doctors would consider 2^10 episodes of TV a "healthy" annual upper limit. b) Any faster and you'll run out of semi-decent TV series to slurp down.
"Did you know that users of Netflix who continually use their limit of what they pay for for access get the speed at which they receive movies limited?"
Really? I had'nt noticed. I keep my NetFlix dvd turn around very short (mail back on the 2nd day usually) and I have not seen even the slightest change in delivery turnaround. I mail one out on monday and then the new dvd is there on wednesday, like clockwork. They don't guarantee delivery times at all, and it varies for popular movies/new releases (though I have yet to get a delay in months). Do you live in some remote area? I can see them keeping stricter guidlines in urban areas over rural/small towns.
Wow thats a good idea providing that the computer truly removed it from the missing list and doesnt just mark it as "found" or something... because when you really lose a few dvd's it might get flagged by their loss prevention script/account nuker.
Actually, if you really wanted to rewrite it in the true spirit of Perl, you would have removed all that wasteful whitespace.
#!/usr/bin/perl
=head1GOAL
Program -- Solve it -- Solves the worlds problems.
All of them. At once.
This will be a great program when I finish it.
=cutusewarnings;usestrict;
#Do something here
exit;
Why? All it's doing is serving up files via Samba shares. I have 20 clients connected to a Debian/Samba box with a 1 ghz P3, 1 gig Ram, and a couple 80 gig IDE drives (no RAID or anythign) . . . not under much strain at all, actually. I know intensive IDE transactions need a lot of CPU, but we're talking about shared office docs. I can't imagine drive operations getting all that intensive when the major bottleneck in this case is going to be to 100mbit ethernet card.
True, and just to put that in perspective...
100 Mbits / 8b = 12.5 MB
So the absolute max of that NIC would be a mere 12.5 MB/s, while a good quality, recent generation IDE hard drive will put out about 50 MB/s. To make it worse, file transfers use TCP. In practice, I have found the TCP vegas overhead to be 12-15%. So you're real 100 mbit NIC max is about:
100 mbit *.88 = 88 mbit / 8 = 11 MB/s
The numbers should scale to gigabit at 110 MB/s, but I can't verify that personally (but I doubt it).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh damn! I meant Google Sets
Google Suggest an awesome display of information retrieval and AJAX at their best!!
Thanks for catching that. I with there was an edit button...
Clearly you have missed the subtle point I was trying to convey. Your solution - restrict trade with the third world - will only start a dominoe effect that will make things worse. Depriving those who already so deprived accomplishes nothing but keeping MORE wealth in those nations above the third world. Closing all the "cheap labor" factories that don't live up to American-style work ethics and environmental regulations will not help. Most of such industry can not afford to compete on the same level as American industry. They only have our bussiness because they are so, oh so, much cheaper. Maintaining a higher minimum wage, complying with international safety/pollution regulations and providing 40 hour+ overtime (instead of 50...60...) is just not possible without significantly raising costs to a degree at which it is no longer much finaincially feasable.
I don't disagree that greed is a part of the problem. However, I believe greed is but a small, nominal, factor in this issue. Once the first manufacturer moved its plants to China, all the rest HAD to follow. As an example, look how long U.S. steel companies and clothing manufacturers tried to keep their north american plants open. It took a decade or so until the 1st world companies had no choice but to close down their domestic plants and move abroad.
Back to the point. Imposing restrictions on a commodity resource industry in which there are almost no barriers to entry would work only domestically (and then just force companies to go abroad).
Excuse me, sometimes I don't proofread. That should read p(.9999), which I think should be obvious as p(.99) is not something I would like to see on a medication bottle.
This is also why some drugs get through the testing hurdles and still manage to kill/harm thousands of people. Even when the statistical formulae work out, there is still the chance that the result was due, in part, to randomness in the population. Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...
You and I say "why can't this support safari,oper,konquerer?" The whole cross-platform concept is very very expensive. It requires developers, testers, a qa qualification process, time, etc. All that is waaay to much (even for a rich company) to invest in every project. Add into this mix the fact that most of Google Labs' ambitious projects... well... fade gracefully into the night... it's just not worth it.
We're all familiar with the process by now. Google releases a new Beta. People use it, or they don't. After a few months, if enough interest remains, Google will start putting some muscle behind its beta. Other ideas don't get so popular and never escape the Google Labs page. (though they don't exactly die either... more like a deep sleep) There are many examples of underdeveloped proof of concept projects at http://labs.google.com/ like the really cool Google Ride Finder. The world just isnt ready for that yet.
Also see Google Suggest, the oldest remaining beta (4 years!!). It's downright crappy webpage is a front for an underdeveloped topic detection algorithm. I wish they'd finish it or open the source
Attention Parents: This is a warning! You must teach your children not to accept CDs or DVDs from strangers in schoolyard. RIAA is going to start deploying 'undercover' agents into schoolyards to catch these 'DVD dealers'. I predict the next round of law suits will be directed at little Timmy and his grade school friends.
The bottom line is: Yes we need to fix this situation, BUT we also need to do it very carefully as it is a very complex issue. Just shouting "mercy!" at Apple or the Government will force them to react. That reaction -- whatever it might be -- would likely be something to help us sleep at night and will certinely just make things worse in the big picture.
I highly recommend that you all to watch these two television commercials by the Ad Council here is the U.S. They are to encourage blood donation, but worth a watch to understand what I mean. See them here:
http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=40
Honestly, I don't see these recent events as anything different than has happened in the past. From the view of the NSA, knowing everything you that everybody does helps to protect the masses. You should have no doubt that the NSA was, in fact, really trying to combat national security threats with these wiretaps. You should also have no doubt that this information has been used for that purpose. Though we are more worried about the OTHER, less acceptable, ways it can/will be used.
The bottom line is that despite how helpful it can be for *them*, it is still a blatent violation of American civil rights and liberties. The NSA needs to do its job, but it needs to do it within the bounds of the law. Expect the NSA and every other government agency right down to the local sheriff to *always* try to push the limits. That includes altering/creating law, as was done here. The masses do the same. It's this endless struggle that makes this country special. The Executive branch stepped (jumped) over the line. The people found out, organized and went to the courts. The courts smacked the executive and the bussinesses involved. That's how America works.
If you don't believe me, just look back to the communist witch hunts during the cold war. Look at the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Im sure it'd be easy to look back further than that.
Reports of VMWares demise have been greatly exaggerated. They're just reacting to a new threat. VMWare is an EMC company, and I doubt EMC is going to let virtualization die. The future of EMC's 23.9 billion dollar empire depends on their ability to virtualize and cluster their machines. This is the quiet before the storm in the storage market...
While this is completely true, in many instances, it does significantly reduce the quantity of data transferred. This is especially true in systems like Amazon.com where lots of analysis is done on every page to present users with relevent information. That information no longer needs to be recomputed all the time.
Excellent! You're so close, now dig deeper.
We don't really care about "AJAX," do we? No... its the idea that excites any web developer. The concept of highly dynamic -- almost application like -- web pages without relying on any third party modifications (see: Java Applets, see: Flash). Is Ajax a fad? Probably. But its more than that. It's an evolutionary step in interactive web design.
Hiring dozens of QA people to discover discover a broken error path that a developer could have fixed in 5 minutes is inefficant and slow. Instead, developers can find many bugs quickly by excerising the data paths of their own code. After (or even better, before) writing a new snippet of code, a motivated developer writes a unit test for it. The test is simple: given certain specific conditions, your code should return some predictable result.
Example- I need to write code that tell me which of two numbers between 1 and 10 is larger. I would need to write at least 6 simple tests that would guarantee this code will work in virtually every scenario. I would need to three tests to make sure it works when the input in valid, and another 3 tests to make sure it works when the input is invalid. Sample inputs:
After a while there will be dozens, hundreds of even thousands of these simple tests. They will not mean much alone, but chained together they can provide a very stable testing bed. By running all the tests every time you release another version, developers can be pretty sure that everything that worked in the past will still work. (see regression testing).
Anyway, I didn't mean to start a lecture on basic testing principles... This post was motivated by the claims in the article regarding code quality. I would take the claim that 'XMMS is the most bug free software' with a grain of salt; a big grain. The results of any testing procedures are only as good as the individual tests. Lets say that the above example was one of the tests that Coverity was using in XMMS. Maybe it passed, great! But what where to happen if a user input -13 instead of 12? or maybe -5,000,000,000 and 1? How about the letter A as an argument?
They don't even give us code coverage numbers, or a count of tests... just a claim. I would bet that the AMANDA project had 10 times as many tests per line of code as XMMS. That would make AMANDA the most bug free software. Oh, and on another note, i noticed some comments about IE testing. I don't use IE, but I am 100% certain that Microsoft has an internal testing framework that puts this one to shame.
Exactly. Microsoft just has too much money now. Maybe they should forget about tightening XP against pirates and concentrate on Vista... Seriously, its the nature of the industry. Any security they can think of can and will be cracked (and fast).
Anyway many other posters seem to no understand that no going crazy with anti-piracy measures can be a great way to suck people in.
Don't get me wrong, the alert level do serve a purpose. They reassure people that the government is doing something, sure, but in reality they mean much more. Security at airports is massively increased. The national guard is all over the place in cities like New York and Washington. Everybody is a little bit more alert. I understand this. The point I want to make is that the way they work now is not very helpful in avoiding immediate terror threats.
I think the REAL reason for the terror alert levels is so that the government can periodically raise and lower them. That at least gets mentioned on most local news stations. It keeps the thought of an attack in everybody's mind. That's a good, if not scary thing. Growing up, I never would have thought that I would worry about terrorists when I get on a subway car... bus... plane... train... tunnel... bridge... I think this terror scale has benefitted us all. Comapanies now take disaister recovery very seriously. Its amazing to see how important colocation and site security has become to firms that never really gave it a second thought only 6 years ago.
If this were a patent case, we would look at who had each idea first. This isnt about patents... it is about implementation. I don't care if Microsoft came up with the "Windows Search" idea in 2000... or 1995... or 1985. The bottom line is that while Microsoft has been talking about desktop search for years, Apple went and actually did it a few (two?) years ago.
Lets look at another example. The Microsoft PowerToy for virtual desktop's dates back a decade (all the way to NT 4). I've used it a few times over the years and I have to say that it sucks. It works... but it sucks. If the MS people had just updated and integrated it into Windows with XP, Apple would not have been able to make such a big deal. What was stopping them? Its an excellent bussiness tool. Frankly I am annoyed that Apple too SO long to come out with virtual desktops. Linux has had them for what seems like forever, and there are already several (free) third-party virtual desktop solutions for the Mac.
Aqua vs. Aero?? Who cares. Maybe Aero was "thought of" first... Aqua has been in production for half a decade (something like that). If Aero was first, them congradulation to Apple on a great preemptive marketing strike.
Widgets and Gadgets. This is pure evil on both sides. Apple ripped the Widgets from Konfabulator. That program was GREAT, I even purchased a license. I was pretty annoyed that Apple did'nt even compensate the original innovator. Microsoft ripped it off of Apple... so I guess Apple deserved that.
The point I am trying to make is that in the end it doesnt really matter who came up with what idea first. The credit goes to the first to market. Welcome to economics... companies release NEW products, or BETTER products. Anything else is just market saturation. On another note, maybe Microsoft will wise up and stop discussing new enchancements 5-10 years before they go to market. Any other company would go out of bussiness by laying their cards face up on the table like that!
Also, you forgot to mention that they raised the alert level to "Critical" only *after* the 21 terrorists were captured... Should'nt it have been raised before? In short, no. Why? Because it means absolutely nothing. Security at airports, seaports and sensitive buildings remains in alert mode all the time (or at least its supposed to). It makes little sense to have heightened security only after we know something was going to happen. Like you said, the alert levels are more of a publicity-political thing than a real preventive measure.
Unless something has changed, I don't believe there is any copy-protection for OSX. The last few times i've installed/upgraded OSX, there was never any key required, nor did the DVD ever resist duplication.
To be honest, I would be suprised if Apple did NOT turn a blind eye to pirating of OSX. It happens to be a great way to get Windows users to *try* OSX. Assuming Windows-to-Mac converts will buy at least one Mac computer after trying OSX, the payoff would be substantial. (not to mention that it could be made into a bait-and-switch scenario, in which Apple hooks people with the OS and then forces them to get a Mac or license).
Actually paper was not always as plentiful as it is now. In fact, as recently as the 1800's, paper was a valuable commodity. (reference: history of paper) It's unfortunate, but likely, that countless important works have been erased and resued. Heck, even most of Leonardo DiVinici paintings were created on reused canvases.
Mmmm i'm pretty sure that "offsite backups" was what the OP was hinting at when he said "an asteroid may obliterate your region." I might be wrong, but I think its safe to say that you missed the point. Only a fool would state - with absolute certinty - that his/her data can never be lost.
Me too, but I think the that OP was being sarcastic. I chuckled.
A clot can become lodged in an artery near soldiers foot, resulting in no bloodflow to - and subsequent loss of - that limb as well.
If it hits the heart, it can again become lodged in an artery. At best that could kill part of the heart muscle.
If a clot gets into your brain, same story. At worst brain death. At best transient ischemic stroke with no life-altering side effects.
Bottom line is that if I were lying on the battlefield and bleeding out from the femural artery - with seconds to live - I would want the medic to take that chance. Who knows, maybe this thing will really work. I can see the modern ambulance equiped with 'ultasonic turnaquets'.
"We rent TV series on DVD and we easily go through 10 disks in a two weeks, thereby hitting the limit quickly."
You're definitely in the front-end of their customer usage bell curve... " 2.5%". I use Netflix primary for TV series as well. It comes out to like 30 cents per episode for me, definitely worth it. By some quick math you and your wife plow through ((10*4)/14)*7) = 20 episodes per week, or 20*4 = 80 episodes a month.
In the U.S., TV series generally last 5 or 6 seasons (just enough pass 100 episodes and enter syndication... figures). So at 125 episodes for a series, you can clear from premier to finale in 125/80 =~ 1.5 months or 8 complete series a year (1040 episodes). Anyway the whole point of this excersize is to show you that Netflix is helping you out by limiting your annual TV episode consumption to around 2^10 episodes/year. Why is this a help??
a) I think most doctors would consider 2^10 episodes of TV a "healthy" annual upper limit.
b) Any faster and you'll run out of semi-decent TV series to slurp down.
"Did you know that users of Netflix who continually use their limit of what they pay for for access get the speed at which they receive movies limited?" Really? I had'nt noticed. I keep my NetFlix dvd turn around very short (mail back on the 2nd day usually) and I have not seen even the slightest change in delivery turnaround. I mail one out on monday and then the new dvd is there on wednesday, like clockwork. They don't guarantee delivery times at all, and it varies for popular movies/new releases (though I have yet to get a delay in months). Do you live in some remote area? I can see them keeping stricter guidlines in urban areas over rural/small towns.
Wow thats a good idea providing that the computer truly removed it from the missing list and doesnt just mark it as "found" or something... because when you really lose a few dvd's it might get flagged by their loss prevention script/account nuker.
100 Mbits / 8b = 12.5 MB
So the absolute max of that NIC would be a mere 12.5 MB/s, while a good quality, recent generation IDE hard drive will put out about 50 MB/s. To make it worse, file transfers use TCP. In practice, I have found the TCP vegas overhead to be 12-15%. So you're real 100 mbit NIC max is about:
100 mbit * .88 = 88 mbit / 8 = 11 MB/s
The numbers should scale to gigabit at 110 MB/s, but I can't verify that personally (but I doubt it).