Leaving Trolling aside, it would be interesting to read a review of the lastest versions of the 3 SQL engines, with benchmarks and everything. Does anyone knows a site/magazine which still do those kind of performance tests?
1. Log in usen your OS admin password (Linux/Windows) 2. Insert a CD 3. Execute a program which alters CD drive functionality 4. Hide all trace the program. 5. Disable some OS functions.
I guess points from 3 to 5 would not be possible if point 1 was not there. But then again, that is the nature of TROJANS, when you run them, they appear to be something else, and they do malicious things once installed.
To give an example, imagine you buy Quake 5 game for Linux, and to install it you need to at certain point have root privileges (I think on most Linux distros you MUST have root privs to install a RPM).
If you had downloaded the.ISO from a pirate bay, you would be worried, but if you BOUGHT the DVD from BestBuy or any other store you would expect that the program will do no harm.
Vote with your cash, buy non-DRM encumbered CDs or else just steal it. I'd prefer to take the moral issues and risk of stealing rather than just be Sony's bitch and install their shitty rootkit on my computer.
Or better yet, buy your music from cheaper and DRM-free places.
According to his post, it seems Sony's fix "patch" makes a little "contact home" contacting Sony servers. This even when sony claims that their software didnt made contact with them.
Slashdot covered previously the intial XCP rootkit story.
The inquirer has an interesting article on the Sony DRM technology overall.
AND My all life rant with Open Source software is...
I studied 5 years to have a Software Engineering major, with specialization in Software developing.
I specifically DID NOT a career related to CUSTOMER SERVICES and whatever. Now, a bunch of people is telling me to give away my software for FREE and charge for "SERVICES".
I know how to do GREAT QUALITY SOFTWARE. I know how to systematize processes, I know how to detect bottleneck processes in systems and how to help a company process using computing technology.
What I DO NOT KNOW how to do is to answer telephones and say "HELLO, CUSTOMER SUPPORT SERVICE"...
So, what the Open Source buisness model is saying me is "spend your time dooing what you know how to do, and give it away", and "try get money to live by doing something you do not know how to do".
I am sure that if I follow that line I will end selling Tacos in the Periferico, of course everyone may end loving me online because I have teh_project.sf.net online...
Your task is to edit an existing Automotive product title to make it more human readable and update and add additional feature points about the product. This HIT will require some research to complete. Approval depends on the quality of your title and feature points, determined by a manual review.
So, they get a lot of results and they do not approve anyone of them because the quality is not enough. And they get the job done uh?
Kind of reminds me of the Car companies buyout. IIRC some of the "deluxe" car companies like Jaguar and Renault being acquired by the "standard" companies like Nissan and Ford.
I think the same thing has been happening with computers. Of course SGI computers are better, but it seems the real money is in the standard cheap hardware.
Unfortunately there does not appear to be a market for them. The reason may be that companies that once bought high end servers may be opting now for cheap clusters of low end machines (with free operating systems).
SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story.
They should change their focus on making 3D Video cards and accesories (like nvidia and ATI). Making them really good AND 100% Linux/BSD/Win/etc compliant. This will allow them to exploit the OpenGL standard they somehow created.
The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers.
It is all just a matter of compatibility. If one company manages to make an optical Hard Disk which interface is the same SATA or IDE, and which is affordable of course, then it will surely be a great replacement for the current slow disks.
The same goes for RAM, or motherboards. As long as they continue providing the same connecting interfaces (and are backwards compatible) they wont have any problem getting into the market.
When I was younger, I got the SNES, after I have had the NES. Both consoles where a big part of my infancy.
My mother used to see me play, I played Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and some other games.
Now, there were some titles that she actually played, and when an Aunt visited us, she also tried to play (I am speaking about 35 AND 45 yr old women). The games they enjoyed where: "Mario Kart", "Pilot Wings" and "Where in time is Carmen Sandiego". Of course they didnt played a lot, and they where not good (they were terrible in fact =oP) But those where the games they played.
Now, on a side note. My father didn't played at all and he even got a book titled: Video Kids, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo to try to understand why we spent a lot of time playing (just wanted to state that he is from the "old school"). But, there was one game that really got him, it was Tetris. I remember sometimes me and my brother would be pissed off because he wont let us play because he kept playing Tetris (NES).
Now, I also (barely) remember with the Atari, there were some games which were played with the other control that was not the joystick (the rotary controllers or paddles). I remember a game that could be played by 4 persons with 4 of these controllers. Man, that game was incredible. In the game, each person had to take care of a "fortress" on each corner of the screen, and she controlled a small paddle as in Pong and had to avoid that the ball hit her fortress.
The important thing is that we played that with my mother also. And I barely remember that some of my cousins (women) enjoyed playing that.
Nowadays, I have some games in my laptop. I just installed The Sims 2, and my girlfriend seems to enjoy playing it. Also, I downloaded a SNES emulator and the game Mario Super Pickcross (nonogram) which to my surprise, the also enjoyed playing (darn! I had to tell her to borrow me my computer to work!).
To conclude, I think the main issue with Women games is that they are very specific games. Most women do not enjoy current FPS, this is, blowing up whatever they see. They also do not enjoy current RTS, this is creating a super-whooper-l33t army and blow up all the oponents.
They also do not enjoy curent RPGs, that is, developing a mega-super-l33t warrior/mage/avatar to blow up whoever crosses your way.
How does the game industry tries to fix it?, just adding boobs and long hair to the character. That is stupid. The argument is that in that way women will feel more "identified" with the character. That is stupid.
Think for a second about my next RTS. What is the "soul" of a RTS game? - Develop an economy (specifically on current games develop you base) - Create manaegable units (specifically "troops" on current RTS). - Do something with those units (specifically "kick enemy asses" RTS).
Now, the "develop an economy" part is one that women do not have problem with that. And it could be modified to develop [something else] (as in The Sims, where you develop a home).
Second, when the manaegable units enter, it is something that women dont like. Because it is where the "ass kicking" focus starts. Instead of "troops" you could create other kind of units. And, the actions of course should be changed, instead of making them able to destroy, what about transporting or even fighting the nature (imagine a RTS game where you focused on evacuating native people from a place before a hurrican attacked). You do not need to kill anyone!
And the last sentence brings the third point, do something with those units. This is where the main "quick fun" should be.
Now, all this was for RTS games. I am sure the same analysis can be done to FPS games (of course they will be FP? instead) and other kind of games.
It would be very interesting to get statisticall information from Yahoo games, to see which of their online games are played by women.
Actually, it is a rip off of netvibes and all of them are rip offs of myYahoo portal (only with a lot of javascript [no, i wont use THAT buzzword]).
Microsoft has another page which IMO is better than this, it is start.com. It works with firefox and it is under that domain that the new Hotmail beta service is 'hidden'.
about the Windows Live bit, it is just plain brand naming.
I think it would be better to have a "maturity threshold value", which you can specify when browsing/searching wikipedia. That way, you could select a "Only Featured articles" if you wanted to see only the good articles or you could slide it to "Even stubs" if you wanted to see those almost unuseful stub articles.
And btw, I think the printed wiki should print JUST the featured articles.
I think an important point to note is the number of users (more than 195 million users acording to Wikipedia [i know, i know... maybe it was better to get the number from my ass]).
And yet worse, unlike other software which keep open ports, Messenger software has the slight property that its users does not know a lot about computers to take precautions.
About heterogeneity, it would be nice to see if the "attacked because it is the most used" argument of MS Windows holds here. IIRC Aol IM is the most widley used messenger. Which one will get more viruses?? AIM? or MSNM? place your bets!
Note: I would had preffered to make a nice looking list, but Slashdot was spitting me " Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 36.7)." so I had to remove all the CRLF from my post. Sorry
I am sure that "call home" approach of the Blue Ray players will not be a problem.
I remember wonce I downloaded a crack for a program which protection mechanism consisted in a key validation. To validate the key the program sent it to the company servers.
I thought the crack was really awesome as it simulated the actual company server and you only had to tell the program you where using a "proxy" to connect to internet and point it to 127.0.0.1:XXXX. While running the crack program.
When the program tried to connect to the server to validate your key, the crack program responded saying the key was valid.
Once I did some cracks for some programs (just for education), never released anything. But I learned the different "levels" of cracks, being this crack one of the finest and cleanest one.
I am sure, after the Blu-Disk or HD-DVD PC drives come into the market, those kind of hacks will become available. It is just a mather of time.
If you think that encryption could stop this approach I am sure not, it is just a matter of "brute forcing" the keys in the messages that go through the localhost connection.
...The strict typing and verbose exception handling is annoying if you just want to get something done quick. [...] you start to appreciate that the language tries to force good programming practice, and that a lot of bugs are caught not at runtime but at compile time (or even as you are typing if you use a tool like Eclipse). This is a lot more important than raw performance, since a lot more time is spent on maintaining a product than building it in the first place (90% is number often cited).
Just a small comment, all those properties you mention are part of the Java specificaction language, it is trivial to create a native-compiled language that uses exactly the same Java specification (the same BNF). All those properties have nothing to do with the virtual-machine oriented nature of Java which makes it slower than the native compiled languages.
and that a lot of bugs are caught not at runtime but at compile time (or even as you are typing if you use a tool like Eclipse
If you want some similar functionality for a compiled based language (C/C++) try using the CDT plugin for Eclipse.
does the average user *really* need them? I certainly can't remember ever having said 'Damn, I wish this piece-of-crap-OS would support symlinks' during my Windows days.
Man, you need to use symlinks to see how useful they are. As someone pointed before, symlinks are great to create compilations of files on a directory. Also, they are very useful if you want to use different types of libraries (DLLs) on different programs (in different directoires).
As for the "average user", as someone else said also, this symlink will surely help the file system Virtual folders or whatever is named. It is the same as the SQL oriented file system, you could ask, will the average user make use of SQL queries?, and the answer is that, they will, indirectley through the applications that are make use of that technology.
Remember, this symlink will be a feature of the FILESYSTEM, which will be used by the programs. I for one would preffer to have multiple symlinks to DLLS than to have to copy the libraries through all the hard disk (or maybe not DLLS but other files).
I agree with that, I use Latex (Tecnixcenter) to typeset documents, I use gnuplot or Graphcalc to create graphics and mysql with java for databases (I dont know any scripting language like python or tcl/tk... I will learn them one day...).
Basically, what does an Office suites provides: - Writing (Tex... or Abiword if you like WYSIWYG) - Statistical oriented Data management (you could use R) - Database oriented data management (Use mysql, or any other DB management, even Access!!) - Mail (I use only webmail [gmail] but feel free to use anything)
The fact that with the Writing subapp of these office suites you can do all 4 is incredibly bad.
I remember that, once, there was an opertaing system and a community whoes trend on applications was to write simple, stand alone, task oriented applications whose results could be combined to make something big.
I am sure that is possible to do making use of Graphical User Interfaces! And, I am also sure that if the approach to program was that, applications will tend to be a hell of more stable.
The only downside I see on that is that there should be a need of a lot of standarization in the different output/input formats. But I think this is not difficult now with XML.
Why on earth would any company ship their valuable data to a third party to process?
Completley agree with you, moreover the companies (as stated on the article) that could use this service are finance focused companies and maybe some phramacy companies.
This makes me think on the software laiability issues point, I am sure these companies would demand something very very far from the typical "EULA" or contract to use this service.
Darn I am sure any of the big stock exchange palyers would be really pissed of if someone was sniffing their data during the transit from Sun clusters to their clients.
I think a good way for Sun to make this service go up is that a company could rent them this CPU power and lease it to smaller users. Something on the lines of an Eceed UNIX client whose "virtual" servers run on these Sun clusters.
I remember I saw a talk on this system on the TADA0-IJCAI05 workshop. IIRC they are planning to give away CPU!
Does this mean that the only reason why someone would want such computing power is because they want to run projects they wouldn't want the public to know about?
No.
The basis of their project is that it would be better for companies to buy processing time than to build their own distributed processing network.
Of course it is interesting to see who (in the real world) are those companies?. If we suppose they are some top-notch companies that use a lot of processing power (like stock market companies wanting to run their models) they may preffer (and they may already have) to run their own servers to protect their secrets.
If they are not so big companies with not too much data then they may have enough power with a beowulf cluster of this-and-that.
The main problem I see here is that any company willing to "buy" this power have to ponder at least this two issues: - They have to give their data and algorithms. - They have to relay on SUNs servers stability.
Now, I think the theory behind this service is quite good and, I am thinking to use it as an application case for my risk management on multi agent systems thesis. But I hope when I start looking at the test cases there are at least some companies over there using it.
LCD/DLP/Plasma are still not bright enough for well lit spaces (IMHO). I don't always want to use the basement for my Television viewing.
While I agree with your point I think it is nice that companies are discontinuing production of CRT at once. I think this will increase the competitivity for better flat display TV. And I am sure it will also make its prices drop (and this is something I would really want because the prices are still not affordable for people like me).
Also, as there is more companies concentrating on competing in this technologies I am sure the issues you state are going to be lessen. I would really love to see the flat[or other than CRT] technologies catching as standard alternatives NOW!! (even for developing countries like mine [.MX]) becuase, as a slashdoter said before, when you watch a web page with a CRT tube is like "staring at a 60watt lightbulb", and that is why after 8 hours of continuous work you end with a just-shoot-me-eye strain*.
*Just as a side note try making ALL your background color BLACK and your fonts color white just for 1 day and yo will see how nice is that setup for your eyes [of course, you will also see how ALL the internet pages AND Operating System applications are soooo badly designed specifically for white/bright backgrounds].
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving Trolling aside, it would be interesting to read a review of the lastest versions of the 3 SQL engines, with benchmarks and everything. Does anyone knows a site/magazine which still do those kind of performance tests?
No, I think Windows is not to blame now:
.ISO from a pirate bay, you would be worried, but if you BOUGHT the DVD from BestBuy or any other store you would expect that the program will do no harm.
1. Log in usen your OS admin password (Linux/Windows)
2. Insert a CD
3. Execute a program which alters CD drive functionality
4. Hide all trace the program.
5. Disable some OS functions.
I guess points from 3 to 5 would not be possible if point 1 was not there. But then again, that is the nature of TROJANS, when you run them, they appear to be something else, and they do malicious things once installed.
To give an example, imagine you buy Quake 5 game for Linux, and to install it you need to at certain point have root privileges (I think on most Linux distros you MUST have root privs to install a RPM).
If you had downloaded the
Vote with your cash, buy non-DRM encumbered CDs or else just steal it. I'd prefer to take the moral issues and risk of stealing rather than just be Sony's bitch and install their shitty rootkit on my computer.
Or better yet, buy your music from cheaper and DRM-free places.
SysInternal's Mark Russinovich has posted a new entry about Sony's XCP DRM technology.
According to his post, it seems Sony's fix "patch" makes a little "contact home" contacting Sony servers. This even when sony claims that their software didnt made contact with them.
Slashdot covered previously the intial XCP rootkit story.
The inquirer has an interesting article on the Sony DRM technology overall.
And it seems community have found several alternate uses for the XCP technology which include hiding game cheating software and even to bypass DRM technology
AND
My all life rant with Open Source software is...
I studied 5 years to have a Software Engineering major, with specialization in Software developing.
I specifically DID NOT a career related to CUSTOMER SERVICES and whatever. Now, a bunch of people is telling me to give away my software for FREE and charge for "SERVICES".
I know how to do GREAT QUALITY SOFTWARE. I know how to systematize processes, I know how to detect bottleneck processes in systems and how to help a company process using computing technology.
What I DO NOT KNOW how to do is to answer telephones and say "HELLO, CUSTOMER SUPPORT SERVICE"...
So, what the Open Source buisness model is saying me is "spend your time dooing what you know how to do, and give it away", and "try get money to live by doing something you do not know how to do".
I am sure that if I follow that line I will end selling Tacos in the Periferico, of course everyone may end loving me online because I have teh_project.sf.net online...
Your task is to edit an existing Automotive product title to make it more human readable and update and add additional feature points about the product. This HIT will require some research to complete. Approval depends on the quality of your title and feature points, determined by a manual review.
So, they get a lot of results and they do not approve anyone of them because the quality is not enough. And they get the job done uh?
Yeah, sure... where do I sign... *sigh*
Kind of reminds me of the Car companies buyout. IIRC some of the "deluxe" car companies like Jaguar and Renault being acquired by the "standard" companies like Nissan and Ford.
I think the same thing has been happening with computers. Of course SGI computers are better, but it seems the real money is in the standard cheap hardware.
Unfortunately there does not appear to be a market for them.
The reason may be that companies that once bought high end servers may be opting now for cheap clusters of low end machines (with free operating systems).
SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story.
They should change their focus on making 3D Video cards and accesories (like nvidia and ATI). Making them really good AND 100% Linux/BSD/Win/etc compliant. This will allow them to exploit the OpenGL standard they somehow created.
Just a IMHO thought.
The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers.
It is all just a matter of compatibility. If one company manages to make an optical Hard Disk which interface is the same SATA or IDE, and which is affordable of course, then it will surely be a great replacement for the current slow disks.
The same goes for RAM, or motherboards. As long as they continue providing the same connecting interfaces (and are backwards compatible) they wont have any problem getting into the market.
darn... silly me,
real links:
http://emmaf.isuisse.com/anarcook/co2bombs.htm
http://emmaf.isuisse.com/anarcook/tchxplvs.htm
http://emmaf.isuisse.com/anarcook/lttrboms.htm
Anyway... you got it no?
*wink* *wink* *sob* *sob*
Sure!
;-) ;-) *sob* *sob* *wink*
I specially recommend that you use one of the many little tricks here.
Specially
any
one of
these.
HTH.
You may be interested in my signature... and my XCP affected Album list.
Hope this helps!
I just want to comment about my own experience.
When I was younger, I got the SNES, after I have had the NES. Both consoles where a big part of my infancy.
My mother used to see me play, I played Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and some other games.
Now, there were some titles that she actually played, and when an Aunt visited us, she also tried to play (I am speaking about 35 AND 45 yr old women). The games they enjoyed where: "Mario Kart", "Pilot Wings" and "Where in time is Carmen Sandiego". Of course they didnt played a lot, and they where not good (they were terrible in fact =oP) But those where the games they played.
Now, on a side note. My father didn't played at all and he even got a book titled: Video Kids, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo to try to understand why we spent a lot of time playing (just wanted to state that he is from the "old school"). But, there was one game that really got him, it was Tetris. I remember sometimes me and my brother would be pissed off because he wont let us play because he kept playing Tetris (NES).
Now, I also (barely) remember with the Atari, there were some games which were played with the other control that was not the joystick (the rotary controllers or paddles). I remember a game that could be played by 4 persons with 4 of these controllers. Man, that game was incredible. In the game, each person had to take care of a "fortress" on each corner of the screen, and she controlled a small paddle as in Pong and had to avoid that the ball hit her fortress.
The important thing is that we played that with my mother also. And I barely remember that some of my cousins (women) enjoyed playing that.
Nowadays, I have some games in my laptop. I just installed The Sims 2, and my girlfriend seems to enjoy playing it. Also, I downloaded a SNES emulator and the game Mario Super Pickcross (nonogram) which to my surprise, the also enjoyed playing (darn! I had to tell her to borrow me my computer to work!).
To conclude, I think the main issue with Women games is that they are very specific games. Most women do not enjoy current FPS, this is, blowing up whatever they see. They also do not enjoy current RTS, this is creating a super-whooper-l33t army and blow up all the oponents.
They also do not enjoy curent RPGs, that is, developing a mega-super-l33t warrior/mage/avatar to blow up whoever crosses your way.
How does the game industry tries to fix it?, just adding boobs and long hair to the character. That is stupid. The argument is that in that way women will feel more "identified" with the character. That is stupid.
Think for a second about my next RTS. What is the "soul" of a RTS game?
- Develop an economy (specifically on current games develop you base)
- Create manaegable units (specifically "troops" on current RTS).
- Do something with those units (specifically "kick enemy asses" RTS).
Now, the "develop an economy" part is one that women do not have problem with that. And it could be modified to develop [something else] (as in The Sims, where you develop a home).
Second, when the manaegable units enter, it is something that women dont like. Because it is where the "ass kicking" focus starts. Instead of "troops" you could create other kind of units. And, the actions of course should be changed, instead of making them able to destroy, what about transporting or even fighting the nature (imagine a RTS game where you focused on evacuating native people from a place before a hurrican attacked). You do not need to kill anyone!
And the last sentence brings the third point, do something with those units. This is where the main "quick fun" should be.
Now, all this was for RTS games. I am sure the same analysis can be done to FPS games (of course they will be FP? instead) and other kind of games.
It would be very interesting to get statisticall information from Yahoo games, to see which of their online games are played by women.
Actually, it is a rip off of netvibes and all of them are rip offs of myYahoo portal (only with a lot of javascript [no, i wont use THAT buzzword]).
Microsoft has another page which IMO is better than this, it is start.com. It works with firefox and it is under that domain that the new Hotmail beta service is 'hidden'.
about the Windows Live bit, it is just plain brand naming.
I think it would be better to have a "maturity threshold value", which you can specify when browsing/searching wikipedia. That way, you could select a "Only Featured articles" if you wanted to see only the good articles or you could slide it to "Even stubs" if you wanted to see those almost unuseful stub articles.
And btw, I think the printed wiki should print JUST the featured articles.
I think an important point to note is the number of users (more than 195 million users acording to Wikipedia [i know, i know... maybe it was better to get the number from my ass]).
And yet worse, unlike other software which keep open ports, Messenger software has the slight property that its users does not know a lot about computers to take precautions.
About heterogeneity, it would be nice to see if the "attacked because it is the most used" argument of MS Windows holds here. IIRC Aol IM is the most widley used messenger. Which one will get more viruses?? AIM? or MSNM? place your bets!
Only-a-matter-of-time ... For Now
Browse other stories in the same department:
Benetton Says No to RFIDs
HP Licenses Apple's iPod & iTMS
Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
If you know about other CD's, feel free to help.
The list of CD's so far are:
Note: I would had preffered to make a nice looking list, but Slashdot was spitting me " Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 36.7)." so I had to remove all the CRLF from my post. Sorry
Nothing Is Sound. Switchfoot Unwritten [ENHANCED] Natasha Bedingfield Ride Shelly Fairchild 12 Songs Neil Diamond Touch Amerie Bloom Remix Album [ENHANCED] Sarah McLachlan Kasabian Kasabian The Essential Pete Seeger [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Pete Seeger Jeru [ENHANCED] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Gerry Mulligan imes Like These Buddy Jewell, Bob Brookmeyer & Friends [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Bob Brookmeyer Healthy In Paranoid Times [ENHANCED] Our Lady Peace Cautivo [DUALDISC] Chayanne The Invisible Invasion Coral, The Coral Defined Amici Forever Suspicious Activity [ENHANCED] The Bad Plus Manhattan Symphonie [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Dexter Gordon Phantoms Acceptance On Ne Change Pas Celine Dion Get Right with the Man Van Zant To Love Again [ENHANCED] Chris Botti Life [DUALDISC] Ricky Martin The Essential Dion [ENHANCED] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Dion Faso Latido A Static Lullaby Change It All Goapele Susie Suh Susie Suh My Very Special Guests [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] George Jones Broken Valley Life of Agony Silver's Blue [ENHANCED] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] Horace Silver Z [ENHANCED] My Morning Jacket
Just a little thought.
I am sure that "call home" approach of the Blue Ray players will not be a problem.
I remember wonce I downloaded a crack for a program which protection mechanism consisted in a key validation. To validate the key the program sent it to the company servers.
I thought the crack was really awesome as it simulated the actual company server and you only had to tell the program you where using a "proxy" to connect to internet and point it to 127.0.0.1:XXXX. While running the crack program.
When the program tried to connect to the server to validate your key, the crack program responded saying the key was valid.
Once I did some cracks for some programs (just for education), never released anything. But I learned the different "levels" of cracks, being this crack one of the finest and cleanest one.
I am sure, after the Blu-Disk or HD-DVD PC drives come into the market, those kind of hacks will become available. It is just a mather of time.
If you think that encryption could stop this approach I am sure not, it is just a matter of "brute forcing" the keys in the messages that go through the localhost connection.
Neat uh?
Just a small comment, all those properties you mention are part of the Java specificaction language, it is trivial to create a native-compiled language that uses exactly the same Java specification (the same BNF). All those properties have nothing to do with the virtual-machine oriented nature of Java which makes it slower than the native compiled languages.
and that a lot of bugs are caught not at runtime but at compile time (or even as you are typing if you use a tool like Eclipse
If you want some similar functionality for a compiled based language (C/C++) try using the CDT plugin for Eclipse.
does the average user *really* need them? I certainly can't remember ever having said 'Damn, I wish this piece-of-crap-OS would support symlinks' during my Windows days.
Man, you need to use symlinks to see how useful they are. As someone pointed before, symlinks are great to create compilations of files on a directory. Also, they are very useful if you want to use different types of libraries (DLLs) on different programs (in different directoires).
As for the "average user", as someone else said also, this symlink will surely help the file system Virtual folders or whatever is named. It is the same as the SQL oriented file system, you could ask, will the average user make use of SQL queries?, and the answer is that, they will, indirectley through the applications that are make use of that technology.
Remember, this symlink will be a feature of the FILESYSTEM, which will be used by the programs. I for one would preffer to have multiple symlinks to DLLS than to have to copy the libraries through all the hard disk (or maybe not DLLS but other files).
I think what you want to say is that Office Suites suck overall.
I agree with that, I use Latex (Tecnixcenter) to typeset documents, I use gnuplot or Graphcalc to create graphics and mysql with java for databases (I dont know any scripting language like python or tcl/tk... I will learn them one day...).
Basically, what does an Office suites provides:
- Writing (Tex... or Abiword if you like WYSIWYG)
- Statistical oriented Data management (you could use R)
- Database oriented data management (Use mysql, or any other DB management, even Access!!)
- Mail (I use only webmail [gmail] but feel free to use anything)
The fact that with the Writing subapp of these office suites you can do all 4 is incredibly bad.
I remember that, once, there was an opertaing system and a community whoes trend on applications was to write simple, stand alone, task oriented applications whose results could be combined to make something big.
I am sure that is possible to do making use of Graphical User Interfaces!
And, I am also sure that if the approach to program was that, applications will tend to be a hell of more stable.
The only downside I see on that is that there should be a need of a lot of standarization in the different output/input formats. But I think this is not difficult now with XML.
Why on earth would any company ship their valuable data to a third party to process?
Completley agree with you, moreover the companies (as stated on the article) that could use this service are finance focused companies and maybe some phramacy companies.
This makes me think on the software laiability issues point, I am sure these companies would demand something very very far from the typical "EULA" or contract to use this service.
Darn I am sure any of the big stock exchange palyers would be really pissed of if someone was sniffing their data during the transit from Sun clusters to their clients.
I think a good way for Sun to make this service go up is that a company could rent them this CPU power and lease it to smaller users. Something on the lines of an Eceed UNIX client whose "virtual" servers run on these Sun clusters.
I remember I saw a talk on this system on the TADA0-IJCAI05 workshop. IIRC they are planning to give away CPU!
Does this mean that the only reason why someone would want such computing power is because they want to run projects they wouldn't want the public to know about?
No.
The basis of their project is that it would be better for companies to buy processing time than to build their own distributed processing network.
Of course it is interesting to see who (in the real world) are those companies?. If we suppose they are some top-notch companies that use a lot of processing power (like stock market companies wanting to run their models) they may preffer (and they may already have) to run their own servers to protect their secrets.
If they are not so big companies with not too much data then they may have enough power with a beowulf cluster of this-and-that.
The main problem I see here is that any company willing to "buy" this power have to ponder at least this two issues:
- They have to give their data and algorithms.
- They have to relay on SUNs servers stability.
Now, I think the theory behind this service is quite good and, I am thinking to use it as an application case for my risk management on multi agent systems thesis. But I hope when I start looking at the test cases there are at least some companies over there using it.
LCD/DLP/Plasma are still not bright enough for well lit spaces (IMHO). I don't always want to use the basement for my Television viewing.
While I agree with your point I think it is nice that companies are discontinuing production of CRT at once. I think this will increase the competitivity for better flat display TV. And I am sure it will also make its prices drop (and this is something I would really want because the prices are still not affordable for people like me).
Also, as there is more companies concentrating on competing in this technologies I am sure the issues you state are going to be lessen. I would really love to see the flat[or other than CRT] technologies catching as standard alternatives NOW!! (even for developing countries like mine [.MX]) becuase, as a slashdoter said before, when you watch a web page with a CRT tube is like "staring at a 60watt lightbulb", and that is why after 8 hours of continuous work you end with a just-shoot-me-eye strain*.
*Just as a side note try making ALL your background color BLACK and your fonts color white just for 1 day and yo will see how nice is that setup for your eyes [of course, you will also see how ALL the internet pages AND Operating System applications are soooo badly designed specifically for white/bright backgrounds].