Spheres have minimal surface area when the surface is smooth. When the surface is made of aligned cubes, this is no longer true. Consider the two dimensional case, packing 25 units:
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx
xxxx
the square above has a perimiter of 20 units, the more circular shape below has a perimiter of 22 units. The square is the optimal shape for smallest perimiter, and this projects onto higher dimensions.
Non-cube shapes are interesting because a cube has minimal surface area - you might want more surface area because external i/o is through the exposed faces. Also, varied shapes might provide better cooling, access to inner modules, etc.
Nice to see that the masters of war have found a way to develop their implements of destruction without resorting to messy nuke tests that could harm children or other living things. Will they have stickers that say, "No animals were harmed in the development of this warhead?" I hope the folks at peta are happy about this.
Indeed. Read the page that you linked to, it describes "two of the web's coolest FREE software applications - Gator and OfferCompanion!" Ooh, ah. Be the first on your block to have happy jolly fun anthrax powder.
Most users aren't going to know what Gator and Bonzai are, and they will want these "web's coolest applications" that come with the cute game. It's just insidious.
One of my friends is fond of the game
Snood
for Windows, and encouraged me to check it out. When I did,
I found that it came with two annoying bits of software, both a copy of Gator, and links to Bonzai Buddy, that stick themselves in your Start menu and various other places. Yick! (And goodbye Gator, banzai Banzai, and so long Snood.)
Before I did any of this fancy stuff, I'd settle for fixing aol and outlook to have all mail sent to more than three recipients to be automatically bcc'd, unless overridden by the sender.
This article is talking about security problems. That's only one kind of bad. Other kinds of bad include unreliable (hangs, bsods, whatever), incompatible, obfuscatory, and so forth.
Microsoft might be able and interested to remove security bugs from their software, no downside for them there. But what if Microsoft would engage in some obvious "good software practices" to make their software less bad? Like what if they made their software simpler? More modular? Like if their OS could run whatever window system, window manager, file browser you wanted, a la UNIX. Or whatever web browser. Imagine.
What kind of idiotic system design is it that has all these user-mode applications inextricably woven into the fabric of the OS? What unfathomable nonsense. What person who ever studied software engineering buys this silly story?
How about if MS would use unobfuscated data formats, so that it would be easy to work with document data (let's grep through my.doc files!)
or multimedia data (let's convert between.wma and.mp3!).
How about if they had a simple and stable API for writing software, so that it would be easy to port software between the MS OS and other OS's. Fat chance.
These are some of the things that make MS bad. Will they ever address them? Magic 8-ball says, "Outlook not so good."
Not only that, but the consumer goes to Best Buy and sees the Windows PCs running lame M$ screensaver (the app usually active at retailers), and then sees Linux running muy macho jwz xscreensaver. Once there's a row of Linux PC's at Best Buy (and therein lies the rub), M$ is d00med for sure.
This article isn't just talking about people who know how to play chess, it's talking about people who play lots of chess - every day, or every weekend. Club players, tournament players, or people who hang around at the chess tables in parks, or who spend hours a day on the net chess servers.
At times in my life I've played lots of chess like this, played in clubs every week, lots of weekend tournaments, internet chess every day. You get to know the players who gather at tournaments and clubs. In contrast to the romantic image that some people have that
chess makes kids smart,
I found that most chess players are of fairly average intelligence, and many focus on chess to the exclusion of other pursuits, like many hackers do. I found that many chess players were more interested than other people, in gambling - betting on football games or bridge or cribbage or whatever, and their satisfaction in tournament play was all about winning money prizes rather than about the aesthetics of the game. Players might be ingenious over the board, but otherwise utterly lacking in insight, knowledge, intelligence, or refinement.
I do think that teaching children to play chess can help sharpen their thinking skills.
Then again, the findings of this study don't surprise me at all, but I don't think it's talking about casual chess players.
As you know, our President has put us on High Alert, and that means more security, and naturally, that's going to affect accessibility. Vigilance is the price we Americans must pay for liberty, and if that makes the web site less accessible, then deal with it.
But Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson says the criticism is
unfair. In an emailed response to Mullen's commentary, Davidson wrote
that Oracle is giving the holes reported by Litchfield the "highest priority,"
but suggested that everything depends on what your definition of
"unbreakable" is.
Rather than representing a literal claim that Oracle's products are
impregnable, the campaign "speaks to" fourteen independent security
evaluations that Oracle's database server passed, Davidson wrote, and
"represents Oracle's commitment to a secure product lifecycle for our
entire product suite."
So Oracle says it's fair that they assert that their software is unbreakable when it is not, but they say it's unfair when others criticize their misleading and errant claim. What's wrong with this picture?
On the dual processor theme, the X Window System probably takes as much CPU scrolling your terminal window during the make as the compiler takes churning out your code. Having a processor handling the screen while another processor sends it the stuff to draw
is a good idea.
Wow. There is really lots of interesting historical context in there, and doing a quick scan for my quaint and curious forgotten posts, it looks like most of them are there.
Until computer networks were overrun by the multitudes, they were populated by mostly research and development sorts of folks, and the signal to noise ratio of the posts was a bit higher. But that only lasted a few minutes.
Linux GUI interfaces are not useful to novices unless they are ubiquitous. For instance, the article describes modem config available in Mandrake 8.0, or Star Office. Unless these GUIs are installed, available, and identical on (practically) every system, like the MSWin Dialup Networking GUI or MS Word are, they aren't a very compelling alternative to Windows GUIs. I say this as a hacker with no love for MS, who has been using UNIX for 20+ years.
It's not a hub. It's a switch. There's a difference.
Yes, a switch, not a hub. Now explain to me why a person using this device, sitting in a cubicle or bedroom or office, needs a switch rather than a hub. Then explain why this person, who has several networked devices and the cables that come with them, is going to be better off with this switchplate switch rather than a typical standalone hub (or switch). The cost saving business, about not having to run four cables from a router, is silly.
the classic in this vein
on
Electronic Abacus
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Slashdot Mirror
Spheres have minimal surface area when the surface is smooth. When the surface is made of aligned cubes, this is no longer true. Consider the two dimensional case, packing 25 units:
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxx
xxxxxx
xxxxxx
xxxxxx
xxxx
the square above has a perimiter of 20 units, the more circular shape below has a perimiter of 22 units. The square is the optimal shape for smallest perimiter, and this projects onto higher dimensions.
Non-cube shapes are interesting because a cube has minimal surface area - you might want more surface area because external i/o is through the exposed faces. Also, varied shapes might provide better cooling, access to inner modules, etc.
Nice to see that the masters of war have found a way to develop their implements of destruction without resorting to messy nuke tests that could harm children or other living things. Will they have stickers that say, "No animals were harmed in the development of this warhead?" I hope the folks at peta are happy about this.
Most users aren't going to know what Gator and Bonzai are, and they will want these "web's coolest applications" that come with the cute game. It's just insidious.
One of my friends is fond of the game Snood for Windows, and encouraged me to check it out. When I did, I found that it came with two annoying bits of software, both a copy of Gator, and links to Bonzai Buddy, that stick themselves in your Start menu and various other places. Yick! (And goodbye Gator, banzai Banzai, and so long Snood.)
Before I did any of this fancy stuff, I'd settle for fixing aol and outlook to have all mail sent to more than three recipients to be automatically bcc'd, unless overridden by the sender.
Microsoft might be able and interested to remove security bugs from their software, no downside for them there. But what if Microsoft would engage in some obvious "good software practices" to make their software less bad? Like what if they made their software simpler? More modular? Like if their OS could run whatever window system, window manager, file browser you wanted, a la UNIX. Or whatever web browser. Imagine.
What kind of idiotic system design is it that has all these user-mode applications inextricably woven into the fabric of the OS? What unfathomable nonsense. What person who ever studied software engineering buys this silly story?
How about if MS would use unobfuscated data formats, so that it would be easy to work with document data (let's grep through my .doc files!)
or multimedia data (let's convert between .wma and .mp3!).
How about if they had a simple and stable API for writing software, so that it would be easy to port software between the MS OS and other OS's. Fat chance.
These are some of the things that make MS bad. Will they ever address them? Magic 8-ball says, "Outlook not so good."
why bother walking through an office? yell it on your radio show, espcially if it's being webcast.
Not just probation. Double secret probation.
Not only that, but the consumer goes to Best Buy and sees the Windows PCs running lame M$ screensaver (the app usually active at retailers), and then sees Linux running muy macho jwz xscreensaver. Once there's a row of Linux PC's at Best Buy (and therein lies the rub), M$ is d00med for sure.
Asking PC makers to copy-control PC storage is like asking paper-makers to copy-control their paper.
MOSIX is clustering software that has run with Bell UNIX, BSD, and Linux, and originally ran on PDP/11's.
At times in my life I've played lots of chess like this, played in clubs every week, lots of weekend tournaments, internet chess every day. You get to know the players who gather at tournaments and clubs. In contrast to the romantic image that some people have that chess makes kids smart, I found that most chess players are of fairly average intelligence, and many focus on chess to the exclusion of other pursuits, like many hackers do. I found that many chess players were more interested than other people, in gambling - betting on football games or bridge or cribbage or whatever, and their satisfaction in tournament play was all about winning money prizes rather than about the aesthetics of the game. Players might be ingenious over the board, but otherwise utterly lacking in insight, knowledge, intelligence, or refinement.
I do think that teaching children to play chess can help sharpen their thinking skills. Then again, the findings of this study don't surprise me at all, but I don't think it's talking about casual chess players.
As you know, our President has put us on High Alert, and that means more security, and naturally, that's going to affect accessibility. Vigilance is the price we Americans must pay for liberty, and if that makes the web site less accessible, then deal with it.
Note also that there were funky TRON toys and a TRON video game.
On the dual processor theme, the X Window System probably takes as much CPU scrolling your terminal window during the make as the compiler takes churning out your code. Having a processor handling the screen while another processor sends it the stuff to draw is a good idea.
Until computer networks were overrun by the multitudes, they were populated by mostly research and development sorts of folks, and the signal to noise ratio of the posts was a bit higher. But that only lasted a few minutes.
Here's one of my first posts, from 1981.
it's a diminutive form of Shoshana, which is the Hebrew name that Susan is derived from. So Shoshkele is approximately the same as Susie.
Linux GUI interfaces are not useful to novices unless they are ubiquitous. For instance, the article describes modem config available in Mandrake 8.0, or Star Office. Unless these GUIs are installed, available, and identical on (practically) every system, like the MSWin Dialup Networking GUI or MS Word are, they aren't a very compelling alternative to Windows GUIs. I say this as a hacker with no love for MS, who has been using UNIX for 20+ years.
KPMG!
Born to be free!
Just like the fish in the sea!
If you're allergic to Katz, you can avoid him by clicking on preferences and checking him off in "Excluding Stories from the Homepage."
Yes, a switch, not a hub. Now explain to me why a person using this device, sitting in a cubicle or bedroom or office, needs a switch rather than a hub. Then explain why this person, who has several networked devices and the cables that come with them, is going to be better off with this switchplate switch rather than a typical standalone hub (or switch). The cost saving business, about not having to run four cables from a router, is silly.
is As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, in Atlantic Magazine, July 1945. They have a web page Prophets of the Computer Age with more interesting flashbacks.