What is a good hardware accelerated audio card that works with Vista and Ubuntu? Honestly, I don't know.
I always loved my old Creative sound card, until it broke. I didn't get a new one because nowadays every motherboard has an onboard audio chipset. If the audio really makes a 5% difference, maybe I should save up for a new one?
There's been research on free-scale networks, and essentially, the result is the following: the internet can probably withstand a large random failure (say several thousand nodes), but fail in case of a few well-placed attacks (say below 10).
That said, and, as a couple of other people have also said, the internet should still be the least of our worries.
As you can see, the second version is even shorter than the first. And even better, imagine someone writes the following code:
list.addElement(null);
Then the compiler can already flag this _at compile time_! Now this is an obvious mistake, to make the example clear, but there are many examples, where this isn't as obvious:
Element e = null; if (condition1) {...
e = new Element();... } else if (condition2) {...
e = new Element();... } addElement(e);
If the code is a little longer, then you can't immediately see that e may indeed be null when addElement is called. The compiler nevertheless can easily perform this kind of analysis.
I can easily think of many many more examples where it's useful to have the compiler check your parameters for you.
Yes. I remember reading about a study by IBM (?) that it made a surprisingly large difference. I can't find the study itself right now though, but I read it in this book:
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that while the 'expert' strategy may lead to consistently high results, it doesn't necessarily lead to optimal results. The most probable words aren't necessarily the ones giving the highest scores.
Which doesn't invalidate this record, quite the opposite. If you start playing scrabble professionally, you have to realize that a part of winning is just damn good luck.
FWIW, I'd suggest to take two different (!) shuttle PCs (you don't want both to have the same hardware failure), install windows on one and linux or dual-boot on the other. Make sure you get windows and linux covered from the software side. Set both up for remote control (vnc comes to mind). They also should have two ethernet cards each (there are shuttle PCs with two ethernet adapters on board). Outfit them with different firewall and different anti-virus software. You said that you sometimes have to connect to untrusted networks. If you use the identical setup on both machines, that increases your risk. Take laptops with you to remote control the PCs (everyone's got a laptop, right?). VNC for windows or x-over-ssh for linux. Also, have a backup pcmcia-card with you that can do video streaming, even if it's not as high-quality.
That way, if any two things break, you're still covered. You're still covered for some combinations of three things breaking simultaneously (except if its the three capture cards). You're also covered when facing spyware, virus and worms.
You probably need 3 or 4 people to carry all of that stuff, the shuttles are light enough, and you probably already got laptops anyway. If you want to put in another backup layer, take a small TFT screen and standard keyboard/mouse with you (standard so they are easily replaceable). On the road, everything will break sooner or later.
I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to US authorities, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in the US. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.
Yes, the link is fake.
But you did know that Amnesty has a record on every major country, right?
Honestly, I am not sure how complying with local laws can be construed as 'doing evil'. I don't regard Google as evil when they comply with US laws. Yes, the government may be evil and the laws may be ugly (DMCA anyone?), but regarding a company doing business in such a country as evil? I don't hear many calls for Google to pull out of the US. Do you?
No, it took me 10 mins (max) to paste from here. If, however, everyone uses Sun JDK, then why should anyone be afraid of forks? (Which in turn just prooves my point.)
How good a programmer are you? Good? Very good? Excellent? Even Perfect?
No doubt you are not perfect, you are human after all. Now, I've never seen a Java programmer write code that could be exploited with a buffer overflow exploit. But I've seen countless buffer overflow bugs in C software. Just subscribe to one of the numerous security mailing lists.
Yes, you can write unsafe software in Java. No doubt about that. But a language where you cannot use the standard library (string functions!!!) for security related software is at best not well designed.
Look at google. They need so much computing power, it's cheaper for them to use a datacenter with lots of them and just replace the _whole_ computer when it breaks. They are not going to buy Itanium. And I'm guessing the same holds for other big companies (think amazon, ebay). Processors are exactly not like cars.
That's not the problem with the DRM clause. The problem is that it may also prohibit (render illegal) certain other uses of open source software, that might actually be ok. The question is, what could that be?
Consider the following example:
The US military creates a new hardware device and to secure it, they install a non-modifiable key into it, so it only runs software that the military has signed. Now technically, they are violating the DRM clause and therefore it's illegal for them to use open source software.
Or maybe yet another example:
In the wake of the electronic voting desaster, someone creates these plans for new electronic voting machines. However, to make it secure, he installs a non-modifiable key into it, so you can't temper with the software.
DRM has its good uses and there are actually a couple of open source projects out there that deal with it. Here's what you can do to stop DRM: Vote with your wallet. I know I'm not going to buy DRMd CDs or DVDs.
I've heard that the real reason CISC processors are taking off once more is that they have a better information to memory-size ratio. The big problem with processor design is that cpus are getting faster and faster but memory isn't. 3.5 GHz CPU, 200 Mhz Memory bus, what the fuck?
I've heard numbers that RISC programs are about 30% larger than the equivalent CISC program, which means that you're going to have 30% more memory accesses which translates directly into (worse) performance.
At least our CS prof was claiming that at those rare occurances when I was actually listening.;)
"0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
"Finally, Allen adds a Fourth Law, which instructs the robot to do "whatever it likes" so long as this does not conflict with the first three Laws."
The zeroth law was more or less invented by robots, in particular Giskard and Daneel. The forth law was introduced when robots became sufficiently sentient.
However, if everybody starts update at the same time, the update-site will go down and thus, noone will be able to get the update. Of course, you could build a bittorrent client into firefox...
Say you have a DVD that sells for $50 and 1 Million copies are sold. If you lower the price to (say) $25 and you sell 1.9 Million copies, you have effectively earned _less_. MORE copies DONT imply MORE money. It also works the other way round. If you sell 1.9 Million copies of $25 each and you raise the price to $50, then you may only sell 1 Million copies, but you have effectively earned _more_. HIGHER prices DOESNT imply LESS earning.
If they offered downloadable movies in DVD-quality that I could play on Linux (DRM or not), I'd only buy it if
a) it's something I really want (given that I rarely buy DVDs that's not a lot of money to be had there)
b) it's comparable to DVD rentals and to the cinema Renting a DVD costs about $3 (where I live), going to the cinema costs even less ~$2.5 (after a few weeks). If the download costs $4 and I can get it before its out on DVD, I would consider it.
Maybe I'm not the target demographic. They could even get away with selling downloads at the DVD price point, but I doubt that would be very successfull. And crippling the downloads is not really an exciting addon.
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What is a good hardware accelerated audio card that works with Vista and Ubuntu? Honestly, I don't know.
I always loved my old Creative sound card, until it broke. I didn't get a new one because nowadays every motherboard has an onboard audio chipset. If the audio really makes a 5% difference, maybe I should save up for a new one?
There's been research on free-scale networks, and essentially, the result is the following: the internet can probably withstand a large random failure (say several thousand nodes), but fail in case of a few well-placed attacks (say below 10).
That said, and, as a couple of other people have also said, the internet should still be the least of our worries.
DbC is rather like the difference between these two addElement methods which both disallow null entries in the list:
...
...
... ... ... ...
void addElement(E whatever)
{
if (whatever == null)
{
throw new NullPointerException("whatever must not be null");
}
}
@precondition(whatever != null)
void addElement(E whatever)
{
}
As you can see, the second version is even shorter than the first. And even better, imagine someone writes the following code:
list.addElement(null);
Then the compiler can already flag this _at compile time_!
Now this is an obvious mistake, to make the example clear, but there are many examples, where this isn't as obvious:
Element e = null;
if (condition1)
{
e = new Element();
}
else if (condition2)
{
e = new Element();
}
addElement(e);
If the code is a little longer, then you can't immediately see that e may indeed be null when addElement is called. The compiler nevertheless can easily perform this kind of analysis.
I can easily think of many many more examples where it's useful to have the compiler check your parameters for you.
Yes. I remember reading about a study by IBM (?) that it made a surprisingly large difference. I can't find the study itself right now though, but I read it in this book:
c ts-Teams-Ed/dp/0932633439
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Proje
Sounds like SE-Linux.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that while the 'expert' strategy may lead to consistently high results, it doesn't necessarily lead to optimal results. The most probable words aren't necessarily the ones giving the highest scores.
Which doesn't invalidate this record, quite the opposite. If you start playing scrabble professionally, you have to realize that a part of winning is just damn good luck.
FWIW, I'd suggest to take two different (!) shuttle PCs (you don't want both to have the same hardware failure), install windows on one and linux or dual-boot on the other. Make sure you get windows and linux covered from the software side. Set both up for remote control (vnc comes to mind). They also should have two ethernet cards each (there are shuttle PCs with two ethernet adapters on board). Outfit them with different firewall and different anti-virus software. You said that you sometimes have to connect to untrusted networks. If you use the identical setup on both machines, that increases your risk. Take laptops with you to remote control the PCs (everyone's got a laptop, right?). VNC for windows or x-over-ssh for linux. Also, have a backup pcmcia-card with you that can do video streaming, even if it's not as high-quality.
That way, if any two things break, you're still covered. You're still covered for some combinations of three things breaking simultaneously (except if its the three capture cards). You're also covered when facing spyware, virus and worms.
You probably need 3 or 4 people to carry all of that stuff, the shuttles are light enough, and you probably already got laptops anyway. If you want to put in another backup layer, take a small TFT screen and standard keyboard/mouse with you (standard so they are easily replaceable). On the road, everything will break sooner or later.
Good luck.
I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to US authorities, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in the US. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.
Yes, the link is fake.
But you did know that Amnesty has a record on every major country, right?
Honestly, I am not sure how complying with local laws can be construed as 'doing evil'. I don't regard Google as evil when they comply with US laws. Yes, the government may be evil and the laws may be ugly (DMCA anyone?), but regarding a company doing business in such a country as evil? I don't hear many calls for Google to pull out of the US. Do you?
Did you know that Google censors search results in Germany and France too? And again, I don't hear many calls for Google to pull out of Germany or France.
Yes, I understand that China is a sensitive issue. But things aren't as clear cut as some people (in general, not you in particular) seem to think.
No, it took me 10 mins (max) to paste from here. If, however, everyone uses Sun JDK, then why should anyone be afraid of forks? (Which in turn just prooves my point.)
Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.
How can you not see this?
Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!
How good a programmer are you? Good? Very good? Excellent? Even Perfect?
No doubt you are not perfect, you are human after all. Now, I've never seen a Java programmer write code that could be exploited with a buffer overflow exploit. But I've seen countless buffer overflow bugs in C software. Just subscribe to one of the numerous security mailing lists.
Yes, you can write unsafe software in Java. No doubt about that. But a language where you cannot use the standard library (string functions!!!) for security related software is at best not well designed.
Look at google. They need so much computing power, it's cheaper for them to use a datacenter with lots of them and just replace the _whole_ computer when it breaks. They are not going to buy Itanium. And I'm guessing the same holds for other big companies (think amazon, ebay). Processors are exactly not like cars.
That's not the problem with the DRM clause. The problem is that it may also prohibit (render illegal) certain other uses of open source software, that might actually be ok. The question is, what could that be?
Consider the following example:
The US military creates a new hardware device and to secure it, they install a non-modifiable key into it, so it only runs software that the military has signed. Now technically, they are violating the DRM clause and therefore it's illegal for them to use open source software.
Or maybe yet another example:
In the wake of the electronic voting desaster, someone creates these plans for new electronic voting machines. However, to make it secure, he installs a non-modifiable key into it, so you can't temper with the software.
DRM has its good uses and there are actually a couple of open source projects out there that deal with it. Here's what you can do to stop DRM: Vote with your wallet. I know I'm not going to buy DRMd CDs or DVDs.
I've heard that the real reason CISC processors are taking off once more is that they have a better information to memory-size ratio. The big problem with processor design is that cpus are getting faster and faster but memory isn't. 3.5 GHz CPU, 200 Mhz Memory bus, what the fuck?
;)
I've heard numbers that RISC programs are about 30% larger than the equivalent CISC program, which means that you're going to have 30% more memory accesses which translates directly into (worse) performance.
At least our CS prof was claiming that at those rare occurances when I was actually listening.
The current count is five laws of robotics, not three :)
c s
Quoting the corresponding parts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Roboti
"0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
"Finally, Allen adds a Fourth Law, which instructs the robot to do "whatever it likes" so long as this does not conflict with the first three Laws."
The zeroth law was more or less invented by robots, in particular Giskard and Daneel. The forth law was introduced when robots became sufficiently sentient.
You still havn't got it, have you?
;)
CmdrTaco is trying to tell us what we should give him as a present. I just wonder what he's going to do with half a million GoodFather CDs.
However, if everybody starts update at the same time, the update-site will go down and thus, noone will be able to get the update. Of course, you could build a bittorrent client into firefox...
Economics don't work that way... unfortunately.
Say you have a DVD that sells for $50 and 1 Million copies are sold. If you lower the price to (say) $25 and you sell 1.9 Million copies, you have effectively earned _less_. MORE copies DONT imply MORE money. It also works the other way round. If you sell 1.9 Million copies of $25 each and you raise the price to $50, then you may only sell 1 Million copies, but you have effectively earned _more_. HIGHER prices DOESNT imply LESS earning.
If they offered downloadable movies in DVD-quality that I could play on Linux (DRM or not), I'd only buy it if
a) it's something I really want
(given that I rarely buy DVDs that's not a lot of money to be had there)
b) it's comparable to DVD rentals and to the cinema
Renting a DVD costs about $3 (where I live), going to the cinema costs even less ~$2.5 (after a few weeks). If the download costs $4 and I can get it before its out on DVD, I would consider it.
Maybe I'm not the target demographic. They could even get away with selling downloads at the DVD price point, but I doubt that would be very successfull. And crippling the downloads is not really an exciting addon.
You forget to take two things into account:
1. If you could get an iPod with video capability and at a only slightly higher price point, would you?
2. If iTunes starts having video content (like music videos), a portable video player doesn't sound so bad after all.