Comcast isn't engaging in traffic shaping or some other QoS type thing, they're sending out RSTs to both ends of the connection with forged addresses on the IP packets to terminate the connection completely. While Comcast could surely make an argument that they have the right to provide packet shaping to maximize the capabilities of their network, this is something far more nefarious.
He waited for the statute of limitations to expire on all of the traffic violations before having the story published, so he's no longer in risk of being prosecuted for them.
TCP and IP are standards in the sense that they are both documented by RFCs, which are considered to be standards by pretty much everyone who matters (i.e. the people implementing the protocols).
You've got to be kidding me. About a year ago I tried installing Gentoo on a P166 just for giggles and kicks. Even though the kernel was really stripped down (really, nothing that I didn't need) it still took at least four or five hours to build the kernel. Things have been like this for a long time. Remember when it took a full day to build a kernel? That was on systems not too much weaker than this, when the kernel was much, much smaller than it is now.
Not Any Time Soon
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not an active Go player anymore, but I used to me. And the current state of artificial Go intelligence is pretty sad. The best junior players in the world (10-13 or so, IIRC) can beat the very strongest computer Go programs, and they're literally orders of magnitude worse than the best human players.
Playing Go is more than just searching a lot of positions. The game is _very_ subtle. To even understand how a professional 9 dan player (i.e. the very highest ranked players) plays every move in a game, you really need to be at least a 7 dan or so -- anything less than that and the moves just won't make a lot of sense. I have the feeling that it will be at least a decade (but probably much longer) before computer opponents can beat professional players, and even longer than that until they can beat the very best human player.s
Right, because the kernel developers should drop what they're doing and start hacking on userspace applications and doing things to make Linux more "user friendly."
The article is about a new release of the kernel, it's not about the desktop experience, or ease of use, or anything along those lines. They're totally separate topics.
You can definitely run a kernel on 16 MB of RAM. A year or two ago I built a stripped down Linux installation (I think Debian) that used ~10 MB of RAM to boot into a virtual console, with a good number of the important Unix services running. And there are embedded kernels and distributions that run busybox and the like and use signifcantly less RAM than that setup. The biggest problem is the amount of memory used by typical userspace applications.
The parent poster is exactly right. Very often you see software with the following words in the license:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This clause is not part of the license -- it's just wording that the FSF recommends you use when describing the licensing of your software. You can also explicitly say just version 2, only version 3, or any other degree of specificity. So just say that you're releasing it under version 2 or any later release (or under version 2 or version 3 but no later releases).
The author may be confusing monopoly with property, but you're confusing copyright with other forms of intellectual property -- namely patents. You cannot copyright an invention, you can only copyright a creative work. You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc., but you cannot copyright the general ideas of such works, and you certainly cannot copyright an invention like a chair.
I'm a young college-aged student, and I've definitely noticed a shift towards Japanese style emoticons like ^_^ from my peers. Even among those who use the "sideways" emoticons, certainly you would never see:-) -- the hyphen is considered superfluous, and a simple:) will do just fine.
Maybe I'm asocial, but because of this I've adopted the "retro":-) style smilies, which seems to really bug a lot of my friends.
I know that Suse has long been a KDE-oriented distribution, but I was still surprised to see such a high percentage of respondents who used it. When I started using Linux several years ago, it seemed that most users were running KDE, but lately with the huge success of Gnome and Gnome-origented distributions, I was expecting to see a higher adoption rate of Gnome (yes, even among Suse users).
Also, did anyone else think it was weird that among all the questions asked, they neglected to ask what geographic region respondents were from?
Normally I'd agree with sentiments such as yours, but since ext3 is more stable/reliable and xfs is faster and much more scalable, I think we can safely say that we should stop using reiserfs anyway.
Sorry, but Linux does _not_ have 10% of the desktop market -- not even close. I know a lot of people who "use" Linux. Meaning that they installed a random distribution on their computer a long time ago, figured out how to get GRUB to default to the Windows entry, and then promptly forgot about the Linux installation that they couldn't get working properly.
I'm sure that a lot of computers have Linux installed on them, but I'd be surprised if even 5% of desktop users use Linux on a day to day basis. There are quite a few people using Linux casually, like the barmaids you described or my roommate's family, but who happened to run into some nerd who could install it for them (or convince them to install it themselves), but by far most of the users are still geeks. And since most of the geeks who "use" Linux don't actually use it enough to be considered Linux users (not in my mind, anyway), I'm still convinced that only a very small minority of computer users run Linux.
I agree with this 100%. If you look at the work that goes into Gnome, a very large proportion of it comes from developers at Redhat and Novell. A lot of the developers are still unaffiliated with any large corporations, but certainly if you browse through the Gnome bugzilla you will see that a lot of the core developers that are pushing Gnome forward are paid for their work. And this really helps the community. Furthermore, Gnome has lately benefited from the interest of late from mobile and embedded developers, who have done a lot of work in push down the resource usage of Gnome components.
Gnome is a big project. There is a lot of code, and a lot of it is showing its age. If Gnome was an all volunteer effort, there would be a lot more focus on exciting new technologies, and less focus on fixing bugs and cleaning up old code. In a sense, this is how I see KDE. KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined. The hard work that has gone into Gnome by commercialization has helped reduced bugs in the code, kept it up to date, and continues to push the project forward.
As you've already pointed out, supporting MS Office files is probably not a big deal. None of the "enterprise" users I know take advantage of this feature on their phones. The people who really do want to use Word/Excel/whatever on their phones are going to stick with a Windows Mobile device anyway.
What is a big deal is an Exchange email client. Exchange is really dominant in corporations. I work at a very large Internet company. Many years ago all of the email accounts were on POP. There was a demand for Exchange from the business types, which resulted in employees either getting a POP account or an Exchange account. Sometime later POP was phased out in favor of IMAP, and eventually the IT people decided they wanted to move everyone over to IMAP. IMAP scales much better than Exchange, and our company uses Unix/Linux servers for nearly everything other than Exchange anyway. Consequently, everyone was pushed over to IMAP. There was a huge backlash from the business/marketing types, and now _everyone_ is being pushed back to Exchange. A large number of the employees are on Linux/BSD systems, and the response has been to tell these users that they have to use OWA (Outlook Web Access) to read their email.
In theory, OWA will enable iPhone users to connect to their Exchange accounts with Safari. However, this is a huge inconvenience. Most of the time you are using your phone you are not online. The ability to read and compose emails while commuting or otherwise away from the office makes the Blackberry really appealing.
The correlation coefficient is an exact amount in this case, assuming that the data collected was accurately (which should be the case, since it's not at all difficult to tell if someone yawned or did not yawn), because there was no measurement error.
I don't understand the attraction to full disk encryption. Sure, it will prevent a would be thief from reading some of your personal emails or getting access to your credit card information. But all the good secrets are on servers and corporate networks, not on people's laptops. And if the secrets are really good, you're not going to be able to just get to them just by stealing someone's laptop.
For example, where I work, to get onto the corporate intranet you need to actually be physically connected to the corporate network, or you need to access it via a VPN. To get on the VPN, you need the group password and your individual password. The group password is static, but your own password is a combination of a PIN plus the sequence of digits on the RSA SecurID card you're issued, which change every sixty seconds. This is a really standard setup, and means that to get anywhere you would need to steal my laptop (to get the group password), know my PIN, _and_ steal my SecurID card. Actually, you would _also_ need my corporate username and passphrase, but if you're good enough to get all of the above I assume you can get those too.
If you want to secure email (or whatever), that's easy too. To get to the mail servers you need to be on the VPN, which is already a pretty good start. At that point all you need to do is make sure that all the really sensitive email accounts are local delivery only (i.e. no POP/Exchange/IMAP access). To read email you get a web based email solution or a shell account on the mail server. Either way you log in by connecting to the VPN and doing your normal Kerberos authentication. Obviously web mail presents a bit of a problem in the way of the browser cache, but it's fairly simple to lock down a shell account in such a way that users can't connect out from the account (or scp files).
Anyway, adding full disk encryption to this is a joke. It's a scam to let the companies that provide the disk encryption hardware/software make a lot of easy money. If you were doing things right in the first place it would be a _lot_ easier for someone to get the encryption password than it would be for them to get to your sensitive data. Instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars on a proprietary disk encryption solution, get some competent system administrators.
I doubt it. Normally you sit down in a room, put the calculator on a desk, and get to work. Since the calculator is just sitting there, it's not going to generate any power. Furthermore, the solar panels in such calculators already generate enough power (and generally if there isn't enough ambient light, you wouldn't be able to see the screen very well anyway), so why try to fix them? On top of all of this, it's probably much cheaper to manufacture one of those low grade photovoltaic cells than it would be to make one of these devices.
I mostly agree with what you had to say. The part about the one child law is not that accurate however, so I wanted to comment on it.
China has bred themselves into a crisis. With their 1 child per couple law that has been in effect for decades, they now have 1 child that is supporting 2 parents who supports 4 granparents as they all move into retirement age. This is a monumental economic problem and is the reason why their economic policy is evolving at a rate that far outpaces the political evolution. External influences are what are changing the Chinese government, causing them to adopt rule sets and make changes that would never come internally.
This hasn't really been in effect for as long as you think. My girlfriend and I are both 20, and her parents were both born well before the one child law. So probably the very first people born under this law have started to have children. I was also told by her family (not sure if this is 100% accurate) that the law works every other generation. So if you were a single child, you can have two children -- and they can have a single child, and their children can have two children, and so forth. In addition to all of this, it is worth mentioning that the population of China is still (slowly) growing, which indicates that the one child law isn't as strictly enforced as you might think.
With respect to the rest of what you said, I agree with a lot of it. External influences dictate a huge amount of the national policy in the country. To even keep up the pace of growth that they have been sustaining for as long as they have shows that they are hugely more aware of international and economic policy than many people give them credit for. At the end of the day, China will do what it needs to do to keep their economy strong and safe.
The USPTO is entirely funded by the money the receive from processing patents (and trademarks). This is the same principle of operation as the postal system, the Federal Reserve, and numerous other federal entities that essentially act as private businesses.
Changing this isn't as simple as just funding the USPTO with taxes (or other federal funds). If the government were to actively step in by funding (and hence regulating) the patent office, there would be a lot of issues to deal with wrt the government effectively legislating through the USPTO. Not to mention that this would be more costly, the USPTO is currently self sustaining, and it could potentially cause major disruptions.
I'm not sure about Windows, but at least in Linux threading has been extremely efficient since LinuxThreads was replaced by NPTL (a few years ago). While LinuxThreads wasn't that performant, NPTL has very impressive benchmarking results, and is really a first class threading implementation.
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Comcast isn't engaging in traffic shaping or some other QoS type thing, they're sending out RSTs to both ends of the connection with forged addresses on the IP packets to terminate the connection completely. While Comcast could surely make an argument that they have the right to provide packet shaping to maximize the capabilities of their network, this is something far more nefarious.
He waited for the statute of limitations to expire on all of the traffic violations before having the story published, so he's no longer in risk of being prosecuted for them.
TCP and IP are standards in the sense that they are both documented by RFCs, which are considered to be standards by pretty much everyone who matters (i.e. the people implementing the protocols).
You've got to be kidding me. About a year ago I tried installing Gentoo on a P166 just for giggles and kicks. Even though the kernel was really stripped down (really, nothing that I didn't need) it still took at least four or five hours to build the kernel. Things have been like this for a long time. Remember when it took a full day to build a kernel? That was on systems not too much weaker than this, when the kernel was much, much smaller than it is now.
I'm not an active Go player anymore, but I used to me. And the current state of artificial Go intelligence is pretty sad. The best junior players in the world (10-13 or so, IIRC) can beat the very strongest computer Go programs, and they're literally orders of magnitude worse than the best human players.
Playing Go is more than just searching a lot of positions. The game is _very_ subtle. To even understand how a professional 9 dan player (i.e. the very highest ranked players) plays every move in a game, you really need to be at least a 7 dan or so -- anything less than that and the moves just won't make a lot of sense. I have the feeling that it will be at least a decade (but probably much longer) before computer opponents can beat professional players, and even longer than that until they can beat the very best human player.s
Right, because the kernel developers should drop what they're doing and start hacking on userspace applications and doing things to make Linux more "user friendly."
The article is about a new release of the kernel, it's not about the desktop experience, or ease of use, or anything along those lines. They're totally separate topics.
You can definitely run a kernel on 16 MB of RAM. A year or two ago I built a stripped down Linux installation (I think Debian) that used ~10 MB of RAM to boot into a virtual console, with a good number of the important Unix services running. And there are embedded kernels and distributions that run busybox and the like and use signifcantly less RAM than that setup. The biggest problem is the amount of memory used by typical userspace applications.
Most people in the IT world don't bother to get professional certifications (at least in *nix land, not sure about Windows).
The synaptics touchpads only have multifinger support for clicking/tapping -- there isn't any support for detecting multifinger motions.
Because it's GNU/Linux, not GNU/Warez.
Minix was not based on Xenix, at all. Linux was only superficially based on Minix. So how do you conclude that Linux is based on Xenix?
The author may be confusing monopoly with property, but you're confusing copyright with other forms of intellectual property -- namely patents. You cannot copyright an invention, you can only copyright a creative work. You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc., but you cannot copyright the general ideas of such works, and you certainly cannot copyright an invention like a chair.
I'm a young college-aged student, and I've definitely noticed a shift towards Japanese style emoticons like ^_^ from my peers. Even among those who use the "sideways" emoticons, certainly you would never see :-) -- the hyphen is considered superfluous, and a simple :) will do just fine.
:-) style smilies, which seems to really bug a lot of my friends.
Maybe I'm asocial, but because of this I've adopted the "retro"
I know that Suse has long been a KDE-oriented distribution, but I was still surprised to see such a high percentage of respondents who used it. When I started using Linux several years ago, it seemed that most users were running KDE, but lately with the huge success of Gnome and Gnome-origented distributions, I was expecting to see a higher adoption rate of Gnome (yes, even among Suse users).
Also, did anyone else think it was weird that among all the questions asked, they neglected to ask what geographic region respondents were from?
Normally I'd agree with sentiments such as yours, but since ext3 is more stable/reliable and xfs is faster and much more scalable, I think we can safely say that we should stop using reiserfs anyway.
Sorry, but Linux does _not_ have 10% of the desktop market -- not even close. I know a lot of people who "use" Linux. Meaning that they installed a random distribution on their computer a long time ago, figured out how to get GRUB to default to the Windows entry, and then promptly forgot about the Linux installation that they couldn't get working properly.
I'm sure that a lot of computers have Linux installed on them, but I'd be surprised if even 5% of desktop users use Linux on a day to day basis. There are quite a few people using Linux casually, like the barmaids you described or my roommate's family, but who happened to run into some nerd who could install it for them (or convince them to install it themselves), but by far most of the users are still geeks. And since most of the geeks who "use" Linux don't actually use it enough to be considered Linux users (not in my mind, anyway), I'm still convinced that only a very small minority of computer users run Linux.
I agree with this 100%. If you look at the work that goes into Gnome, a very large proportion of it comes from developers at Redhat and Novell. A lot of the developers are still unaffiliated with any large corporations, but certainly if you browse through the Gnome bugzilla you will see that a lot of the core developers that are pushing Gnome forward are paid for their work. And this really helps the community. Furthermore, Gnome has lately benefited from the interest of late from mobile and embedded developers, who have done a lot of work in push down the resource usage of Gnome components.
Gnome is a big project. There is a lot of code, and a lot of it is showing its age. If Gnome was an all volunteer effort, there would be a lot more focus on exciting new technologies, and less focus on fixing bugs and cleaning up old code. In a sense, this is how I see KDE. KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined. The hard work that has gone into Gnome by commercialization has helped reduced bugs in the code, kept it up to date, and continues to push the project forward.
As you've already pointed out, supporting MS Office files is probably not a big deal. None of the "enterprise" users I know take advantage of this feature on their phones. The people who really do want to use Word/Excel/whatever on their phones are going to stick with a Windows Mobile device anyway.
What is a big deal is an Exchange email client. Exchange is really dominant in corporations. I work at a very large Internet company. Many years ago all of the email accounts were on POP. There was a demand for Exchange from the business types, which resulted in employees either getting a POP account or an Exchange account. Sometime later POP was phased out in favor of IMAP, and eventually the IT people decided they wanted to move everyone over to IMAP. IMAP scales much better than Exchange, and our company uses Unix/Linux servers for nearly everything other than Exchange anyway. Consequently, everyone was pushed over to IMAP. There was a huge backlash from the business/marketing types, and now _everyone_ is being pushed back to Exchange. A large number of the employees are on Linux/BSD systems, and the response has been to tell these users that they have to use OWA (Outlook Web Access) to read their email.
In theory, OWA will enable iPhone users to connect to their Exchange accounts with Safari. However, this is a huge inconvenience. Most of the time you are using your phone you are not online. The ability to read and compose emails while commuting or otherwise away from the office makes the Blackberry really appealing.
The correlation coefficient is an exact amount in this case, assuming that the data collected was accurately (which should be the case, since it's not at all difficult to tell if someone yawned or did not yawn), because there was no measurement error.
I don't understand the attraction to full disk encryption. Sure, it will prevent a would be thief from reading some of your personal emails or getting access to your credit card information. But all the good secrets are on servers and corporate networks, not on people's laptops. And if the secrets are really good, you're not going to be able to just get to them just by stealing someone's laptop.
For example, where I work, to get onto the corporate intranet you need to actually be physically connected to the corporate network, or you need to access it via a VPN. To get on the VPN, you need the group password and your individual password. The group password is static, but your own password is a combination of a PIN plus the sequence of digits on the RSA SecurID card you're issued, which change every sixty seconds. This is a really standard setup, and means that to get anywhere you would need to steal my laptop (to get the group password), know my PIN, _and_ steal my SecurID card. Actually, you would _also_ need my corporate username and passphrase, but if you're good enough to get all of the above I assume you can get those too.
If you want to secure email (or whatever), that's easy too. To get to the mail servers you need to be on the VPN, which is already a pretty good start. At that point all you need to do is make sure that all the really sensitive email accounts are local delivery only (i.e. no POP/Exchange/IMAP access). To read email you get a web based email solution or a shell account on the mail server. Either way you log in by connecting to the VPN and doing your normal Kerberos authentication. Obviously web mail presents a bit of a problem in the way of the browser cache, but it's fairly simple to lock down a shell account in such a way that users can't connect out from the account (or scp files).
Anyway, adding full disk encryption to this is a joke. It's a scam to let the companies that provide the disk encryption hardware/software make a lot of easy money. If you were doing things right in the first place it would be a _lot_ easier for someone to get the encryption password than it would be for them to get to your sensitive data. Instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars on a proprietary disk encryption solution, get some competent system administrators.
I doubt it. Normally you sit down in a room, put the calculator on a desk, and get to work. Since the calculator is just sitting there, it's not going to generate any power. Furthermore, the solar panels in such calculators already generate enough power (and generally if there isn't enough ambient light, you wouldn't be able to see the screen very well anyway), so why try to fix them? On top of all of this, it's probably much cheaper to manufacture one of those low grade photovoltaic cells than it would be to make one of these devices.
I mostly agree with what you had to say. The part about the one child law is not that accurate however, so I wanted to comment on it.
This hasn't really been in effect for as long as you think. My girlfriend and I are both 20, and her parents were both born well before the one child law. So probably the very first people born under this law have started to have children. I was also told by her family (not sure if this is 100% accurate) that the law works every other generation. So if you were a single child, you can have two children -- and they can have a single child, and their children can have two children, and so forth. In addition to all of this, it is worth mentioning that the population of China is still (slowly) growing, which indicates that the one child law isn't as strictly enforced as you might think.
With respect to the rest of what you said, I agree with a lot of it. External influences dictate a huge amount of the national policy in the country. To even keep up the pace of growth that they have been sustaining for as long as they have shows that they are hugely more aware of international and economic policy than many people give them credit for. At the end of the day, China will do what it needs to do to keep their economy strong and safe.
The USPTO is entirely funded by the money the receive from processing patents (and trademarks). This is the same principle of operation as the postal system, the Federal Reserve, and numerous other federal entities that essentially act as private businesses.
Changing this isn't as simple as just funding the USPTO with taxes (or other federal funds). If the government were to actively step in by funding (and hence regulating) the patent office, there would be a lot of issues to deal with wrt the government effectively legislating through the USPTO. Not to mention that this would be more costly, the USPTO is currently self sustaining, and it could potentially cause major disruptions.
I'm not sure about Windows, but at least in Linux threading has been extremely efficient since LinuxThreads was replaced by NPTL (a few years ago). While LinuxThreads wasn't that performant, NPTL has very impressive benchmarking results, and is really a first class threading implementation.