For an amateur you make some bold sweeping statements.:-)
I understand the point of view that string theory isn't disprovable but it's kind of like saying magnetic field theory isn't disprovable because it seems to be able to describe a physical process but noone can discover the value of mu or epsilon.
Clearly when you're dealing with as many unknowns as there are in string theory it would seem you could model almost anything while you don't know the values of your constants. However, a whole heap of research and thinking by people much smarter than you or I has lead to some percentage of them agreeing this *might* be the way to model the universe. I can't dismiss it just because it seems contrived not to fail. I do realise it could still fail.
The sad bit is that we seem to listen to these people rather than just asking some other random person off the street to comment. Both people have an equally valid viewpoint, assuming of course you find equally informed people. In fact if you think about most celebrities they probably shouldn't be allowed to have any views in the first place.
At least it gets people on Slashdot riled enough to post their own views, I suppose. Maybe we should start submitting New Weekly stories on how [current top 40/blockbuster personality] 'loves the environment'. These people are always stating the vacuously obvious in order to appeal to their audience, so we'd have plenty to work with.
Oh wait, I forgot 90% of our stories come from some idiot IT industy figure's blog...
I must say that it is possible to kill most 'hard' viruses yourself with a copy of rootkitrevealer, unlocker and some understanding of windows services and startup applications works. If you go and explicitly install a virus (obediently rebooting afterwards of course) you will always have a harder time removing in than a malicious ActiveX or something. Spybot is still a great tool as far as looking at your startup (and stopping things readding themselves), installed BHOs and stuff. What I find more annoying is the massively bloated virus scanners that get so easily disabled - Norton's is practically always in a state where it can't even uninstall itself by the time I get to see it.
I'll just add that HijackThis logs are the worst thing to ever happen to searching for security information on the web. All you can turn up these days is log after log of chumps that are infected with everything under the sun.
And yes, cleaning spyware and viruses *is* my job.
What blows me away is that no virus is going to open an explorer window in order to format your hard drive. In fact, a smart virus wouldn't touch the Windows libraries at all while doing it, if it hadn't already just replaced them. So the only person that they're annoying is the user. What's even more outrageous is that there's a registry setting to turn the messages off. Have they learnt nothing in the last five years?
Can I lay $5 on this going down in history as the most circumventable (and as you correctly point out completely pointless) security check to date? It will be in the hall of fame with Windows.SecurityCentre.AntiVirusDisabledOverride which you (ie the chumps) have to use a third-party tool to detect. Does an alert window pop up when changing that registry setting? I haven't checked that one yet.:-)
For Mr. Hacker it really is just business as usual with Vista. In fact I think they got better support than all those people with overpriced 'Vista Ready' hardware for which there are still no drivers.:-D
*THIS* is *STILL* what the desktop search wars are about? Whether or not you can search by the basic attributes of a file using wildcards and conveniently launch it afterwards?
For fsck()'s sake someone give me the damn code for a few days. LMAO people are patenting this shit and having wars over it, and *still* noone (not Mac, not MS, not Linux) has a relational FS, 'like X' searching, result grouping, file-types not determined by extension... C'mon the Amiga had that one in 1989!!! Everybody knew it was a hack that.info files were displayed as icons, but other than that what you did with a file did NOT depend on the last three (or even... get this... *four*) characters of its name.
ROFL, I wonder how many millions have been spent presenting the same search technology from pre 1990 in a different way in the last 18 years? Gotta get a job doing that. If you can't write it in a single line of SQL then it ain't a search function worth having, right? My sides hurt, seriously.
What really surprises me is forum searching. There are so many open source bulletin boards in use, but not one of them has an even remotely helpful search function, despite their widespread use and (supposedly) active development cycles. The human race is doomed to be crushed under the weight of its own information, and all because it's about whether your search engine has a dog or a butterfly on it that talks to you, rather than ACTUALLY MAKING SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES. Actually slashdot tagging is one of the best 'innovations' I've seen lately. Haven't used it but it certainly seems to work from the chump end.
This one will keep me grinning for days. Stupid humans!
You've touched on an interesting point there (aperture problem). Has anyone ever thought of feeding the information to a computer in DivX format, where movement and recognition of basic shapes has already been done?
When was the last time you saw an ad that made you want to buy something? *NEVER* in my lifetime. Even the dumbest people I know don't see ads as a source of information about products. And seriously, have you looked at these blogs? Only the truly ultimately dumbest of the dumb would think for a second they were made by a real person with a point of view about something. (That's out of the truly ultimately outrageously stupid people who think blogging and reading blogs is a valid way to spend time in the first place).
Ads are just noise, they get as much attention as muzak in shopping centres, warnings on cigarettes and promises from politicians.
The bible is completely wrong on this. Don't believe (let alone buy) anything you aren't looking at.
Isn't Flash player that plugin that makes the little bar come out of the top of IE to tell you about security problems? I didn't know it did anything different.
But seriously the sooner people get off Flash the better - C'mon, even HTML support is still dodgy, and never mind the fact that we're still trying to use it as a container for things it was never designed for.
The internet sucks arse and needs a complete redesign from a technical standpoint. Just boycott the sites that want to use local native code in order to play a stupid animation and then we might see some progress.
Could have been perusing too fast, but this guy fails to mention that one of the biggest obstacles to writing super fast multi-threaded code is the OS mutexes. Everything else he has said is far from surprising news but this *is* only slashdot after all...
We need to do away with our safe but expensive locks and critical sections, which work great in a system where you only have one core anyway so locking just lets someone else get something done, but which cause way too many cross-core stalls in a real-time system.
Something that would help a hell of a lot would be to have implementations of lock free FIFOs being created, supported and tweaked by OS developers.
GP is free to consider it treason; I agree, in fact - perverting the law you've sworn to uphold is certainly treasonous. However, we are talking about the crime of treason, something you can be judged in a court for.
Where are you in every discussion about copyright ever had on/. where someone gets modded insightful for pointing out that copyright infringement isn't theft? It's reassuring that there are people in the world can see the difference between legal semantics and real world effects.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call this act treason, but we do live in an information age and I look at this as propaganda intended to erode the will of US citizens.
There's a game which is tuned to make winners win more. It's the main reason I stopped playing. CS was the same. Game creators would do well to take a page out of this guy's book and try to analyse the larger trends that will occur over time with their games.
Sucked in. You could always get the f*ck out of their country and there wouldn't be a problem.:-)
Besides, this thing goes both ways - you can't blame the other side for working hard to think of these things before you did, and like a lot military propaganda this sort of scaremongering is only trying to villify the winner of this round of the battle for that exact reason.
Google Earth either needs to block certain areas or show the whole globe IMO, and this level of surveillance either can hardly be considered useful in a military context, so...
That is correct - on a paper ballot it is impossible to avoid 'donkey' votes and blank ballots. What I can't understand is how a computer which can wait until you do vote properly before marking you off the electoral roll and which can display the candidates in a random ordering each time the ballot is displayed can possibly end up with invalidated votes.
I find your view on democracy kind of scary. Firstly, allowing people to not vote seems strange to me as an Australian - we are taught to value this right and it *is* a crime not to vote - well, you get a small fine anyway. It seems to me that in a society where voting is optional only the extreme views will ever be represented.
Secondly, the idea of not liking any candidate - I suppose again that is something I've grown up with and gotten used to - but we have a preferential voting system and there's always a bunch of crazy sounding parties like the 'Legalise Marijuana Party' or the 'Three Day Weekend Party' to vote for. Not liking politicians (who does?) doesn't mean people don't have to choose someone to run the country - it's one of those communal duty things.
Finally, I wish everyone would stop talking about misvoting. How is it at all possible to fuck up a vote on a computer screen? You could conceivably cast your vote for the wrong person or what ever, but someone PLEASE explain under what circumstances a computer would let me fail to tick one and only one box, or to number the boxes with my preferences? Did I miss something incredibly complicated about filling out a ballot? Did we not manage to elect school captains from age 8 or so onwards? You CANNOT misvote on a computer voting system... Right?!?
And yeah, whoever allowed you guys to vote on closed source voting machines needs to be publicly tortured and then run out of town in stocks.
We're talking about MS Exchange/Outlook/OE here. This is a setup used by massive corporations every single day as a core part of how they run their business.
This is a setup that won't allow you to search the mailboxes you are looking at, won't let you individually share items like calendars across the board, and doesn't actually provide any useful tools for ensuring that, say, Person A and Person B aren't out on jobs at the same time.
So, if you can make the entire world work on such a useless hub, charge exorbitant amounts of money for it and ignore every single request to fix these problems, why the fSck() would you bother fixing the 1% of emails going missing problem?:-)
when people are prepared to pay almost $1000 (AU) for something they haven't seen yet. I hope the people silly enough not to wait a few months think it was all worth it. By the time they get their cards back they'll be in [insert local electronics chain here] for half the price. ROFL.
No matter how inane your idea, start a project online. Submit it to various places like BetaNews. Learn how to deal with front line programming - you will find each day is a new challenge. I've learnt an incredible amount from silly projects. Case in point would be a little backup app I wrote. I had to learn about living in the system tray, playing nice with computer shutdown events, and a million other little things I never thought of at the outset.
In short as many other people are saying: practice makes perfect. In my opinion, putting yourself out there is important because the stupidity of users and the obscurity of their feature requests makes you go outside your comfort zone. Programming to suit your own needs won't provide the same level of motivation for learning.
As for learning a new language, I've always been able to pick them up as needed. Learning a new language probably won't give you the same thrill as going deeper than you have before with one you know.
First thing I do with a new home machine is to strip off the AV software provided by Dell as cramware.
Well there's your problem right there. If you want to go out of your way to pay more than you should for a computer with things you don't want, the state of your kernel is the least of your worries.:-)
Yes, we don't like to see our citizens in your prisons without recourse to even the bullshit judicial system you call law over there. We also don't like to see you invade countries on flimsy pretexts despite world-wide opposition.
So maybe you are damned if you do, damned if you don't, but if you want to make that argument you might want to leave your military prisons and the "War on terror" (LMAO!) out of the discussion.
By the way, in Rwanda the country was torn to shreds by civil unrest and genocide already. In Afghanistan there was just a bunch of people who (some might say justifiably so) don't agree with what your economic sanctions and continuous war-mongering are doing to the world. Even then it was a small percentage - it's like if Australia decided to topple the US government because of your weekend warriors....after having blown up the Opera House ourselves. No I'll take that back and stop there.
When will people realise that the reason we have 2D boxes that can be dragged around on top of each other is NOT because we can't do anything else. Simply put it is the only simple, reasonable way to display text or pictures. 3D content is great, but I'm sure we'd be using 3D operating systems by now if it was a more/equally effective way to work.
And no Aero does NOT count. It may use 3D capabilities (in order to f*ck up an already hugely flawed GUI system) but you still have flat surfaces to read text or whatever from. Even in the future when we have 3D displays, I will still want to read my text of a flat surface, not the side of a sphere or something gay like that.
In summary, I put this into the same bag as an article from the Australian Amiga magazine (I forget what it was even called now) from about 15 years ago. The author believed we were all stuck in an invisible cage by being forced to use such outdated (even then) ideas as folders and documents. Of course the only way to 'improve' on this system would be to call them something else (hey its taken us that long to add a decent search function to the systems we have) but I'm still going to want to find information, and I expect to be able to group similar information. Call it what you want, all you need is windows, folders and files./Rant.:-)
Insightful? I think not. There are already THREE ways to install an updated version or to update it without going online. And of course there is Windizupdate.
If you're doing kernel development, you may want to look into (or indeed focus on) lock free and wait free data structures. I'm not sure if there are any books out on this, but there are some great resources on the web such as
Slashdot Mirror
But until then, spinning platers!
There will always be a place for the platTers. In 10 years time my HD rips of Deep Space 9 are going to want a lot more than 80GB to live on. ;-)
For an amateur you make some bold sweeping statements. :-)
I understand the point of view that string theory isn't disprovable but it's kind of like saying magnetic field theory isn't disprovable because it seems to be able to describe a physical process but noone can discover the value of mu or epsilon.
Clearly when you're dealing with as many unknowns as there are in string theory it would seem you could model almost anything while you don't know the values of your constants. However, a whole heap of research and thinking by people much smarter than you or I has lead to some percentage of them agreeing this *might* be the way to model the universe. I can't dismiss it just because it seems contrived not to fail. I do realise it could still fail.
The sad bit is that we seem to listen to these people rather than just asking some other random person off the street to comment. Both people have an equally valid viewpoint, assuming of course you find equally informed people. In fact if you think about most celebrities they probably shouldn't be allowed to have any views in the first place.
At least it gets people on Slashdot riled enough to post their own views, I suppose. Maybe we should start submitting New Weekly stories on how [current top 40/blockbuster personality] 'loves the environment'. These people are always stating the vacuously obvious in order to appeal to their audience, so we'd have plenty to work with.
Oh wait, I forgot 90% of our stories come from some idiot IT industy figure's blog...
I must say that it is possible to kill most 'hard' viruses yourself with a copy of rootkitrevealer, unlocker and some understanding of windows services and startup applications works. If you go and explicitly install a virus (obediently rebooting afterwards of course) you will always have a harder time removing in than a malicious ActiveX or something. Spybot is still a great tool as far as looking at your startup (and stopping things readding themselves), installed BHOs and stuff. What I find more annoying is the massively bloated virus scanners that get so easily disabled - Norton's is practically always in a state where it can't even uninstall itself by the time I get to see it.
I'll just add that HijackThis logs are the worst thing to ever happen to searching for security information on the web. All you can turn up these days is log after log of chumps that are infected with everything under the sun.
And yes, cleaning spyware and viruses *is* my job.
What blows me away is that no virus is going to open an explorer window in order to format your hard drive. In fact, a smart virus wouldn't touch the Windows libraries at all while doing it, if it hadn't already just replaced them. So the only person that they're annoying is the user. What's even more outrageous is that there's a registry setting to turn the messages off. Have they learnt nothing in the last five years?
:-)
:-D
Can I lay $5 on this going down in history as the most circumventable (and as you correctly point out completely pointless) security check to date? It will be in the hall of fame with Windows.SecurityCentre.AntiVirusDisabledOverride which you (ie the chumps) have to use a third-party tool to detect. Does an alert window pop up when changing that registry setting? I haven't checked that one yet.
For Mr. Hacker it really is just business as usual with Vista. In fact I think they got better support than all those people with overpriced 'Vista Ready' hardware for which there are still no drivers.
*THIS* is *STILL* what the desktop search wars are about? Whether or not you can search by the basic attributes of a file using wildcards and conveniently launch it afterwards?
.info files were displayed as icons, but other than that what you did with a file did NOT depend on the last three (or even... get this... *four*) characters of its name.
For fsck()'s sake someone give me the damn code for a few days. LMAO people are patenting this shit and having wars over it, and *still* noone (not Mac, not MS, not Linux) has a relational FS, 'like X' searching, result grouping, file-types not determined by extension... C'mon the Amiga had that one in 1989!!! Everybody knew it was a hack that
ROFL, I wonder how many millions have been spent presenting the same search technology from pre 1990 in a different way in the last 18 years? Gotta get a job doing that. If you can't write it in a single line of SQL then it ain't a search function worth having, right? My sides hurt, seriously.
What really surprises me is forum searching. There are so many open source bulletin boards in use, but not one of them has an even remotely helpful search function, despite their widespread use and (supposedly) active development cycles. The human race is doomed to be crushed under the weight of its own information, and all because it's about whether your search engine has a dog or a butterfly on it that talks to you, rather than ACTUALLY MAKING SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES. Actually slashdot tagging is one of the best 'innovations' I've seen lately. Haven't used it but it certainly seems to work from the chump end.
This one will keep me grinning for days. Stupid humans!
You've touched on an interesting point there (aperture problem). Has anyone ever thought of feeding the information to a computer in DivX format, where movement and recognition of basic shapes has already been done?
When was the last time you saw an ad that made you want to buy something? *NEVER* in my lifetime. Even the dumbest people I know don't see ads as a source of information about products. And seriously, have you looked at these blogs? Only the truly ultimately dumbest of the dumb would think for a second they were made by a real person with a point of view about something. (That's out of the truly ultimately outrageously stupid people who think blogging and reading blogs is a valid way to spend time in the first place).
Ads are just noise, they get as much attention as muzak in shopping centres, warnings on cigarettes and promises from politicians.
The bible is completely wrong on this. Don't believe (let alone buy) anything you aren't looking at.
Aaron.
The only teeth that can eat other teeth. ;-)
Isn't Flash player that plugin that makes the little bar come out of the top of IE to tell you about security problems? I didn't know it did anything different.
But seriously the sooner people get off Flash the better - C'mon, even HTML support is still dodgy, and never mind the fact that we're still trying to use it as a container for things it was never designed for.
The internet sucks arse and needs a complete redesign from a technical standpoint. Just boycott the sites that want to use local native code in order to play a stupid animation and then we might see some progress.
Could have been perusing too fast, but this guy fails to mention that one of the biggest obstacles to writing super fast multi-threaded code is the OS mutexes. Everything else he has said is far from surprising news but this *is* only slashdot after all...
We need to do away with our safe but expensive locks and critical sections, which work great in a system where you only have one core anyway so locking just lets someone else get something done, but which cause way too many cross-core stalls in a real-time system.
Something that would help a hell of a lot would be to have implementations of lock free FIFOs being created, supported and tweaked by OS developers.
A guy can dream...
GP is free to consider it treason; I agree, in fact - perverting the law you've sworn to uphold is certainly treasonous. However, we are talking about the crime of treason, something you can be judged in a court for.
/. where someone gets modded insightful for pointing out that copyright infringement isn't theft? It's reassuring that there are people in the world can see the difference between legal semantics and real world effects.
Where are you in every discussion about copyright ever had on
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call this act treason, but we do live in an information age and I look at this as propaganda intended to erode the will of US citizens.
There's a game which is tuned to make winners win more. It's the main reason I stopped playing. CS was the same. Game creators would do well to take a page out of this guy's book and try to analyse the larger trends that will occur over time with their games.
Sucked in. You could always get the f*ck out of their country and there wouldn't be a problem. :-)
Besides, this thing goes both ways - you can't blame the other side for working hard to think of these things before you did, and like a lot military propaganda this sort of scaremongering is only trying to villify the winner of this round of the battle for that exact reason.
Google Earth either needs to block certain areas or show the whole globe IMO, and this level of surveillance either can hardly be considered useful in a military context, so...
That is correct - on a paper ballot it is impossible to avoid 'donkey' votes and blank ballots. What I can't understand is how a computer which can wait until you do vote properly before marking you off the electoral roll and which can display the candidates in a random ordering each time the ballot is displayed can possibly end up with invalidated votes.
I find your view on democracy kind of scary. Firstly, allowing people to not vote seems strange to me as an Australian - we are taught to value this right and it *is* a crime not to vote - well, you get a small fine anyway. It seems to me that in a society where voting is optional only the extreme views will ever be represented.
Secondly, the idea of not liking any candidate - I suppose again that is something I've grown up with and gotten used to - but we have a preferential voting system and there's always a bunch of crazy sounding parties like the 'Legalise Marijuana Party' or the 'Three Day Weekend Party' to vote for. Not liking politicians (who does?) doesn't mean people don't have to choose someone to run the country - it's one of those communal duty things.
Finally, I wish everyone would stop talking about misvoting. How is it at all possible to fuck up a vote on a computer screen? You could conceivably cast your vote for the wrong person or what ever, but someone PLEASE explain under what circumstances a computer would let me fail to tick one and only one box, or to number the boxes with my preferences? Did I miss something incredibly complicated about filling out a ballot? Did we not manage to elect school captains from age 8 or so onwards? You CANNOT misvote on a computer voting system... Right?!?
And yeah, whoever allowed you guys to vote on closed source voting machines needs to be publicly tortured and then run out of town in stocks.
We're talking about MS Exchange/Outlook/OE here. This is a setup used by massive corporations every single day as a core part of how they run their business.
:-)
This is a setup that won't allow you to search the mailboxes you are looking at, won't let you individually share items like calendars across the board, and doesn't actually provide any useful tools for ensuring that, say, Person A and Person B aren't out on jobs at the same time.
So, if you can make the entire world work on such a useless hub, charge exorbitant amounts of money for it and ignore every single request to fix these problems, why the fSck() would you bother fixing the 1% of emails going missing problem?
when people are prepared to pay almost $1000 (AU) for something they haven't seen yet. I hope the people silly enough not to wait a few months think it was all worth it. By the time they get their cards back they'll be in [insert local electronics chain here] for half the price. ROFL.
No matter how inane your idea, start a project online. Submit it to various places like BetaNews. Learn how to deal with front line programming - you will find each day is a new challenge. I've learnt an incredible amount from silly projects. Case in point would be a little backup app I wrote. I had to learn about living in the system tray, playing nice with computer shutdown events, and a million other little things I never thought of at the outset.
In short as many other people are saying: practice makes perfect. In my opinion, putting yourself out there is important because the stupidity of users and the obscurity of their feature requests makes you go outside your comfort zone. Programming to suit your own needs won't provide the same level of motivation for learning.
As for learning a new language, I've always been able to pick them up as needed. Learning a new language probably won't give you the same thrill as going deeper than you have before with one you know.
First thing I do with a new home machine is to strip off the AV software provided by Dell as cramware.
Well there's your problem right there. If you want to go out of your way to pay more than you should for a computer with things you don't want, the state of your kernel is the least of your worries. :-)
Yes, we don't like to see our citizens in your prisons without recourse to even the bullshit judicial system you call law over there. We also don't like to see you invade countries on flimsy pretexts despite world-wide opposition.
...after having blown up the Opera House ourselves. No I'll take that back and stop there.
So maybe you are damned if you do, damned if you don't, but if you want to make that argument you might want to leave your military prisons and the "War on terror" (LMAO!) out of the discussion.
By the way, in Rwanda the country was torn to shreds by civil unrest and genocide already. In Afghanistan there was just a bunch of people who (some might say justifiably so) don't agree with what your economic sanctions and continuous war-mongering are doing to the world. Even then it was a small percentage - it's like if Australia decided to topple the US government because of your weekend warriors.
When will people realise that the reason we have 2D boxes that can be dragged around on top of each other is NOT because we can't do anything else. Simply put it is the only simple, reasonable way to display text or pictures. 3D content is great, but I'm sure we'd be using 3D operating systems by now if it was a more/equally effective way to work.
/Rant. :-)
And no Aero does NOT count. It may use 3D capabilities (in order to f*ck up an already hugely flawed GUI system) but you still have flat surfaces to read text or whatever from. Even in the future when we have 3D displays, I will still want to read my text of a flat surface, not the side of a sphere or something gay like that.
In summary, I put this into the same bag as an article from the Australian Amiga magazine (I forget what it was even called now) from about 15 years ago. The author believed we were all stuck in an invisible cage by being forced to use such outdated (even then) ideas as folders and documents. Of course the only way to 'improve' on this system would be to call them something else (hey its taken us that long to add a decent search function to the systems we have) but I'm still going to want to find information, and I expect to be able to group similar information. Call it what you want, all you need is windows, folders and files.
100 thousand kilometers? How far away is space again?
Insightful? I think not. There are already THREE ways to install an updated version or to update it without going online. And of course there is Windizupdate.
If you're doing kernel development, you may want to look into (or indeed focus on) lock free and wait free data structures. I'm not sure if there are any books out on this, but there are some great resources on the web such as
;-)
http://works.music.columbia.edu/LFDS
as well as a mailing list at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/liblf-dev/
The group is developing an open source lock free data structures library - I'm just a lurker waiting for the library to become available
The posts so far at the Yahoo site are a gold mine of links to sites and papers.