I know nothing about pitot tubes in particular, but what I do know is that when some outcome could have been avoided but for some reason wasn't, it usually has something to do with money. I.e., somebody was cutting corners because they could make more money that way. After all, how many people actually use the product they make and sell? Those whom I can name are, by no coincidence, also known for making products of sufficient if not superb quality.
The key to parallel programming is compartmentalization. With a good enough foundation that compartmentalizes properly, parallel programming would only be a matter of coding the compartments and synchronizing their results.
That having been said, parallel programming these days solves a fairly niche problem. The speed of modern processors make faking parallelism with interrupts viable. The only area where parallelism truly makes sense is when working with extremely large amounts of large chunks of data.
For example, in gaming, there is a need for the rendering, texturing, lighting, and physics engine to work at 100% all at once in addition to the UI and AI (the latter two could possibly be satisfied with interrupts, but only up to a certain point). In weather forecasting, there's a need to independently calculate the output of a large amount of locations in order to generate the input for the next group of results.
What's difficult is trying to parallelize every problem regardless of the nature of the problem, especially just for the marketing department to throw the buzzword into the promotional materials. And what makes things difficult are generic schedulers who would do it for you even if you didn't want it. But a good programmer should be able to compartmentalize the problem, and then determine based on that whether parallelization is appropriate.
I think your argument would hold more weight if it weren't for the last section in the wikipedia article (yeah, I probably shouldn't trust wikipedia 100%, but I think it's accurate enough to believe until I hear otherwise). The flight that supposedly was the Roswell crash was also supposedly canceled due to poor weather. That reeks too much like the "magic bullet" theory to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Soviets pulled a stunt like this, and there was (and still is) a massive coverup by the U.S. government. The only issue is, there are far too many assumptions to make to accept the author's premise.
Between this and actual E.T.'s crashing, Occam's Razor feels mightly sharp right about now.
It's not "massive amounts of technology" so much as "shady business practices" that Gates is well known for. This has changed significantly over the past ten or fifteen years, partly due to the anti-trust ruling. Once that has expired, Microsoft can go back to throwing their weight around in the industry again. I don't know if Ballmer is the same level of business genius that Gates was. But he's certainly not moving the company in any other direction though.
The lack of imagination and technological foresight part is otherwise fairly accurate. Individual employees might disagree, but this particular trait or the lack thereof comes out in management decisions.
As if DDoSing their websites would have any effect on their election. Put up a bunch of attack ads on TV and you have something. Buy some ads in meatspace, and people will notice. Make phone calls. Pass out signs and bumper stickers. These things will make people notice. The loss of a website would affect only a small percentage of voters, and even so, it certainly wouldn't make those affected switch their vote in any way. After all, there are so many other avenues of "information" out there about their favorite candidate.
Not that the opponent your attacks would be indirectly promoting would be any better. Unless you could provide a good alternative, even if you had the money to plaster the populace with campaign ads everywhere, you'd still be fucked in the end, just by the other candidate instead. But by that time, you'd have the money and resources to run your own campaign, which is probably what you should've done in the first place.
But at least they know how to pick their mistresses, unlike their U.S. counterparts. I'm talking about the politicians of course, whose range of selection go from teenage boys to the cleaning lady.
That would require too much work. It'd require the complete re-engineering of what's running under the hood. They might as well write a completely new browser then.
I don't know about the wisdom fo removing the URL bar outright, but there are definitely interface and usability issues with it, and it can be something better and more useful than just something that shows the current page's URL (and it's sometimes misleading at that too). After all, you don't need an editable text box just to show the URL of the page you're visiting.
From an interface standpoint, the URL bar looks as if it were something that applies to all of the tabs. What they could do to clean up the interface is switch the tab and the url bar around, so that each tab would appear to have its own url bar. I have the same objections to the navigation/reload/stop/home buttons.
In terms of functionality, the URL bar only shows URLs, which is a waste of space when there are other places (like a status bar) that would fit that purpose. In fact, a great anti-phishing device would be to display in the status bar the URL of the part of the page the cursor is hovering over. You can't really do this on the URL bar because that's supposed to be static until you type something in or click on a link, but the status bar changes depending on what you hover over.
But I digress. I'd like to see more functionality integrated into the URL bar. They should make it more closely resemble a CLI, where if somebody types in "google abc" or something of that sort, it would search for "abc" using Google. "help" would launch help (like F1). "get http://something.com/foobar.zip" would download foobar.zip from something.com. "bookmark" would bookmark the page. And in the way Excel behaves when typing in functions, there could be a toggle-able auto-complete command feature.
People like big buttons and fancy menus, and those should not be removed outright (they should be hide-able). But I think a lot of people would enjoy the ability to do everything with a few strokes of the keyboard.
Trying to unseat JPEG is akin to the various attempts at unseating MP3. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. There's just too much support for JPEG out there. Nobody's going to support a second file format just because; they rather spend the development time enhancing their product in more meaningful ways.
Even Apple had to cave when it came to MP3 (they wouldn't sell it, but the iPod had to play it). I can't imagine Google could possibly do any better with JPEG.
Considering the timing of the announcement, and Microsoft's business practices in the past, I imagine there's plenty of reasons to suspect Microsoft's hand in the matter.
What they've all failed to realize is that they were actually correct: The people who were going to be saved by the rapture were already saved by the rapture. They (and everybody else) are in denial because it wasn't them.
As foretold, this is the first sign that the world will cease to exist in 6 months. The second sign will happen on June 3rd.
They can start by consulting the history books. There are plenty of recorded instances were animals were behaving strangely right before a major earthquake. People may have written it off previously as superstition, but it's probably a good time to re-examine those stories now.
Eventually, we (and I use this term loosely) may be able to narrow it down to certain types of quakes (e.g. the massive subduction zone-type quakes), but we can't be certain other types of quakes (transform faults) will exhibit the same type of behavior.
What they'll probably find is that it is an event that can, but does not necessarily precede an earthquake. They may, however, be able to use it to determine whether a quake is a foreshock, the main shock, or an aftershock when it does happen.
That'll be valid until somebody hacks Microsoft and does the same to their data.
Funny thing about security is that you're never 100% secure. You're only secure enough that it's not worth most people's effort to break your security.
That having been said, I'm fairly confident the people at Microsoft know what they're doing. Say what you will about their strategic moves, but from a tactical one, they're at the top of their game, on par with other major web technology companies like Google and Facebook.
They are a major employer of techies, tinkerers, and others of the hacking variety. If there's anyone who knows how to lock down a system and control access, it'll be them. The company as a whole may or may not take securing user data very seriously (they probably have since scrambled to identify holes in their system), but I'm certain the employees will more than make up for any deficiencies at the upper management level.
Incidentally there have been proposals to introduce a constitutional Bill of Rights in the past. They have not been successful. There are as many arguments against an entrenched and absolute statement of rights, as there are for one - there are pros and cons in each case.
Funny thing is, the founders of the U.S. Constitution wrestled with this very idea as well. It was debate over this very thing that led to the Bill of Rights being the first 10 amendments as opposed to a part of the constitution itself.
The 10th amendment or something similar is probably the key to any codified objections. In your case, perhaps the equivalent to the 10th amendment can read something like "any rights not explicitly expressed are granted based on common law."
Today, it's a ping. Tomorrow, it's a system-level log. Ten releases later, you wonder where things went wrong when Windows starts keylogging and screen capturing to a corporate server.
Ok, it probably won't get that bad (corporations and the government would throw a hissy fit if it came true), but at the end of the day, this does expose the vulnurability of closed source projects to espionage. Hell, open source projects (or at least the compiled binaries of an open source compiler) are theoretically vulnurable. But I'd rather have one pair of honest eyes auditing the code for such misbehavior once every ten years it than none.
That's good and all, until someone ups and acquires your company. Suddenly, that "defensive" patent portfolio your company's been keeping becomes somebody else's offensive one. Look at the Sun acquisition if you want more details.
It's not a bad thing for your company to keep a nice portfolio handy for when it gets sued. However, the Sun acquisition is something for your upper management to be aware of in case there's some kind of hostile or otherwise takeover.
Slashdot Mirror
I know nothing about pitot tubes in particular, but what I do know is that when some outcome could have been avoided but for some reason wasn't, it usually has something to do with money. I.e., somebody was cutting corners because they could make more money that way. After all, how many people actually use the product they make and sell? Those whom I can name are, by no coincidence, also known for making products of sufficient if not superb quality.
The key to parallel programming is compartmentalization. With a good enough foundation that compartmentalizes properly, parallel programming would only be a matter of coding the compartments and synchronizing their results.
That having been said, parallel programming these days solves a fairly niche problem. The speed of modern processors make faking parallelism with interrupts viable. The only area where parallelism truly makes sense is when working with extremely large amounts of large chunks of data.
For example, in gaming, there is a need for the rendering, texturing, lighting, and physics engine to work at 100% all at once in addition to the UI and AI (the latter two could possibly be satisfied with interrupts, but only up to a certain point). In weather forecasting, there's a need to independently calculate the output of a large amount of locations in order to generate the input for the next group of results.
What's difficult is trying to parallelize every problem regardless of the nature of the problem, especially just for the marketing department to throw the buzzword into the promotional materials. And what makes things difficult are generic schedulers who would do it for you even if you didn't want it. But a good programmer should be able to compartmentalize the problem, and then determine based on that whether parallelization is appropriate.
...how this even remotely constitutes as "news for nerds." I'd have expected to see this in Fark or Digg, but not Slashdot.
Really guys? Is it that slow a news day?
I think your argument would hold more weight if it weren't for the last section in the wikipedia article (yeah, I probably shouldn't trust wikipedia 100%, but I think it's accurate enough to believe until I hear otherwise). The flight that supposedly was the Roswell crash was also supposedly canceled due to poor weather. That reeks too much like the "magic bullet" theory to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Soviets pulled a stunt like this, and there was (and still is) a massive coverup by the U.S. government. The only issue is, there are far too many assumptions to make to accept the author's premise.
Between this and actual E.T.'s crashing, Occam's Razor feels mightly sharp right about now.
It's not "massive amounts of technology" so much as "shady business practices" that Gates is well known for. This has changed significantly over the past ten or fifteen years, partly due to the anti-trust ruling. Once that has expired, Microsoft can go back to throwing their weight around in the industry again. I don't know if Ballmer is the same level of business genius that Gates was. But he's certainly not moving the company in any other direction though.
The lack of imagination and technological foresight part is otherwise fairly accurate. Individual employees might disagree, but this particular trait or the lack thereof comes out in management decisions.
As if DDoSing their websites would have any effect on their election. Put up a bunch of attack ads on TV and you have something. Buy some ads in meatspace, and people will notice. Make phone calls. Pass out signs and bumper stickers. These things will make people notice. The loss of a website would affect only a small percentage of voters, and even so, it certainly wouldn't make those affected switch their vote in any way. After all, there are so many other avenues of "information" out there about their favorite candidate.
Not that the opponent your attacks would be indirectly promoting would be any better. Unless you could provide a good alternative, even if you had the money to plaster the populace with campaign ads everywhere, you'd still be fucked in the end, just by the other candidate instead. But by that time, you'd have the money and resources to run your own campaign, which is probably what you should've done in the first place.
Oh the irony if a major political party's web servers were used to host a torrent tracker without their knowledge.
That'd be unlikely though, as someone would easily notice the sudden spike in traffic a tracker brings.
This should be a ask slashdot question: What computing features no longer available would you bring back if you designed a machine?
But at least they know how to pick their mistresses, unlike their U.S. counterparts. I'm talking about the politicians of course, whose range of selection go from teenage boys to the cleaning lady.
That would require too much work. It'd require the complete re-engineering of what's running under the hood. They might as well write a completely new browser then.
Maybe they're addressing the bug reports by removing features.
I don't know about the wisdom fo removing the URL bar outright, but there are definitely interface and usability issues with it, and it can be something better and more useful than just something that shows the current page's URL (and it's sometimes misleading at that too). After all, you don't need an editable text box just to show the URL of the page you're visiting.
From an interface standpoint, the URL bar looks as if it were something that applies to all of the tabs. What they could do to clean up the interface is switch the tab and the url bar around, so that each tab would appear to have its own url bar. I have the same objections to the navigation/reload/stop/home buttons.
In terms of functionality, the URL bar only shows URLs, which is a waste of space when there are other places (like a status bar) that would fit that purpose. In fact, a great anti-phishing device would be to display in the status bar the URL of the part of the page the cursor is hovering over. You can't really do this on the URL bar because that's supposed to be static until you type something in or click on a link, but the status bar changes depending on what you hover over.
But I digress. I'd like to see more functionality integrated into the URL bar. They should make it more closely resemble a CLI, where if somebody types in "google abc" or something of that sort, it would search for "abc" using Google. "help" would launch help (like F1). "get http://something.com/foobar.zip" would download foobar.zip from something.com. "bookmark" would bookmark the page. And in the way Excel behaves when typing in functions, there could be a toggle-able auto-complete command feature.
People like big buttons and fancy menus, and those should not be removed outright (they should be hide-able). But I think a lot of people would enjoy the ability to do everything with a few strokes of the keyboard.
Trying to unseat JPEG is akin to the various attempts at unseating MP3. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. There's just too much support for JPEG out there. Nobody's going to support a second file format just because; they rather spend the development time enhancing their product in more meaningful ways.
Even Apple had to cave when it came to MP3 (they wouldn't sell it, but the iPod had to play it). I can't imagine Google could possibly do any better with JPEG.
And then they should be able to regulate the hell out of the cables they laid (within the confines of the state and federal constitution).
Considering the timing of the announcement, and Microsoft's business practices in the past, I imagine there's plenty of reasons to suspect Microsoft's hand in the matter.
He's a married man with kids. Nights are reserved for porn.
What they've all failed to realize is that they were actually correct: The people who were going to be saved by the rapture were already saved by the rapture. They (and everybody else) are in denial because it wasn't them.
As foretold, this is the first sign that the world will cease to exist in 6 months. The second sign will happen on June 3rd.
In the same manner? It's considered worse than piracy.
They can start by consulting the history books. There are plenty of recorded instances were animals were behaving strangely right before a major earthquake. People may have written it off previously as superstition, but it's probably a good time to re-examine those stories now.
Eventually, we (and I use this term loosely) may be able to narrow it down to certain types of quakes (e.g. the massive subduction zone-type quakes), but we can't be certain other types of quakes (transform faults) will exhibit the same type of behavior.
What they'll probably find is that it is an event that can, but does not necessarily precede an earthquake. They may, however, be able to use it to determine whether a quake is a foreshock, the main shock, or an aftershock when it does happen.
I saw a t-shirt once that said:
You can't fix stupid.
I find it more and more relevant each day.
That'll be valid until somebody hacks Microsoft and does the same to their data.
Funny thing about security is that you're never 100% secure. You're only secure enough that it's not worth most people's effort to break your security.
That having been said, I'm fairly confident the people at Microsoft know what they're doing. Say what you will about their strategic moves, but from a tactical one, they're at the top of their game, on par with other major web technology companies like Google and Facebook.
They are a major employer of techies, tinkerers, and others of the hacking variety. If there's anyone who knows how to lock down a system and control access, it'll be them. The company as a whole may or may not take securing user data very seriously (they probably have since scrambled to identify holes in their system), but I'm certain the employees will more than make up for any deficiencies at the upper management level.
Incidentally there have been proposals to introduce a constitutional Bill of Rights in the past. They have not been successful. There are as many arguments against an entrenched and absolute statement of rights, as there are for one - there are pros and cons in each case.
Funny thing is, the founders of the U.S. Constitution wrestled with this very idea as well. It was debate over this very thing that led to the Bill of Rights being the first 10 amendments as opposed to a part of the constitution itself.
The 10th amendment or something similar is probably the key to any codified objections. In your case, perhaps the equivalent to the 10th amendment can read something like "any rights not explicitly expressed are granted based on common law."
Purely out of spite, the mods gave you a +4 instead of a +5.
Today, it's a ping. Tomorrow, it's a system-level log. Ten releases later, you wonder where things went wrong when Windows starts keylogging and screen capturing to a corporate server.
Ok, it probably won't get that bad (corporations and the government would throw a hissy fit if it came true), but at the end of the day, this does expose the vulnurability of closed source projects to espionage. Hell, open source projects (or at least the compiled binaries of an open source compiler) are theoretically vulnurable. But I'd rather have one pair of honest eyes auditing the code for such misbehavior once every ten years it than none.
That's good and all, until someone ups and acquires your company. Suddenly, that "defensive" patent portfolio your company's been keeping becomes somebody else's offensive one. Look at the Sun acquisition if you want more details.
It's not a bad thing for your company to keep a nice portfolio handy for when it gets sued. However, the Sun acquisition is something for your upper management to be aware of in case there's some kind of hostile or otherwise takeover.