I mean if make a mini-black hole and drop it on the floor by acident, wouldn't it just absorb more and more mass on the way to the center of the earth.
I didn't know Ed Wood developed plot lines on Slashdot.
As a basic sort of testing phase, do it all on one computer. This eliminates all possible network errors that can occur. I'm assuming this is meant to be huge so maybe the bugs you speak of result from multiple machines fouling each other up. Either way, let's talk debugging strategies!
Also, as I recall from my days of drudgery at college, create tons of output.
So I will suggest as a preliminary requirement that you create a nice logging system (if you haven't done so already). I haven't written much C# so I'm going to be talking abstractly. Hopefully the rest of Slashdot can help with the specifics to C#. Now, what I mean is that you should create a class that just creates an output log file that you can read for output later. I don't mean to put a message for every packet sent but maybe it wouldn't hurt to put a message for each stream or connection opened. It's going to help for you to generate random IDs for each call and to put the destination/receiving IP:Port in your log. This would most likely be helpful with a server. It also will be helpful to store printlns in your code (redirect standard out to the logger).
Now use this on every machine in the system. If one machine should start to give you problems, create a mutual exclusion on this log (or put all of the log entries in critical regions). In Java, you can use object locks or the synchronized keyword--in C# I'm pretty sure they have something similar. Just because it's not a GUI doesn't mean you can't record output.
Just a friendly warning, time stamping is usually worthless unless you have a logical network (i.e. a Lamport Clock) clock scheme set up (which usually requires lots of time on one's hands). You could shoot for an NTP server but I wouldn't trust the accuracy past 500 ms. If you absolutely need a clock scheme, I recommend having one machine on the network tick tock an increasing number that is reflected in all the logs. Make the time between ticks adjustable--this way you'll be able to check out events roughly relevant to these ticks (assuming the time it takes to get there is similar).
In the end, your best tool is your brain. Designing tests and double checking the logs on each machine to see that the linear time sequence of relative events is correct. Logic will be your only friend in this journey. Don't be afraid to kick off more threads on the client side if they don't need to share resources. If you have a server side, be careful in how many threads you have and make sure you realize what memory scope they're limited to.
For the love of god, if you use ports--don't forget to free them when you're done using them!
Unfortunately, Nornir is not OSS... yet. Their papers may be of use to you, however. If you're having problems with packets on either end, use my good friend ethereal.
Honestly, I was afraid that Songbird would be too bloated--trying to do everything for everyone a la Winamp.
I do not agree with your assessment of Winamp being the lightest audio player. It probably has Windows Media Player beat but I use better alternatives in alternate operating systems.
Short Answer: Moderators Are Not Responsible
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Probably because the moderators are not responsible enough to RTFA before moderating comments. I did, however, RTFA and discovered that Rob Lord is one of the primary developers of Winamp--making my post about Winamp on-topic. Yet, what happened was the moderators took a quick glance at the topic and looked at my post (which probably read like I had an axe to grind with Winamp, I don't know).
What I tried to offer readers was a link to his homepage and resume (which lists the companies he's done work for). Why do I think this is pertinent? Well, because open source developers trying to write something like Songbird are not common. I feel that we should be heralding Rob Lord for his work in providing us an alternative to iTunes--whether it flies or not, god bless him he tried. I think the best way to do that is to visit his webpage and find out what he's about.
If you actually visit his page, he's a witty and interesting man. Am I some sort of Lord fan boy? No, and I'm not even religious to boot! Alright, that pun was a license to mod this post as low as you want.
One thing you'll notice about stories like this is that if you post additional links to information on the stories, some people don't care. Everyone suddenly focused on "iTunes" and "DRM" when they read this article. These are some very negative caveats of this story, in my opinion. What did I find to be the positive aspect? The man behind the code.
If you're interested in more of Robert Lord's background and experiences, check out his resume.
Although I dislike Winamp for it's complexity, I did thoroughly enjoy his simplistic (and very well designed) homepage called "smudges of wisdom."
He seems to be an interesting fellow with odd musical tastes:
Mostly sadcore (tm), not to be conflated with common ennuicore (tm).
Also interesting is that he goes through a list of decent books, some of which I'm familiar with. The best part about them is that they aren't at all the typical programming books you'd expect.
How come zero hits turn up for Ceragenins when I search for it?
This article didn't include much of the above information and seemed to give a completely different name for CSAs than what they truly are--compound steroids used to primarily combat bacteria.
As we all know, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a desease that attacks the body's immune system.
I'm no med student but the article states that:
CSA-54, one of a family of compounds called Ceragenins (or CSAs), mimics the disease-fighting characteristics of anti-microbial and anti-viral agents produced naturally by a healthy human immune system.
Ok, if this is true, then we've overcome the large part of AIDS (immunodeficiency). We can just boost the hell out of the white blood cell mimicking Ceragenins. Will this stop AIDS? Maybe not, but it will provide the defenses that AIDS rips from its patients. If I recall correctly, it's not the AIDS virus itself that kills a victim but instead another desease/sickness that occurs from a weakened immune system.
What's exciting is that the AIDS virus probably doesn't infect/reproduce when it is being killed by Ceragenins like it does to white blood cells. Thus, they may have something here if their premises hold true.
Googling for "Ceragenins" results in zero hits. Which means this is some magical elixir that is a mistakened cure all. Or perhaps it's something very obscure that no one has thought of until today? We shall see.
Bacteria and Yeast are not the same as the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS and HIV are viruses.
Therefore, speculating that the same thing that stops viruses will also inhibit yeast or bacteria is erroneous. One consists of live cells--the other merely protiens (and is debated whether or not it is 'alive').
A million AIDS patients is about 1/40th of today's problem. Either way, you're painting a pretty damn good picture if your 'prediction' holds true.
I get called out on this a lot and I'm going to point out some key differences between two types of RAID arrays. A RAID 0 (also known as a striped set) splits data evenly across two or more disks with no parity information for redundancy. Therefore, it is an example of a RAID array that is actually not redundant (despite the acronym). Even if a normal user was running RAID 0, a hard drive crash would be catastrophic.
How much is that increased security really worth for an average home user, when you break it down? According to me, fairly little. Here's why.
Yes, it is duly noted that you're the only person from which this information is originating.
But what is more important to a home user? His or her own personal files, or a bunch of system files?
If "Johnny's first day at school" is more important that system critical resources, perhaps you should have hard copies (CD, DVD, tape, etc.) of this media.
Of course, they should make backups-- but wasn't Linux supposed to be secure? So why should they backup?
You're right, you should make backups. You have a love-affair-dependency on your hard drive. Everyday you need it to retain the ones and zeros it holds that forms your data. One day, your personal hard drive isn't going to be there for you. That's why you should back up regardless of how secure you feel. Most "normal home users" don't have redundant RAID arrays running. Furthermore, it isn't "secure period," it's touted to be one of the most secure operating systems. Wait, weren't we talking about Unix?
Isn't Linux immune to viruses and what not? Isn't that what the Linux world has been telling them?
I don't think anyone but Mac users claim that. And anyone that claims that for any processing device is lying to you. There are Linux Viruses out there, just use your favorite search engine.
UNIX might be more secure than Windows, but that only goes for the system itself.
Oh good, we're back on Unix here (they're not exactly the same, you know). I disagree, both sides (user and system) are more secure in the case of Unix or Linux for that matter.
In the end, the result of a devastating virus or other malware program can be just as devastating on a UNIX-like system as it can be on a Windows system
While this might be true, I think you should take into account the frequency of said viruses. When's the last time a massive virus attack has taken down entire networks of Unix machines?
To blatantly copy Oasis: don't believe the truth.
So you talked about Unix security without quoting a single authoritative source on the issue. And to finish off this article, you rely on a one-hit wonder brit pop band to prove your thesis. May Slashdot have mercy on your soul, Thomas. Endure the onslaught.
The big question is whether or not this will be able to understand the scheduling signals that my local provider (Comcast, Cox, etc.) sends to their proprietary boxes. Am I going to have to pay a monthly fee for this instead a la Tivo?
Hmmmm, do I pick being able to swing Link's sword in my living room or not having to parse through my roommate's Fox & WB fodder to get to my Aqua Teen.... so many choices and they're only rumors so far! Curse you Slashdot, why must you taunt me so?
*head explodes*
I know the rest of this post is painfully offtopic but I'll take the karma hit for those of you that like trivia.
Take with the usual recommended amount of salt.
The saying "with a grain of salt" refers way back to its Latin phrase, "cum grano salis." Pliny the Elder wrote about a poison that had an antidote that needed to be taken with a grain of salt. Since said antidote was known by Pliny, any threats involving the known poison were said to be taken "with a grain of salt" meaning they were not to be taken seriously or to be believed since the antidote was on hand. Another take on it from Maven's Words:
Other etymologists believe that, at some point centuries later, someone decided that Pliny had been skeptical about either the antidote or its efficacy and took cum grano salis to mean 'with a dose of skepticism'. That has been its meaning since its first appearance in English in the 17th century.
I don't work with Unix servers, but I've always heard that entry servers using the Power4 processors were the best. From The Unix Guardian:
As I said when I went over the high-end and the entry Unix server markets earlier this year, without any doubt, IBM has been an increasingly dominant factor in the Unix server business, across all form factors and SMP scalability, since the Power4 processors debuted four years ago. IBM is, in fact, arguably the main reason that the Unix server business has seen any growth at all.
Now, as the table with that article shows, the 2005 pSeries kills the competition in their workload tests. I'm curious though about other server solutions (large or small scale) that Slashdot users may work with or know about. What about Unisys or Hewlett Packard scalable multiprocessor (SMP) solutions? Has anyone used Unix on these? Is it not recommended because of the chipsets or the way the processors are built?
While Amazon and Ebay continue to have average quarterly profits of $1 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, and are successes by any measure, the $17 billion per annum Google Marketplace is clearly the most impressive success story of what used to be called, pre-crash, "The New Economy."
Perhaps I misread that... maybe $17 billion is their gross profit? Either way, I said "profit" not "gross profit" or "net profit."
Since it's IPO on April 30th 2004, Google seems to be testing the waters of a lot of different markets.
Granted, they all center on information technology, this company is ever expanding along different product lines. We've seen Google blogs, Picasa, Analytics, Video, Desktop, Talk, Earth, Toolbar, Gmail, Translate, Mobile, etc. And (thank god), they've all been presented to us rather benignly but are they all considered successes?
And now we observe GBuy, a service to compete with Paypal. Paypal's history has been rocky but they do have a solid foothold as they are almost married with eBay. Will eBay welcome the new GBuy and favor it equally with Paypal?
Google profits around $17 billion a year--do they really need to become a money transfer service? Ebay reports $4.5 billion a year, will they be sharing some of that with Google? Will a cut of that even matter to Google?
What's interesting is to see if they actually take a cut (a la Paypal) or if they just continue Google ads through the pages on the service to pay for all of the legal work that comes with claims and fraud. They have the resources to do it and this would probably kill sites like Paypal that take a 3% or more charge on each transaction.
It was fairly lightweight, I could load in huge playlists of college-napster-garbage without slowdown and I knew all the hot keys for searching and what not.
Then that llama came into the picture. I think it must have been version three or four (I can't remember) when there was a damned llama or alpaca or whatever in a green field. Now, I love llamas and alpacas, don't get me wrong. The problem was that now Winamp was about "graphix" and "features" that were once plugins that I didn't want.
I don't know why they thought Winamp needed to be able to play videos but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to show stupid tripping-on-acid-harmonograph visualizations but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to melt songs together but it did now... etc.
On top of that, the memory footprint in Windows was crazy. And my roommate tried to put skins on Winamp that just made my computer shit its gourd. I was disgusted... the hot keys may have still been there but what I was looking for in a media player was not. For some reason, they seemed to think that competing with Windows Media Player meant mimicking it to every detail. Fine. I never want to touch Windows Media Player, it's about as useful as my appendix. And now I feel the same way about Winamp.
Now there's a spyware flaw in Winamp. Am I surprised? Not really. They have gotten so complicated that there's probably a thousand holes in that application. They definitely lost site of what I was looking for--a plain jane slim audio player. Winamp's executing a remote method invocation through a playlist that can trigger itself to be automatically loaded and ran? Now that sounds like a "feature" I want my audio player to have.
Is this the first time this has happened? Nope, remember the zero day exploit that targeted skins in 2004? There's been a myriad of security issues with Winamp since it became more and more complicated.
"Gee, the way our audio player loads playlists isn't very secure. But it works and the people who use our application aren't interested in security--they're interested in playing AVI files on their audio player!"
So what would I recommend? Well, if you're using Linux, I can think of at least ten things better but XMMS would probably be my favorite. If you're running Windows, I like to use Quintessential Player which can be modified to be as complicated as new Winamp or can be
No, I haven't read the book. I don't much like the guy, and don't have any motivation to do so.
Look, you're a porn king which, I assume, means you have tons of time on your hands. Literally.
Go to your library and check out Business at the Speed of Thought. Not for the sake of continuing this argument but for the sake of educating yourself about the man we both hate. There are some very key ideas in there that I've touched on before and I think would benefit you greatly to realize.
I'm not telling you to be like Gates, I'm telling you to understand how his mind works because that is the kind of strategy and attitude that dominate today's industry. If you can't understand it, you can't hope to compete with it.
By the way, I rarely chase arguments like this but you did encourage me to defend myself. Sorry for being so obtuse towards you earlier but I believe you were the first to direct comments towards me... let's keep our aim on the issue.
Well, it's been a while since I've read Business at the Speed of Thought but I remember him talking about his interests when he was in Lakeside School and--to a lesser extent--through college. He sure reveals a lot about his past and his decisions along his career path in that book, why don't you read it sometime? Too bad he left that heated letter out of his book. I'd like to hear him explain himself. Sure the book was written after 1976 but it reveals a lot about what shaped him before and during the 70s.
I love good arguments and I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong
Bullshit. You might admit it if God came down and beat the truth into you with a stick. Even then, you would struggle.
Then God must have descended and beat me on Tuesday December 20, @10:43AM. Sorry you missed him... but there were a few other times I'm too lazy to find, this was only the first of them. I'll let you know next time I'm humbled, unfortunately, you were unsuccessful.
So it seems that the proof for the Speed Demos Archive lies in the video, correct?
I mean, it's a great concept but I can put an NES game on my Dreamcast and up the speed to 1.5x using NesterDC and record that.
Maybe that looks a little fishy so instead I play the game regularly on the NES and capture the video at a rate of 30 frames per second. Then I load it into Gordian Knot and just remove a frame or two for every 15, inching my time up a half minute or so overall.
How would they protect against something like this?
Well, "dude," I wasn't projecting my personal hatred and bias against Gates. I've read a lot of his books. He's a smart rich bastard with a lack of certain business ethics and morals. Would I want to be him? You bet.
I'm not afraid to say I'm jealous of where he sits... especially with the recent power to quash anti-trust convictions. Now there's influence.
What I was doing was taking his background motive, adding the letter and inferring what he was really saying. No, they're not stated anywhere. But if that's what everyone (including Gates) is thinking, then surely there's some merit to them.
According to the Interesting modifier the post currently holds, people think what I have to say is interesting. It's not hard to figure out. You obviously think I'm full of shit. Right on, I love good arguments and I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong so please post more than one line and refute my assumptions about his motives.
[a darkened man is sitting on a park bench talking to an FBI agent facing away from him]
Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: What is this... thing... this "eldavojohn" that posts twice the same information--in a single thread no less? Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: The answers are out there, Agent Mulder, you need to open your eyes and see people for what they really are. Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: He's a Karma Whore... one who prays on the moderator points divvied out by others... Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: You're quicker than the thousands before you, Agent Mulder. Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: They're posting here aren't they? Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: Mr. Mulder, THEY'VE been posting here for a long, long time.
I'm not an investor or broker so perhaps someone can explain this to me while I furrow my brow in a vain attempt to understand the situation.
From TFA: It was the second time in a week that Google shares - the hottest, most talked about company stock in the world - were plunged unexpectedly into a frigid bath.
Ok, shares plunged. Got it. Now, let's go look at the big board for the last five days. Ok, I see the plunges, $430 to $390. Ouch--12%.
But with today's trading, as of 11 AM Central Standard Time, shares are hovering around $405. How frigid is that "bath" if it only takes five days to get back up to $430? Clearly it's already rising back up to its once held position.
Perhaps it's time I make 12% on that extra $1,000 rainy day money I've got lying around. What does slashdot think? Google stock for the (almost certain) cash or Rickenbacker bass to make my going-nowhere-band slightly better?
For references, these are the enumeration names and where to go to make sure you have the latest anti-virus signature. Remember, this variant will uninstall and delete most anti-virus software so it's important to recognize it before it goes active tomorrow. Most virus definition software refers to it as CME-24. This is important since this worm has many different names including Nyxem.E, BlackWorm, Grew and Mywife.E.
More on the worm and its permutations and statistics on spreading.
And, if it's worth anything to you, the Microsoft advisory which seems to tout that Windows Live Safety Center Beta can protect against it.
If you're in charge of computer security at your workplace, I would send out an e-mail instructing everyone to verify that they have the correct anti-virus definitions and to scan their computers before leaving tonight. Luckily, that's not my job where I work.
First off, read the entire letter from Gates linked in my original post if you're going to comment on this.
He says hobbyists cannot write good software:
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
He says he's the best at doing it:
The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists.
He says that if you sell software written by yourself, you're just distributing bugs. So that implies that only software written by his company should be distributed because only he has the resources to make it immaculate.
Free software is bad because he can't make money:
Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
That "deluge" would almost certainly cause him some financial gain from people who otherwise would have worked on projects to distribute as a hobbyist.
I'm reminded of a movie called Revolution OS which enlightened me to Gates' history with hobbyists.
Remember the open letter to hobbyists that Gates penned on the third of February, nineteen seventy six?
A choice selection of his letter: The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written.
And for those of you that hate reading the word of Gates, I'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words:
Remember, don't you dare try to write your own software. Leave that to me. Then buy it from me. Any resistance to this shows that you are ruining the software industry as we know it. If we fool everyone into thinking they need to pay us money for software, then we can rape the world, are you blind?
Look what you've done! You horrible hobbyists. You steal software. You make technology do what you want it to do. You write and distribute freely. For shame.
Slashdot Mirror
How many micro-black holes have we measured in a lab?
None.
How many micro-black holes have we even seen?
None, as it turns out.
This is a story of hope and speculation--much like the story of super string theory.
Hell, do we even have the capabilities to smash two high energy protons together?
To be fair, Bosonic Super string theory has room for 25 dimensions but it's flawed with tachyon, the so called imaginary mass.
I'd be interested to know how they intend to measure the micro-black holes.
As a basic sort of testing phase, do it all on one computer. This eliminates all possible network errors that can occur. I'm assuming this is meant to be huge so maybe the bugs you speak of result from multiple machines fouling each other up. Either way, let's talk debugging strategies!
... yet. Their papers may be of use to you, however. If you're having problems with packets on either end, use my good friend ethereal.
Also, as I recall from my days of drudgery at college, create tons of output.
So I will suggest as a preliminary requirement that you create a nice logging system (if you haven't done so already). I haven't written much C# so I'm going to be talking abstractly. Hopefully the rest of Slashdot can help with the specifics to C#. Now, what I mean is that you should create a class that just creates an output log file that you can read for output later. I don't mean to put a message for every packet sent but maybe it wouldn't hurt to put a message for each stream or connection opened. It's going to help for you to generate random IDs for each call and to put the destination/receiving IP:Port in your log. This would most likely be helpful with a server. It also will be helpful to store printlns in your code (redirect standard out to the logger).
Now use this on every machine in the system. If one machine should start to give you problems, create a mutual exclusion on this log (or put all of the log entries in critical regions). In Java, you can use object locks or the synchronized keyword--in C# I'm pretty sure they have something similar. Just because it's not a GUI doesn't mean you can't record output.
Just a friendly warning, time stamping is usually worthless unless you have a logical network (i.e. a Lamport Clock) clock scheme set up (which usually requires lots of time on one's hands). You could shoot for an NTP server but I wouldn't trust the accuracy past 500 ms. If you absolutely need a clock scheme, I recommend having one machine on the network tick tock an increasing number that is reflected in all the logs. Make the time between ticks adjustable--this way you'll be able to check out events roughly relevant to these ticks (assuming the time it takes to get there is similar).
In the end, your best tool is your brain. Designing tests and double checking the logs on each machine to see that the linear time sequence of relative events is correct. Logic will be your only friend in this journey. Don't be afraid to kick off more threads on the client side if they don't need to share resources. If you have a server side, be careful in how many threads you have and make sure you realize what memory scope they're limited to.
For the love of god, if you use ports--don't forget to free them when you're done using them!
Unfortunately, Nornir is not OSS
Good luck! Happy debugging!
From other slashdot users, I've been alerted to foobar2000, the light quinnware, a crude hack of XMMS2 for Windows, etc. Just check out this site if you want to look up new lightweight players. There are lists everywhere.
Honestly, I was afraid that Songbird would be too bloated--trying to do everything for everyone a la Winamp.
I do not agree with your assessment of Winamp being the lightest audio player. It probably has Windows Media Player beat but I use better alternatives in alternate operating systems.
Probably because the moderators are not responsible enough to RTFA before moderating comments. I did, however, RTFA and discovered that Rob Lord is one of the primary developers of Winamp--making my post about Winamp on-topic. Yet, what happened was the moderators took a quick glance at the topic and looked at my post (which probably read like I had an axe to grind with Winamp, I don't know).
What I tried to offer readers was a link to his homepage and resume (which lists the companies he's done work for). Why do I think this is pertinent? Well, because open source developers trying to write something like Songbird are not common. I feel that we should be heralding Rob Lord for his work in providing us an alternative to iTunes--whether it flies or not, god bless him he tried. I think the best way to do that is to visit his webpage and find out what he's about.
If you actually visit his page, he's a witty and interesting man. Am I some sort of Lord fan boy? No, and I'm not even religious to boot! Alright, that pun was a license to mod this post as low as you want.
One thing you'll notice about stories like this is that if you post additional links to information on the stories, some people don't care. Everyone suddenly focused on "iTunes" and "DRM" when they read this article. These are some very negative caveats of this story, in my opinion. What did I find to be the positive aspect? The man behind the code.
Although I dislike Winamp for it's complexity, I did thoroughly enjoy his simplistic (and very well designed) homepage called "smudges of wisdom."
He seems to be an interesting fellow with odd musical tastes: Also interesting is that he goes through a list of decent books, some of which I'm familiar with. The best part about them is that they aren't at all the typical programming books you'd expect.
Ok, so I missed that word. I did RTFA but I'm still skeptical.
Viruses and bacteria are so different to me, rarely a treatment affects both.
CSA, in fact, stands for Cationic Steroid Antimicrobial and almost every piece of research involving them is centered on attacking bacteria.
How come zero hits turn up for Ceragenins when I search for it?
This article didn't include much of the above information and seemed to give a completely different name for CSAs than what they truly are--compound steroids used to primarily combat bacteria.
I'm no med student but the article states that: Ok, if this is true, then we've overcome the large part of AIDS (immunodeficiency). We can just boost the hell out of the white blood cell mimicking Ceragenins. Will this stop AIDS? Maybe not, but it will provide the defenses that AIDS rips from its patients. If I recall correctly, it's not the AIDS virus itself that kills a victim but instead another desease/sickness that occurs from a weakened immune system.
What's exciting is that the AIDS virus probably doesn't infect/reproduce when it is being killed by Ceragenins like it does to white blood cells. Thus, they may have something here if their premises hold true.
Googling for "Ceragenins" results in zero hits. Which means this is some magical elixir that is a mistakened cure all. Or perhaps it's something very obscure that no one has thought of until today? We shall see.
Bacteria and Yeast are not the same as the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS and HIV are viruses.
Therefore, speculating that the same thing that stops viruses will also inhibit yeast or bacteria is erroneous. One consists of live cells--the other merely protiens (and is debated whether or not it is 'alive').
A million AIDS patients is about 1/40th of today's problem. Either way, you're painting a pretty damn good picture if your 'prediction' holds true.
I get called out on this a lot and I'm going to point out some key differences between two types of RAID arrays. A RAID 0 (also known as a striped set) splits data evenly across two or more disks with no parity information for redundancy. Therefore, it is an example of a RAID array that is actually not redundant (despite the acronym). Even if a normal user was running RAID 0, a hard drive crash would be catastrophic.
Still laughing?
If "Johnny's first day at school" is more important that system critical resources, perhaps you should have hard copies (CD, DVD, tape, etc.) of this media.
You're right, you should make backups. You have a love-affair-dependency on your hard drive. Everyday you need it to retain the ones and zeros it holds that forms your data. One day, your personal hard drive isn't going to be there for you. That's why you should back up regardless of how secure you feel. Most "normal home users" don't have redundant RAID arrays running. Furthermore, it isn't "secure period," it's touted to be one of the most secure operating systems. Wait, weren't we talking about Unix?
I don't think anyone but Mac users claim that. And anyone that claims that for any processing device is lying to you. There are Linux Viruses out there, just use your favorite search engine.
Oh good, we're back on Unix here (they're not exactly the same, you know). I disagree, both sides (user and system) are more secure in the case of Unix or Linux for that matter.
While this might be true, I think you should take into account the frequency of said viruses. When's the last time a massive virus attack has taken down entire networks of Unix machines? So you talked about Unix security without quoting a single authoritative source on the issue. And to finish off this article, you rely on a one-hit wonder brit pop band to prove your thesis. May Slashdot have mercy on your soul, Thomas. Endure the onslaught.
Hmmmm, do I pick being able to swing Link's sword in my living room or not having to parse through my roommate's Fox & WB fodder to get to my Aqua Teen
*head explodes*
I know the rest of this post is painfully offtopic but I'll take the karma hit for those of you that like trivia.
The saying "with a grain of salt" refers way back to its Latin phrase, "cum grano salis." Pliny the Elder wrote about a poison that had an antidote that needed to be taken with a grain of salt. Since said antidote was known by Pliny, any threats involving the known poison were said to be taken "with a grain of salt" meaning they were not to be taken seriously or to be believed since the antidote was on hand. Another take on it from Maven's Words:
Since it's IPO on April 30th 2004, Google seems to be testing the waters of a lot of different markets.
Granted, they all center on information technology, this company is ever expanding along different product lines. We've seen Google blogs, Picasa, Analytics, Video, Desktop, Talk, Earth, Toolbar, Gmail, Translate, Mobile, etc. And (thank god), they've all been presented to us rather benignly but are they all considered successes?
And now we observe GBuy, a service to compete with Paypal. Paypal's history has been rocky but they do have a solid foothold as they are almost married with eBay. Will eBay welcome the new GBuy and favor it equally with Paypal?
Google profits around $17 billion a year--do they really need to become a money transfer service? Ebay reports $4.5 billion a year, will they be sharing some of that with Google? Will a cut of that even matter to Google?
What's interesting is to see if they actually take a cut (a la Paypal) or if they just continue Google ads through the pages on the service to pay for all of the legal work that comes with claims and fraud. They have the resources to do it and this would probably kill sites like Paypal that take a 3% or more charge on each transaction.
Once upon a time, I used Winamp.
... etc.
... the hot keys may have still been there but what I was looking for in a media player was not. For some reason, they seemed to think that competing with Windows Media Player meant mimicking it to every detail. Fine. I never want to touch Windows Media Player, it's about as useful as my appendix. And now I feel the same way about Winamp.
And it was good.
It was fairly lightweight, I could load in huge playlists of college-napster-garbage without slowdown and I knew all the hot keys for searching and what not.
Then that llama came into the picture. I think it must have been version three or four (I can't remember) when there was a damned llama or alpaca or whatever in a green field. Now, I love llamas and alpacas, don't get me wrong. The problem was that now Winamp was about "graphix" and "features" that were once plugins that I didn't want.
I don't know why they thought Winamp needed to be able to play videos but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to show stupid tripping-on-acid-harmonograph visualizations but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to melt songs together but it did now
On top of that, the memory footprint in Windows was crazy. And my roommate tried to put skins on Winamp that just made my computer shit its gourd. I was disgusted
Now there's a spyware flaw in Winamp. Am I surprised? Not really. They have gotten so complicated that there's probably a thousand holes in that application. They definitely lost site of what I was looking for--a plain jane slim audio player. Winamp's executing a remote method invocation through a playlist that can trigger itself to be automatically loaded and ran? Now that sounds like a "feature" I want my audio player to have.
Is this the first time this has happened? Nope, remember the zero day exploit that targeted skins in 2004? There's been a myriad of security issues with Winamp since it became more and more complicated.
"Gee, the way our audio player loads playlists isn't very secure. But it works and the people who use our application aren't interested in security--they're interested in playing AVI files on their audio player!"
So what would I recommend? Well, if you're using Linux, I can think of at least ten things better but XMMS would probably be my favorite. If you're running Windows, I like to use Quintessential Player which can be modified to be as complicated as new Winamp or can be
Go to your library and check out Business at the Speed of Thought. Not for the sake of continuing this argument but for the sake of educating yourself about the man we both hate. There are some very key ideas in there that I've touched on before and I think would benefit you greatly to realize.
I'm not telling you to be like Gates, I'm telling you to understand how his mind works because that is the kind of strategy and attitude that dominate today's industry. If you can't understand it, you can't hope to compete with it.
By the way, I rarely chase arguments like this but you did encourage me to defend myself. Sorry for being so obtuse towards you earlier but I believe you were the first to direct comments towards me
Then God must have descended and beat me on Tuesday December 20, @10:43AM. Sorry you missed him
So it seems that the proof for the Speed Demos Archive lies in the video, correct?
I mean, it's a great concept but I can put an NES game on my Dreamcast and up the speed to 1.5x using NesterDC and record that.
Maybe that looks a little fishy so instead I play the game regularly on the NES and capture the video at a rate of 30 frames per second. Then I load it into Gordian Knot and just remove a frame or two for every 15, inching my time up a half minute or so overall.
How would they protect against something like this?
Well, "dude," I wasn't projecting my personal hatred and bias against Gates. I've read a lot of his books. He's a smart rich bastard with a lack of certain business ethics and morals. Would I want to be him? You bet.
... especially with the recent power to quash anti-trust convictions. Now there's influence.
...
I'm not afraid to say I'm jealous of where he sits
What I was doing was taking his background motive, adding the letter and inferring what he was really saying. No, they're not stated anywhere. But if that's what everyone (including Gates) is thinking, then surely there's some merit to them.
According to the Interesting modifier the post currently holds, people think what I have to say is interesting. It's not hard to figure out. You obviously think I'm full of shit. Right on, I love good arguments and I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong so please post more than one line and refute my assumptions about his motives.
Slashdot is waiting
[a darkened man is sitting on a park bench talking to an FBI agent facing away from him]
... thing ... this "eldavojohn" that posts twice the same information--in a single thread no less? ...
Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: What is this
Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: The answers are out there, Agent Mulder, you need to open your eyes and see people for what they really are.
Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: He's a Karma Whore... one who prays on the moderator points divvied out by others
Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: You're quicker than the thousands before you, Agent Mulder.
Agent Fox "AC" Mulder: They're posting here aren't they?
Deep "CmdrTaco" Throat: Mr. Mulder, THEY'VE been posting here for a long, long time.
I'm not an investor or broker so perhaps someone can explain this to me while I furrow my brow in a vain attempt to understand the situation.
From TFA:
It was the second time in a week that Google shares - the hottest, most talked about company stock in the world - were plunged unexpectedly into a frigid bath.
Ok, shares plunged. Got it. Now, let's go look at the big board for the last five days. Ok, I see the plunges, $430 to $390. Ouch--12%.
But with today's trading, as of 11 AM Central Standard Time, shares are hovering around $405. How frigid is that "bath" if it only takes five days to get back up to $430? Clearly it's already rising back up to its once held position.
Perhaps it's time I make 12% on that extra $1,000 rainy day money I've got lying around. What does slashdot think? Google stock for the (almost certain) cash or Rickenbacker bass to make my going-nowhere-band slightly better?
For references, these are the enumeration names and where to go to make sure you have the latest anti-virus signature. Remember, this variant will uninstall and delete most anti-virus software so it's important to recognize it before it goes active tomorrow. Most virus definition software refers to it as CME-24. This is important since this worm has many different names including Nyxem.E, BlackWorm, Grew and Mywife.E.
More on the worm and its permutations and statistics on spreading.
A very detailed analysis with all types of files that may be affected.
And, if it's worth anything to you, the Microsoft advisory which seems to tout that Windows Live Safety Center Beta can protect against it. If you're in charge of computer security at your workplace, I would send out an e-mail instructing everyone to verify that they have the correct anti-virus definitions and to scan their computers before leaving tonight. Luckily, that's not my job where I work.
He says hobbyists cannot write good software:
He says he's the best at doing it:
He says that if you sell software written by yourself, you're just distributing bugs. So that implies that only software written by his company should be distributed because only he has the resources to make it immaculate.
Free software is bad because he can't make money: That "deluge" would almost certainly cause him some financial gain from people who otherwise would have worked on projects to distribute as a hobbyist.
I'm reminded of a movie called Revolution OS which enlightened me to Gates' history with hobbyists.
Remember the open letter to hobbyists that Gates penned on the third of February, nineteen seventy six?
A choice selection of his letter:
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written.
And for those of you that hate reading the word of Gates, I'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words:
Remember, don't you dare try to write your own software. Leave that to me. Then buy it from me. Any resistance to this shows that you are ruining the software industry as we know it. If we fool everyone into thinking they need to pay us money for software, then we can rape the world, are you blind?
Look what you've done! You horrible hobbyists. You steal software. You make technology do what you want it to do. You write and distribute freely. For shame.
*Gates shakes rolled up newspaper at the world*
No DRM for you. No. Bad hobbyist. Get.
This is why we can't have nice things.