As an @Home customer, it pisses me off that they took a solid infrastructure business and wrecked it because they wanted to be Yahoo. Broadband over cable TV lines -- simple, powerful, doable. By now they should be rich enough to found a quasi-nation and buy an aircraft carrier. Or whatever they would want to do with $10^10.
But no, instead they got feverish with dotcom mania. They really thought that megabit internet access was just a stepping stone to the real money -- banner ad revenue on their web portal. I'm not making this up, honest! That's why they
spent $780 million on BlueMountain, a loss-leader greeting card site, among other dot-bombs.
So now they're low on cash and their backbone needs maintenance (duh). If they shut off cable modem service I'll have to smack someone. I'd rather commute to my office than use phone modem again.
This is (quite literally) not the end of the world, and also not relevant to the evolution debate (although it will surely be blown out of proportion a billion-fold by shoddy journalists). Some info for the crowd:
The fine structure constant (alpha) is found by combining several other "universal constants" in such a way that all of the units (such as meters per second) cancel out. You get a dimensionless number, like pi, whose particular value (about 137) is basically built in to the universe. One formula is:
So if alpha is actually not constant, any one of those items may have changed while others remained constant. And more importantly, the research points to a change of only 0.001% over the past 12 billion years. In short, warp drive this ain't.
Re:Shutting off IIS on an comprimised box...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
Most of the infections I've seen are on home PCs with cable modem, and the owner doesn't even know that IIS is active by default. I'd like to find a request that will switch IIS service from automatic to disabled. They'll never notice the difference, and the world will be a better place.
Many leading stem cell researchers in the US have only heard of a dozen or so cell lines. Here's an article. The only person in it who accepted the 60 figure is a "senior Bush administration official" who wasn't willing to give their name.
As a rabid Mac evangelist, I am saddened to agree with this statement. Not only is the iBook's ATI 128 card capable of higher resolutions, it is also capable of dual screen support (have the LCD and the video out showing separate windows).
Apple intentionally left those features out of their iBook drivers to push sales to the TiBook, which is a freaking awesome beast that does not need stupid protectionism. Just give it a 100M speed bump, an optional Radeon or Geforce, and a mild price cut. Hamstringing the iBook is not the right answer.
are they never going to get to the Mozilla 1.0 stage?
Well, you could go to the Roadmap and see for yourself. The number of bugs left before they're ready to call it 1.0 is declining quite nicely.
The only one left that bothers me is ATM smoothing. Total deal-breaker for anyone using postscript fonts. Luckily the bug is now understood and is scheduled (hopefully) for 0.9.4
great deal of error in gathering energy values, even when energies are collected at femtosecond intervals. This is due to freaky quantum physics i don't understand.
Simple explanation: How do you measure the energy value (tantamount to speed or momentum) of an electron? By looking at it. How do you look at it? With photons. What happens when a photon hits an electron? They trade some energy. What is it you were trying to measure? . . .
If you bombard a subatomic particle with other particles, and do it 10^12 times per second, of course you're going to have a hard time keeping the answer straight, because your measuring device is causing the answer to change.
I went to xpenguin.com, clicked on the email link, and viewed source.
Having your email address on a web site in any way (mailto link, body text, form element, or even just a comment tag) is an open invitation to spam harvesting.
Consider that the lowly Sircam worm will read through web page caches to find email addresses -- spambots are at least that smart.
Sorry if this is slightly off-topic -- it pertains to Passport but not XP.
I've got a roomful of semipublic PCs (usable by anyone in my organization) and I'd like to completely lock them out of Passport. I've started by adding a half-dozen lines to the Hosts file:
127.0.0.1 lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com
127.0.0.1 login.hotmail.passport.com
127.0.0.1 login.msnia.passport.com
127.0.0.1 login.passport.com
127.0.0.1 passport.com
127.0.0.1 www.passport.com
But of course M$ can get around this by adding a new hostname or just using IP numbers. What's the easiest way to prevent all traffic to/from Passport at the level of the individual PC (not at the firewall/router level)? Thanks.
Why do we have a person reviewing a movie based on a game when that person hasn't ever played the game.
Sorry, but you're full of shit. If this movie were marketed only to people who have played the games, they'd have to charge about $100 per ticket in order to recoup their costs. This movie is being sold to the general public, in standard movie theaters. The producers have an obligation to make the movie comprehensible in its own right, otherwise they deserve criticism (and probable financial ruin).
If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed.
Note that you're using the word "soon" in conjunction with an event 3 billion years from now. It seems to me that if we can get a self-sufficient Mars base within the next thousand years, and colonize other solar systems within the next million years, then we're way ahead of the game.
Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri.
Overpopulation is generally self-correcting (starvation). It's also easily handled by public education and women's rights (see western europe). And as for biowar/mutation, I have justified belief in medicalprogress and the human immune system.
why, if our universe is expanding, we have two galaxies that are going to collide?
Because typical distances between objects in the universe (such as superclusters) are a lot Lot LOT bigger than the measly 2,300,000 light years between Milky Way and Andromeda.
The expansion of the universe means things which are already very far apart will get farther apart -- "the rich get richer...". It has miniscule effect at the level of individual galaxies, where gravity is firmly in charge.
You should now feel a whole lot smaller than you did a few minutes ago. On the bright side, you're still way bigger than quarks.:-)
suprising that so many people have searched for Wimbledon since the official site is www.wimbledon.com
Going straight to FOO.com is a risky strategy -- it's not at all uncommon to get trapped in a pr0n squatter site. Google is damn good about getting you to the genuinely useful sites, both official and not.
never found out whether anyone has actually done it!
Using speed differences from a bright neutrino source to estimate their mass was done ages ago -- assuming you accept that
Supernova 1987A is bright enough. The data showed an upper bound of 20eV, but couldn't rule out masslessness.
Caveat Lector: I am not a chip designer; this is probably wrong. But if overshoot won't explain himself, someone else ought to try.
At the speeds these little sweeties work, there is no such thing as digital.
Transistors don't really send 1s and 0s, they allow current to pass through (or not). As you flip them on and off more quickly, things that used to look like square waves (digital) begin to show their sine wave (analog) roots.
unity-gain crossover frequency. At 210, the device takes as much power in as out
If I'm reading this correctly, F_tau seems to indicate how fast you can "overclock" an individual transistor and still get a usable signal out of it.
In practice, you need quite a bit more than unity gain. So you operate the thing down in the 50 GHz region
Since real-world chips contain lots of transistors in a row, you need to slow it down enough that you can get a usable signal all the way from one end to the other.
front-end amplifier and demultiplexer for OC-768 fiber interfaces, which are currently ruled by indium-phosphide devices.
OC-768 is a honking large optical backbone. It runs a whole lot of frequencies all at once (multiplex). In order to convert it back to something like plain-old-ethernet, you need to split the signal up again.
Indium-Phosphide is just a different compound to make chips from, like Silicon-Germanium, or Gallium-Arsenide. Apparently InP is the current industry standard for demulitplexers.
IBM is the only outfit with a SiGe process that plays in this game.
By now the rest should make more sense. Assuming I didn't totally screw up. Overshoot?
consists mostly of pictures of multi-cultural kids at an iMac
Actually, they use rotating banner images. I got a grandpa and grandkid on the porch watching an LCD screen. Go to
http://www.ucentric.com/images/ and look at the various choices for hrz_[foo].jpg
Obviously this GPS method won't be used outside of rental agencies, since it's a nasty invasion of privacy when applied to a user-owned vehicle. But there are plenty of non-invasive ways to issue speeding tickets that could do the same job.
My personal favorite idea, that as far as I know is not currently in use anywhere (I really should patent it instead of posting), is Turnpike speed timing. Most toll roads give you a card with a magnetic stripe on it. Hook all the exits up to a central network time server, imprint entry time on the card, read time at exit.
Divide the distance between exits by the elapsed time, and issue speeding tickets accordingly. Note that this won't actually catch a lot of people, but it will produce a nice increase in concession sales at the turnpike's rest stops -- smart speeders would opt to hang out at Wendy's for half an hour to get under the limit.
It probably got tossed in the bit bucket the same time half the companies in Palo Alto lost their VC and went belly up. Silicon Valley's tax base is a tad smaller than it was 2 years ago.
supreme court justice, the candates have to get reviewed by the ABA.
Not only is Maskirovka wrong about this in general (the ABA nominee review has always been a friendly agreement, not a law), he's wrong about this in specific (Dubya told the ABA to piss off 3 months ago). Here's a CNN analysis.
I can see how Maskirovka might qualify as "Interesting", but... Moderators should NEVER use +1: Insightful unless they know for a fact that the statement is TRUE.
After a jaunt to my local library, I can say with reasonable authority that we were both wrong.
Out of my head, about 200,000 died on Aug. 6, 1945
The best accepted figures say approximately 80,000 were killed by blast/fire at Hiroshima, and another 60,000 died later of radiation. Some articles claim 60,000 more long-term deaths (leading to the 200k you cited), but causation is often disputed. A comparable number died in the firebombing of Tokyo and Yokohama (March 10, 1945). A total of 500,000 were killed by firebombs in Japan, with similar counts (a bit lower) in Germany.
found this article. (Dresden around 20,000.)
Other souces say the Dresden bombing killed over 100,000 people. However, the best respected figures are about 40,000 -- same as the people blown up at Nagasaki (plus another 40k from radiation).
Although any single incident is not quite equivalent, the total firebombings killed more civilians.
the College Board is changing the language to Java
Moderators, pay attention. That was the most important statement in the entire discussion (at the high school level). AP Courses should use the language that's in the AP Exam. Period. Otherwise the students will not get AP credit which can save them $$$ in college tuition.
The current AP CS Exams use C/C++, but they will switch to Java in 2003. College courses should use whatever language is best for them; personally I recommend Scheme or Python. But for the high school level, you ignore the Board at your own peril.
allied forces firebombed Dresden, and some argue that the destruction was greater then Nagasaki
No. Some people have never looked at the actual numbers, or they would know that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were definitely more destructive than the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More casualties, more area destroyed, more total explosive yield, etc. Here's one sample link.
It's the calculus of war: lots of "small" weapons delivered continuously will outgun a single big kaboom. Bringing this back on topic, it's similar to the way a bunch of ordinary cell phone towers can help shoot down a billion dollar bomber.
I don't really hate MS that much as I use MS Office 6 on my Power Mac 6100 and I like it.
I have to say, it's very difficult to trust a review written by someone who actually likes Word 6 for Mac. It is widely considered one of the worst kludgy ports ever made, and was a key factor in the creation of the independent Mac business unit within Microsoft.
To bring this back on topic... I really want to see Mozilla succeed, and I'm glad it's about equally compliant as IE 5 for Mac (which is what IE 6 is based on). But so far the XUL interface is way too slow and too buggy.
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As an @Home customer, it pisses me off that they took a solid infrastructure business and wrecked it because they wanted to be Yahoo. Broadband over cable TV lines -- simple, powerful, doable. By now they should be rich enough to found a quasi-nation and buy an aircraft carrier. Or whatever they would want to do with $10^10.
But no, instead they got feverish with dotcom mania. They really thought that megabit internet access was just a stepping stone to the real money -- banner ad revenue on their web portal. I'm not making this up, honest! That's why they spent $780 million on BlueMountain, a loss-leader greeting card site, among other dot-bombs.
So now they're low on cash and their backbone needs maintenance (duh). If they shut off cable modem service I'll have to smack someone. I'd rather commute to my office than use phone modem again.
This is (quite literally) not the end of the world, and also not relevant to the evolution debate (although it will surely be blown out of proportion a billion-fold by shoddy journalists). Some info for the crowd:
The fine structure constant (alpha) is found by combining several other "universal constants" in such a way that all of the units (such as meters per second) cancel out. You get a dimensionless number, like pi, whose particular value (about 137) is basically built in to the universe. One formula is:
where
So if alpha is actually not constant, any one of those items may have changed while others remained constant. And more importantly, the research points to a change of only 0.001% over the past 12 billion years. In short, warp drive this ain't.
Most of the infections I've seen are on home PCs with cable modem, and the owner doesn't even know that IIS is active by default. I'd like to find a request that will switch IIS service from automatic to disabled. They'll never notice the difference, and the world will be a better place.
Many leading stem cell researchers in the US have only heard of a dozen or so cell lines. Here's an article. The only person in it who accepted the 60 figure is a "senior Bush administration official" who wasn't willing to give their name.
As a rabid Mac evangelist, I am saddened to agree with this statement. Not only is the iBook's ATI 128 card capable of higher resolutions, it is also capable of dual screen support (have the LCD and the video out showing separate windows).
Apple intentionally left those features out of their iBook drivers to push sales to the TiBook, which is a freaking awesome beast that does not need stupid protectionism. Just give it a 100M speed bump, an optional Radeon or Geforce, and a mild price cut. Hamstringing the iBook is not the right answer.
Well, you could go to the Roadmap and see for yourself. The number of bugs left before they're ready to call it 1.0 is declining quite nicely.
The only one left that bothers me is ATM smoothing. Total deal-breaker for anyone using postscript fonts. Luckily the bug is now understood and is scheduled (hopefully) for 0.9.4
Simple explanation: How do you measure the energy value (tantamount to speed or momentum) of an electron? By looking at it. How do you look at it? With photons. What happens when a photon hits an electron? They trade some energy. What is it you were trying to measure? . . .
If you bombard a subatomic particle with other particles, and do it 10^12 times per second, of course you're going to have a hard time keeping the answer straight, because your measuring device is causing the answer to change.
Having your email address on a web site in any way (mailto link, body text, form element, or even just a comment tag) is an open invitation to spam harvesting.
Consider that the lowly Sircam worm will read through web page caches to find email addresses -- spambots are at least that smart.
Sorry if this is slightly off-topic -- it pertains to Passport but not XP.
I've got a roomful of semipublic PCs (usable by anyone in my organization) and I'd like to completely lock them out of Passport. I've started by adding a half-dozen lines to the Hosts file:
But of course M$ can get around this by adding a new hostname or just using IP numbers. What's the easiest way to prevent all traffic to/from Passport at the level of the individual PC (not at the firewall/router level)? Thanks.
Well, one easy option is Get a Mac. Fully compatible with Exchange, except for worms and trojans.
Sorry, but you're full of shit. If this movie were marketed only to people who have played the games, they'd have to charge about $100 per ticket in order to recoup their costs. This movie is being sold to the general public, in standard movie theaters. The producers have an obligation to make the movie comprehensible in its own right, otherwise they deserve criticism (and probable financial ruin).
Note that you're using the word "soon" in conjunction with an event 3 billion years from now. It seems to me that if we can get a self-sufficient Mars base within the next thousand years, and colonize other solar systems within the next million years, then we're way ahead of the game.
Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri.Overpopulation is generally self-correcting (starvation). It's also easily handled by public education and women's rights (see western europe). And as for biowar/mutation, I have justified belief in medical progress and the human immune system.
Because typical distances between objects in the universe (such as superclusters) are a lot Lot LOT bigger than the measly 2,300,000 light years between Milky Way and Andromeda.
The expansion of the universe means things which are already very far apart will get farther apart -- "the rich get richer...". It has miniscule effect at the level of individual galaxies, where gravity is firmly in charge.
You should now feel a whole lot smaller than you did a few minutes ago. On the bright side, you're still way bigger than quarks. :-)
Going straight to FOO.com is a risky strategy -- it's not at all uncommon to get trapped in a pr0n squatter site. Google is damn good about getting you to the genuinely useful sites, both official and not.
Using speed differences from a bright neutrino source to estimate their mass was done ages ago -- assuming you accept that Supernova 1987A is bright enough. The data showed an upper bound of 20eV, but couldn't rule out masslessness.
Caveat Lector: I am not a chip designer; this is probably wrong. But if overshoot won't explain himself, someone else ought to try.
At the speeds these little sweeties work, there is no such thing as digital.Transistors don't really send 1s and 0s, they allow current to pass through (or not). As you flip them on and off more quickly, things that used to look like square waves (digital) begin to show their sine wave (analog) roots.
unity-gain crossover frequency. At 210, the device takes as much power in as outIf I'm reading this correctly, F_tau seems to indicate how fast you can "overclock" an individual transistor and still get a usable signal out of it.
In practice, you need quite a bit more than unity gain. So you operate the thing down in the 50 GHz regionSince real-world chips contain lots of transistors in a row, you need to slow it down enough that you can get a usable signal all the way from one end to the other.
front-end amplifier and demultiplexer for OC-768 fiber interfaces, which are currently ruled by indium-phosphide devices.OC-768 is a honking large optical backbone. It runs a whole lot of frequencies all at once (multiplex). In order to convert it back to something like plain-old-ethernet, you need to split the signal up again.
Indium-Phosphide is just a different compound to make chips from, like Silicon-Germanium, or Gallium-Arsenide. Apparently InP is the current industry standard for demulitplexers.
IBM is the only outfit with a SiGe process that plays in this game.By now the rest should make more sense. Assuming I didn't totally screw up. Overshoot?
Yes. To be precise, those two things are:
It's good that they're not relying on boguson particles to save the day, but that by itself does not mean they have good science.
quantum slipstream? I could have sworn I had heard the term beforeYes. You heard it before on Star Trek. I'm pretty sure that Voyager even phase modulated the quantum sliptream at some point. The horror!
Actually, they use rotating banner images. I got a grandpa and grandkid on the porch watching an LCD screen. Go to http://www.ucentric.com/images/ and look at the various choices for hrz_[foo].jpg
Obviously this GPS method won't be used outside of rental agencies, since it's a nasty invasion of privacy when applied to a user-owned vehicle. But there are plenty of non-invasive ways to issue speeding tickets that could do the same job.
My personal favorite idea, that as far as I know is not currently in use anywhere (I really should patent it instead of posting), is Turnpike speed timing. Most toll roads give you a card with a magnetic stripe on it. Hook all the exits up to a central network time server, imprint entry time on the card, read time at exit.
Divide the distance between exits by the elapsed time, and issue speeding tickets accordingly. Note that this won't actually catch a lot of people, but it will produce a nice increase in concession sales at the turnpike's rest stops -- smart speeders would opt to hang out at Wendy's for half an hour to get under the limit.
It probably got tossed in the bit bucket the same time half the companies in Palo Alto lost their VC and went belly up. Silicon Valley's tax base is a tad smaller than it was 2 years ago.
Not only is Maskirovka wrong about this in general (the ABA nominee review has always been a friendly agreement, not a law), he's wrong about this in specific (Dubya told the ABA to piss off 3 months ago). Here's a CNN analysis.
I can see how Maskirovka might qualify as "Interesting", but ... Moderators should NEVER use +1: Insightful unless they know for a fact that the statement is TRUE.
After a jaunt to my local library, I can say with reasonable authority that we were both wrong.
The best accepted figures say approximately 80,000 were killed by blast/fire at Hiroshima, and another 60,000 died later of radiation. Some articles claim 60,000 more long-term deaths (leading to the 200k you cited), but causation is often disputed. A comparable number died in the firebombing of Tokyo and Yokohama (March 10, 1945). A total of 500,000 were killed by firebombs in Japan, with similar counts (a bit lower) in Germany.
Other souces say the Dresden bombing killed over 100,000 people. However, the best respected figures are about 40,000 -- same as the people blown up at Nagasaki (plus another 40k from radiation).
Although any single incident is not quite equivalent, the total firebombings killed more civilians.
Moderators, pay attention. That was the most important statement in the entire discussion (at the high school level). AP Courses should use the language that's in the AP Exam. Period. Otherwise the students will not get AP credit which can save them $$$ in college tuition.
The current AP CS Exams use C/C++, but they will switch to Java in 2003. College courses should use whatever language is best for them; personally I recommend Scheme or Python. But for the high school level, you ignore the Board at your own peril.
No. Some people have never looked at the actual numbers, or they would know that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were definitely more destructive than the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More casualties, more area destroyed, more total explosive yield, etc. Here's one sample link.
It's the calculus of war: lots of "small" weapons delivered continuously will outgun a single big kaboom. Bringing this back on topic, it's similar to the way a bunch of ordinary cell phone towers can help shoot down a billion dollar bomber.
I have to say, it's very difficult to trust a review written by someone who actually likes Word 6 for Mac. It is widely considered one of the worst kludgy ports ever made, and was a key factor in the creation of the independent Mac business unit within Microsoft.
To bring this back on topic ... I really want to see Mozilla succeed, and I'm glad it's about equally compliant as IE 5 for Mac (which is what IE 6 is based on). But so far the XUL interface is way too slow and too buggy.