This change is to allow third party code to come down through Windows Update, in essence adding more package sources.
So in essence, they did what I can do with vi/etc/apt/sources.list? Or they replaced a hardcoded "deb http://http.microsoft.com/windows/ valuable_vista main contrib non-free" with the same information but now in C:\windows\etc\apt\sources.list, and now I (and my programs) can edit it?
trying to run anything reliable when you give any control you had to other random people on the Internet is doomed to fail.
I've heard a talk from someone who suggested moving to content-addressing: instead of giving you a URL, I give you a sha1 hash of the page you want (and maybe an URL to tell you where to start looking). Then, you don't care from where you get your data, as long as it matches. You can grab the page from the originating host, or from a local cache, or from a bunch of different peers, or from... well, you name it. As long as you get the bits that match the hash, you're happy.
I think the idea is (1) good; (2) pie in the sky; and (3) applicable here.
Let p' be "not p". What's the difference between showing "not p'" and "not q"? Why can't the patent owner say "We'll try to show Not-p'" rather than "[...] Not-Q"? Why don't they say "OK, P-And-Q so we can't enforce patent"?
You say something about legal wrangling, without any details. I don't think you can argue that one works better than the other based solely based on propositional (or if you prefer, second order prepositional) logic---at least not the kind of logic that deals with what is true rather than what is convincing.
I think you need to argue from the realities of court rooms and court cases: that based on historical evidence we know that one kind of argument convinces people and another kind of argument does so too but less often. Maybe you can argue based on what the law says: that "it has been done before" isn't enough to constitute prior art, and therefore Q is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defending yourself (that makes your second scenario, juxtaposed with your first, make sense).
But calling the claims one-letter names and formalizing the structure of the argument, what exactly has that gained you? Exactly what are you claiming here?
This is why you need version control on laws
on
Full ACTA Leak Online
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You have the amendment itself, which says thing like "in section 3, omit the words blah and replace with blah" or "section 82(b) is hereby repealed".
If you squint hard enough and replace the arbitrary words with intuitively selected symbols (plus, minus, at, comma), it looks almost like...
A diff.
So... a consolidated version is one with... all patches applied? Like git checkout HEAD?
And they have this cumbersome process automated? Why, we programmers should do that too! It would save lots of effort:)
I actually miss Windows Mobile. To use the phone to its fullest capacity (yes, including capacity), I had to do no hacks, no low level patches. Just install the right program and go.
Funny, that's exactly what I've experienced with my Nokia N900.
Heck, even better than that, on day one I install code I had contributed to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, file bugs against it, and start looking at how to develop for this mean ass machine.
I don't have to pay corporate overlords (for what, gcc? ^_^), no one is going to say "no, you can't have that software"; I'm free to play and build, and turn my phone into exactly what I want it to be. And other people want to do the same thing, so it's not like I'm all alone:-)
It has its warts, so look into reviews and troll posts on maemo forums, and decide if they sound like you can live with them. But Nokia loves you and wants you to play./* I'm not paid to write this, I just evangelize to what I assume is an eager audience (of at least one person) */
Now I just need to fix the dictionary of every clueless tech writer who uses the word "brick" because it sounds cool, despite not knowing what it means. I guess I shall have to cease using writing implements and begin using clue bats to achieve this goal. Sadly:(
for example, the latest level on the Cliq locks out root and the holes to get root.
Get a Nokia N900. It's not Android, but it's Linux, it's a damn fine phone/skype/IM/facetwitter appliance, and it comes with xterm preinstalled and gainroot ready in the repositories.
Downsides: slightly heavy, slightly big, slightly short battery life (but maybe I ought to not use the screen as a flashlight, no?). That hasn't made anything impossible for me, it's just something I have had to adapt to.
The thing that really amuses me about the whole Windows vs. Mac thing
For those of us who can't find large differences between an Apple laptop running Linux and an Dell laptop running Linux, thank you very much for not framing the debate as PC versus Mac.
I can't tell you how badly I hate that choice of words. It pulls me in (because I use a computer that either is or isn't made by Apple) but then leaves me out (because I use software that both isn't made by Microsoft and isn't made by Apple).
The word (/abbrev.) PC means nothing having to do with being a personal thing and much more about being a consumer-affordable general purpose computer (i.e. my Wii/router/phone isn't a PC, nor is my Cray 1, but my Apple laptop is); at least that's the way I use it and hear it used, except maybe by people who need to distance themselves from the majority of people who run Windows on an Intel box.
Get over yourself. Yes, I run something else too. I don't go around telling everybody about it any longer. I was a fan boy. Now I'm pretty chill about it. Linux is the set of trade-offs that works best for me; if you like something else that's fine with me. Heck if you prefer Blackbox to Fluxbox or vim to emacs, that's cool. Use what works for you. Even if it's made by a company I don't like.
Just leave me out of your mud wrestling match between you and The Windows Sheeple. Maybe we can have a beer together when you get over it?
Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs has security implications. For example, encryption of existing unencrypted data on flash-based SSDs cannot be performed securely due to the fact that wear leveling causes new encrypted drive sectors to be written to a physical location different from their original location
Fail. Really, this is about deletion, not encryption: you still get to have E(x), but you don't have it rather than x, you get to have both.
And the same issue presents itself on HDDs if you use journaling file systems. And if you don't, you get slow fsck operations, plus your data could be better protected at non-noticeable cost. Your disk may work twice as hard (doubly writing everything), but it does so when you look away and don't notice it.
I mean really, who needs an expensive big SSD for your porn collection?
Me. Well, kind of. I'd use it in a hybrid way.
For every video and audio file, I'd store the first X miliseconds worth of data on the SSD and the rest on the HDD, where X is chosen such that I can fetch another hunk of data from the HDD within those X miliseconds with probability p, say for p = 99%.
In that way, I would have playback start instantly (the promise of SSDs) and I would store all my stuff cheaply (the promise of HDDs). It won't be optimally fast or optimally cheap, but it'd be like a 90/90 going against a 50/100 and a 100/50 (for certain anally extracted values of 90, 50 and 100).
some people might find them exciting, but that's just people who haven't been around computers long enough to know all the (similar) bad ideas, that already existed before...
I realize I have been unclear: the quote I gave was said (IIRC) by a psychologist, and psychologists talk weird.
In this case, the psychologese word "complex" translates (I think) into the enginereese phrase "non-trivial". As in the opposite of assembly line work, or data entry, or of "write the exact same program again". Programming is always complex/nontrivial---when done with a bare minimum of good architecture tools and people---because you never do the same thing twice.
It's quite obvious to me that it's more than coincidence.
Could it be that even the leaders sometimes juts follow the herd, or appoint bad people, or only appoint people with opinions they can themselves understand ("cellular video telephintergames---whatamajiggy? Uhmm... ban tits!")?
you are crippling your programmers and taking a hit on both productivity and maintainability by banning it.
I think it'd be a bit off-putting too. You're hired for a certain expertise, then you have that expertise overridden for arguably factually incorrect reasons.
I recently read an article about why video games are addictive (http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p2.html); short story, they fill a void that would be much better filled by our jobs, if our jobs gave us (1) autonomy; (2) complexity and (3) feedback. It sounds like a good idea to not strip any of these away if it can be avoided.
For the statistics to mean anything, they should tell what percentage of the people choose which browser on the ballot, otherwise it's meaningless.
That'd certainly be an interesting number. Another interesting number might be the number of people exposed to the ballot screen---it tells you how much to trust the first number. Ask a statistician, or ask yourself this: if two people had been exposed, and both chose firefox, would you predict a 100% market share for firefox or would you think firefox got lucky and wait for more data to come in?
It might also be interesting to know how browser changes have happened historically---how do the switch rates develop over time? Should we expect to see more or less people leaving IE in the near and far future? How big are the gross and net switchovers? How big are they going to become?
"2.5 percent" is a really nice number. It sounds pleasant, like 2.4 children. But exactly, exactly what does it mean?
Personally, I'd like to explore a school that was just about learning the material, but it's not the system we have in the US.
Isn't that the purpose of most universities---in general terms, "to gather, discover and disseminate scholarly knowledge", not saying anything about particular skills (writing, oratory/rhetorical, social).
Sure, the individual students might want to work on their social skills to have complete and fulfilling lives, but the university isn't there tuo give them a place to practice; it's about the material(s).
So, highschool math is about taking notes. and writing skills. and verbal skills. and social skills. and everything else that makes up life and work.
I read a text that was, by my best guess, by-and-for teachers, talking about how middle school was meant to teach not only the curriculum, but also organization skills.
If my school tried to do that, they failed. They could have had us read David Allen's Getting Things Done in English class, and it would have exercised our (foreign) language skill just as fine as doing literary critique, but we would have learned something useful along the way too.
Point being: Why not make the hidden-curriculum lessons explicit? Why not talk about meta-cognitive study skills, personal organization skills, goal-setting, planning and all sorts of useful stuff in $FOREIGN_LANGUAGE instead of playing literary bullshit bingo? If school is meant to teach social skills, why no explicit talking about them (and why do the teachers tacitly allow all the bullying -.-)?
Can you tell I'm bitter?
Ah well, at least you have the sensibility to study and teach a subject where there are right answers:)
The STM transaction are not monitors, because they are not objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(synchronization) says monitors are objects). Also, STM transactions nest.
Suppose your queue has a shift method, which does something like { while (empty) wait; ret=first; --size; return ret; }. Suppose it has a similar push method.
Now, I want to do a queue transfer: grab one element from one queue and put it in another. How?
{ while (q1.empty) wait; while (q2.full) wait; q2.push(q1.shift()); }
How do you do that with threads and locks? Well, if you don't reach into the locks inside of q2, you can have it fill up after you shifted out of q1, leaving you dangling (perhaps causing a deadlock somewhere else). So really, you have to violate the encapsulation of the queue class to add new atomic methods _using_ queues (not extending them).
That is why STM beats locks and conds, and incidentally why it beats monitors implemented using locks and conds (yeah, you can use semaphores instead, but you don't want to).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say "let the best pirate win", but I'm afraid it's going to be anti-climac^Htic
Don't tease his spaghettiness!
Fucking pussies and their keyboards and their mice.
Who in their right mind fucks keyboards and mice? :-o
I dunno, if just solving it was prize enough for him, why would he have told anyone?
To share this newly discovered knowledge with the rest of humanity---for the good of others.
He solved the conjecture, his name will be in math books for the rest of eternity, and that is prize enough for him.
I think you're either misunderstanding him, or replacing his wants by your own.
I think it's more like this: he solved the conjecture, and that is prize enough for him.
This change is to allow third party code to come down through Windows Update, in essence adding more package sources.
So in essence, they did what I can do with vi /etc/apt/sources.list? Or they replaced a hardcoded "deb http://http.microsoft.com/windows/ valuable_vista main contrib non-free" with the same information but now in C:\windows\etc\apt\sources.list, and now I (and my programs) can edit it?
It's not new or unique
True, that :)
trying to run anything reliable when you give any control you had to other random people on the Internet is doomed to fail.
I've heard a talk from someone who suggested moving to content-addressing: instead of giving you a URL, I give you a sha1 hash of the page you want (and maybe an URL to tell you where to start looking). Then, you don't care from where you get your data, as long as it matches. You can grab the page from the originating host, or from a local cache, or from a bunch of different peers, or from... well, you name it. As long as you get the bits that match the hash, you're happy.
I think the idea is (1) good; (2) pie in the sky; and (3) applicable here.
I think you need some statistics training :-)
I think he did quite well, actually :p
Both spend their careers constructing logical arguments to accomplish tasks, and legalese is just another programming language.
Is the executive branch the run-time system and/or virtual machine then? Does that make the police force a garbage collector?
And how about the judicial, are they the evil OS, sending SIGFINE and chroot jail?
Let p' be "not p". What's the difference between showing "not p'" and "not q"? Why can't the patent owner say "We'll try to show Not-p'" rather than "[...] Not-Q"? Why don't they say "OK, P-And-Q so we can't enforce patent"?
You say something about legal wrangling, without any details. I don't think you can argue that one works better than the other based solely based on propositional (or if you prefer, second order prepositional) logic---at least not the kind of logic that deals with what is true rather than what is convincing.
I think you need to argue from the realities of court rooms and court cases: that based on historical evidence we know that one kind of argument convinces people and another kind of argument does so too but less often. Maybe you can argue based on what the law says: that "it has been done before" isn't enough to constitute prior art, and therefore Q is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defending yourself (that makes your second scenario, juxtaposed with your first, make sense).
But calling the claims one-letter names and formalizing the structure of the argument, what exactly has that gained you? Exactly what are you claiming here?
You have the amendment itself, which says thing like "in section 3, omit the words blah and replace with blah" or "section 82(b) is hereby repealed".
If you squint hard enough and replace the arbitrary words with intuitively selected symbols (plus, minus, at, comma), it looks almost like...
A diff.
So... a consolidated version is one with... all patches applied? Like git checkout HEAD?
And they have this cumbersome process automated? Why, we programmers should do that too! It would save lots of effort :)
I actually miss Windows Mobile. To use the phone to its fullest capacity (yes, including capacity), I had to do no hacks, no low level patches. Just install the right program and go.
Funny, that's exactly what I've experienced with my Nokia N900.
Heck, even better than that, on day one I install code I had contributed to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, file bugs against it, and start looking at how to develop for this mean ass machine.
I don't have to pay corporate overlords (for what, gcc? ^_^), no one is going to say "no, you can't have that software"; I'm free to play and build, and turn my phone into exactly what I want it to be. And other people want to do the same thing, so it's not like I'm all alone :-)
It has its warts, so look into reviews and troll posts on maemo forums, and decide if they sound like you can live with them. But Nokia loves you and wants you to play. /* I'm not paid to write this, I just evangelize to what I assume is an eager audience (of at least one person) */
or actually bricks (as in bricks)
FTFY.
Now I just need to fix the dictionary of every clueless tech writer who uses the word "brick" because it sounds cool, despite not knowing what it means. I guess I shall have to cease using writing implements and begin using clue bats to achieve this goal. Sadly :(
for example, the latest level on the Cliq locks out root and the holes to get root.
Get a Nokia N900. It's not Android, but it's Linux, it's a damn fine phone/skype/IM/facetwitter appliance, and it comes with xterm preinstalled and gainroot ready in the repositories.
Downsides: slightly heavy, slightly big, slightly short battery life (but maybe I ought to not use the screen as a flashlight, no?). That hasn't made anything impossible for me, it's just something I have had to adapt to.
Upsides: Nokia loves you. Nokia loves your nerdy peculiarities. They want you to hack it, see http://blogs.nokia.com/pushn900/
The thing that really amuses me about the whole Windows vs. Mac thing
For those of us who can't find large differences between an Apple laptop running Linux and an Dell laptop running Linux, thank you very much for not framing the debate as PC versus Mac.
I can't tell you how badly I hate that choice of words. It pulls me in (because I use a computer that either is or isn't made by Apple) but then leaves me out (because I use software that both isn't made by Microsoft and isn't made by Apple).
It's a relic of the past---from when PC meant IBM-compatible PC. The IBM PC business has died out as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible#The_declining_influence_of_IBM.
The word (/abbrev.) PC means nothing having to do with being a personal thing and much more about being a consumer-affordable general purpose computer (i.e. my Wii/router/phone isn't a PC, nor is my Cray 1, but my Apple laptop is); at least that's the way I use it and hear it used, except maybe by people who need to distance themselves from the majority of people who run Windows on an Intel box.
Get over yourself. Yes, I run something else too. I don't go around telling everybody about it any longer. I was a fan boy. Now I'm pretty chill about it. Linux is the set of trade-offs that works best for me; if you like something else that's fine with me. Heck if you prefer Blackbox to Fluxbox or vim to emacs, that's cool. Use what works for you. Even if it's made by a company I don't like.
Just leave me out of your mud wrestling match between you and The Windows Sheeple. Maybe we can have a beer together when you get over it?
Thanks. </rant>
FTF WP A:
Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs has security implications. For example, encryption of existing unencrypted data on flash-based SSDs cannot be performed securely due to the fact that wear leveling causes new encrypted drive sectors to be written to a physical location different from their original location
Fail. Really, this is about deletion, not encryption: you still get to have E(x), but you don't have it rather than x, you get to have both.
And the same issue presents itself on HDDs if you use journaling file systems. And if you don't, you get slow fsck operations, plus your data could be better protected at non-noticeable cost. Your disk may work twice as hard (doubly writing everything), but it does so when you look away and don't notice it.
I mean really, who needs an expensive big SSD for your porn collection?
Me. Well, kind of. I'd use it in a hybrid way.
For every video and audio file, I'd store the first X miliseconds worth of data on the SSD and the rest on the HDD, where X is chosen such that I can fetch another hunk of data from the HDD within those X miliseconds with probability p, say for p = 99%.
In that way, I would have playback start instantly (the promise of SSDs) and I would store all my stuff cheaply (the promise of HDDs). It won't be optimally fast or optimally cheap, but it'd be like a 90/90 going against a 50/100 and a 100/50 (for certain anally extracted values of 90, 50 and 100).
some people might find them exciting, but that's just people who haven't been around computers long enough to know all the (similar) bad ideas, that already existed before...
Would that be the GNOME Usability Experts?
I'd say similar things about complexity.
I realize I have been unclear: the quote I gave was said (IIRC) by a psychologist, and psychologists talk weird.
In this case, the psychologese word "complex" translates (I think) into the enginereese phrase "non-trivial". As in the opposite of assembly line work, or data entry, or of "write the exact same program again". Programming is always complex/nontrivial---when done with a bare minimum of good architecture tools and people---because you never do the same thing twice.
It's quite obvious to me that it's more than coincidence.
Could it be that even the leaders sometimes juts follow the herd, or appoint bad people, or only appoint people with opinions they can themselves understand ("cellular video telephintergames---whatamajiggy? Uhmm... ban tits!")?
Or does it have to be a conspiracy?
What's particularly nice about Ruby, over the theoretically nicer LISP/Smalltalk/etc, is that Ruby is actually used fairly often...
Every move-to-column you make
Every gdb-point you break
Every file you save
Every font-lock-keyword you say
I'll be ru-u-unning you
From the Song of Emacs
you are crippling your programmers and taking a hit on both productivity and maintainability by banning it.
I think it'd be a bit off-putting too. You're hired for a certain expertise, then you have that expertise overridden for arguably factually incorrect reasons.
I recently read an article about why video games are addictive (http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p2.html); short story, they fill a void that would be much better filled by our jobs, if our jobs gave us (1) autonomy; (2) complexity and (3) feedback. It sounds like a good idea to not strip any of these away if it can be avoided.
For the statistics to mean anything, they should tell what percentage of the people choose which browser on the ballot, otherwise it's meaningless.
That'd certainly be an interesting number. Another interesting number might be the number of people exposed to the ballot screen---it tells you how much to trust the first number. Ask a statistician, or ask yourself this: if two people had been exposed, and both chose firefox, would you predict a 100% market share for firefox or would you think firefox got lucky and wait for more data to come in?
It might also be interesting to know how browser changes have happened historically---how do the switch rates develop over time? Should we expect to see more or less people leaving IE in the near and far future? How big are the gross and net switchovers? How big are they going to become?
"2.5 percent" is a really nice number. It sounds pleasant, like 2.4 children. But exactly, exactly what does it mean?
Personally, I'd like to explore a school that was just about learning the material, but it's not the system we have in the US.
Isn't that the purpose of most universities---in general terms, "to gather, discover and disseminate scholarly knowledge", not saying anything about particular skills (writing, oratory/rhetorical, social).
Sure, the individual students might want to work on their social skills to have complete and fulfilling lives, but the university isn't there tuo give them a place to practice; it's about the material(s).
So, highschool math is about taking notes. and writing skills. and verbal skills. and social skills. and everything else that makes up life and work.
I read a text that was, by my best guess, by-and-for teachers, talking about how middle school was meant to teach not only the curriculum, but also organization skills.
If my school tried to do that, they failed. They could have had us read David Allen's Getting Things Done in English class, and it would have exercised our (foreign) language skill just as fine as doing literary critique, but we would have learned something useful along the way too.
Point being: Why not make the hidden-curriculum lessons explicit? Why not talk about meta-cognitive study skills, personal organization skills, goal-setting, planning and all sorts of useful stuff in $FOREIGN_LANGUAGE instead of playing literary bullshit bingo? If school is meant to teach social skills, why no explicit talking about them (and why do the teachers tacitly allow all the bullying -.-)?
Can you tell I'm bitter?
Ah well, at least you have the sensibility to study and teach a subject where there are right answers :)
The STM transaction are not monitors, because they are not objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(synchronization) says monitors are objects). Also, STM transactions nest.
Suppose your queue has a shift method, which does something like { while (empty) wait; ret=first; --size; return ret; }. Suppose it has a similar push method.
Now, I want to do a queue transfer: grab one element from one queue and put it in another. How?
{ while (q1.empty) wait; while (q2.full) wait; q2.push(q1.shift()); }
How do you do that with threads and locks? Well, if you don't reach into the locks inside of q2, you can have it fill up after you shifted out of q1, leaving you dangling (perhaps causing a deadlock somewhere else). So really, you have to violate the encapsulation of the queue class to add new atomic methods _using_ queues (not extending them).
That is why STM beats locks and conds, and incidentally why it beats monitors implemented using locks and conds (yeah, you can use semaphores instead, but you don't want to).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex and http://sjc.blog.uvm.edu/archives/memex-1.jpg
Something like this? Designed/envisioned in 1945 :)