Google absolutely blows away the competition, however it is humorous seeing entries in my log file related to people looking for masturbation tips (from the beginner level "How To" style queries, to full blown searches for advanced techniques). The page in question is entitled "Hey Jerk : Get Off My Computer!" (and relates to pop-up ad windows) and I'm, uh, proud to see that it ranks #2 for searches for "jerk off technique" (I've had dozens of related hits appearing). While it is humorous seeing searching going a little off-track, I am very curious how many consumers know that each link you follow passes on where you came from, so for instance I see log entries like
I agree with the rest, however as of late the iPaq has been seriously stomping into Palm territory (indeed I believe I read that the iPaq now is commanding new sales). Of course the iPaq runs PocketPC (which is Windows CE 3).
Microsoft's investment in Rogers was almost two years ago so I really don't see what part if any that plays in the fact that Rogers just came out with a Linux box. Just a point of clarification because the implication seems to be that Microsoft just bought in to thwart this Linux initiative, when in reality that is old news.
This does look fascinating, although really it was inevitable. Right now I have a @Home feed and a digital feed to my settop box (not WebTV but rather just digital TV) so making a more intelligent box makes sense. However I think there's a huge overemphasis on the Linux aspect of this: It's a tool that facilitates a means, and many different tools could achieve the same thing.
A more realistic take on it is that CNet makes money by getting hits, and nothing gets hits more than pandering to a group. There are have been countless articles on CNet which have obviously been targeted at the Slashdot/Open Source crowd, just as there have been articles targeted at the IT department head type. Do you think CEOs and IT heads read this stuff? Very very unlikely.
Just because something is on an online site doesn't mean everyone reads it. This is akin to the many online polls that are overwhelmingly pro-Linux/GPL/Open Source yet analyzing the style of the article and the most common links finds that the overwhelming number of visitors are already converted: To use an old analogy it's like preaching to the choir.
The only reason you can run commercial software on Linux is because Linus, who seemed to like and not-like the GPL, put in disclaimers basically trumping the GPL in the Linux license : The whole disclaimer saying that commercial software can utilize Linux however it would like with no need to be GPLd, etc. So whenever a GPL fanatic points to Oracle running on Linux as some great proof that the GPL and business can coexist, please realize that that is hardly the case.
While the market isn't what it used to be (remember the heyday of domain name buying and reselling?), I wonder what the now defunct (or rather non-updating) suck.com could get for their domain from most probably the adult industry.
Let me put it this way: When I'm standing still it says 0 KPH. When I walk at a regular pace it says 2.5KPH. When I walk slowly it says 1.2KPH. If it is accurate to show me precisely when I slowed down and sped up while walking, then this $200 unit can certainly accurately gauge the speed at 100 KPH (i.e. if the position is good enough to measure such minute speeds, it's obviously good enough to measure 100 KPH).
Again standard deviation can easily correct for offset errors (that is trivial statistics) and on anything but the most moronic device is not a factor unless you're aiming cruise missiles.
When calculating velocity, 15ft will make a TREMENDOUS difference.
Sure it does if you take two single samples a short time apart (say when the person has travelled 30 ft) it could hypothetically make an inaccuracy of up to 100%. However when you are taking 100s of samples at a quickly duration you can quickly filter the errant data. As I mentioned in another post my GPS has a lag from my speed of about 0.5s and the reason is obviously because it amasses enough samples and then filters out the slight discrepencies to come up with the average speed for the prior period, etc. It's not like the speed is jumping up and down, but rather it smoothly transitions based on my changes. If I use it while in a car I can see the car holding speed, gaining a KPH or two, etc. i.e. This is something that you have to experience to truly gain faith in it.
Again I can walk down the street and it shows my walking speed pretty much precisely, and given that give or take 15ft will make a much bigger difference to someone going 2.5KPH I'm prone to believing it's quite accurate for someone going 100KPH.
GPS is hardly that unproven of a technology: Aircraft can now legally land (if I recall correctly) based upon GPS information of where the runway is supposed to be related to where the aircraft thinks it is (and this is the civilian signal). GPS is a very, very reliable system. If WW3 kicked up they might shut it down, but the military isn't going to just for the heck of it.
The speed tracking on most GPS units is extremely accurate, and with modern units that usually try to maintain "contact" (of course the contact is one way with the GPS only receiving) with 12 satellites at once it'd be extremely rare under all but the worse situation that it would suddenly "snap" you into a new position (and of course unless you're doing a rally it's easy to filter out such errant info). My little handheld amateur Garmin has a speed accuracy of.2 MPH, and in practical terms I found that it is REMARKABLY accurate (albeit lagged from my current speed by about.5s), whether in a canoe, on foot, or in a car. Indeed I discovered that both my cars overstate the speed by ~5KPH at 100KPH which makes me wonder if this is a way major car manufacturers chop 5% off the warranty secretly (or overcharge for excess KM on leases).
I take issue with comparing going over the speed limit to running red lights: While going over the speed limit has only mildly been correlated with accidents (though the British government, in its campaign to reduce car speeds, brought up some bogus stats to try to make the case for that), going through red lights is absolutely dangerous and is the result of many injuries and deaths. Here in the greater Toronto area (GTA) there has been a huge push to install red-light cameras and there is little or no public opposition (it's very unlike a GPS planted in your car anyways: Your own property is not giving you up, but rather an external unit is). Quite contrary though there was a huge public outroar about a previous initiative that saw them parking radar vans on the side of highways and racking up hundreds of fines for people marginally over the speed limit.
All of those whacky regionalized date/time designations are crap. Use ISO 8601:2000 and the world will be a much nicer place. Seriously.
Irony alert: When I bought the 8601:2000 PDF from the ISO page the date/time in the upper right was in dd-mm-yyyy format (and because it was lower digits for dd/mm it was ambiguous). Found that pretty funny.
This message was posted at 2001-06-19T01:30-04 (2001-06-19T05:30Z)
This is absolutely idiotic. Cheaters are antisocial opportunists who feel such a sense of inferiority and a failure to ever compete that they "overcompensate" by using tools that allow them to supercede rules of the game: Tools which in >99.9999% of they just downloaded (they're not "subverting the architecture" : They're just losers using someone else's program).
Just because your idea of fun is more childish than others', doesn't make other people's idea of fun any less legitimate than yours.
I hope you're a troll and you're not really this stupid. A cheater intentional has "fun" at the expense of everyone else.
I disagree. "Normal" people don't think that the bullets in the gun are "physical", and they aren't viewing it as a solid, immutable world, but rather they appreciate that every limitation in the game is an aspect that modifies your strategy. Bullets run out? Great that means that I have to formulate a strategy that will lead to reequiping, even though it means I have to run for dangerous areas: Perhaps I'll analyze the various weapon spawn points to determine the best area for doing so. Can't run for eternity without getting tired? Okay strategically run at only the right moments to ensure burnout doesn't occur. etc.
The point of all of this is that every limitation and restriction in the game (ergo not being able to see through walls) is a part of the rules of the game, and it is these rules that cheaters want to supercede so that they can have an upperhand over non-cheaters. Personally I consider cheaters seriously psychologically challenged (How can a cheater with an aimbot feel a sense of accomplishment? I despise anyone who feels that cheating is reasonable, and I will treat people the same in real life. A cheater is an anti-social opportunists who would fuck you over given a chance, and who likely shoplifts in their spare time). Cheaters are the scourge of online games because their goal is purely to make life hell for non-cheaters. I played Diablo I online for about 5 minutes before just completely giving up because every level was full of asshole 500hp/all spell "lvl. 2" characters. These losers would hang out just to kill true low level characters (because of course there was no challenge). How very cool.
While I did enjoy the Simpson's early exploits, when I see those episodes now I largely find them hard to watch. The drawing is primitive, the voice acting horrible (I saw one yesterday and I believe Ned was doing Carl's voice...but it sounded like Ned. And there's the whole issue of both Chief Wiggums and Smithers being seemingly African-American half the time), and the family more bizarre. The series definitely refined as it went through the years. I will probably buy the DVD set anyways though.
I was humored by the Apolcalypse article just before this one as anyone who saw the episode where the Simpsons visited Japan (one of my favourites. Homer walking through the walls was classic Homer, and as a Canadian I found the Canadian couple getting rained on by scorpions hilarious) and Homer spent the last of their money to buy a square watermellon (which promptly popped back to round one).
Maybe you should learn a little more about concurrent programming instead of preaching about it here if you don't know what coroutines are.
Wow! For someone who preaches that one should use threads for simple overlapped I/O, it's quite astounding seeing you giving lessons and actually referring to my comment as "appaling" when it is still painfully obvious that you don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about. P.S. A "coroutine", known in NT/2000 land as a fiber, is a thread that doesn't have OS scheduling, and it is grossly inappropriate for the scenario I laid out. I'm sure you know that though from your extensive analysis and clear mastery of concurrent programming (especially by your demonstrated mastery of the term "coroutine", which is a term which only has relevance for a small number of languages on a small number of platforms. Genius! Good old ivory towers always keep us laughing). I presume it is, however, what you happened to learn about in this weeks "How to program 101" so you felt the need to run to Slashdot to demonstrate your great wisdom.
When they discuss mutexes and standard synchronization objects I presume you'll be back to extoll your wisdom wherever possible.
Ughhh..make that terminology difference. I gotta start previewing.
In any case my point (that Mac Daddyo Waterloo man apparently dissed) was that I have seen numerous STATE MACHINE designs where people hold the state of various operations and sit in a loop checking on the various operation status flags, calling off to functions to transition states when relevant. Debugging such systems is often extremely fraught with errors and convoluted, and the state machine system is just like a cooperative Windows task scheduler: Such designs often lend themselves to multithreading (wanko I'm sure is going to pipe in "WHAT ABOUT SYNCHRONIZATION!" : No shit idiot. I think that's a given when discussing multithreading). Blegh.
The previous poster's example of using synchronized threads to implement a finite automaton with implicit state management was particularly apalling.
Perhaps we have a bit of a terminology, oh master, however obviously you don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about. Thank you for coming out though.
P.S. Your great example of when to use threading is called overlapped I/O: Just about every modern OS has it. Pretty piss poor example of when to use threading.
While it is extremely well written and very informative and interesting, I have a feeling that a lot of developers will read it through expecting information that it is not providing. This article is, at least from my interpretation, largely analyzing the designs of various processors/hardware platforms. It is not (again IMHO) discussing software development multithreading techniques, so if you're looking to it for information on how to pThread your application, or the pitfalls of multithreading, or whether a state machine is more efficient than synchronous threads, you won't find what you're looking for. Do read the intropage about RC5 & S@H though as that is fascinating, though it applies primarily to the constraints of the hardware system.
Totally disagree in that multithreading often simplifies the flow of execution in software, making maintaining and debugging the code much much easier. If given the choice between a state machine type code architecture, and one that spawns a thread that performs some synchronous task in a linear fashion, I will most certainly choose the latter. At the very least with NT/2000 utilizes fibres (which are a lightweight user controlled version of threading) which largely eliminates synchronization issues (because the user is in control), but is allows for threads of execution.
There are several messages regarding this article claiming that multithreading is wrong philisophically or architecturally and I think that is a gross simplification. There are a lot of people who use threads when they are not appropriate, but conversely there are certainly a lot of people who don't use threads when they would be appropriate.
P.S. Regarding metrics the point is that there is neither a gain in resources (including memory, disk usage, queue depth, CPU usage. The standard bogus "it slowed down" claims) over time, so coupled with the fact that it runs perfectly under load for a reasonable test sample that could be extrapolated out to infinity.
Slashdot Mirror
That site is absolutely hilarious! Thank you for the link.
Google absolutely blows away the competition, however it is humorous seeing entries in my log file related to people looking for masturbation tips (from the beginner level "How To" style queries, to full blown searches for advanced techniques). The page in question is entitled "Hey Jerk : Get Off My Computer!" (and relates to pop-up ad windows) and I'm, uh, proud to see that it ranks #2 for searches for "jerk off technique" (I've had dozens of related hits appearing). While it is humorous seeing searching going a little off-track, I am very curious how many consumers know that each link you follow passes on where you came from, so for instance I see log entries like
200x-xx-xx xx:xx:xx xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx GET /rants/jerk/index.htm 200 5986 334 270 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+98;+Dig Ext) http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=jerk+off&b=21& hc=0&hs=5 /rants/jerk/index.htm 200 5986 437 1292 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+98;+Dig Ext;+sureseeker.com) http://www.google.com/search?q=guys+who+jerk+off
-or-
200x-xx-xx xx:xx:xx xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx GET
I agree with the rest, however as of late the iPaq has been seriously stomping into Palm territory (indeed I believe I read that the iPaq now is commanding new sales). Of course the iPaq runs PocketPC (which is Windows CE 3).
Microsoft's investment in Rogers was almost two years ago so I really don't see what part if any that plays in the fact that Rogers just came out with a Linux box. Just a point of clarification because the implication seems to be that Microsoft just bought in to thwart this Linux initiative, when in reality that is old news.
This does look fascinating, although really it was inevitable. Right now I have a @Home feed and a digital feed to my settop box (not WebTV but rather just digital TV) so making a more intelligent box makes sense. However I think there's a huge overemphasis on the Linux aspect of this: It's a tool that facilitates a means, and many different tools could achieve the same thing.
A more realistic take on it is that CNet makes money by getting hits, and nothing gets hits more than pandering to a group. There are have been countless articles on CNet which have obviously been targeted at the Slashdot/Open Source crowd, just as there have been articles targeted at the IT department head type. Do you think CEOs and IT heads read this stuff? Very very unlikely.
Just because something is on an online site doesn't mean everyone reads it. This is akin to the many online polls that are overwhelmingly pro-Linux/GPL/Open Source yet analyzing the style of the article and the most common links finds that the overwhelming number of visitors are already converted: To use an old analogy it's like preaching to the choir.
The only reason you can run commercial software on Linux is because Linus, who seemed to like and not-like the GPL, put in disclaimers basically trumping the GPL in the Linux license : The whole disclaimer saying that commercial software can utilize Linux however it would like with no need to be GPLd, etc. So whenever a GPL fanatic points to Oracle running on Linux as some great proof that the GPL and business can coexist, please realize that that is hardly the case.
While the market isn't what it used to be (remember the heyday of domain name buying and reselling?), I wonder what the now defunct (or rather non-updating) suck.com could get for their domain from most probably the adult industry.
Let me put it this way: When I'm standing still it says 0 KPH. When I walk at a regular pace it says 2.5KPH. When I walk slowly it says 1.2KPH. If it is accurate to show me precisely when I slowed down and sped up while walking, then this $200 unit can certainly accurately gauge the speed at 100 KPH (i.e. if the position is good enough to measure such minute speeds, it's obviously good enough to measure 100 KPH).
Again standard deviation can easily correct for offset errors (that is trivial statistics) and on anything but the most moronic device is not a factor unless you're aiming cruise missiles.
When calculating velocity, 15ft will make a TREMENDOUS difference.
Sure it does if you take two single samples a short time apart (say when the person has travelled 30 ft) it could hypothetically make an inaccuracy of up to 100%. However when you are taking 100s of samples at a quickly duration you can quickly filter the errant data. As I mentioned in another post my GPS has a lag from my speed of about 0.5s and the reason is obviously because it amasses enough samples and then filters out the slight discrepencies to come up with the average speed for the prior period, etc. It's not like the speed is jumping up and down, but rather it smoothly transitions based on my changes. If I use it while in a car I can see the car holding speed, gaining a KPH or two, etc. i.e. This is something that you have to experience to truly gain faith in it.
Again I can walk down the street and it shows my walking speed pretty much precisely, and given that give or take 15ft will make a much bigger difference to someone going 2.5KPH I'm prone to believing it's quite accurate for someone going 100KPH.
GPS is hardly that unproven of a technology: Aircraft can now legally land (if I recall correctly) based upon GPS information of where the runway is supposed to be related to where the aircraft thinks it is (and this is the civilian signal). GPS is a very, very reliable system. If WW3 kicked up they might shut it down, but the military isn't going to just for the heck of it.
The speed tracking on most GPS units is extremely accurate, and with modern units that usually try to maintain "contact" (of course the contact is one way with the GPS only receiving) with 12 satellites at once it'd be extremely rare under all but the worse situation that it would suddenly "snap" you into a new position (and of course unless you're doing a rally it's easy to filter out such errant info). My little handheld amateur Garmin has a speed accuracy of .2 MPH, and in practical terms I found that it is REMARKABLY accurate (albeit lagged from my current speed by about .5s), whether in a canoe, on foot, or in a car. Indeed I discovered that both my cars overstate the speed by ~5KPH at 100KPH which makes me wonder if this is a way major car manufacturers chop 5% off the warranty secretly (or overcharge for excess KM on leases).
I take issue with comparing going over the speed limit to running red lights: While going over the speed limit has only mildly been correlated with accidents (though the British government, in its campaign to reduce car speeds, brought up some bogus stats to try to make the case for that), going through red lights is absolutely dangerous and is the result of many injuries and deaths. Here in the greater Toronto area (GTA) there has been a huge push to install red-light cameras and there is little or no public opposition (it's very unlike a GPS planted in your car anyways: Your own property is not giving you up, but rather an external unit is). Quite contrary though there was a huge public outroar about a previous initiative that saw them parking radar vans on the side of highways and racking up hundreds of fines for people marginally over the speed limit.
All of those whacky regionalized date/time designations are crap. Use ISO 8601:2000 and the world will be a much nicer place. Seriously.
Irony alert: When I bought the 8601:2000 PDF from the ISO page the date/time in the upper right was in dd-mm-yyyy format (and because it was lower digits for dd/mm it was ambiguous). Found that pretty funny.
This message was posted at 2001-06-19T01:30-04 (2001-06-19T05:30Z)
This is absolutely idiotic. Cheaters are antisocial opportunists who feel such a sense of inferiority and a failure to ever compete that they "overcompensate" by using tools that allow them to supercede rules of the game: Tools which in >99.9999% of they just downloaded (they're not "subverting the architecture" : They're just losers using someone else's program).
Just because your idea of fun is more childish than others', doesn't make other people's idea of fun any less legitimate than yours.
I hope you're a troll and you're not really this stupid. A cheater intentional has "fun" at the expense of everyone else.
I disagree. "Normal" people don't think that the bullets in the gun are "physical", and they aren't viewing it as a solid, immutable world, but rather they appreciate that every limitation in the game is an aspect that modifies your strategy. Bullets run out? Great that means that I have to formulate a strategy that will lead to reequiping, even though it means I have to run for dangerous areas: Perhaps I'll analyze the various weapon spawn points to determine the best area for doing so. Can't run for eternity without getting tired? Okay strategically run at only the right moments to ensure burnout doesn't occur. etc.
The point of all of this is that every limitation and restriction in the game (ergo not being able to see through walls) is a part of the rules of the game, and it is these rules that cheaters want to supercede so that they can have an upperhand over non-cheaters. Personally I consider cheaters seriously psychologically challenged (How can a cheater with an aimbot feel a sense of accomplishment? I despise anyone who feels that cheating is reasonable, and I will treat people the same in real life. A cheater is an anti-social opportunists who would fuck you over given a chance, and who likely shoplifts in their spare time). Cheaters are the scourge of online games because their goal is purely to make life hell for non-cheaters. I played Diablo I online for about 5 minutes before just completely giving up because every level was full of asshole 500hp/all spell "lvl. 2" characters. These losers would hang out just to kill true low level characters (because of course there was no challenge). How very cool.
Ughh...Definitely a matter of personal opinion as I personally feel the original Star Trek is barely worthy of archive video reels at the network.
While I did enjoy the Simpson's early exploits, when I see those episodes now I largely find them hard to watch. The drawing is primitive, the voice acting horrible (I saw one yesterday and I believe Ned was doing Carl's voice...but it sounded like Ned. And there's the whole issue of both Chief Wiggums and Smithers being seemingly African-American half the time), and the family more bizarre. The series definitely refined as it went through the years. I will probably buy the DVD set anyways though.
I was humored by the Apolcalypse article just before this one as anyone who saw the episode where the Simpsons visited Japan (one of my favourites. Homer walking through the walls was classic Homer, and as a Canadian I found the Canadian couple getting rained on by scorpions hilarious) and Homer spent the last of their money to buy a square watermellon (which promptly popped back to round one).
Maybe you should learn a little more about concurrent programming instead of preaching about it here if you don't know what coroutines are.
Wow! For someone who preaches that one should use threads for simple overlapped I/O, it's quite astounding seeing you giving lessons and actually referring to my comment as "appaling" when it is still painfully obvious that you don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about. P.S. A "coroutine", known in NT/2000 land as a fiber, is a thread that doesn't have OS scheduling, and it is grossly inappropriate for the scenario I laid out. I'm sure you know that though from your extensive analysis and clear mastery of concurrent programming (especially by your demonstrated mastery of the term "coroutine", which is a term which only has relevance for a small number of languages on a small number of platforms. Genius! Good old ivory towers always keep us laughing). I presume it is, however, what you happened to learn about in this weeks "How to program 101" so you felt the need to run to Slashdot to demonstrate your great wisdom.
When they discuss mutexes and standard synchronization objects I presume you'll be back to extoll your wisdom wherever possible.
Ughhh..make that terminology difference. I gotta start previewing.
In any case my point (that Mac Daddyo Waterloo man apparently dissed) was that I have seen numerous STATE MACHINE designs where people hold the state of various operations and sit in a loop checking on the various operation status flags, calling off to functions to transition states when relevant. Debugging such systems is often extremely fraught with errors and convoluted, and the state machine system is just like a cooperative Windows task scheduler: Such designs often lend themselves to multithreading (wanko I'm sure is going to pipe in "WHAT ABOUT SYNCHRONIZATION!" : No shit idiot. I think that's a given when discussing multithreading). Blegh.
The previous poster's example of using synchronized threads to implement a finite automaton with implicit state management was particularly apalling.
Perhaps we have a bit of a terminology, oh master, however obviously you don't have the slightest clue what I was talking about. Thank you for coming out though.
P.S. Your great example of when to use threading is called overlapped I/O: Just about every modern OS has it. Pretty piss poor example of when to use threading.
While it is extremely well written and very informative and interesting, I have a feeling that a lot of developers will read it through expecting information that it is not providing. This article is, at least from my interpretation, largely analyzing the designs of various processors/hardware platforms. It is not (again IMHO) discussing software development multithreading techniques, so if you're looking to it for information on how to pThread your application, or the pitfalls of multithreading, or whether a state machine is more efficient than synchronous threads, you won't find what you're looking for. Do read the intropage about RC5 & S@H though as that is fascinating, though it applies primarily to the constraints of the hardware system.
Still very interesting though.
Totally disagree in that multithreading often simplifies the flow of execution in software, making maintaining and debugging the code much much easier. If given the choice between a state machine type code architecture, and one that spawns a thread that performs some synchronous task in a linear fashion, I will most certainly choose the latter. At the very least with NT/2000 utilizes fibres (which are a lightweight user controlled version of threading) which largely eliminates synchronization issues (because the user is in control), but is allows for threads of execution.
There are several messages regarding this article claiming that multithreading is wrong philisophically or architecturally and I think that is a gross simplification. There are a lot of people who use threads when they are not appropriate, but conversely there are certainly a lot of people who don't use threads when they would be appropriate.
I wouldn't call it flamebait, but rather very topical and insightful humor given the situation. I got a chuckle out of it myself.
P.S. Regarding metrics the point is that there is neither a gain in resources (including memory, disk usage, queue depth, CPU usage. The standard bogus "it slowed down" claims) over time, so coupled with the fact that it runs perfectly under load for a reasonable test sample that could be extrapolated out to infinity.
Those are the metrics....beeeaaaoootttchhhh!
Sorry make that SP6a. All the talk about SP7 contaminated my brain.