While you don't actually agree with the grandparent post that "only Windows and Office make money", you do seem to support it by refuting sql*kitten. However, take alook at the link that you yourself gave.
Three Microsoft divisions are highly profitable: These include Client (Windows XP Professional and Home, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT Workstation, Windows Me, Windows 98, and embedded systems), Server Paltforms (Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Systems Management Server, Windows Terminal Server, and Small Business Server), and Information Worker (Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, Visio, other standalone information worker applications, SharePoint Portal Server and CALs, and professional product support services). The grandparent's statement that the only profitable segemnts of Microsoft are "Windows and Office" is ridiculously disingenous and grossly inaccurate: The overwhelming majority of Microsoft's development effort is profitable.
What isn't profitable? MSN, the Entertainment division (XBox), Windows CE (expect a big turnaround in coming quarters) and the newly organized "Business Solutions" (which includes the newly acquired Great Plains Software). Anyone who doesn't think that division will be highly profitable in a couple of quarters is deluded.
For all the slashdotters out there with an axe to grind towards Microsoft, and a fervent desire to "be different", realize that the biggest mistake you can ever make is to underestimate your foe. The implication here is that Microsoft is riding the coattails of their purported monopoly [insert some comment from someone saying "CONVICTED MONOPOLY"...I presume they call Kevin Mitnick a "convicted hacker" without subtext], rather than the extremely successful (and agile) software company that they are.
Totally agreed. Indeed in some ways it's redundant: Point #1 is "unvalidated parameters" while point #6 is "command injection" (which is via "unvalidated parameters"). Of course most troubling of all is the link on the right for "WebGoat": I suspect this must be some sort of automated goatse trolling system (humor).
Anyway, that's my story, believe it or not. And, as such, it's not entirely unbelievable to me that someone could do 1,500 LOC/day for at least a few days at a shot. Doing it for 18 months straight though? Doesn't seem likely.
It is not my contention that it is impossible to do a 20 hour (or even 24 hour) day. Indeed, I would totally believe in a 48 hour session...but then my belief wanes (and one can't simply think "well what if you do a long session, then break, then a long session!?": The problem is that following a long session one generally crashes and crashes hard -- The net productivity over the period of combined heroics and crash evens out, if not falling on the negative side).
Extrapolating it out is just as silly as saying that since someone can run 100m in 10 seconds, therefore they can run a kilometer in 100 seconds. This same thing holds true for code: Yeah I've had periods where I'm reimplementing something I've done dozens of times (like basic winmain type code), usually due to bad code reuse patterns, and I spew it out quickly...there is a limit to that sort of code though. A single bug could easily eat over 1/2 my coding time as well, slashing the LOC productivity.
I dono, maybe me and my co-workers are some kind of gods, but I don't see these "one week" numbers as outrageous.
We're all gods when we don't need proof though, right? I code 100,000 lines per day and sleep 15 minutes on my commute to work (it's a straight section of the highway). I am a GOD!
Of course then there's that silly old thing called reality. Here are some simple facts. Feel free to disagree.
Heroic coding is almost always destructive. Read The Mythical Man Month for a little background on this: Basically when people start putting in those 20 hour days then it's either the beginning of the end (which in some cases as the beginning of the beginning as well. See many well know.com cases). People, even gods like yourself, have a finite amount of problem solving cerebral ability per day, and extending that is generally counter productive.
The human body can go a couple of days with minimal sleep, but it is absolute folly to extrapolate that and presume that it'll keep going for even a week: Instead you'll either require a massive sleep "make-up", or you'll become mentally dull while your immune system collapses (this is presuming you don't have a medical condition).
A line of code per 16 seconds again sounds good and we can all easily do it by reimplementing something that we've already done (ooh look at my reversing a string function!), but it is astoundingly unlikely that someone could continue such a rate beyond even an hour. If coding were so trivial we would have tools to generate the code.
Ah the number of projects I've worked on where someone has given optimistic numbers, presuming that they'll magically create line after line after line...and then a subtle bug hits. Days later their half a day of coding is eclipsed by days of problem solving. I'm sure this doesn't affect Gods, though.
If I can go for 4 days on about 4 hours of sleep for DragonCON I'm sure some of the more hardcore programmers can do it for a codeing binge.
Actually I doubt they can: While the other post implies that this is some sort of norm, the human body starts to self destructive after more than a couple of days with insufficient sleep: Perhaps a couple of nights with a couple of hours sleep, but a week? Put that in concert with the fact that mental agility precipitously declines and the error rate shoots through the roof and such heroic coding turns self destructive.
Again note that I'm talking about actual code as well, not comments. Spitting out four paragraphs of comments can be done relatively rapidly because it's a single crystalized throught that you're extrapolating out. Code isn't quiet so clear cut, so again apart from trivial implementations where you're parsing a string or something of that genre, it isn't a single crystalized thought, but rather hundreds of disparate thoughts. Couple that with the fact that code progress declines in step with the size of the code base (even using the best OO guidelines) and this puts any continuous heroic push even further into question.
I personally have managed 4,500 per day for a period of about a week on occasion...
Given a 16 hour day (even presuming a short 6 hours of sleep, there's still 2 hours at a minimum for extraneous things), that would be 281 lines per hour, which per minute is ~5 lines per minute, or a line every 11 seconds or so. While it's entirely reasonable that you TYPE that fast, if absolutely impossible that that sort of rate could be maintained for anything more than "spitting out the trivial function that's so trivial that you should probably look at the library docs because it almost certainly already exists". Instead each line is generally the result of a contemplation process, and then of course invariably one rewrites/refactors and the line out drops even more.
Netscape's rise was more like Google's, where it rose to "power" by being more and more favoured by web surfers; it's major competition was also free. We used Internet in a Box which came with Spry Mosaic, but DOWNLOADED Netscape on top of that because it was better.
Not sure about the analogy. Indeed I would say that Google rose to power in the same way that Internet Explorer rose to power: Instead of the ads that all the competitors filled their pages with to try to finance their site, along came Google with a site with zero advertisements on it. In an era when Excite and friends were bloating and bloating, suddenly game a free one where the sponsors were eating the costs to garner support. After they had taken the marketshare, along came Adwords and friends.
I think Google is great, personally, however it made its initial mark basically by undercutting (albeit in ads) the competitors.
Firstly again this is anti-Microsoft revisionist history: Netscape came out with a full featured virtually free browser that virtually no one actually paid for (everyone was a "educational" user), destroying the market for companies like Spyglass. Indeed, when IE first came out you had to buy it in the Plus! pack.
Secondly have you heard of Mozilla? What about Opera? Either are VERY credible competitors to Internet Explorer. Opera even charges money for their browser.
ike there is nothing else well-heeled geeks could do with a wireless computer except watch trailers--TRAILERS, mind you, not movies.
Well lets be honest here: Everytime a "geek" trailer comes out (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix 2, etc) the theatres are filled with revenue sucking slimeballs who will stand in line, take one of a limited number of seats, and then leave after they've seen the magical trailer that they went there for on the "big screen". This product seems perfect for that sort of misguided individual.
Oh right, and root is only for guys name "Steve" who eat Burger King Whoppers.
If someone actually is an administrator on the network, he doesn't use a root-level account as his normal, everyday, email-reading and web-surfing account. However, on a Windows network, it's quite common to give an everyday email-reading web-surfing account administrative priviledges, or some portion thereof.
This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the "implementation" (though your fervent zealotry was clear when you contrasted Windows against "real OSs"), but rather common usage: Every guide on Windows administration since the days of NT 3.51 had admonished that one use the administrator account only for administrative purposes.
In any case if one did a poll of the general Slashdot community, I would bet pretty big bucks that a very good portion of them are running under the root account, or a root priviledge account (no one needs to reply to give their uppity righteous "We don't do that here in Linux land". I know from personal contacts that it is quite common). I have an SSH to my FreeBSD box right now as root: It's just convenient and saves a su step.
I agree with everything you say up until and the performance is always on-par or better than C/C++ programs: While I would take Delphi over VB any day of the week, and while Delphi apps are close to Visual C++ executables in performance, on average VC will beat it, and in some cases by a massive margin. If performance and small size is the #1 concern (for example developing something like Photoshop) then Visual C++ is the only choice. If speedy development (i.e. enterprise development) is a concern then Delphi, Visual Basic, of C#.Net are the choices.
Microsoft settled out of court for more than $150 millions after Borland sued them for copying them.
I believe that the lawsuit had to do more with Borland claiming that Microsoft was unfairly "stealing" their employees (i.e. the MS limos pulling up at lunch, etc.). However, the Microsoft settlement could be seen in many ways: One they got Borland onboard to support.NET (which the next version of Delphi will do), and they kept Borland alive (at a time when its situation was pretty dire) to perhaps give it some honest competition.
The spammer cannot adapr to you because s/he does not know the ruleset you are using to detect spam. Even a spammer running 1,000,000 valid emails through a filter would not work, because the filter adapts to the email you actually *receive*.
This sort of concept works if the core of people that you correspond with numbers in the single digit, and there is a common subject matter. That is often not the case and instead one corresponds with a wide range of people with a wide range of subject matter and writing styles. The idea that the dialect of the people that you correspond with is so dramatically distinct that it can be categorically recognized strikes me as, well, absolutely ridiculous.
Again related to the link I gave in another one, that guy wrote a reply in relation to people who claim that their own filters will be highly individualized and hence impervious to tricky spammers. Note that I don't know that guy and just came across his link while looking up this on Google.
The point more seriously is that the existence of something like Moore's law, which was the observation of an exponential growth process over the course of decades, gives people license to believe (and they have) that technology really will always be there to step up, or (alternatively) that (chip) technology provides a model for what other fields could hope to accomplish if only they could {fill in the nostrum here}.
I'm not sure what technical literature you've been reading, but every bit of prediction that I've read would do nothing more than perpetually claim the end of Moore's law, not the continuation of it. I recall in the 386 to 486 transition days when already they were ringing the death knells for the then nasceant "Moore's Law", assuring us all that transistors were hitting some magical limit and computing power had peaked. This same cycle has continued for years. This idea that "Moore's Law" has sold us all on some endless progress is absolutely, positively ridiculous: We've had progress in spite of the constant cries of the death or Moore's Law.
How you curve balled the somewhat humorous and loose observation by Gordon Moore into Worldcom baffles me. Worldcom had nothing to do with rational thought, but rather outright fraud and irrational pyramid scheme exhuberance. I highly doubt that anyone was thinking "oooh, if Moore's Law has held true, then therefore this stock will go up forever!".
I had a long winded reply regarding false positives and what they represent to even the best filtration (i.e. what happens when your filter is attuned to emails between you and your buddies, and suddenly a proposal comes in from an employer, or a partner, or a customer? This single lost email could be incredibly damaging) when I noticed this page that says it eloquently and thoroughly.
The US contains a large quantity of pc's and internet connections (if not most internet connections anymore). A law in the US alone will reduce the flow of spam massively, as these 300 million people use the internet disproportionately.
While US citizens may "use the internet" disproportionately, overwhelmingly my spam is sourced from Asia as of late. In the days of old people like Spamford Wallace could take credit for the majority of spam, but today I would imagine far more prevalent is distributed spammers in far away lands.
Having said that I'm certainly for laws: Often these spammers ARE profiting off of Americans so it seems fair that seizure of their credit card/paypal/etc funds would be just.
Perhaps the best law of all would be one banning people from responding to or buying stuff from spams...
Is that a challenge?:-) Seriously though I don't imagine it would be that hard to do a, tada, Baysesian analysis of a large set of email and from that author spam that fits within the profile closely. For the filters to continue to filter out spam they would have to start filtering "suspect" emails (Hotmail, for example, would always filter messages that had short subjects. As friends often emailed me with subject lines like "BTW" this became a major nuisance), including false positives, and that is absolutely deadly for any anti-spam product (as one link I came across while trying to determine what this new fangled "Bayesian filter" was: It's like an acne cream that kills the user).
That particular trend in graphing drives me nuts. It's also used frequently to dramatize sales fluctuations and economic data.
In any case those graphs make me chuckle as they seriously seem to imply that two cards, running at the same clock speed, will perform differently with different cooling solutions. Huh? The best a cooling solution will do is allow one to overclock a little bit more, but it's not going to suddenly make that instruction that used to take 7 cycles suddenly take 5.
Mozilla has (very preliminary) Bayessian classification.
Just as an aside it's "Bayesian". I'm not launching into pedantry but noticed that when I tried doing a search on it (good old Google and its suggestions).
In any case, the success of Bayesian Filtering is because it is rare: Do you think that spammers couldn't dedicate some time and create a "norm" email if these filters were widespread? The only reason that they haven't is because users utilizing it as an anti-spam technique are rare, though if it took off it would be rendered impotent quite quickly. In other words if you like it so much, don't go around advertising it.
The ones working for IBM? The businesses which buy linux-related hardware and services from IBM.
This one is a bit funny, really. For all of the talk of IBM's "investment" in Linux, where is the results? From everything I've read the most that IBM has done has shuffled a bunch of expenses over to their "Linux" account, and paid for some vandelism in some major metropolitan areas. Their "$1.5 billion" could have redeveloped the entire Linux system several dozens of times over. I suspect a big organization cashing in on the basement developers, and the basement developer cheerleaders hilariously applauding them.
In any case I suspect that the overall rate of free Linux development has dropped perilously. Why? Because of the tech slowdown. Most open source development, I suspect, was happening on the backs of organizations that tolerated it (despite no measurable benefit to themselves. They could just freeload off everyone else to largely the same net result) lest they lose their elite Linux squad. Of course the balance of power is back in their hands again, so I doubt they put up with anything like that (and projects that don't have a measurable, more than just theoretical positive result on the bottom line get axed).
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance.
Is this a joke? Moore's law isn't E or the speed of sound: It's a general hypothesis about the rate of technological progress. No one expects there to be an absolute correlation, and really any correlation that there has been has largely been perceived as humorous in the context of the "law" (it isn't a "law", of course, but is rather an "observation").
Should we go back and re-engineer all of the processors because of this amazing new research into Moore's Law?
If there's a calculated column that's calculating the age of the person based on the current date, clearly it's going to execute everytime the column is selected. As most users select their data as "SELECT * FROM YoMama" this column would be computed needlessly over and over again.
What the...don't you realize who I am? I am Microsoft Astroturfer #50274A! Are you Harold from the West division???
I'm not quite sure where you felt that I was critical of Microsoft (though it does bother me that there isn't a simple "Disallow new windows" option and instead one is relegated to third party tools or wholescale disabling scripting, neither of which is preferrable).
It does make me feel warm inside seeing the other AC claiming that I've been "sucking Microsoft stock" for years. Indeed, I have been oft filling the role of Microsoft defender in these online arguments, though I've never worked for or with Microsoft apart from as a consumer*. Well I did receive a rebate from them for a Sidewinder Precision Pro joystick.
*- In reality I recently did my first bit of work with Microsoft, so soon I will never again be able to claim total impartiality. It has nothing to do with astroturfing on Slashdot, though: I do that pro bono!
Slashdot Mirror
While you don't actually agree with the grandparent post that "only Windows and Office make money", you do seem to support it by refuting sql*kitten. However, take alook at the link that you yourself gave.
1 03221002001614/d10q.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000
Three Microsoft divisions are highly profitable: These include Client (Windows XP Professional and Home, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT Workstation, Windows Me, Windows 98, and embedded systems), Server Paltforms (Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Systems Management Server, Windows Terminal Server, and Small Business Server), and Information Worker (Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, Visio, other standalone information worker applications, SharePoint Portal Server and CALs, and professional product support services). The grandparent's statement that the only profitable segemnts of Microsoft are "Windows and Office" is ridiculously disingenous and grossly inaccurate: The overwhelming majority of Microsoft's development effort is profitable.
What isn't profitable? MSN, the Entertainment division (XBox), Windows CE (expect a big turnaround in coming quarters) and the newly organized "Business Solutions" (which includes the newly acquired Great Plains Software). Anyone who doesn't think that division will be highly profitable in a couple of quarters is deluded.
For all the slashdotters out there with an axe to grind towards Microsoft, and a fervent desire to "be different", realize that the biggest mistake you can ever make is to underestimate your foe. The implication here is that Microsoft is riding the coattails of their purported monopoly [insert some comment from someone saying "CONVICTED MONOPOLY"...I presume they call Kevin Mitnick a "convicted hacker" without subtext], rather than the extremely successful (and agile) software company that they are.
Totally agreed. Indeed in some ways it's redundant: Point #1 is "unvalidated parameters" while point #6 is "command injection" (which is via "unvalidated parameters"). Of course most troubling of all is the link on the right for "WebGoat": I suspect this must be some sort of automated goatse trolling system (humor).
Anyway, that's my story, believe it or not. And, as such, it's not entirely unbelievable to me that someone could do 1,500 LOC/day for at least a few days at a shot. Doing it for 18 months straight though? Doesn't seem likely.
It is not my contention that it is impossible to do a 20 hour (or even 24 hour) day. Indeed, I would totally believe in a 48 hour session...but then my belief wanes (and one can't simply think "well what if you do a long session, then break, then a long session!?": The problem is that following a long session one generally crashes and crashes hard -- The net productivity over the period of combined heroics and crash evens out, if not falling on the negative side).
Extrapolating it out is just as silly as saying that since someone can run 100m in 10 seconds, therefore they can run a kilometer in 100 seconds. This same thing holds true for code: Yeah I've had periods where I'm reimplementing something I've done dozens of times (like basic winmain type code), usually due to bad code reuse patterns, and I spew it out quickly...there is a limit to that sort of code though. A single bug could easily eat over 1/2 my coding time as well, slashing the LOC productivity.
If I can go for 4 days on about 4 hours of sleep for DragonCON I'm sure some of the more hardcore programmers can do it for a codeing binge.
Actually I doubt they can: While the other post implies that this is some sort of norm, the human body starts to self destructive after more than a couple of days with insufficient sleep: Perhaps a couple of nights with a couple of hours sleep, but a week? Put that in concert with the fact that mental agility precipitously declines and the error rate shoots through the roof and such heroic coding turns self destructive.
Again note that I'm talking about actual code as well, not comments. Spitting out four paragraphs of comments can be done relatively rapidly because it's a single crystalized throught that you're extrapolating out. Code isn't quiet so clear cut, so again apart from trivial implementations where you're parsing a string or something of that genre, it isn't a single crystalized thought, but rather hundreds of disparate thoughts. Couple that with the fact that code progress declines in step with the size of the code base (even using the best OO guidelines) and this puts any continuous heroic push even further into question.
I personally have managed 4,500 per day for a period of about a week on occasion ...
Given a 16 hour day (even presuming a short 6 hours of sleep, there's still 2 hours at a minimum for extraneous things), that would be 281 lines per hour, which per minute is ~5 lines per minute, or a line every 11 seconds or so. While it's entirely reasonable that you TYPE that fast, if absolutely impossible that that sort of rate could be maintained for anything more than "spitting out the trivial function that's so trivial that you should probably look at the library docs because it almost certainly already exists". Instead each line is generally the result of a contemplation process, and then of course invariably one rewrites/refactors and the line out drops even more.
Structs and classes are the same thing in C++ apart from the fact that the default visibility of structs are public, whereas classes are private.
Man I miss C++: I've been so caught up in database and higher level language stuff. C++ is definitely my favourite language.
We salute you!
Netscape's rise was more like Google's, where it rose to "power" by being more and more favoured by web surfers; it's major competition was also free. We used Internet in a Box which came with Spry Mosaic, but DOWNLOADED Netscape on top of that because it was better.
Not sure about the analogy. Indeed I would say that Google rose to power in the same way that Internet Explorer rose to power: Instead of the ads that all the competitors filled their pages with to try to finance their site, along came Google with a site with zero advertisements on it. In an era when Excite and friends were bloating and bloating, suddenly game a free one where the sponsors were eating the costs to garner support. After they had taken the marketshare, along came Adwords and friends.
I think Google is great, personally, however it made its initial mark basically by undercutting (albeit in ads) the competitors.
Firstly again this is anti-Microsoft revisionist history: Netscape came out with a full featured virtually free browser that virtually no one actually paid for (everyone was a "educational" user), destroying the market for companies like Spyglass. Indeed, when IE first came out you had to buy it in the Plus! pack.
Secondly have you heard of Mozilla? What about Opera? Either are VERY credible competitors to Internet Explorer. Opera even charges money for their browser.
ike there is nothing else well-heeled geeks could do with a wireless computer except watch trailers--TRAILERS, mind you, not movies.
Well lets be honest here: Everytime a "geek" trailer comes out (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix 2, etc) the theatres are filled with revenue sucking slimeballs who will stand in line, take one of a limited number of seats, and then leave after they've seen the magical trailer that they went there for on the "big screen". This product seems perfect for that sort of misguided individual.
For one thing, ANYONE can be an administrator.
Oh right, and root is only for guys name "Steve" who eat Burger King Whoppers.
If someone actually is an administrator on the network, he doesn't use a root-level account as his normal, everyday, email-reading and web-surfing account. However, on a Windows network, it's quite common to give an everyday email-reading web-surfing account administrative priviledges, or some portion thereof.
This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the "implementation" (though your fervent zealotry was clear when you contrasted Windows against "real OSs"), but rather common usage: Every guide on Windows administration since the days of NT 3.51 had admonished that one use the administrator account only for administrative purposes.
In any case if one did a poll of the general Slashdot community, I would bet pretty big bucks that a very good portion of them are running under the root account, or a root priviledge account (no one needs to reply to give their uppity righteous "We don't do that here in Linux land". I know from personal contacts that it is quite common). I have an SSH to my FreeBSD box right now as root: It's just convenient and saves a su step.
I agree with everything you say up until and the performance is always on-par or better than C/C++ programs: While I would take Delphi over VB any day of the week, and while Delphi apps are close to Visual C++ executables in performance, on average VC will beat it, and in some cases by a massive margin. If performance and small size is the #1 concern (for example developing something like Photoshop) then Visual C++ is the only choice. If speedy development (i.e. enterprise development) is a concern then Delphi, Visual Basic, of C#.Net are the choices.
Microsoft settled out of court for more than $150 millions after Borland sued them for copying them.
.NET (which the next version of Delphi will do), and they kept Borland alive (at a time when its situation was pretty dire) to perhaps give it some honest competition.
I believe that the lawsuit had to do more with Borland claiming that Microsoft was unfairly "stealing" their employees (i.e. the MS limos pulling up at lunch, etc.). However, the Microsoft settlement could be seen in many ways: One they got Borland onboard to support
The spammer cannot adapr to you because s/he does not know the ruleset you are using to detect spam. Even a spammer running 1,000,000 valid emails through a filter would not work, because the filter adapts to the email you actually *receive*.
This sort of concept works if the core of people that you correspond with numbers in the single digit, and there is a common subject matter. That is often not the case and instead one corresponds with a wide range of people with a wide range of subject matter and writing styles. The idea that the dialect of the people that you correspond with is so dramatically distinct that it can be categorically recognized strikes me as, well, absolutely ridiculous.
Again related to the link I gave in another one, that guy wrote a reply in relation to people who claim that their own filters will be highly individualized and hence impervious to tricky spammers. Note that I don't know that guy and just came across his link while looking up this on Google.
The point more seriously is that the existence of something like Moore's law, which was the observation of an exponential growth process over the course of decades, gives people license to believe (and they have) that technology really will always be there to step up, or (alternatively) that (chip) technology provides a model for what other fields could hope to accomplish if only they could {fill in the nostrum here}.
I'm not sure what technical literature you've been reading, but every bit of prediction that I've read would do nothing more than perpetually claim the end of Moore's law, not the continuation of it. I recall in the 386 to 486 transition days when already they were ringing the death knells for the then nasceant "Moore's Law", assuring us all that transistors were hitting some magical limit and computing power had peaked. This same cycle has continued for years. This idea that "Moore's Law" has sold us all on some endless progress is absolutely, positively ridiculous: We've had progress in spite of the constant cries of the death or Moore's Law.
How you curve balled the somewhat humorous and loose observation by Gordon Moore into Worldcom baffles me. Worldcom had nothing to do with rational thought, but rather outright fraud and irrational pyramid scheme exhuberance. I highly doubt that anyone was thinking "oooh, if Moore's Law has held true, then therefore this stock will go up forever!".
I had a long winded reply regarding false positives and what they represent to even the best filtration (i.e. what happens when your filter is attuned to emails between you and your buddies, and suddenly a proposal comes in from an employer, or a partner, or a customer? This single lost email could be incredibly damaging) when I noticed this page that says it eloquently and thoroughly.
The US contains a large quantity of pc's and internet connections (if not most internet connections anymore). A law in the US alone will reduce the flow of spam massively, as these 300 million people use the internet disproportionately.
While US citizens may "use the internet" disproportionately, overwhelmingly my spam is sourced from Asia as of late. In the days of old people like Spamford Wallace could take credit for the majority of spam, but today I would imagine far more prevalent is distributed spammers in far away lands.
Having said that I'm certainly for laws: Often these spammers ARE profiting off of Americans so it seems fair that seizure of their credit card/paypal/etc funds would be just.
Perhaps the best law of all would be one banning people from responding to or buying stuff from spams...
Is that a challenge? :-) Seriously though I don't imagine it would be that hard to do a, tada, Baysesian analysis of a large set of email and from that author spam that fits within the profile closely. For the filters to continue to filter out spam they would have to start filtering "suspect" emails (Hotmail, for example, would always filter messages that had short subjects. As friends often emailed me with subject lines like "BTW" this became a major nuisance), including false positives, and that is absolutely deadly for any anti-spam product (as one link I came across while trying to determine what this new fangled "Bayesian filter" was: It's like an acne cream that kills the user).
That particular trend in graphing drives me nuts. It's also used frequently to dramatize sales fluctuations and economic data.
In any case those graphs make me chuckle as they seriously seem to imply that two cards, running at the same clock speed, will perform differently with different cooling solutions. Huh? The best a cooling solution will do is allow one to overclock a little bit more, but it's not going to suddenly make that instruction that used to take 7 cycles suddenly take 5.
Mozilla has (very preliminary) Bayessian classification.
Just as an aside it's "Bayesian". I'm not launching into pedantry but noticed that when I tried doing a search on it (good old Google and its suggestions).
In any case, the success of Bayesian Filtering is because it is rare: Do you think that spammers couldn't dedicate some time and create a "norm" email if these filters were widespread? The only reason that they haven't is because users utilizing it as an anti-spam technique are rare, though if it took off it would be rendered impotent quite quickly. In other words if you like it so much, don't go around advertising it.
The ones working for IBM? The businesses which buy linux-related hardware and services from IBM.
This one is a bit funny, really. For all of the talk of IBM's "investment" in Linux, where is the results? From everything I've read the most that IBM has done has shuffled a bunch of expenses over to their "Linux" account, and paid for some vandelism in some major metropolitan areas. Their "$1.5 billion" could have redeveloped the entire Linux system several dozens of times over. I suspect a big organization cashing in on the basement developers, and the basement developer cheerleaders hilariously applauding them.
In any case I suspect that the overall rate of free Linux development has dropped perilously. Why? Because of the tech slowdown. Most open source development, I suspect, was happening on the backs of organizations that tolerated it (despite no measurable benefit to themselves. They could just freeload off everyone else to largely the same net result) lest they lose their elite Linux squad. Of course the balance of power is back in their hands again, so I doubt they put up with anything like that (and projects that don't have a measurable, more than just theoretical positive result on the bottom line get axed).
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance.
Is this a joke? Moore's law isn't E or the speed of sound: It's a general hypothesis about the rate of technological progress. No one expects there to be an absolute correlation, and really any correlation that there has been has largely been perceived as humorous in the context of the "law" (it isn't a "law", of course, but is rather an "observation").
Should we go back and re-engineer all of the processors because of this amazing new research into Moore's Law?
If there's a calculated column that's calculating the age of the person based on the current date, clearly it's going to execute everytime the column is selected. As most users select their data as "SELECT * FROM YoMama" this column would be computed needlessly over and over again.
What the...don't you realize who I am? I am Microsoft Astroturfer #50274A! Are you Harold from the West division???
I'm not quite sure where you felt that I was critical of Microsoft (though it does bother me that there isn't a simple "Disallow new windows" option and instead one is relegated to third party tools or wholescale disabling scripting, neither of which is preferrable).
It does make me feel warm inside seeing the other AC claiming that I've been "sucking Microsoft stock" for years. Indeed, I have been oft filling the role of Microsoft defender in these online arguments, though I've never worked for or with Microsoft apart from as a consumer*. Well I did receive a rebate from them for a Sidewinder Precision Pro joystick.
*- In reality I recently did my first bit of work with Microsoft, so soon I will never again be able to claim total impartiality. It has nothing to do with astroturfing on Slashdot, though: I do that pro bono!