Considering something like 30% of the genome is made up of introns (unexpressed DNA), I'm not too surprised. In theory at least, anything could be there with little effect on survivability.
Of course, we all know that. Firing half your employees will let you coast through the quarter on inertia, with half the expense - so double the profit. Obviously, a few quarters later that doesn't work.
The problem is, a CEO looking out for their best interest will fire half the employees, see it through to the next quarter, and leave with a huge parachute because they "did the company so well".
The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.
If you have a fully managed office, and you can remote in to all these desktops and fix everything really quickly - then you're probably OK.
Unobtanium was silly - the entire theater laughed out loud on that one. I look at it as Cameron respecting the viewer's intelligence. This is a story about people, and the conflict between races, etc. The reason humans are there isn't important - just that they aren't leaving unless forced. I think Unobtanium - that is, something so obviously ridiculous - is Cameron's way of saying "yes, I know it's a silly premise but let's move on". Like "dilithium"
Would you have preferred some elaborate BS? Because I'm sure they thought of it and chose this instead.
If it's encrypted and the keys are stored elsewhere, the drive is full of useless data. If you use any competent encryption, it will take at least thousands of years to break - assuming he has no more resources than every computer on earth.
Exactly. It's the same problem as with DRM and audio/video - your software can kick ass, but all it takes is one person to break it and everybody has a copy.
I hope you're not joking, because it's called the BBC. In fact, your (rhetorical?) question just about defines why they're so good; that is, they don't need to worry about a market or getting their budget, and they're disconnected from the government.
I'm from the US, but even I know how ridiculously awesome the Beeb is. Fun fact - each party says the BBC is biased towards the other party. That's as close to non-biased as it comes.
No, it's not capitalism but don't go dragging the big bad government scarecrow in here.
The thing about capitalism is it leads - inherently - to exactly the sort of situation you seem to think requires a government to create. When the first company goes around laying phone lines, or cable lines, or train tracks, or anything requiring a large initial investment in infrastructure, you usually get something known as a "natural monopoly". When Ma Bell put in their phone lines, it seems reasonable to think that another company could just put in a duplicate set of phone lines - obviously, AT&T has no incentive to share theirs. Unfortunately, this never happens. While you're trying to pay off your entirely redundant infrastructure, the incumbent will just undercut you.
Then, with networks connecting people, you have to worry about the network effect. If everybody (or almost everybody) uses AT&T, and they won't allow your new startup to connect to their network - well, you're screwed before you begin.
The situation is the same with cellphone market. The tendency is for one company to do it all.
Food for thought: Without government intervention, you'd still have Ma Bell but you wouldn't be able to use your own phone, or a modem. There wouldn't be any other cell companies - it'd all be Bell, because they would just prevent interconnection. Want a cellphone, and want to talk to people on landlines? Gotta be Bell.
Please, if you're going to spout off about the evils of government, at least be right. There's plenty of things to be annoyed at the government about, but regulation of natural monopolies is not one of them (unless, of course, you run a natural monopoly...)
You're lucky. In my area, they filter at least incoming port 80 and outgoing port 25. Their speeds were terrible, and it was far too expensive. (like $35-40/mo for 768k down and about 96k up). I asked their support - on multiple occasions - about getting 80 and 25 unblocked, and they didn't know what I was talking about; in fact, they denied they did such a thing. They wanted $15/mo for a static IP, but wouldn't do reverse DNS - not that it would help, if I couldn't run my own mailserver.
I'm with AT&T DSL now, which is really just resold Covad DSL. It's been great - even gave me 2 free static IPs, when I asked. No port blocks, 4 times faster (though still fairly slow), and excellent support. Only problem is it goes out a few times a year - but it is residential.
Point being, anecdotes are anecdotes. Maybe Verizon is great in some areas.
The PHP interpreter can and should run in-process to the webserver. Compiled C++, not so much.
Now, I imagine Facebook's scripts are really quite simple - fetch from the database and do some formatting. Moreover, they're called like a thousand times a second. Grabbing from the DB is already the expensive bit; C++ won't help that. But starting thousands of processes a second can't possibly be faster than the in-server interpreter effectively just looping.
Am I missing something or is this a pointlessly stupid article, bordering on troll?
Would you like to hear something interesting? I'm a libertarian socialist - I think the government has a responsibility to do things like transportation, utilities, telecom, and other infrastructure, but that they should have essentially no control over individual people.
In my opinion, libertarians have a collective persecution bias. I don't think libertarians (little L) would know what to do with themselves if they actually became a significant force. Oh the status quo and people profiting and the founding fathers... everybody opposes us which prevents us from doing anything.
And, deep down, I think they know it. People know that withdrawing government from, well, just about everything could never work. But it's popular to denigrate the government because it can't argue back. It's a one-sided 'debate' that nearly everybody agrees with - and that's fun.
the crap that I have to put up with being the only woman.
Don't kid yourself - that has nothing, or at least very little, to do with being a woman. Techies do that to each other - whether you're a man or a woman, it's how you're treated. Maybe it's because it's male-dominated, but it applies to everyone. Why should I care what someone thinks, unless they've convinced (or forced) me to respect them?
I think it's similar with men in most every field. Guys don't tend to play games, or screw around, with people they don't respect. Respect is something to be earned, and not granted by default - short of basic human respect. Guys tend to take no heed of people they don't respect.
Why should it be any different? If anyone - regardless of gender - wants anyone to care about their opinion, why shouldn't they need to earn the respect of their audience?
In my experience, women are less bothered by the idea of maneuvering through the minefield of everybody's concerns and opinions. Frankly, the thought sickens me and most male acquaintances - so we limit our pool of "everybody" to the people who we respect.
It's one of those things that won't be useful until just about everybody has implemented it. The way it works is by defining which IPs can send email purporting to be from a domain; if you receive an email "from" a yahoo address but coming from some cable modem, you can block it. And as long as not everyone has SPF, you can't just block emails that fail a SPF check...
So yes - I do use it. But it's mostly altruistic, as it really has no effect on incoming email unless you just block no/invalid SPF.
I don't understand why everybody doesn't just enable it - it's a few minutes' worth of a TXT field.
Yeah, I figured that out last night. It was great; if I wanted to hear a song I'd just go to Imeem and type it in. It played the music I wanted, not the music it thinks I wanted.
At least Myspace seems to have full songs, but their interface is shit.
Oh well, back to Gnutella I guess... which is a shame. I didn't want to screw around with a website in order to hear a song - Imeem let me just play it. I bought so much music because I'd been listening to the song for a few days, and it was easier to buy it than rip it from the client.
You're on Linux, right? Virtual memory is the process's memory plus the shared libraries. Linux shared libraries (GTK, X11, the rest) are big, for some reason, but they're only loaded once. I also think it includes disk caches.
Hence, you want what's listed under "real memory". It's probably about half the size. In any case, that's the real indicator of memory usage. Closing Firefox will increase your free memory by that amount.
I'm perfectly happy to look at ads, particularly relevant unobtrusive ads. To that end, I go out of my way to allow Google's ads - text on a howto doesn't bother me.
But without adblock, I feel like I can't even use the damn internet any more. Even Slashdot has a huge ad just below the story. I have the "disable ads" checkbox now, so that's not a problem, but all sorts of other sites have this bullshit spewed over the page. It's particularly bad when accidentally hovering over some jiggling flash ad takes up the whole fucking window, and you need to find this tiny-ass close button.
Fuck'em. Don't piss me off, don't support ad providers that piss me off, and I'd be happy to have ads.
For what it's worth, it's the same thing with TV. If I see an ad that looks interesting, I'll watch it. But most ads are actively insulting, it seems, so I skip them with my DVR. Which means I usually miss the interesting ones.
Firefox extensions would be next to useless if there was sandboxing or anything like that. The entire base browser is more-or-less a large extension, at least from an architectural point of view. The idea is that extensions can and and replace arbitrary bits of the browser, because they're peers.
"Fixing" that problem would destroy Firefox.
Enough people use Firefox that, if your dire predictions were accurate, we'd see hundreds of exploits. But Firefox makes it really hard to install extensions from anywhere outside the SSL-secured addons.mozilla.org site.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if he correctly applied the Drake Equation, it seems the equation is wrong - the odds are clearly much higher than the equation predicts.
But more likely, the formula makes assumptions his case doesn't meet, or he did it wrong.
Non-story.
Considering something like 30% of the genome is made up of introns (unexpressed DNA), I'm not too surprised. In theory at least, anything could be there with little effect on survivability.
Of course, we all know that. Firing half your employees will let you coast through the quarter on inertia, with half the expense - so double the profit. Obviously, a few quarters later that doesn't work.
The problem is, a CEO looking out for their best interest will fire half the employees, see it through to the next quarter, and leave with a huge parachute because they "did the company so well".
The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.
If you have a fully managed office, and you can remote in to all these desktops and fix everything really quickly - then you're probably OK.
Like most of IT, whatever works.
Yet people like you are the people who complain about every Linux point release (not saying it's you, just people like you)
Unobtanium was silly - the entire theater laughed out loud on that one. I look at it as Cameron respecting the viewer's intelligence. This is a story about people, and the conflict between races, etc. The reason humans are there isn't important - just that they aren't leaving unless forced. I think Unobtanium - that is, something so obviously ridiculous - is Cameron's way of saying "yes, I know it's a silly premise but let's move on". Like "dilithium"
Would you have preferred some elaborate BS? Because I'm sure they thought of it and chose this instead.
No, it means compiled just in time. Shocking, I know.
If it's encrypted and the keys are stored elsewhere, the drive is full of useless data. If you use any competent encryption, it will take at least thousands of years to break - assuming he has no more resources than every computer on earth.
Exactly. It's the same problem as with DRM and audio/video - your software can kick ass, but all it takes is one person to break it and everybody has a copy.
I hope you're not joking, because it's called the BBC. In fact, your (rhetorical?) question just about defines why they're so good; that is, they don't need to worry about a market or getting their budget, and they're disconnected from the government.
I'm from the US, but even I know how ridiculously awesome the Beeb is. Fun fact - each party says the BBC is biased towards the other party. That's as close to non-biased as it comes.
No, it's not capitalism but don't go dragging the big bad government scarecrow in here.
The thing about capitalism is it leads - inherently - to exactly the sort of situation you seem to think requires a government to create. When the first company goes around laying phone lines, or cable lines, or train tracks, or anything requiring a large initial investment in infrastructure, you usually get something known as a "natural monopoly". When Ma Bell put in their phone lines, it seems reasonable to think that another company could just put in a duplicate set of phone lines - obviously, AT&T has no incentive to share theirs. Unfortunately, this never happens. While you're trying to pay off your entirely redundant infrastructure, the incumbent will just undercut you.
Then, with networks connecting people, you have to worry about the network effect. If everybody (or almost everybody) uses AT&T, and they won't allow your new startup to connect to their network - well, you're screwed before you begin.
The situation is the same with cellphone market. The tendency is for one company to do it all.
Food for thought: Without government intervention, you'd still have Ma Bell but you wouldn't be able to use your own phone, or a modem. There wouldn't be any other cell companies - it'd all be Bell, because they would just prevent interconnection. Want a cellphone, and want to talk to people on landlines? Gotta be Bell.
Please, if you're going to spout off about the evils of government, at least be right. There's plenty of things to be annoyed at the government about, but regulation of natural monopolies is not one of them (unless, of course, you run a natural monopoly...)
You're lucky. In my area, they filter at least incoming port 80 and outgoing port 25. Their speeds were terrible, and it was far too expensive. (like $35-40/mo for 768k down and about 96k up). I asked their support - on multiple occasions - about getting 80 and 25 unblocked, and they didn't know what I was talking about; in fact, they denied they did such a thing. They wanted $15/mo for a static IP, but wouldn't do reverse DNS - not that it would help, if I couldn't run my own mailserver.
I'm with AT&T DSL now, which is really just resold Covad DSL. It's been great - even gave me 2 free static IPs, when I asked. No port blocks, 4 times faster (though still fairly slow), and excellent support. Only problem is it goes out a few times a year - but it is residential.
Point being, anecdotes are anecdotes. Maybe Verizon is great in some areas.
The PHP interpreter can and should run in-process to the webserver. Compiled C++, not so much.
Now, I imagine Facebook's scripts are really quite simple - fetch from the database and do some formatting. Moreover, they're called like a thousand times a second. Grabbing from the DB is already the expensive bit; C++ won't help that. But starting thousands of processes a second can't possibly be faster than the in-server interpreter effectively just looping.
Am I missing something or is this a pointlessly stupid article, bordering on troll?
Would you like to hear something interesting? I'm a libertarian socialist - I think the government has a responsibility to do things like transportation, utilities, telecom, and other infrastructure, but that they should have essentially no control over individual people.
In my opinion, libertarians have a collective persecution bias. I don't think libertarians (little L) would know what to do with themselves if they actually became a significant force. Oh the status quo and people profiting and the founding fathers... everybody opposes us which prevents us from doing anything.
And, deep down, I think they know it. People know that withdrawing government from, well, just about everything could never work. But it's popular to denigrate the government because it can't argue back. It's a one-sided 'debate' that nearly everybody agrees with - and that's fun.
Don't kid yourself - that has nothing, or at least very little, to do with being a woman. Techies do that to each other - whether you're a man or a woman, it's how you're treated. Maybe it's because it's male-dominated, but it applies to everyone. Why should I care what someone thinks, unless they've convinced (or forced) me to respect them?
I think it's similar with men in most every field. Guys don't tend to play games, or screw around, with people they don't respect. Respect is something to be earned, and not granted by default - short of basic human respect. Guys tend to take no heed of people they don't respect.
Why should it be any different? If anyone - regardless of gender - wants anyone to care about their opinion, why shouldn't they need to earn the respect of their audience?
In my experience, women are less bothered by the idea of maneuvering through the minefield of everybody's concerns and opinions. Frankly, the thought sickens me and most male acquaintances - so we limit our pool of "everybody" to the people who we respect.
Yet, when I read that, it sounds like what I already do - cool, getting paid to do a hobby!
On the other hand, the thought of doing lesson plans and dealing with shitty kids and shitty parents makes my skin crawl.
But nobody is falling over themselves to get me to be a teacher.
I have Dreamhost. They provide a copy and paste line for a DNS entry. See http://wiki.dreamhost.com/SPF
It's one of those things that won't be useful until just about everybody has implemented it. The way it works is by defining which IPs can send email purporting to be from a domain; if you receive an email "from" a yahoo address but coming from some cable modem, you can block it. And as long as not everyone has SPF, you can't just block emails that fail a SPF check...
So yes - I do use it. But it's mostly altruistic, as it really has no effect on incoming email unless you just block no/invalid SPF.
I don't understand why everybody doesn't just enable it - it's a few minutes' worth of a TXT field.
Yeah, I figured that out last night. It was great; if I wanted to hear a song I'd just go to Imeem and type it in. It played the music I wanted, not the music it thinks I wanted.
At least Myspace seems to have full songs, but their interface is shit.
Oh well, back to Gnutella I guess... which is a shame. I didn't want to screw around with a website in order to hear a song - Imeem let me just play it. I bought so much music because I'd been listening to the song for a few days, and it was easier to buy it than rip it from the client.
They made it easier than pirating, but oh well.
You're on Linux, right? Virtual memory is the process's memory plus the shared libraries. Linux shared libraries (GTK, X11, the rest) are big, for some reason, but they're only loaded once. I also think it includes disk caches.
Hence, you want what's listed under "real memory". It's probably about half the size. In any case, that's the real indicator of memory usage. Closing Firefox will increase your free memory by that amount.
I'm perfectly happy to look at ads, particularly relevant unobtrusive ads. To that end, I go out of my way to allow Google's ads - text on a howto doesn't bother me.
But without adblock, I feel like I can't even use the damn internet any more. Even Slashdot has a huge ad just below the story. I have the "disable ads" checkbox now, so that's not a problem, but all sorts of other sites have this bullshit spewed over the page. It's particularly bad when accidentally hovering over some jiggling flash ad takes up the whole fucking window, and you need to find this tiny-ass close button.
Fuck'em. Don't piss me off, don't support ad providers that piss me off, and I'd be happy to have ads.
For what it's worth, it's the same thing with TV. If I see an ad that looks interesting, I'll watch it. But most ads are actively insulting, it seems, so I skip them with my DVR. Which means I usually miss the interesting ones.
I don't live so I can spend my time watching ads.
How about the Skip button? There's only three buttons, you know. That's not too many
Try again. Firefox+Windows XP run fine on an 800Mhz PIII with 256MB RAM.
They run better on a faster machine, but it's not the bloated POS you seem to think it is.
Um... what exactly do you think Firefox extensions are written in?
Hint: one's an interpreted web scripting language, and the other is a markup language...
Firefox extensions would be next to useless if there was sandboxing or anything like that. The entire base browser is more-or-less a large extension, at least from an architectural point of view. The idea is that extensions can and and replace arbitrary bits of the browser, because they're peers.
"Fixing" that problem would destroy Firefox.
Enough people use Firefox that, if your dire predictions were accurate, we'd see hundreds of exploits. But Firefox makes it really hard to install extensions from anywhere outside the SSL-secured addons.mozilla.org site.
IOW, it's not a problem
The exact same thing has happened before, and was even covered on slashdot, many many times.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/05/20/0228229/FBI-Wiretapping-Audit-Secrets-Uncovered-Via-CtrlC
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/138210
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/11/01/1729257/Memory-Hole-Un-Redacts-Redacted-DOJ-Memo