Please understand the subject you're talking about before discussing it as almost all of your information is incorrect.
The information in my post is about a Canadian University, as is stated in the first line of the post.
We were assigned an average of 900+ pages of reading a week over the courses I took and they expected you to read it all. Then there were the papers: the last course I took with them had 9 major papers due in 5 weeks, comprised of 5 individual and 4 group papers.
The workload that you are describing still corresponds to a light full-time workload for a university student in an arts program. For instance, 900+ pages is the equivalent of 3 to 4 books per week, which is just under the reading workload of an undergraduate English major. I have no idea why anyone would want an IT course with that level of reading and essay workload. You would not have any time to get any hands-on or theoretical learning done. Even MBA management courses limit the level of emphasis on reading and writing skills, because the focus is on the team-building and practical learning exercises.
At many Canadian Universities, 4 classes would be considered a full-time load. Part time load is 1 to 3 classes. Full time load is 4 or 5 classes, and "overload" is 6 classes. Generally, each class will have 3 to 4 of in class teaching, with lab work additional. As such, 15 hours per week of *classes* is reasonable for 4 courses. For each class hour, you are expected to work 4 to 5 additional hours independently. Thus an average student should be working up to 65 hours per week for 4 classes (15 in class + 40 independently).
It sounds like you signed up for a full-time undergraduate load, and expected a part-time load with spare time to raise a family.
To make matters worse, it sounds like you signed up for an arts (as in not science) based program. These programs tend to have a good portion of the workload in a few major papers due at the end of the term. Predictably, the students wait until almost the end of the term before starting the major papers.
Math, engineering, science, and many business courses are easier to schedule for an adult learner. Many of these courses attempt to force the students to keep up, and mark based on on-going progress. As such, the workload is not as "peaky" as it is in courses that depend on major papers. However, the reason for the non-peaky workload, is that many math, engineering and science courses are much more difficult, in that if you miss any portion of the course the remaining concepts become much more difficult to understand. Another disadvantage of science and engineering courses is that it is common to have "lab" time, and this places additional demands on the students.
In the end, an engineering degree proves that you have the ability to think analytically, learn quickly, and proceed with determination, while working 60 to 80 hours per week.
IANAL, but I will have a go at answering the questions.
If I legally play a movie at my house, but I happen to have a legal surveillance camera in there, and as part of the image my camera is recording, it records the surface of the TV, is that security footage illegal, does it constitute copyright infringement?
If the security footage is distributed, then Yes you are violating the copyright on the movie. If the security footage is kept for your own use, then you are okay under the "family and friends" exemption. The law on showing the security footage to other people, like a private investigator, is complex, because outside financial interests and public viewing may be at issue.
If I legally download a movie,let's say, from itunes, and I don't actively share it, but I have my machine connected to the internet, and my hard drive is shared through samba, unsecured, to the whole internet. If someone connects to that samba share, and then copies the movie, is that my fault? Is it my duty too to protect the media I have from being copied? To what extent?
Recent court cases indicate that having the open samba share will make you vulnerable. If someone actually does download it, then you are vulnerable for uploading it.
If the photons that my LCD is emitting when I'm watching a move leave my house, am I broadcasting the movie, therefore, infringing copyright? Up to what point am I supposed to protect that movie from being copied?
You are not allowed to have a "public performance", unless the material is properly licensed. Singing along to your iPod while in public counts as a public performance, however to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been taken to court for it.
Expect a lawsuit if you operate a "drive-in" movie. Similarly, I think someone was sued after operating a home laser light show without the appropriate license for the copyrighted music.
Is closing the curtains enough, or since energy can't be destroyed, only transformed, I am legally obliged to control the energy emanating from my LCD forever?
If someone (in the public) can view the "energy from the LCD" and reconstruct it into something resembling the original copyrighted work, then yes, it is a public performance. For instance, if you played the radio sufficiently loudly at a workplace that other co-workers could hear it, then in some jurisdictions (U.S., Britain), then you should expect a lawsuit. A public performance occurs when someone views the material.
If I legally store a legally downloaded movie on my hard drive, and then, due to a vulnerability in my operating system, that information is leaked, and every single human being on the world downloads a copy, is it my fault or the fault of the developers of my OS?
It is your fault. Your are responsible. I really clever lawyer may also argue that it is all Microsoft's fault too, as they enabled the infringement. Expect the person with the deepest pockets to be sued and be the primary target of the lawsuit, with an initial "scatter gun" strategy of listing all involved parties as defendants. These lawsuits can be difficult (expensive) to extricate yourself from.
The damages may be reduced if your involvement can be shown to be accidental and inadvertent, however this does not mitigate fault or responsibility.
My mistake. The link I was thinking of related to an ancillary computer doing semi-critical testing. The safety system detected the ancillary computers failure, and shut down the reactor. The story referenced was about a different type of failure.
Unfortunately, I assumed that computers killing a nuclear reactor was such an unlikely story that only ONE incident had been reported. My mistake.
What the hell kind of sales pitch is "We're only a little more than twice as slow!"
The two times speed gain point is where it becomes pointless to exploit specialized hardware. Frequently, the software development program manager has two choices:
a) Ship a product now, or
b) Spend 1 to 2 more years developing the product, then ship it.
The issue is that hardware doubles in speed every 1 to 2 years. If the cost of exploiting current specialized hardware is an additional 1 to 2 years software development, then the "user" performance at the end of 1 to 2 years is the same.
The revenue from the additional time to market is not. Being in the market first, can yield additional sales. Simply having a product to market, results in sales. As such, delaying software development to get a speed gain, adversely affects revenues.
Most significantly, having a product in the marketplace allows one to understand what the users "want". The users might not want speed. They might have some massive algorithmic problem with the product. Perhaps, you designed the software for a small investor tracking one stock, and the purchasers are wall street traders tracking thousands of stocks. In this case, the program needs to be restructured to better handle the problems the user base wants solved.
The "additional software development time" argument significantly reduces the usefulness of the CUDA approach. Intel delivers processors that can speed up the current software, immediately. No need to rewrite software. "Twice as slow" is approximately the break even point for many businesses.
The only problem I have with the apt tax is taxation of withdrawals and deposits.
For withdrawals, presumably that money has already been taxed once when it was paid to me.
For deposits, especially for businesses, it has already been taxed at the register.
For both of them, I despise taxation on my property when it doesn't legally change hands. The bank account is in my name, I legally own that money, and it's even federally insured.
This is precisely the issue with the tax. People would very quickly discover that if they cash a pay cheque, instead of depositing it in the bank, they pay the tax only once. Even better, if the employer pays you in cash, you don't get taxed ever. If your favourite store runs entirely on cash, then they don't pay tax either. Very quickly, large segments of the economy become barter collectives or entirely cash based.
The end result is that the "100 times" financial transfer multiplier from the article can be reduced by a clever populace. The tax becomes a tax on big financial businesses, which may have positive effects at very small (0.05%) tax rates. However, it would never replace income tax as a revenue generator. The tax is too easy to avoid.
I debunked this statement several times here.
Please stop posting these false statements !
I believe that you are a sociopath, since you purposely forget that humans are dying here, but I guess they just represent a few dollars for you ?
If you had to pick up the pieces inside a factory after one or more serious accidents including deaths, you would be keenly aware that tragic incidents happen all over the world. After a long-time, I have learned that: "you can't save everyone." It is vital to preserve a sense of humour, no matter how bleak, black, and awful the situation gets. Unfortunately, humour is not always taken well on the internet.
The truth is that suicide patterns like this occur in Canada. It is difficult to find accurate employment related suicide rates, however, anecdotally, incidents like these are frequently used as an explanation as to why Japan has a significantly higher suicide rate than Canada.
Essentially, any time you subject a population to:
1. Reduced daylight.
2. Stress.
3. A perceived or real inability for the people concerned to improve their lives.
4. Poor recognition of the warning signs, particularly for management and close friends.
5. Indifferent power system including strained Management-Union relations or strained governmental relations.
A group of the population becomes at risk of suicide. In the event of one suicide, suicides frequently cluster, and a cluster of suicides occurs.
Foxconn has an inordinate degree of control over their employees, with both the long hours of work, and the on-site residences. Similar incidents occur in Japan too. In Canada, remote Indian tribes have suicide outbreaks, for slightly different reasons.
Some people have pointed out that a better management culture will avoid deaths. On the whole, this is true. However, there will always be situations where the situation is not optimal. The U.S. has the phrase "going Postal" referring to Postal workers. Researching further, I stumbled upon a list of employment related suicides from England. The number of teachers and headmasters committing suicide in their teaching system is significant. Most major industrial organizations in Canada and the U.S. have experienced both suicides and industrial accidents, and some industrial accidents are a "call for help", just like attempted suicides.
With these situations, China is joining Canada, the U.S., Japan, Britain, and most other countries. Every country has it's own issues with suicides.
This was done back in the Windows 2.0 days with segmented memory. It was a disaster. Every pointer/array access requires incurs significant overheads. VM (Virtual Memory) is the preferred approach because for most applications it results in significant performance improvements.
Three different memory access scenarios need to be considered:
1. Memory block is already in memory, and in the current page/segment. If memory is presented as an array of linear blocks, then the processor can simply access the relevant segment. If the memory paging is done manually with software, then software must check if it can simply access the block. The software VM solution is slower in this case.
2. Memory block is in memory, and in a different page/segment. The VM hardware on an x86 processor can deal with this optimally. If paging is done in manually with software, then the software needs to do it's routine, and then the VM will do it's routine too. Thus, the VM operation is done twice by a software approach. The software VM solution is slower in this case too.
3. Memory block is not in memory. Either way, you are paging to disk. The only performance gain is if your software solution is much better at reducing pages to disk than the operating system's solution. In practice, it is hard to beat the operating system.
The fundamental problem is that the gains by managing your own virtual memory in #3 must be significant enough to justify the software overhead in #1 and #2. The software overhead in #1 and #2 is huge, because it is on every memory access. Also, memory prices are constantly falling. The software vendor runs the risk that a customer that really needs more memory to reduce paging activity, may simply purchase more RAM. With the hardware VM approach, the speed gains are immediate. With a software approach, adding more RAM has less benefit, because the speed loss in #1 and #2 is still on every memory access, even if software VM is not needed.
If VM is causing a serious performance problem for a given application, then likely you need one of these three solutions:
1. Switch off VM, and don't use a backing store.
2. Write your own VM allocation routines. This is doable under Linux.
3. Enable Intel's "Big Pages" option. This increases the page size to 4 MB. It is intended for embedded applications, that do not want their pages swapped to disk. The "Big Pages" option significantly reduces page change overhead inside the operating system, and works well for applications that do not need and/or do not use disk as a backing store.
Finally, remember that "RAM" memory is itself an abstraction when running in user-mode under most operating systems. Specifically, even if the destination address is in hardware RAM, the page lookup table introduces a delay when switching pages. For most operating systems, pages are 4KB bytes long. This gives 4KB bytes times 1024 TLB pages as the maximum "quickly" available memory. As such, a program can only quickly access 4 MB of RAM. With Big Pages, 4 KB becomes 4 MB, and the program can quickly access 4 GB of RAM.
Recently, a paper was presented (not saying which conference), in which the objective was to produce a very large acceleration to "instantly stop" a test. The researcher, at a government science facility, was not allowed to use: (a) explosives, (b) dangerous chemicals, (c) high pressure gases, (d) expensive consumables,... etc. As such, the paper was on how to get acceptable research result, in the most politically correct manner possible.
I'm all for health and safety. However, I really wonder about peoples ability to accept and understand risk. Researchers need the ability to do dangerous things. Very large acceleration testing is greatly aided by explosives. Used properly, small quantities of explosives are not that dangerous. This research only required small charges.
People today are terrified. They have been scared so often about so many different things, that it makes it difficult to do research without being threatened by spurious accusations.
Yes, obviously the workers who killed themselves are in the wrong. Why does it always seem that the world turns upside-down in the world of business and economics?
In the U.S., families often encouraged the police to classify suicides as "accidental" gun-shot wounds. For example: "Gun cleaning accidents." This avoided many social stigmas for the surviving family. As such, the family quietly encouraged the police to do this.
When Foxconn kills suicide payments, the families will pressure the police to classify the deaths as "accidents". Thus avoiding some bad press for Foxconn. It is amazing what a little financial encouragement can accomplish...
The suicide rate in Canada is about 3600 deaths per year for 1992 in a population of 28.4 million. If Foxconn employs 800,000 workers, one would expect 101 suicides, assuming the same suicide rate. This is far higher than the number actually experienced at FoxConn, where only 9 people have died as of May.
Based on this, working for Foxconn in China is better than living in Canada, at least as far as suicide risk is concerned.
This puts the numbers in perspective. Down with the oppressive Canadian Imperialist Overlords!
What I don't understand, is how did this analyst have access to 260,000 classified US Embassy Cables?
The entire story sounds like a System Administrator browsing the directories of a Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Exchange Email Server. With full administrative privileges, it is straightforward to find embarrassing documents, even on corporate servers. Can the U.S. Military be storing highly secret information on a regular servers viewable by everyone with Administrative privileges?
Oh, wait! EDS (HP) provides computers to the Department of Defense under an outsourcing agreement, and requires everyone to use Microsoft Windows. Maybe cracking US military command really is as easy as finding a young officer with Administrative privileges...
For prior art we can claim a paper I did in elementary school about 30 years ago, if anyone can find it.
I believe student projects are not claimable as prior art, which is sad. At the very least, if a young, learning, practitioner in training can generate an idea, then almost by definition, it must be "obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art". Students are practitioners in training. If a student can figure it out, then it should make the idea should either be unpatentable, or patentable only by the student that first came up with the idea.
As it the law is currently, a corporation can patent something, and student projects are not prior art.
I've never perceived the problem of getting vehicles to turn off engines at traffic lights as being a technical issue. Rather, the problem is much more one of regulation, and forcing everyone to adopt a standard. To make the strategy work, you need to:
(a) get every state in the union, and perhaps every municipality in every state, to modify their traffic lights in the same way, and
(b) get every automaker to make cars that with electronic modules that work with the *SAME* standard as the traffic lights, and
(c) get every class action litigator to agree to not sue anyone.
Business text books clearly say to "run away" from any system that requires broad corporate/public/governmental agreement, particularly if the system involves long-term governmental and corporate cooperation.
Going by the code table in the article, the encryption algorithm is not a substitution cipher. Microsoft's algorithm is an XOR with 0xEE. To decrypt, XOR with 0xEE again.
You are more correct than you expected. The encoding algorithm is not a Caesar Cipher algorithm. Going by the code table in the article, Microsoft simply XORs the incoming data with 0xEE. To undo the cipher, XOR again with 0xEE.
Using XOR makes for really easy coding. Instead of having an encryption and decryption function, now only one function will do both.
Hard drives? We used to boot off paper tape: "A 'boot' process could be initiated from the paper tape reader which forced a nine word read..."
I know someone that is still doing it.
I love CNC (computer numerically controlled) manufacturing machines made before the popularity of the CRT monitor. It makes you realize that it is possible to do things, without layers and layers of software. Who new that it was possible to have a computer do useful things without video games? operating systems? graphical user interfaces? blinking lights?
It is really important to not detonate a missile against a satellite. Essentially, it results in a bunch of high-velocity projectiles, that destroy other satellites in the area. People will be quite upset if you detonate a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and destroy a bunch of other satellites in the process.
A more realistic option would be to send a robot into orbit, and have it carefully push the errant satellite into a higher or lower orbit. The key technical issue is that satellites are deliberately made to be delicate to save weight. It is tough to get hold of and push into different orbit without the satellite breaking apart.
More importantly, lie detectors can only tell what the subject believes to be true. Given the number of people in America that believe that the world is flat, that Elvis is alive, that George Bush masterminded the 9/11 bombings, that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, or that off-sea oil-rigs pose no risks, I think it is safe to say: "All sorts of people in America believe things that are not true."
This is a huge problem for witnesses at accidents. 5 different witnesses will give the cops 5 different stories, and then when the case gets to trial, 5 additional slightly different stories. People remember things in different ways, and some believe strange things. It is a fact of life.
Why did they start designing copy machines to have long term storage, and to keep a copy of everything ever copied?
The copiers scan the originals into memory, and then print from memory. It allows them to print 5 copies of a 100 page document, all perfectly collated. The long term storage is a side effect.
Having a hard drive also enables new features, like network printing to the photocopier, and network scanning. These command a significant price premium with minimal hardware cost. As such, the photocopier sales people are encouraged to sell these features.
Finally, hard drives are significantly cheaper than RAM and ROM, I wouldn't expect them to go away either. It would actually cost more to build the modern copier without the hard drive.
Check that the problem is not closer to home. The problem could be either technical like a corrupt ISP or some spyware, or it could be an insider running the scam.
To make this scam work, the third party needs a great deal of inside information. That points to an insider. For instance, the third party would need access to invoicing forms to make everything look official.
My personal preference would be to use both PDF (or HTML) and an editable the DOC, XLS, or DWG format. I can read some really old file formats with current software, and DOC and XLS formats are so popular this will likely continue. However, something like PDF will always render exactly the same, and I think the PDF file format will be with us for a long time. For instance, the postscript PS and EPS formats can still be processed, decades after they were originally invented.
My primary hesitation with HTML is that Microsoft tends to encourage the use of a Microsoft Internet Explorer Version specific version of HTML, like IE V6. Microsoft should never have created browser version specific code, and I think they are currently paying the price. Additionally, HTML suffers from the difficulty it does not print well. Often, when an old file is being called up, what is required is a simple print out. Thus a long term printable copy is what is really desired, and PDF does this very well.
Slashdot Mirror
The information in my post is about a Canadian University, as is stated in the first line of the post.
The workload that you are describing still corresponds to a light full-time workload for a university student in an arts program. For instance, 900+ pages is the equivalent of 3 to 4 books per week, which is just under the reading workload of an undergraduate English major. I have no idea why anyone would want an IT course with that level of reading and essay workload. You would not have any time to get any hands-on or theoretical learning done. Even MBA management courses limit the level of emphasis on reading and writing skills, because the focus is on the team-building and practical learning exercises.
At many Canadian Universities, 4 classes would be considered a full-time load. Part time load is 1 to 3 classes. Full time load is 4 or 5 classes, and "overload" is 6 classes. Generally, each class will have 3 to 4 of in class teaching, with lab work additional. As such, 15 hours per week of *classes* is reasonable for 4 courses. For each class hour, you are expected to work 4 to 5 additional hours independently. Thus an average student should be working up to 65 hours per week for 4 classes (15 in class + 40 independently).
It sounds like you signed up for a full-time undergraduate load, and expected a part-time load with spare time to raise a family.
To make matters worse, it sounds like you signed up for an arts (as in not science) based program. These programs tend to have a good portion of the workload in a few major papers due at the end of the term. Predictably, the students wait until almost the end of the term before starting the major papers.
Math, engineering, science, and many business courses are easier to schedule for an adult learner. Many of these courses attempt to force the students to keep up, and mark based on on-going progress. As such, the workload is not as "peaky" as it is in courses that depend on major papers. However, the reason for the non-peaky workload, is that many math, engineering and science courses are much more difficult, in that if you miss any portion of the course the remaining concepts become much more difficult to understand. Another disadvantage of science and engineering courses is that it is common to have "lab" time, and this places additional demands on the students.
In the end, an engineering degree proves that you have the ability to think analytically, learn quickly, and proceed with determination, while working 60 to 80 hours per week.
IANAL, but I will have a go at answering the questions.
If the security footage is distributed, then Yes you are violating the copyright on the movie. If the security footage is kept for your own use, then you are okay under the "family and friends" exemption. The law on showing the security footage to other people, like a private investigator, is complex, because outside financial interests and public viewing may be at issue.
Recent court cases indicate that having the open samba share will make you vulnerable. If someone actually does download it, then you are vulnerable for uploading it.
You are not allowed to have a "public performance", unless the material is properly licensed. Singing along to your iPod while in public counts as a public performance, however to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been taken to court for it.
Expect a lawsuit if you operate a "drive-in" movie. Similarly, I think someone was sued after operating a home laser light show without the appropriate license for the copyrighted music.
If someone (in the public) can view the "energy from the LCD" and reconstruct it into something resembling the original copyrighted work, then yes, it is a public performance. For instance, if you played the radio sufficiently loudly at a workplace that other co-workers could hear it, then in some jurisdictions (U.S., Britain), then you should expect a lawsuit. A public performance occurs when someone views the material.
It is your fault. Your are responsible. I really clever lawyer may also argue that it is all Microsoft's fault too, as they enabled the infringement. Expect the person with the deepest pockets to be sued and be the primary target of the lawsuit, with an initial "scatter gun" strategy of listing all involved parties as defendants. These lawsuits can be difficult (expensive) to extricate yourself from.
The damages may be reduced if your involvement can be shown to be accidental and inadvertent, however this does not mitigate fault or responsibility.
My mistake. The link I was thinking of related to an ancillary computer doing semi-critical testing. The safety system detected the ancillary computers failure, and shut down the reactor. The story referenced was about a different type of failure.
Unfortunately, I assumed that computers killing a nuclear reactor was such an unlikely story that only ONE incident had been reported. My mistake.
People are moderating above post as funny. In fact, a Microsoft Security Update really did shut down a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to shut downs caused by network, malware, and "normal" Microsoft Windows related issues. See: malware shutting down a nuclear reactor, and network trouble shuts down a nuclear reactor.
Oh No! I have 6 cards from 6 letters from 6 stores.
The two times speed gain point is where it becomes pointless to exploit specialized hardware. Frequently, the software development program manager has two choices:
a) Ship a product now, or
b) Spend 1 to 2 more years developing the product, then ship it.
The issue is that hardware doubles in speed every 1 to 2 years. If the cost of exploiting current specialized hardware is an additional 1 to 2 years software development, then the "user" performance at the end of 1 to 2 years is the same.
The revenue from the additional time to market is not. Being in the market first, can yield additional sales. Simply having a product to market, results in sales. As such, delaying software development to get a speed gain, adversely affects revenues.
Most significantly, having a product in the marketplace allows one to understand what the users "want". The users might not want speed. They might have some massive algorithmic problem with the product. Perhaps, you designed the software for a small investor tracking one stock, and the purchasers are wall street traders tracking thousands of stocks. In this case, the program needs to be restructured to better handle the problems the user base wants solved.
The "additional software development time" argument significantly reduces the usefulness of the CUDA approach. Intel delivers processors that can speed up the current software, immediately. No need to rewrite software. "Twice as slow" is approximately the break even point for many businesses.
This is precisely the issue with the tax. People would very quickly discover that if they cash a pay cheque, instead of depositing it in the bank, they pay the tax only once. Even better, if the employer pays you in cash, you don't get taxed ever. If your favourite store runs entirely on cash, then they don't pay tax either. Very quickly, large segments of the economy become barter collectives or entirely cash based.
The end result is that the "100 times" financial transfer multiplier from the article can be reduced by a clever populace. The tax becomes a tax on big financial businesses, which may have positive effects at very small (0.05%) tax rates. However, it would never replace income tax as a revenue generator. The tax is too easy to avoid.
If you had to pick up the pieces inside a factory after one or more serious accidents including deaths, you would be keenly aware that tragic incidents happen all over the world. After a long-time, I have learned that: "you can't save everyone." It is vital to preserve a sense of humour, no matter how bleak, black, and awful the situation gets. Unfortunately, humour is not always taken well on the internet.
The truth is that suicide patterns like this occur in Canada. It is difficult to find accurate employment related suicide rates, however, anecdotally, incidents like these are frequently used as an explanation as to why Japan has a significantly higher suicide rate than Canada.
Essentially, any time you subject a population to:
1. Reduced daylight.
2. Stress.
3. A perceived or real inability for the people concerned to improve their lives.
4. Poor recognition of the warning signs, particularly for management and close friends.
5. Indifferent power system including strained Management-Union relations or strained governmental relations.
A group of the population becomes at risk of suicide. In the event of one suicide, suicides frequently cluster, and a cluster of suicides occurs.
Foxconn has an inordinate degree of control over their employees, with both the long hours of work, and the on-site residences. Similar incidents occur in Japan too. In Canada, remote Indian tribes have suicide outbreaks, for slightly different reasons.
Some people have pointed out that a better management culture will avoid deaths. On the whole, this is true. However, there will always be situations where the situation is not optimal. The U.S. has the phrase "going Postal" referring to Postal workers. Researching further, I stumbled upon a list of employment related suicides from England. The number of teachers and headmasters committing suicide in their teaching system is significant. Most major industrial organizations in Canada and the U.S. have experienced both suicides and industrial accidents, and some industrial accidents are a "call for help", just like attempted suicides.
With these situations, China is joining Canada, the U.S., Japan, Britain, and most other countries. Every country has it's own issues with suicides.
This was done back in the Windows 2.0 days with segmented memory. It was a disaster. Every pointer/array access requires incurs significant overheads. VM (Virtual Memory) is the preferred approach because for most applications it results in significant performance improvements.
Three different memory access scenarios need to be considered:
1. Memory block is already in memory, and in the current page/segment. If memory is presented as an array of linear blocks, then the processor can simply access the relevant segment. If the memory paging is done manually with software, then software must check if it can simply access the block. The software VM solution is slower in this case.
2. Memory block is in memory, and in a different page/segment. The VM hardware on an x86 processor can deal with this optimally. If paging is done in manually with software, then the software needs to do it's routine, and then the VM will do it's routine too. Thus, the VM operation is done twice by a software approach. The software VM solution is slower in this case too.
3. Memory block is not in memory. Either way, you are paging to disk. The only performance gain is if your software solution is much better at reducing pages to disk than the operating system's solution. In practice, it is hard to beat the operating system.
The fundamental problem is that the gains by managing your own virtual memory in #3 must be significant enough to justify the software overhead in #1 and #2. The software overhead in #1 and #2 is huge, because it is on every memory access. Also, memory prices are constantly falling. The software vendor runs the risk that a customer that really needs more memory to reduce paging activity, may simply purchase more RAM. With the hardware VM approach, the speed gains are immediate. With a software approach, adding more RAM has less benefit, because the speed loss in #1 and #2 is still on every memory access, even if software VM is not needed.
If VM is causing a serious performance problem for a given application, then likely you need one of these three solutions:
1. Switch off VM, and don't use a backing store.
2. Write your own VM allocation routines. This is doable under Linux.
3. Enable Intel's "Big Pages" option. This increases the page size to 4 MB. It is intended for embedded applications, that do not want their pages swapped to disk. The "Big Pages" option significantly reduces page change overhead inside the operating system, and works well for applications that do not need and/or do not use disk as a backing store.
Finally, remember that "RAM" memory is itself an abstraction when running in user-mode under most operating systems. Specifically, even if the destination address is in hardware RAM, the page lookup table introduces a delay when switching pages. For most operating systems, pages are 4KB bytes long. This gives 4KB bytes times 1024 TLB pages as the maximum "quickly" available memory. As such, a program can only quickly access 4 MB of RAM. With Big Pages, 4 KB becomes 4 MB, and the program can quickly access 4 GB of RAM.
Recently, a paper was presented (not saying which conference), in which the objective was to produce a very large acceleration to "instantly stop" a test. The researcher, at a government science facility, was not allowed to use: (a) explosives, (b) dangerous chemicals, (c) high pressure gases, (d) expensive consumables, ... etc. As such, the paper was on how to get acceptable research result, in the most politically correct manner possible.
I'm all for health and safety. However, I really wonder about peoples ability to accept and understand risk. Researchers need the ability to do dangerous things. Very large acceleration testing is greatly aided by explosives. Used properly, small quantities of explosives are not that dangerous. This research only required small charges.
People today are terrified. They have been scared so often about so many different things, that it makes it difficult to do research without being threatened by spurious accusations.
In the U.S., families often encouraged the police to classify suicides as "accidental" gun-shot wounds. For example: "Gun cleaning accidents." This avoided many social stigmas for the surviving family. As such, the family quietly encouraged the police to do this.
When Foxconn kills suicide payments, the families will pressure the police to classify the deaths as "accidents". Thus avoiding some bad press for Foxconn. It is amazing what a little financial encouragement can accomplish ...
The suicide rate in Canada is about 3600 deaths per year for 1992 in a population of 28.4 million. If Foxconn employs 800,000 workers, one would expect 101 suicides, assuming the same suicide rate. This is far higher than the number actually experienced at FoxConn, where only 9 people have died as of May.
Based on this, working for Foxconn in China is better than living in Canada, at least as far as suicide risk is concerned.
This puts the numbers in perspective. Down with the oppressive Canadian Imperialist Overlords!
What I don't understand, is how did this analyst have access to 260,000 classified US Embassy Cables?
The entire story sounds like a System Administrator browsing the directories of a Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Exchange Email Server. With full administrative privileges, it is straightforward to find embarrassing documents, even on corporate servers. Can the U.S. Military be storing highly secret information on a regular servers viewable by everyone with Administrative privileges?
Oh, wait! EDS (HP) provides computers to the Department of Defense under an outsourcing agreement, and requires everyone to use Microsoft Windows. Maybe cracking US military command really is as easy as finding a young officer with Administrative privileges ...
I believe student projects are not claimable as prior art, which is sad. At the very least, if a young, learning, practitioner in training can generate an idea, then almost by definition, it must be "obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art". Students are practitioners in training. If a student can figure it out, then it should make the idea should either be unpatentable, or patentable only by the student that first came up with the idea.
As it the law is currently, a corporation can patent something, and student projects are not prior art.
I've never perceived the problem of getting vehicles to turn off engines at traffic lights as being a technical issue. Rather, the problem is much more one of regulation, and forcing everyone to adopt a standard. To make the strategy work, you need to:
(a) get every state in the union, and perhaps every municipality in every state, to modify their traffic lights in the same way, and
(b) get every automaker to make cars that with electronic modules that work with the *SAME* standard as the traffic lights, and
(c) get every class action litigator to agree to not sue anyone.
Business text books clearly say to "run away" from any system that requires broad corporate/public/governmental agreement, particularly if the system involves long-term governmental and corporate cooperation.
Going by the code table in the article, the encryption algorithm is not a substitution cipher. Microsoft's algorithm is an XOR with 0xEE. To decrypt, XOR with 0xEE again.
You are more correct than you expected. The encoding algorithm is not a Caesar Cipher algorithm. Going by the code table in the article, Microsoft simply XORs the incoming data with 0xEE. To undo the cipher, XOR again with 0xEE.
Using XOR makes for really easy coding. Instead of having an encryption and decryption function, now only one function will do both.
ABB and MotoMan are quaking in their boots.
Seriously, does anyone use Microsoft's Robotics Products? for anything industrial?
I know someone that is still doing it.
I love CNC (computer numerically controlled) manufacturing machines made before the popularity of the CRT monitor. It makes you realize that it is possible to do things, without layers and layers of software. Who new that it was possible to have a computer do useful things without video games? operating systems? graphical user interfaces? blinking lights?
It is really important to not detonate a missile against a satellite. Essentially, it results in a bunch of high-velocity projectiles, that destroy other satellites in the area. People will be quite upset if you detonate a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and destroy a bunch of other satellites in the process.
A more realistic option would be to send a robot into orbit, and have it carefully push the errant satellite into a higher or lower orbit. The key technical issue is that satellites are deliberately made to be delicate to save weight. It is tough to get hold of and push into different orbit without the satellite breaking apart.
More importantly, lie detectors can only tell what the subject believes to be true. Given the number of people in America that believe that the world is flat, that Elvis is alive, that George Bush masterminded the 9/11 bombings, that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, or that off-sea oil-rigs pose no risks, I think it is safe to say: "All sorts of people in America believe things that are not true."
This is a huge problem for witnesses at accidents. 5 different witnesses will give the cops 5 different stories, and then when the case gets to trial, 5 additional slightly different stories. People remember things in different ways, and some believe strange things. It is a fact of life.
The copiers scan the originals into memory, and then print from memory. It allows them to print 5 copies of a 100 page document, all perfectly collated. The long term storage is a side effect.
Having a hard drive also enables new features, like network printing to the photocopier, and network scanning. These command a significant price premium with minimal hardware cost. As such, the photocopier sales people are encouraged to sell these features.
Finally, hard drives are significantly cheaper than RAM and ROM, I wouldn't expect them to go away either. It would actually cost more to build the modern copier without the hard drive.
Check that the problem is not closer to home. The problem could be either technical like a corrupt ISP or some spyware, or it could be an insider running the scam.
To make this scam work, the third party needs a great deal of inside information. That points to an insider. For instance, the third party would need access to invoicing forms to make everything look official.
My personal preference would be to use both PDF (or HTML) and an editable the DOC, XLS, or DWG format. I can read some really old file formats with current software, and DOC and XLS formats are so popular this will likely continue. However, something like PDF will always render exactly the same, and I think the PDF file format will be with us for a long time. For instance, the postscript PS and EPS formats can still be processed, decades after they were originally invented.
My primary hesitation with HTML is that Microsoft tends to encourage the use of a Microsoft Internet Explorer Version specific version of HTML, like IE V6. Microsoft should never have created browser version specific code, and I think they are currently paying the price. Additionally, HTML suffers from the difficulty it does not print well. Often, when an old file is being called up, what is required is a simple print out. Thus a long term printable copy is what is really desired, and PDF does this very well.