1. Register a domain A and pay for it 2. Wait 5 days 3. Put ads on it 4. "Taste" some domains 5. Put a redirector page from the tasted domains to domain A, or show the content of domain A in a frame 6. Profit!
Obviously people who know something about space should comment on space exploration topics. But since they're talking about cost, the merits of science and similar topics they should obviously also ask some economists, philosophers and similar.
I suppose that in your world we have football players commenting the merit of building of new stadiums.
They asked the following people whether space exploration is worth it:
- G. Scott Hubbard, professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University and former director of the NASA Ames Research Center - Joan Vernikos, a member of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy and former director of NASA's Life Sciences Division - Kathleen M. Connell, a principal of The Connell Whittaker Group, a founding team member of NASA's Astrobiology Program, and former policy director of the Aerospace States Association - Keith Cowing, founder and editor of NASAWatch.com and former NASA space biologist. - David M. Livingston, host of The Space Show, a talk radio show focusing on increasing space commerce and developing space tourism - John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute and acting director of the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs
Something I always wanted to know (applies to the older Acid tests, too): how do they render the reference image? Is someone creating them by hand? How do we know no mistake was made when creating the reference image?
What counts in a projector is contrast (e.g. how much brighter is a "white" projected spot as opposed to a "black" projected spot).
Obviously this depends on ambient light, since the darkest part of the screen (i.e. the "black spot") is illuminated only by ambient light (assuming that 'black' in the projector means 'no light passes').
Illuminance is measured in Lux (lx). Lux is defined as follows.
Lux = Lumen / m^2.
Now, a "good" contrast is 10-15, i.e. a white spot will be illuminated with 10-15 times the lx a black spot is.
Normal ambient light is highly variable; a typical table in a lecture room should be illuminated with about 500-1000 lx; the ambient light on your typical screen in an illuminated room (i.e. not a theatre) will be illuminated with maybe 100-500 lx.
So in order to obtain a proper picture a projector should be able to do at least 1000 lx. Comparison: a typical home cinema beamer has about 2000 lumen and projects an area of about 2x1.12m; this means 2000 lumen / 2.24 m^2 = ~900 lx. And guess what, the picture is just fine when the room is "quite dark" and pretty washed out when it is illuminated.
With the claimed 8-10 lumen - let's assume 10 - you can thus illuminate
10 lumen / 1000 lx = 0.01 m^2
Assuming a picture format of 16:9, that's a picture size of
An incredible 13 cm x 7.5 cm! (5" x 3" for Americans).
That's a diagonal of 5.8". Makes sense since a 2000 lumen projector is 200 times more powerful and accordingly projects an image with sqrt(200) = ~14 times the diagonal.
Except in the darkest of situations, you will *never* have an usable 50 inch image with a lousy 10 lumen.
If what TFA claims is really true, i.e. that the passenger network is physically connected to the control and navigation system, then someone should get fired for this.
The control and navigation system of an airplane is one of the most critical networks possible; the lives of hundreds of passengers (and potentially of thousands of people on the ground) depend on its correct functioning. There are not many more critical networks than that, except maybe control systems for weapons, nuclear plants and some factory control systems.
Even the worst sysadmin out there knows that you do not physically connect such a highly sensitive, highly critical network to something crappy like the in-flight passenger entertainment network.
Why should the two networks should be connected at all? To tell the passengers the current speed of the plane?
The XBox was hacked. The playstation was hacked. DVDs were hacked. HD-DVD was hacked. Pretty much anything out there was hacked if someone had an interest in it (and mostly the interest wasn't commercial, just "for fun"). Even if they do aren't "completely connected" as Boeing claims, the danger of it being hacked is very real. On one hand you are not allowed to use your mobile phone on a plane, and on the other you can play with a network which is attached to the navigation and control system? Come on.
If 4 racks of equipment you're talking about consist of active equipment (active as in "which has fans and/or hard drives", such as switches, routers and servers) then there is only one way to go: resign and find a better job. I don't know whether you know how much noise a full server rack makes, but if you don't, trust me: you do not want to work in a room with server racks. Ever.
If they're just some patch panels you're ok. Try making your office a place where you *feel* good rather than something where you *work* well. Good quality lamps, nice desk and a good chair spring to mind.
When I read the summary, I thought TFA could actually be interesting. But it's not any better than what it is criticizing.
Long story short:
ZDnet published an article comparing Secunia vulnerability counts in Mac OS X and Windows Vista/XP. They spun it the Microsoft way, so Mac OS X loses big time. A mac fanboy wrote a reply spinning it the Apple way.
TFA starts with a long-winded attack against the author of the ZDnet article without ever getting to the point. Let's just say that it talks about Zunes, XBoxes, train wrecks, ballet dancing and many more things.
Then it explains what Secunia does (in about two pages): they track software vulnerabilities which are - among others - reported by the vendors. So "honest" vendors get higher vulnerability counts. Who would have thought.
On it goes by saying that the "border" of an operating system is nowadays blurry; should the vulnerabilities in bundled applications be counted? Even if they are by another vendor?
Then he babbles about how most of the cited vulnerabilites in Mac OS X are related to what he calls "external software" - things such as python, java, perl, samba, tcpdump etc and that those same programs have the the same (or a similar) amount of vulnerabilities on other platforms. What he fails to point out is that Mac OS X *consists* of such "external software" for a big part, and that they are *part* of Mac OS X and cannot be removed easily.
Conclusion: a pointless (and extremely long-winded) article full of Microsoft bashing, as reply to an equally pointless article full of Apple bashing.
Just because it's "Logical" doesn't mean that it's PRACTICAL.
The metric system is not any more "logical" than the imperial system or any other. There is no "logic" in a meter, an inch or a stonetoss. The whole point is that it *is* more practical.
How do you practically measure people in meters? What relation does a person's height have in the laypersons' mind to the speed that light travels in a vaccuum, or the transition period of a hydrogen atom? In meters, everyone is 1.5 to 2 meters tall. I'd rather be 6'1" than 1.85 meters - it's just easier to deal with.
Yeah. And in imperial, everyone is 5 to 6'6". Big deal. I don't see how ft/in is simpler here.
What about volume? What if you want a cup of flour, or a cup of water? It's either.236 L or 236 mL. But to those of us who use imperial, it's a practical measurement, it's about as much water as you'd want in a cup! It's something we can relate to!
You show me the cup which is exactly.236l. Cups here are generally 0.2 dl, 0.25 dl or 0.3 dl.
Plus, its very easy to convert liquid measure from weight to volume in imperial - which is a common complaint I hear. A pint's a pound the world around. 16 ounces of water (or water-type liquid) weighs 16 ounces.
As opposed to 1 l (which happens to be 0.1m^3) of water which has a mass of 1 kg. And to accelerate it by 1 m/s^2 you need 1 Newton of force. Which takes 1 Joule when you do it along 1 m. I'd love to see how you calculate the force it takes to constantly accelerate a pint of water to 1 mph over a distance of 1 ft.
Also, with a pound being 16 ounces and a foot being 12 inches, both of these measurements are divisible by many denominators. Fractions come easily and naturally. Metric fractions are difficult because, while a base-10 system works well with computers and exponents, 1/3 of a meter, or 1/3 of a liter, don't translate into another measurement smoothly.
While there is some truth to that, I'd still like to point out that it is overrated. What matters is the how many different prime factors a numeric base has; in case of 10 we have two (2 and 5); in case of 12 we 3 (2, 3 and 4); and in case of 16, we only have one (2). A base-10 system does not work better with "computers and exponents" better than any other. There are people saying that base 12 would be better for general use than base 10, but I believe that the difference is not that big after all.
What matters *more* though is that pretty much *anything* else uses base 10, and thus the choice of *any* base except 10 is a bad one, because it makes interaction with with those systems more difficult and because people are used to base 10. What's half of 3 hours, 7 minutes and 24 seconds? What's a third of 7'6"?
The Imperial system is worse in all aspects which matter. End.
At the risk of being modded redundant, here's my position on the subject:
"Most people don't understand them" could be applied to most topics on Wikipedia, with or without proof. Just take any page about an advanced topic in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology or probably even history.
I agree that they should not be part of the *same page*, e.g. the previously mentioned proofs of the Pythagorean theorem should IMHO *not* be part of the page "Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem)" (which currently includes 8 different proofs).
I don't think that something like wikibooks or wikiproof is a good idea. When I want to know more about the Pythagorean theorem, should I go to wikipedia? Or citizendium? Or MathWorld? There are already too many choices, and there is absolutely no advantage to having one more. I find it very useful to have *one* resource for "all knowledge". It's not like Wikipedia gets any heavier if it has more pages.
The reasonable thing to do would be to add a "Proof" section to things needing a proof, with one link per proof (e.g. "Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem", "Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem") etc. If using the current Wikipedia system is not good enough for that (but I think it is), it should be easy to introduce a new standard "Proof layout" e.g. something like this:
Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
There are various ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem. Some of them are listed here:
A comprehensive list of proofs of the Pythagorean theorem can be found in Foo's book "1001 proofs for the Pythagorean theorem"; since it was published in 1989, the most recent proofs are missing, notably the Rational Trigoniometry proof.
If something is not in Wikipedia, it is *still* possible to link to Mathworld or wherever else you like. "No mathematic proofs because some don't understand them" is like saying "No dates in history pages because some can't memorize them".
Disclaimer: I'm a European and am not familiar with the US Auto Mileage Standards regulation, or the US in general. Still, as most Europeans, I find the American love for big cars a bit funny.
I somehow think that the $6700 extra per car is highly exaggerated. Your average European or Japanese car is already there, and they're not more expensive than the American cars (at least not in Europe, if you exclude the luxury cars). I mean, you can get an *entire new car* for about $9000 (not a very big one, though). On the other hand the current development of the Euro and the US Dollar will probably make European cars less and less attractive for US residents. I don't know about the Japanese ones, though.
Assuming that the average car does 100k miles in its lifetime, the new regulations imply that it'll use 100k/35 = 2857 gallons instead of 100k/27.5 = 3636 gallons. That's 779 gallons saved. At a price of $4 per gallon that's $3116 saved. Which is less than $6700.
Assuming that it does 200k miles that's $6232. Still less than $6700, but much closer.
At European gas prices (I'm taking $7/gallon) the saved costs would be $5453 and $10906.
Assuming that gas prices in the US go up another bit, that the $6700 are exaggerated and that your car will run 150k miles, I don't see the big deal. The costs are about the same, with the additional benefit of wasting less fuel. If you don't buy a bigger car than what you actually need, you might even save some money.
Let's assume that the author is right, and that people clicking "yes" for an "extra-special secure" connection really are the ones who click yes everywhere, and thus have infected machines. And that people clicking "no" for an "extra-special secure" connection really have clean machines. This assumption is already stupid, because there are more ways to get infected than by clicking "yes" (e.g. a no-clicker could have been infected via some buffer overflow or by some other means). But even if all of this is true, it still doesn't work *at all*:
Being able to "take over" the client's keyboard means that the OS presumably offers this functionality to a website which (I assume) has to provide some kind of credentials (e.g. some special SSL certificate). Let's also assume that this system really works and is unhackable. (Not very likely, but whatever).
There are two types of clients:
a) The clean ones. Here there is no problem, no matter whether you use the "extra-special secure" rootkit or not.
b) The infected ones. These are the ones we're interested in. What happens is the following:
1. User connects to a website using his or her browser 2. The website requests to take over the keyboard somehow. Could be a special HTTP header, a new HTML tag, javascript, whatever. 3. The browser asks whether the client wants to allow that. Now several things can happen: 4a. The software on the infected client says "no". Maybe it even hides the dialog box. The user won't even notice. You lose. 4b. The user clicks "no". You lose. 4c. The user clicks "yes", the hacked software really says no. The website thinks the user said no and might even display that to the user. The user won't notice/care/understand. You lose. 4d. The user clicks "yes", the hacked software emulates the client-side of the extra-special secure functionality. The website thinks all is good, the user thinks all is good, and the hacked software happily logs your keystrokes. You lose. 4e. The user clicks "yes" and it really works. You win.
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I have a little bit of EE background.
As the parent post says, the statement "Power consumption of any chip increases according to the frequency squared." is obviously wrong.
I believe that the author of the article misunderstood the "rule of thumb" for CMOS circuit power consumption, which states the following (from Wikipedia and other sources):
Power = Voltage^2 * Frequency
This obviously applies to the *same* chip only, i.e. if you run the *same* chip at half the clock rate it will use roughly half as much power. Concluding that a 10 MHz chip will consume 10 times more power than a different 1 MHz chip is obviously wrong.
I definitely recall that in some EE lectures (related to real-time scheduling in low-power systems) we were told that the power consumption of a CMOS circuit is proportional to the *square* of the frequency, which happens to be "more similar" to what the article claims. Can anyone comment? Is this related to the fact that you may decrease the voltage when you are decreasing the frequency?
Openoffice 3 is scheduled for release in September 2008 (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Roadmap#Ongoing_OpenOffice.org_3.0). You may like Outlook or not, but there's/no way//anyone/ writes a replacement for it in less than a year.
People are/not/ using Outlook because it is such an incredibly cool mail client (which it isn't); they use it because it integrates mail, contacts and calendars with each other and with Exchange. I mean, you can take Thunberbird, add conversation capabilities and polish the UI a little more and then you'll have the *mail* part of Outlook, but you do *not* have the whole thing.
The MS Office universe is as successful as it is because of the following:
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint are a "classic office suite" and are nicely integrated with each other
- Outlook integrates mail, contacts and calendars with a server (Exchange) and is interacts nicely with the other Office apps
- Access is a crappy database which causes more problems than it solves. Not much to see here. Most people would be better off with excel sheets they mail to each other.
The Status of OpenOffice is IMHO the following:
- Writer is pretty much equivalent to Word. Some things are actually nicer, others are worse. It definitely needs some polish though (there are hundreds of minor nuisances). And they should definitely get rid of the retarded light bulb shaped assistant. It's even more stupid than clippy, but at least it's not animated.
- Calc is close to Excel, but not as close as Writer is to Word. It's usable for most things Excel is used for, but not a replacement yet.
- Impress sucks. It's not even close to PowerPoint. It's usable for presentations consisting of bulleted lists, but if you want anything more, oh my.
- Base vs Access - I have almost no experience with Base, so I can't say much about this. But the concept is the same as Access, so I guess it sucks at least as much.
- There is no replacement for Outlook.
- The integration between the individual programs is *years* behind what MS Office has to offer.
What they *should* do instead of trying to push Thunderbird as "Outlook replacement" is this:
- Polish Writer some more. I use Writer almost daily and have the feeling that it has the potential to be *better* than Word in most tasks. They should *not* try to be bug-by-bug, stupid-feature-by-stupid-feature compatible to Word; people who need that kind of compatibility are not going to switch anyway. Maybe bring it a bit closer to a DTP program (more and more exact controls for layouting and styling, especially for longer and/or structured documents).
- Work a bit on Calc. I mainly use both Excel and Calc for things such as "making lists" or "summing numbers" or maybe to write a small macro, so I don't really care.
- Do something *really cool* with Impress. PowerPoint is far from perfect and presentations are getting more and more important every day. I know I can do "everything" using LaTeX and Beamer, but sometimes you just want to do something *quickly*. And Impress disappoints me every time.
- Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.
Then they could still write an Exchange replacement, and only *then* Outlook can be truly replaced.
I mean, if you have to get the textbooks, they'll have to tell you which ones to get. This means that they are either going to tell you Author/Title/Edition or the ISBN. If you have either of these you can easily look up the other on the internet. And the *prices* can't possibly be protected by copyright.
Moreover, I find it completely normal and sensible to write down the prices of what you are going to get. Maybe you want to pay in cash and have to know how much you have to bring. I mean, what would you do if you walked into a shop, wrote down a price and someone told you that you're not allowed to do that?
I don't know what is going to happen if they are really going to enforce their totally ridiculous "no note taking in a book shop" policy, but I know what *I* would do in a similar situation:
1. Look up the ISBN on the internet 2. Find out where the book is cheapest, maybe both online and offline - they'd obviously out of that because 'note taking' is not allowed 3. Get the book there 4. Only get those books at the Coop which aren't sold anywhere else. Which I doubt are many.
For a traditional mouse, Apple's Mighty Mouse is pretty good
No. It's not. It's actually the worst mouse I have ever seen. Actually, all Apple mice I have ever used (I guess all they made in the last 10 years) simply suck. They all either have awkward shapes (anyone remembers the small round blueish thing?) or they are built around the retarded 'the whole mouse is a button' paradigm. Don't tell me that this is better, because it simply isn't. It makes you click when you want to move the mouse away. When you put anything on your mouse. When you sneeze. When you're tired and about to fall asleep.
The mighty mouse is even worse: it has some sort of 'invisible one button which is really two buttons depending on how you click it'. You can't really understand it unless you tried it. And yes, I guess that after a few days of use you get used to it without always left-clicking when what you want to do is right-click. Isn't Apple the company with the products with a low learning curve? I threw the Mighty Mice which came with my two Mac Pros into the bin less than half an hour after they came.
Apple gets many things right, but their mice are sub-par. Anyone who has ever used any other mouse knows that, but some Mac fanboys just can't admit it.
I find it a bit sad that such things keep on happening all the time (not only to the DOD).
I do realize that, while everyone agrees that "security" is a good thing, it often gets treated lazily for the sake of usability. Even though I think that giving "normal" (i.e. non-system administrator) users the right to just "put things on the server" (likely via FTP or Windows Shares) is just utterly stupid in any context where some sort of security is required. Things will go wrong because people just don't realize (and mostly aren't even interested in) the implications of what they do. I imagine something like this (I have seen that happening too many times):
Alice: Hey, Bob, where's that super secret document we're both working on? Bob: It's on the SourceSafe (or whatever) server, you can check it out Alice: Awww, my SourceSafe isn't set up properly and it takes too long. Can you E-Mail it to me? Bob: Sure! (wants to email the document) Bob: Darn, the attachments have to be less than 500kbytes, otherwise it won't send it. I'll put it on the W: drive! Alice: Ok, thanks!
The ideal solution to this kind of problems would be an USABLE operating system with some kind of sensible data flow tracking (e.g. you can't copy a 'classified' file into a 'not classified' folder or upload it to a 'public' server) and which doesn't get in the way all the time.
Example: I worked at a company where we had Lotus Notes internally. Additionally to the other fabulous features (such as speed, stability and an intuitive interface) of that wonderful software it supported sending 'confidential' and 'highly confidential' mail. The result of sending a 'highly confidential' mail was that you couldn't copy/paste from a mail, which was just great when someone sent you a 60 characters long windows share path and you had to type it all into windows explorer. That is what I mean by 'get in the way'.
Is there any (operating) system out there with some sensible, security-aware data flow tracking? Such as 'when you copy something from a classified document into a non-classified document the non-classified one becomes classified'? Or attaching this kind of security information to files or other objects? I know that this is a major topic of research in computer science, but have never seen it in real use.
Yeah right. Because it is soooo hard to get a free proxy/ssh/web account or whatever in the US. This would simply annoy everybody who wants to legitimately access information from abroad and not help against the bad boys at all.
The paper is quite long, so here's a summary (take this with a grain of salt, who wants accurate information should still RTFP):
Most OSes (Linux, Solaris, Windows but not Mac OS X) are tick-based. This means that the kernel is called from hardware periodically (this is the "HZ" value you set in the Linux kernel). Some of them (Linux) simply check which process is running at each tick and compute statistics based on that ("sample-based statistics"). This means that the process running when the tick happens is billed for the entire period of the tick.
Since ticks are typically "long" (typically 1-10 ms on Linux) more than one process may run during this period. In other words, using this approach leads to inaccuracies in the process billing. If all programs "play by the rules" this works quite well on average though.
Next thing: the classic schedulers typically maintain some sort of "priority" value for each process, which decreases whenever the process is running and increases when it's not. This means that a process runs for some time, its priority decreases, and then another process (which hasn't been running for some time) takes over.
You can exploit that by always sleeping when a tick happens and running only in-between ticks. This makes the kernel thinks that your process is never running and give it a high priority. So, when your process wakes up just after a tick happened, it will have a higher priority than most other processes and be given the CPU. If it goes to sleep again just before the next tick, its priority will not be decreased. Your process will (almost) always run when it wants to and the kernel will think that it's (almost) never running and keep its priority high. You win!
Another aspect is that modern kernels (at least Linux and Windows) distinguish between "interactive" (e.g. media players) and "non-interactive" processes. They do so by looking how many times a process goes to sleep voluntarily. An interactive program (such as a media player) will have many voluntary sleeps (e.g. inbetween displaying frames) while a non-interactive program (e.g. a compiler or some number crunching program) will likely never go to sleep voluntarily. The scheduler gives the interactive programs an additional priority boost.
Since the cheating programs go to sleep very often (at every tick) the kernel thinks they're "very interactive", which makes the situation worse.
Some of the analyzed OSes - even if tick-based - do not use sample-based statistics in the kernel but they do use sample-based statistics for scheduling decisions. So the kernel sees that a process is taking more CPU than it should but it will still keep on scheduling it.
Mac OS X is not affected because it has a tickless kernel (e.g. without periodic interrupts). Because of that sample-based statistics don't work and it has to use accurate statistics, which make it unaffected by the bug.
This bug can be exploited to (at least)
- get more CPU than you're supposed to - hinder other programs in their normal work - hide malicious programs (such as rootkits) which do work in the background
Here's a list with the OSes (this USED TO BE a nicely formatted table, but the darned Slashdot "lameness filter" forced me to remove much of the nice lines and the "ecode" tag collapses whitespace).
I guess that Mac OS X doesn't need a interactive/non-interactive distinction because of its different (tickless) approach. I assume that interactive applications can (implicitly or explicitly) can be recognized as such in a different way. Does anyone have more information on that?
Slashdot Mirror
This is totally pointless.
1. Register a domain A and pay for it
2. Wait 5 days
3. Put ads on it
4. "Taste" some domains
5. Put a redirector page from the tasted domains to domain A, or show the content of domain A in a frame
6. Profit!
Am I missing something here?
http://www.edwardtufte.com.nyud.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00036T&topic_id=1
Ah, you must be part of the "I'm not part of a generation" generation. A post-hippie, basically.
Obviously people who know something about space should comment on space exploration topics. But since they're talking about cost, the merits of science and similar topics they should obviously also ask some economists, philosophers and similar.
I suppose that in your world we have football players commenting the merit of building of new stadiums.
They asked the following people whether space exploration is worth it:
- G. Scott Hubbard, professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University and former director of the NASA Ames Research Center
- Joan Vernikos, a member of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy and former director of NASA's Life Sciences Division
- Kathleen M. Connell, a principal of The Connell Whittaker Group, a founding team member of NASA's Astrobiology Program, and former policy director of the Aerospace States Association
- Keith Cowing, founder and editor of NASAWatch.com and former NASA space biologist.
- David M. Livingston, host of The Space Show, a talk radio show focusing on increasing space commerce and developing space tourism
- John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute and acting director of the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs
They all said yes. Who would have thought.
Something I always wanted to know (applies to the older Acid tests, too): how do they render the reference image? Is someone creating them by hand? How do we know no mistake was made when creating the reference image?
What counts in a projector is contrast (e.g. how much brighter is a "white" projected spot as opposed to a "black" projected spot).
Obviously this depends on ambient light, since the darkest part of the screen (i.e. the "black spot") is illuminated only by ambient light (assuming that 'black' in the projector means 'no light passes').
Illuminance is measured in Lux (lx). Lux is defined as follows.
Lux = Lumen / m^2.
Now, a "good" contrast is 10-15, i.e. a white spot will be illuminated with 10-15 times the lx a black spot is.
Normal ambient light is highly variable; a typical table in a lecture room should be illuminated with about 500-1000 lx; the ambient light on your typical screen in an illuminated room (i.e. not a theatre) will be illuminated with maybe 100-500 lx.
So in order to obtain a proper picture a projector should be able to do at least 1000 lx. Comparison: a typical home cinema beamer has about 2000 lumen and projects an area of about 2x1.12m; this means 2000 lumen / 2.24 m^2 = ~900 lx. And guess what, the picture is just fine when the room is "quite dark" and pretty washed out when it is illuminated.
With the claimed 8-10 lumen - let's assume 10 - you can thus illuminate
10 lumen / 1000 lx = 0.01 m^2
Assuming a picture format of 16:9, that's a picture size of
sqrt(0.01 m^2 / (16 * 9)) * 16 = 0.13 m width
sqrt(0.01 m^2 / (16 * 9)) * 9 = 0.075 m height
An incredible 13 cm x 7.5 cm! (5" x 3" for Americans).
That's a diagonal of 5.8". Makes sense since a 2000 lumen projector is 200 times more powerful and accordingly projects an image with sqrt(200) = ~14 times the diagonal.
Except in the darkest of situations, you will *never* have an usable 50 inch image with a lousy 10 lumen.
If what TFA claims is really true, i.e. that the passenger network is physically connected to the control and navigation system, then someone should get fired for this.
The control and navigation system of an airplane is one of the most critical networks possible; the lives of hundreds of passengers (and potentially of thousands of people on the ground) depend on its correct functioning. There are not many more critical networks than that, except maybe control systems for weapons, nuclear plants and some factory control systems.
Even the worst sysadmin out there knows that you do not physically connect such a highly sensitive, highly critical network to something crappy like the in-flight passenger entertainment network.
Why should the two networks should be connected at all? To tell the passengers the current speed of the plane?
The XBox was hacked. The playstation was hacked. DVDs were hacked. HD-DVD was hacked. Pretty much anything out there was hacked if someone had an interest in it (and mostly the interest wasn't commercial, just "for fun"). Even if they do aren't "completely connected" as Boeing claims, the danger of it being hacked is very real. On one hand you are not allowed to use your mobile phone on a plane, and on the other you can play with a network which is attached to the navigation and control system? Come on.
I like this law. I don't like dogs. And I find it funny. Banning dogs by *height*. I wonder how they measure them, especially the borderline cases.
If 4 racks of equipment you're talking about consist of active equipment (active as in "which has fans and/or hard drives", such as switches, routers and servers) then there is only one way to go: resign and find a better job. I don't know whether you know how much noise a full server rack makes, but if you don't, trust me: you do not want to work in a room with server racks. Ever.
If they're just some patch panels you're ok. Try making your office a place where you *feel* good rather than something where you *work* well. Good quality lamps, nice desk and a good chair spring to mind.
When I read the summary, I thought TFA could actually be interesting. But it's not any better than what it is criticizing.
Long story short:
ZDnet published an article comparing Secunia vulnerability counts in Mac OS X and Windows Vista/XP. They spun it the Microsoft way, so Mac OS X loses big time. A mac fanboy wrote a reply spinning it the Apple way.
TFA starts with a long-winded attack against the author of the ZDnet article without ever getting to the point. Let's just say that it talks about Zunes, XBoxes, train wrecks, ballet dancing and many more things.
Then it explains what Secunia does (in about two pages): they track software vulnerabilities which are - among others - reported by the vendors. So "honest" vendors get higher vulnerability counts. Who would have thought.
On it goes by saying that the "border" of an operating system is nowadays blurry; should the vulnerabilities in bundled applications be counted? Even if they are by another vendor?
Then he babbles about how most of the cited vulnerabilites in Mac OS X are related to what he calls "external software" - things such as python, java, perl, samba, tcpdump etc and that those same programs have the the same (or a similar) amount of vulnerabilities on other platforms. What he fails to point out is that Mac OS X *consists* of such "external software" for a big part, and that they are *part* of Mac OS X and cannot be removed easily.
Conclusion: a pointless (and extremely long-winded) article full of Microsoft bashing, as reply to an equally pointless article full of Apple bashing.
The metric system is not any more "logical" than the imperial system or any other. There is no "logic" in a meter, an inch or a stonetoss. The whole point is that it *is* more practical.
Yeah. And in imperial, everyone is 5 to 6'6". Big deal. I don't see how ft/in is simpler here.
You show me the cup which is exactly
As opposed to 1 l (which happens to be 0.1m^3) of water which has a mass of 1 kg. And to accelerate it by 1 m/s^2 you need 1 Newton of force. Which takes 1 Joule when you do it along 1 m. I'd love to see how you calculate the force it takes to constantly accelerate a pint of water to 1 mph over a distance of 1 ft.
While there is some truth to that, I'd still like to point out that it is overrated. What matters is the how many different prime factors a numeric base has; in case of 10 we have two (2 and 5); in case of 12 we 3 (2, 3 and 4); and in case of 16, we only have one (2). A base-10 system does not work better with "computers and exponents" better than any other. There are people saying that base 12 would be better for general use than base 10, but I believe that the difference is not that big after all.
What matters *more* though is that pretty much *anything* else uses base 10, and thus the choice of *any* base except 10 is a bad one, because it makes interaction with with those systems more difficult and because people are used to base 10. What's half of 3 hours, 7 minutes and 24 seconds? What's a third of 7'6"?
The Imperial system is worse in all aspects which matter. End.
"Most people don't understand them" could be applied to most topics on Wikipedia, with or without proof. Just take any page about an advanced topic in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology or probably even history.
I agree that they should not be part of the *same page*, e.g. the previously mentioned proofs of the Pythagorean theorem should IMHO *not* be part of the page "Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem)" (which currently includes 8 different proofs).
I don't think that something like wikibooks or wikiproof is a good idea. When I want to know more about the Pythagorean theorem, should I go to wikipedia? Or citizendium? Or MathWorld? There are already too many choices, and there is absolutely no advantage to having one more. I find it very useful to have *one* resource for "all knowledge". It's not like Wikipedia gets any heavier if it has more pages.
The reasonable thing to do would be to add a "Proof" section to things needing a proof, with one link per proof (e.g. "Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem", "Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem") etc. If using the current Wikipedia system is not good enough for that (but I think it is), it should be easy to introduce a new standard "Proof layout" e.g. something like this: If something is not in Wikipedia, it is *still* possible to link to Mathworld or wherever else you like. "No mathematic proofs because some don't understand them" is like saying "No dates in history pages because some can't memorize them".
Disclaimer: I'm a European and am not familiar with the US Auto Mileage Standards regulation, or the US in general. Still, as most Europeans, I find the American love for big cars a bit funny.
I somehow think that the $6700 extra per car is highly exaggerated. Your average European or Japanese car is already there, and they're not more expensive than the American cars (at least not in Europe, if you exclude the luxury cars). I mean, you can get an *entire new car* for about $9000 (not a very big one, though). On the other hand the current development of the Euro and the US Dollar will probably make European cars less and less attractive for US residents. I don't know about the Japanese ones, though.
Assuming that the average car does 100k miles in its lifetime, the new regulations imply that it'll use 100k/35 = 2857 gallons instead of 100k/27.5 = 3636 gallons. That's 779 gallons saved. At a price of $4 per gallon that's $3116 saved. Which is less than $6700.
Assuming that it does 200k miles that's $6232. Still less than $6700, but much closer.
At European gas prices (I'm taking $7/gallon) the saved costs would be $5453 and $10906.
Assuming that gas prices in the US go up another bit, that the $6700 are exaggerated and that your car will run 150k miles, I don't see the big deal. The costs are about the same, with the additional benefit of wasting less fuel. If you don't buy a bigger car than what you actually need, you might even save some money.
You must be new to hardware.
This idea is incredibly stupid.
Let's assume that the author is right, and that people clicking "yes" for an "extra-special secure" connection really are the ones who click yes everywhere, and thus have infected machines. And that people clicking "no" for an "extra-special secure" connection really have clean machines. This assumption is already stupid, because there are more ways to get infected than by clicking "yes" (e.g. a no-clicker could have been infected via some buffer overflow or by some other means). But even if all of this is true, it still doesn't work *at all*:
Being able to "take over" the client's keyboard means that the OS presumably offers this functionality to a website which (I assume) has to provide some kind of credentials (e.g. some special SSL certificate). Let's also assume that this system really works and is unhackable. (Not very likely, but whatever).
There are two types of clients:
a) The clean ones. Here there is no problem, no matter whether you use the "extra-special secure" rootkit or not.
b) The infected ones. These are the ones we're interested in. What happens is the following:
1. User connects to a website using his or her browser
2. The website requests to take over the keyboard somehow. Could be a special HTTP header, a new HTML tag, javascript, whatever.
3. The browser asks whether the client wants to allow that. Now several things can happen:
4a. The software on the infected client says "no". Maybe it even hides the dialog box. The user won't even notice. You lose.
4b. The user clicks "no". You lose.
4c. The user clicks "yes", the hacked software really says no. The website thinks the user said no and might even display that to the user. The user won't notice/care/understand. You lose.
4d. The user clicks "yes", the hacked software emulates the client-side of the extra-special secure functionality. The website thinks all is good, the user thinks all is good, and the hacked software happily logs your keystrokes. You lose.
4e. The user clicks "yes" and it really works. You win.
Now, what do you think is going to happen?
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I have a little bit of EE background.
As the parent post says, the statement "Power consumption of any chip increases according to the frequency squared." is obviously wrong.
I believe that the author of the article misunderstood the "rule of thumb" for CMOS circuit power consumption, which states the following (from Wikipedia and other sources):
Power = Voltage^2 * Frequency
This obviously applies to the *same* chip only, i.e. if you run the *same* chip at half the clock rate it will use roughly half as much power. Concluding that a 10 MHz chip will consume 10 times more power than a different 1 MHz chip is obviously wrong.
I definitely recall that in some EE lectures (related to real-time scheduling in low-power systems) we were told that the power consumption of a CMOS circuit is proportional to the *square* of the frequency, which happens to be "more similar" to what the article claims. Can anyone comment? Is this related to the fact that you may decrease the voltage when you are decreasing the frequency?
Openoffice 3 is scheduled for release in September 2008 (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Roadmap#Ongoing_OpenOffice.org_3.0). You may like Outlook or not, but there's /no way/ /anyone/ writes a replacement for it in less than a year.
/not/ using Outlook because it is such an incredibly cool mail client (which it isn't); they use it because it integrates mail, contacts and calendars with each other and with Exchange. I mean, you can take Thunberbird, add conversation capabilities and polish the UI a little more and then you'll have the *mail* part of Outlook, but you do *not* have the whole thing.
People are
The MS Office universe is as successful as it is because of the following:
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint are a "classic office suite" and are nicely integrated with each other
- Outlook integrates mail, contacts and calendars with a server (Exchange) and is interacts nicely with the other Office apps
- Access is a crappy database which causes more problems than it solves. Not much to see here. Most people would be better off with excel sheets they mail to each other.
The Status of OpenOffice is IMHO the following:
- Writer is pretty much equivalent to Word. Some things are actually nicer, others are worse. It definitely needs some polish though (there are hundreds of minor nuisances). And they should definitely get rid of the retarded light bulb shaped assistant. It's even more stupid than clippy, but at least it's not animated.
- Calc is close to Excel, but not as close as Writer is to Word. It's usable for most things Excel is used for, but not a replacement yet.
- Impress sucks. It's not even close to PowerPoint. It's usable for presentations consisting of bulleted lists, but if you want anything more, oh my.
- Base vs Access - I have almost no experience with Base, so I can't say much about this. But the concept is the same as Access, so I guess it sucks at least as much.
- There is no replacement for Outlook.
- The integration between the individual programs is *years* behind what MS Office has to offer.
What they *should* do instead of trying to push Thunderbird as "Outlook replacement" is this:
- Polish Writer some more. I use Writer almost daily and have the feeling that it has the potential to be *better* than Word in most tasks. They should *not* try to be bug-by-bug, stupid-feature-by-stupid-feature compatible to Word; people who need that kind of compatibility are not going to switch anyway. Maybe bring it a bit closer to a DTP program (more and more exact controls for layouting and styling, especially for longer and/or structured documents).
- Work a bit on Calc. I mainly use both Excel and Calc for things such as "making lists" or "summing numbers" or maybe to write a small macro, so I don't really care.
- Do something *really cool* with Impress. PowerPoint is far from perfect and presentations are getting more and more important every day. I know I can do "everything" using LaTeX and Beamer, but sometimes you just want to do something *quickly*. And Impress disappoints me every time.
- Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.
Then they could still write an Exchange replacement, and only *then* Outlook can be truly replaced.
Just my 2 cents.
I speak German, and the end result is definitely *not* like German.
I don't really understand what this is all about.
I mean, if you have to get the textbooks, they'll have to tell you which ones to get. This means that they are either going to tell you Author/Title/Edition or the ISBN. If you have either of these you can easily look up the other on the internet. And the *prices* can't possibly be protected by copyright.
Moreover, I find it completely normal and sensible to write down the prices of what you are going to get. Maybe you want to pay in cash and have to know how much you have to bring. I mean, what would you do if you walked into a shop, wrote down a price and someone told you that you're not allowed to do that?
I don't know what is going to happen if they are really going to enforce their totally ridiculous "no note taking in a book shop" policy, but I know what *I* would do in a similar situation:
1. Look up the ISBN on the internet
2. Find out where the book is cheapest, maybe both online and offline - they'd obviously out of that because 'note taking' is not allowed
3. Get the book there
4. Only get those books at the Coop which aren't sold anywhere else. Which I doubt are many.
No. It's not. It's actually the worst mouse I have ever seen. Actually, all Apple mice I have ever used (I guess all they made in the last 10 years) simply suck. They all either have awkward shapes (anyone remembers the small round blueish thing?) or they are built around the retarded 'the whole mouse is a button' paradigm. Don't tell me that this is better, because it simply isn't. It makes you click when you want to move the mouse away. When you put anything on your mouse. When you sneeze. When you're tired and about to fall asleep.
The mighty mouse is even worse: it has some sort of 'invisible one button which is really two buttons depending on how you click it'. You can't really understand it unless you tried it. And yes, I guess that after a few days of use you get used to it without always left-clicking when what you want to do is right-click. Isn't Apple the company with the products with a low learning curve? I threw the Mighty Mice which came with my two Mac Pros into the bin less than half an hour after they came.
Apple gets many things right, but their mice are sub-par. Anyone who has ever used any other mouse knows that, but some Mac fanboys just can't admit it.
I was being sarcastic ;-)
I find it a bit sad that such things keep on happening all the time (not only to the DOD).
I do realize that, while everyone agrees that "security" is a good thing, it often gets treated lazily for the sake of usability. Even though I think that giving "normal" (i.e. non-system administrator) users the right to just "put things on the server" (likely via FTP or Windows Shares) is just utterly stupid in any context where some sort of security is required. Things will go wrong because people just don't realize (and mostly aren't even interested in) the implications of what they do. I imagine something like this (I have seen that happening too many times):
Alice: Hey, Bob, where's that super secret document we're both working on?
Bob: It's on the SourceSafe (or whatever) server, you can check it out
Alice: Awww, my SourceSafe isn't set up properly and it takes too long. Can you E-Mail it to me?
Bob: Sure! (wants to email the document)
Bob: Darn, the attachments have to be less than 500kbytes, otherwise it won't send it. I'll put it on the W: drive!
Alice: Ok, thanks!
The ideal solution to this kind of problems would be an USABLE operating system with some kind of sensible data flow tracking (e.g. you can't copy a 'classified' file into a 'not classified' folder or upload it to a 'public' server) and which doesn't get in the way all the time.
Example: I worked at a company where we had Lotus Notes internally. Additionally to the other fabulous features (such as speed, stability and an intuitive interface) of that wonderful software it supported sending 'confidential' and 'highly confidential' mail. The result of sending a 'highly confidential' mail was that you couldn't copy/paste from a mail, which was just great when someone sent you a 60 characters long windows share path and you had to type it all into windows explorer. That is what I mean by 'get in the way'.
Is there any (operating) system out there with some sensible, security-aware data flow tracking? Such as 'when you copy something from a classified document into a non-classified document the non-classified one becomes classified'? Or attaching this kind of security information to files or other objects? I know that this is a major topic of research in computer science, but have never seen it in real use.
Yeah right. Because it is soooo hard to get a free proxy/ssh/web account or whatever in the US. This would simply annoy everybody who wants to legitimately access information from abroad and not help against the bad boys at all.
The paper is quite long, so here's a summary (take this with a grain of salt, who wants accurate information should still RTFP):
Most OSes (Linux, Solaris, Windows but not Mac OS X) are tick-based. This means that the kernel is called from hardware periodically (this is the "HZ" value you set in the Linux kernel). Some of them (Linux) simply check which process is running at each tick and compute statistics based on that ("sample-based statistics"). This means that the process running when the tick happens is billed for the entire period of the tick.
Since ticks are typically "long" (typically 1-10 ms on Linux) more than one process may run during this period. In other words, using this approach leads to inaccuracies in the process billing. If all programs "play by the rules" this works quite well on average though.
Next thing: the classic schedulers typically maintain some sort of "priority" value for each process, which decreases whenever the process is running and increases when it's not. This means that a process runs for some time, its priority decreases, and then another process (which hasn't been running for some time) takes over.
You can exploit that by always sleeping when a tick happens and running only in-between ticks. This makes the kernel thinks that your process is never running and give it a high priority. So, when your process wakes up just after a tick happened, it will have a higher priority than most other processes and be given the CPU. If it goes to sleep again just before the next tick, its priority will not be decreased. Your process will (almost) always run when it wants to and the kernel will think that it's (almost) never running and keep its priority high. You win!
Another aspect is that modern kernels (at least Linux and Windows) distinguish between "interactive" (e.g. media players) and "non-interactive" processes. They do so by looking how many times a process goes to sleep voluntarily. An interactive program (such as a media player) will have many voluntary sleeps (e.g. inbetween displaying frames) while a non-interactive program (e.g. a compiler or some number crunching program) will likely never go to sleep voluntarily. The scheduler gives the interactive programs an additional priority boost.
Since the cheating programs go to sleep very often (at every tick) the kernel thinks they're "very interactive", which makes the situation worse.
Some of the analyzed OSes - even if tick-based - do not use sample-based statistics in the kernel but they do use sample-based statistics for scheduling decisions. So the kernel sees that a process is taking more CPU than it should but it will still keep on scheduling it.
Mac OS X is not affected because it has a tickless kernel (e.g. without periodic interrupts). Because of that sample-based statistics don't work and it has to use accurate statistics, which make it unaffected by the bug.
This bug can be exploited to (at least)
- get more CPU than you're supposed to
- hinder other programs in their normal work
- hide malicious programs (such as rootkits) which do work in the background
Here's a list with the OSes (this USED TO BE a nicely formatted table, but the darned Slashdot "lameness filter" forced me to remove much of the nice lines and the "ecode" tag collapses whitespace).
OS, Process statistics, Scheduler decisions, Interactive/non-interactive decision, Affected
Linux, sample, sample, yes, yes
Solaris, accurate, sample, ?, yes
FreeBSD 4BSD, ?, sample, no?, yes
FreeBSD ULE, ?, sample, yes, yes
Windows, accurate, sample, yes, yes
Mac OS X, accurate, accurate, not needed?, yes
I guess that Mac OS X doesn't need a interactive/non-interactive distinction because of its different (tickless) approach. I assume that interactive applications can (implicitly or explicitly) can be recognized as such in a different way. Does anyone have more information on that?
How does tickless Linux compare? What abo