i strenuously disagree that memory management is a boon to developer productivity. in every single case where i've seen serious memory requirements meet garbage collection, not only has performance suffered, but developers spend scads of time banging their heads against the black box of the GC. i'm thinking specifically AS3 and Java.
imo GC is a lose-lose proposition: either 1) you have serious memory requirements, in which case GC just gets in your way and you have to expend serious effort Working Around it, or 2) you don't have serious memory requirements, in which case who gives a shit: leak the stuff. virtual memory is essentially infinite. the only situation where the GC really helps are in long-running but memory-unintensive applications.
+1 dedicated computer. that's exactly what i'm setting up for my mom for her personal online banking - a netbook running linux with strong injunctions from me to use it and only it for banking, in combo with separate email accounts for & only for banking. i admit i haven't done the same for myself, but i plan to soon. ordinarily there's no way any linux distro could survive in the hands of my mom, but if it's only used for connecting to a couple of sites, perhaps it has a chance.
thanks for doing that research. yes, it's clear that you need to click "okay, install stuff" to have anything actually bad happen, but because users are ignorant, clumsy, inattentive, etc, even getting to that point is a huge security flaw. social engineering is a real danger, and the browser/OS need to do everything they can to help the user survive against it.
> I'm sure a bunch of people will install it, but there's nothing you can do about that. that just seems like not facing the problem. consider your grandmother who does her banking online. how can you describe to her what's safe to install and what isn't ?
the legitimate OSX installer should never open up for something the user hasn't intended.
i had a very similar experience yesterday. was GISing in safari for "blanket octopus" and suddenly the osx installer was running. the offending file was also MacProtector.mpkg, which had been downloaded to the desktop.
i've been on osx for about two years, and just yesterday had my first malware experience, which is pretty much identical to Teckla's: i was in safari and followed a GIS link for "blanket octopus" and clicked on one of the pictures, and got a pop-up browser with some "security scan in progres.." BS dialog. no big deal. but then the OSX package installer opened up, trying to install some obvious malware.mpkg which had been downloaded to my desktop. downloading a file without my permission is already a total security fail, imo, but running the installer on it is beyond bad. obviously i nixed the installer and power-cycled and so far haven't noticed anything untoward, but it's scary. the name of the.mpkg was "MacProtector.mpkg". unfortunately i rm -rf'd without making an archive of it. - google shows a few hits for that. so, in short, yeah, Teckla's experience matches mine.
i talked to a number of friends here in SF and was shocked how many were in favour of having apple remove the app. sure it's bigoted, etc, but censorship is not the answer.
"antograph" is a nifty interactive app written by scott snibbe back in 1998 and recently ported to the iDevices. it's a nice demo of some of the concepts of ant simulation.
i'd be pretty skeptical that the bits/kg of biological storage will come anywhere close to that of more traditional media anytime soon. i'm speculating, but i suspect that if you weighed the magnetic particles responsible for current HD technology they'd come in at way over 100GB/gram.
i've been thinking in 1024-byte kilobytes since i first cut my teeth on the sinclair-1000, so i have a fondness for that measure as well, but it's clearly bad practice to mis-use SI units. sure it'll mean a decade or a half of confusion, but i think we should all welcome a switch here, and use other names for 2^10, 2^20, etc.
according to wikipedia, Hetch Hetchy reservoir in california holds about 440,000 cubic decameters of water. 440,000 decameters^3 in liters = 440,000,000,000 liters = 440,000,000,000 kilograms = 440,000,000 metric tons of water
so the moon water estimate of 600,000,000 metric tons is about 1.4 x as large as Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Great for a research or industrial outpost for a couple decades, but small potatoes for popular colonization.
it's got a C++ - style syntax, is forgiving about lots of stuff, can do graphics, can do awesome 3D if there's an interest in that, and imo best of all, it's the most portable language going: it's easy to put your nephew's apps on the intertubes they're guaranteed to run on his friends' computers with no fuss, no muss.
your link to silverseek may have some relevant info, but it also has "sentences" like this: Just as gold miners have cast their geologists to the wind and pretty much eliminated their support structures to find and develop new properties, so haven't the copper miners. Now "they're" worried about a supply 'pinch' in 2006.
seriously, who wrote this ? "Organovo and strategic partner Invetech hope in 2010 to release a commercial version of their 3D organ printer capable of producing very basic tissues like blood vessels."
Re:I heard one of the ants in the experiment speak
on
Ants That Can Count
·
· Score: 1
> What I was trying to say is that counting usually involves numbers.
i would take a broad view of the word "counting" and define it as something like "the ability to remember and compare quantities", regardless of the presence or not of a theory of numbers.
with this view, the ants, the drummers, and the mamas w/ the puppies are all counting.
i am a scientist, but i'm not sure science is the right vehicle to explore that question with. science can provide input, such as "it develops a heartbeat at such-and-such a time" or "it first contemplates its soon-to-be navel at T = 20 weeks" or whatever, but it should obviously be up to [each] culture to interpret those data w/r/t deciding when it's human-enough-to-no-longer-be-abortable.
also, this seems like a well-trod and somewhat tedious subject, as well as totally off-topic.
Slashdot Mirror
interesting. noctilucent clouds have also been on the rise during the period of modern aircraft, and are also seen primarily towards polar latitudes.
i strenuously disagree that memory management is a boon to developer productivity.
in every single case where i've seen serious memory requirements meet garbage collection,
not only has performance suffered, but developers spend scads of time banging their heads against the black box of the GC.
i'm thinking specifically AS3 and Java.
imo GC is a lose-lose proposition:
either 1) you have serious memory requirements, in which case GC just gets in your way and you have to expend serious effort Working Around it,
or 2) you don't have serious memory requirements, in which case who gives a shit: leak the stuff. virtual memory is essentially infinite.
the only situation where the GC really helps are in long-running but memory-unintensive applications.
+1 dedicated computer.
that's exactly what i'm setting up for my mom for her personal online banking - a netbook running linux with strong injunctions from me to use it and only it for banking, in combo with separate email accounts for & only for banking. i admit i haven't done the same for myself, but i plan to soon. ordinarily there's no way any linux distro could survive in the hands of my mom, but if it's only used for connecting to a couple of sites, perhaps it has a chance.
i can code without my glasses, too,
but nobody would suggest they're not necessary.
thanks for doing that research.
yes, it's clear that you need to click "okay, install stuff" to have anything actually bad happen,
but because users are ignorant, clumsy, inattentive, etc, even getting to that point is a huge security flaw.
social engineering is a real danger, and the browser/OS need to do everything they can to help the user survive against it.
> I'm sure a bunch of people will install it, but there's nothing you can do about that.
that just seems like not facing the problem.
consider your grandmother who does her banking online.
how can you describe to her what's safe to install and what isn't ?
the legitimate OSX installer should never open up for something the user hasn't intended.
i had a very similar experience yesterday. was GISing in safari for "blanket octopus" and suddenly the osx installer was running. the offending file was also MacProtector.mpkg, which had been downloaded to the desktop.
i've been on osx for about two years, and just yesterday had my first malware experience, .mpkg which had been downloaded to my desktop. .mpkg was "MacProtector.mpkg". unfortunately i rm -rf'd without making an archive of it.
which is pretty much identical to Teckla's: i was in safari and followed a GIS link for "blanket octopus"
and clicked on one of the pictures, and got a pop-up browser with some "security scan in progres.." BS dialog.
no big deal.
but then the OSX package installer opened up, trying to install some obvious malware
downloading a file without my permission is already a total security fail, imo, but running the installer on it is beyond bad.
obviously i nixed the installer and power-cycled and so far haven't noticed anything untoward, but it's scary.
the name of the
- google shows a few hits for that. so, in short, yeah, Teckla's experience matches mine.
i talked to a number of friends here in SF and was shocked how many were in favour of having apple remove the app.
sure it's bigoted, etc, but censorship is not the answer.
how great would it be if /. automatically filtered stories which are about imagery but do not in fact have images in them.
http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/eclipse110104_solar_transit_33.jpg
disclosure: i know the author of the app.
"antograph" is a nifty interactive app written by scott snibbe back in 1998 and recently ported to the iDevices.
it's a nice demo of some of the concepts of ant simulation.
i'd be pretty skeptical that the bits/kg of biological storage will come anywhere close to that of more traditional media anytime soon.
i'm speculating, but i suspect that if you weighed the magnetic particles responsible for current HD technology they'd come in at way over 100GB/gram.
nobody wants this. it's a desperate attempt at creating a need and for once it's falling short.
every time someone tries to explain why QE is more exciting than what you just described, i'm never convinced.
i guess the "neat" thing here is just that the state of the two particles was preserved for so long.
interesting question.
the obvious answer seems to be that spacetime does not deform instantaneously in response to a distant mass.
i'd be hesitant to bring in inflation theory as evidence that spacetime can distend at speeds greater than c, since it's a pretty tenuous theory.
i've been thinking in 1024-byte kilobytes since i first cut my teeth on the sinclair-1000, so i have a fondness for that measure as well, but it's clearly bad practice to mis-use SI units. sure it'll mean a decade or a half of confusion, but i think we should all welcome a switch here, and use other names for 2^10, 2^20, etc.
according to wikipedia, Hetch Hetchy reservoir in california holds about 440,000 cubic decameters of water.
440,000 decameters^3 in liters = 440,000,000,000 liters
= 440,000,000,000 kilograms
= 440,000,000 metric tons of water
so the moon water estimate of 600,000,000 metric tons is about 1.4 x as large as Hetch Hetchy reservoir.
Great for a research or industrial outpost for a couple decades, but small potatoes for popular colonization.
+1 javascript.
it's got a C++ - style syntax,
is forgiving about lots of stuff,
can do graphics,
can do awesome 3D if there's an interest in that,
and imo best of all, it's the most portable language going: it's easy to put your nephew's apps on the intertubes they're guaranteed to run on his friends' computers with no fuss, no muss.
your link to silverseek may have some relevant info, but it also has "sentences" like this:
Just as gold miners have cast their geologists to the wind and pretty much eliminated their support structures to find and develop new properties, so haven't the copper miners. Now "they're" worried about a supply 'pinch' in 2006.
seriously, who wrote this ?
"Organovo and strategic partner Invetech hope in 2010 to release a commercial version of their 3D organ printer capable of producing very basic tissues like blood vessels."
i felt TFA had a rather stilted tone..
> What I was trying to say is that counting usually involves numbers.
i would take a broad view of the word "counting" and define it as something like "the ability to remember and compare quantities", regardless of the presence or not of a theory of numbers.
with this view, the ants, the drummers, and the mamas w/ the puppies are all counting.
i am a scientist,
but i'm not sure science is the right vehicle to explore that question with.
science can provide input, such as "it develops a heartbeat at such-and-such a time" or "it first contemplates its soon-to-be navel at T = 20 weeks" or whatever, but it should obviously be up to [each] culture to interpret those data w/r/t deciding when it's human-enough-to-no-longer-be-abortable.
also, this seems like a well-trod and somewhat tedious subject, as well as totally off-topic.
.. let's weaponize the shit out of implausability !
or better, write software that can deal with the timer wrapping around. it's not that hard.