Waterboarding might not be a walk in the park, but it's been applied to three people who were known to be high-level terrorists.
Now, where's the "-1 Naïve" when you need it.
Hopefully you meant this as some sort of sick joke. If not, you really owe it to yourself to go watch the award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The passages below are taken from an article in The Washington Post.
In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who'd never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.
He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.
Researchers at Human Rights First have categorized more than 70 detainee deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as homicides linked to gross recklessness, abuse or torture.
Actually they aren't the biggest thieves, how about $5900 for 1m of low-bandwidth data cable? It puzzles me somewhat that no one has sued the so called high-end audio cable industry for fraud and false advertising.
One thing that really puzzles me is how the shift toward digital signals hasn't changed anything at all.
One should think that the advent of the PC would have made people more tech savy, realizing that cheap hardware will do the job just fine, but apparently you can still find someone willing to pay
$5900 for 1m low-bandwidth data cable.
Perhaps it's the same fool who'd already bought the $4600 power cable.
[...] money that could have been spent on something like finding cleaner sources of energy or battling rising food prices, will now be spent on trying to support OOXML
Uh, tread carefully now. Applying the same logic you could argue that one Linux distribution would suffice, one window manager would suffice, one television network would suffice, one Democratic presidential candidate would suffice;-)
It's the nature of any competition: along with diversity comes a rich supply of dead ends and wasted efforts. Yet, hasn't history proved that this is a price we should be willing to pay?
There may be many reasons to object to OOXML being approved as an ISO standard, but the fact that the Open Document Standard already exists is not a valid one. The dominant position of Microsoft's office applications makes the Microsoft formats de facto standards; a fact that ISO cannot ignore.
Let the market decide. If indeed OOXML is an abomination then it won't be with us for long.
Bill Gates campaigned in Denmark, where he is a friend of the Prime Minister.
WTF?!
Whoever gave you that idea? As far as I recall, Bill Gates has only met with the Danish Prime Minister once. That happened back in the days when the EU discussed software patents, and the tone was supposedly less than friendly: Gates tried to Blackmail Danish Government
Free as in Freedom may also be found online for free (as in beer)...in case anyone didn't know already.
As for software patents, I personally object to the very concept of granting individuals exclusive rights to ideas. Software patents are an abomination and should be abolished all together. I fail to see why it should change anything that the applicant is an open source business.
[...] the damage is largely contained to the data in the user's directory.
True, but the user data _is_ the very thing you want to protect.
Feel free to mess up anything you find below C:\Windows, I'll at most be annoyed, everything in there can be replaced. However, the day you start leaking my personal data...
Someone wiser than I once said: Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. I find it hard to believe that there's any evil scheme behind this alleged violation.
The Linux community - or should I say the GNU/Linux community to emphasize my point - has always been fragmented. You might consider this a weakness, I however would say that the very lack of a single 'head' is one of the major strengths of the community.
Furthermore, you are aware that Asus and Microsoft are two different companies?
Oh, the moderation got stripped anyway, so there's no point in hiding behind Mr Anonymous Coward, so allow me to repost unmasked:
Being one of the two moderators who deemed the GP worthy of a +1 insightful, allow me to elaborate:
You state that the kernel developers are largely from these corporations.
No, the GP never made such claims. The GP however rejected the widespread myth that Linux is created by a rag tag band of volunteer programmers.
Figuring out who's behind the contributions is no easy task and requires a lot of digging, a quick scan of the changelog won't provide you with any trustworthy numbers.
Actual numbers are few and far between, but back in February LWN.net conducted a study "Who wrote 2.6.20?" and dared - after some hesitation - to conclude that:
Either way, the results come out about the same: at least 65% of the code which went into 2.6.20 was created by people working for companies. If the entire "unknown" group turns out to be developers working on a volunteer basis - an unlikely result - then just over 1/3 of the 2.6.20 patch stream was written by volunteers. The real number will be lower, but it still shows that a significant portion of the code we run is written by developers who are donating their time.
The book [...] teaches how to create simple and complex databases, as well as how to let a database grow from simple to complex.
Trust me, you don't need to read a book to make that happen;-)
But back onto the topic: Of course you're right, no book will suit everyone in the
audience. But, does the world really need any more reviews of
"Teach yourself <insert a dicipline it'll take you a life-time to master properly> in
<insert a ridiculous short amount of time>",
reviewed by absolute beginners?
There's plenty of such books, finding them really isn't that hard.
The difficult part is finding the real gems, those books that'll bring you
further once you've gotten the basics right.
Does anyone around here know of any numbers backing up the claimed high values for MTBF? I'm not unwilling to accept that the values are indeed high, but I'm looking for something closer to reality than the Wikipedia article arriving at an expected lifetime of 26,600 years.
The flash memory modules I've encountered have guaranteed a minimum of 100.000 write cycles per data memory byte before failure (NDAs prohibit me from listing the specific devices, but I suspect that this number is nothing out of the ordinary).
With a page size of 1024 bytes, a 64GB drive would hold 64 million pages.
If we assume that all updates require a full page erase-write, but that a clever algorithm distributes updates evenly, this leaves us with a guaranteed life-time of 6.4 * 10^12 (6,400,000,000,000) updates before memory failures start rolling in.
That's without doubt more than sufficient for desktop usage, but let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years.
Now, assuming that you're able to feed the drive at 100MB/s is probably way off, but on the other hand your wear levelling algorithm will probably be far from perfect.
this is not what current generation of typical user would do, but I believe they should be educated on this anyway
Reeducate the user, you say. Surely you must be joking, right?
Let's ignore for a moment that Leopard may have a few bugs that will have to be ironed out. That's only to be expected with *_any_* newly released OS and the reason why no sane person would ever dare to update the OS on a mission critical machine within the first few months of the release.
However, if you can't rely on your OS to perform a simple file move without risking data corruption, then the right solution is definitely not to verify every single operation by hand. Automating tedious tasks is exactly what computers do best, and that the OS ensures the integrity of the copy before throwing away the original is definitely something you should expect.
And as for the battle with the Open Source Consortium? "The 12 people who demonstrated outside our offices have every right to demonstrate," says Ashfield. "But I think 'the 12 people' says it all."
Highfield used the numbers of non-Windows users visiting bbc.co.uk as justification for the corporation's XP-only release. "We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users."
No, please don't. Please stop your trolling. Please refrain from dragging MS into each and every discussion. It only derails the discussion and lowers the overall quality of this site.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the limitations of the Express version as well as of the cost of the professional versions. While not as rich on features as its siblings, the Express versions are in fact rather powerful. If you really can't do with the Express version, then you're most likely a professional developer and the $700 per license won't matter anyway.
Yes, as the Jamie Cansdale story illustrates, the license is not without restrictions. Btw. if I remember the story right Jamie Cansdale was selling a unit test add-in for the Express version - I'm slightly puzzled though, the Express version works nicely with the NUnit framework which is open source and free. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of open source build tools developed for VS that'll work nicely with the Express edition, e.g. NAnt and CruiseControl.NET (I'll leave it to you to do the google'ing).
Ah, you're one of these googler-linkers, where you find a post, pick out tiny things, take 2 minutes to google it, and then post a link, as if to prove a point.
Eh? No. I was just somewhat puzzled by the "insightful" moderation (quite a lot puzzled actually) and chose to comment on a few of the points where we obviously disagree, providing links to relevant information in case you actually cared.
I really don't know why I'm trying to explain it to you; I don't live in your black and white world.
But if you compare it to Windows, it looks very open, and open source friendly.
Sorry, but as long as OSX refuses to install on anything but Apple hardware it doesn't look open to me at all. I fail to see why it should matter whether or not it's partly derived from an open source distribution.
To those who'd like to know how this is done: You'll find the source code for the 'hack' here. Be aware though that it relies on an older version of the Windows SDK and you'll need to tweak a header file or two, but you'll find all the missing details in the h2vista thread (as well as a bit of noise).
I can't comment on the quality of ATI's *nix drivers, but FWIW I've never had any trouble with their win32 drivers. My x800xt has served me well the last three years and it still ticks on nicely.
However, much to my regret the ATI of today seems to be a mere shadow of its former self. Given ATI's failure to meet expected release dates with the last two generations, the somewhat disappointing performance of both families when finally released, and the latest string of stories of senior employees signing off, I can't help but think of Netscape's fall from grace and Jamie Zawinski's letter of resignation:
The magic was gone, as the magicians had either moved on to more compelling companies, or were having their voices lost in the din of the crowd [...]
JWZ of course wrote the piece before Firefox saw the light of dawn, so...
Slashdot Mirror
Now, where's the "-1 Naïve" when you need it.
Hopefully you meant this as some sort of sick joke. If not, you really owe it to yourself to go watch the award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The passages below are taken from an article in The Washington Post.
In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who'd never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.
He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.
Researchers at Human Rights First have categorized more than 70 detainee deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as homicides linked to gross recklessness, abuse or torture.
Are you thereby implying that ">>", "<<", "++", and "--" are?
I'd say we're already there: ...that was the point"
Barack Obama: "I inhaled frequently
and Schwarzenegger has never really tried to hide his past.
Monster continues to charge up towards $100
Actually they aren't the biggest thieves, how about $5900 for 1m of low-bandwidth data cable? It puzzles me somewhat that no one has sued the so called high-end audio cable industry for fraud and false advertising.
One thing that really puzzles me is how the shift toward digital signals hasn't changed anything at all.
One should think that the advent of the PC would have made people more tech savy, realizing that cheap hardware will do the job just fine, but apparently you can still find someone willing to pay $5900 for 1m low-bandwidth data cable.
Perhaps it's the same fool who'd already bought the $4600 power cable.
[...] money that could have been spent on something like finding cleaner sources of energy or battling rising food prices, will now be spent on trying to support OOXML
Uh, tread carefully now. Applying the same logic you could argue that one Linux distribution would suffice, one window manager would suffice, one television network would suffice, one Democratic presidential candidate would suffice ;-)
It's the nature of any competition: along with diversity comes a rich supply of dead ends and wasted efforts. Yet, hasn't history proved that this is a price we should be willing to pay?
There may be many reasons to object to OOXML being approved as an ISO standard, but the fact that the Open Document Standard already exists is not a valid one. The dominant position of Microsoft's office applications makes the Microsoft formats de facto standards; a fact that ISO cannot ignore.
Let the market decide. If indeed OOXML is an abomination then it won't be with us for long.
Software chosen by government tends to trickle down to corporations
Perhaps in Soviet Russia ;)
In the rest of the world it usually works the other way round.
You're joking right? If you consider that a proof then I've got a surprise for you.
WTF?!
Whoever gave you that idea? As far as I recall, Bill Gates has only met with the Danish Prime Minister once. That happened back in the days when the EU discussed software patents, and the tone was supposedly less than friendly: Gates tried to Blackmail Danish Government
Free as in Freedom may also be found online for free (as in beer) ...in case anyone didn't know already.
As for software patents, I personally object to the very concept of granting individuals exclusive rights to ideas. Software patents are an abomination and should be abolished all together. I fail to see why it should change anything that the applicant is an open source business.
We need a way to classify [...] software that installs other products that the user would not expect to be installed
Why invent a new term; wouldn't malware fit pretty well ?
[...] the damage is largely contained to the data in the user's directory.
True, but the user data _is_ the very thing you want to protect.
Feel free to mess up anything you find below C:\Windows, I'll at most be annoyed, everything in there can be replaced. However, the day you start leaking my personal data...
Another modern classic: What if Google search had been designed by the guys behind Windows Search
"Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search"
Someone wiser than I once said: Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. I find it hard to believe that there's any evil scheme behind this alleged violation.
The Linux community - or should I say the GNU/Linux community to emphasize my point - has always been fragmented. You might consider this a weakness, I however would say that the very lack of a single 'head' is one of the major strengths of the community.
Furthermore, you are aware that Asus and Microsoft are two different companies?
Oh, the moderation got stripped anyway, so there's no point in hiding behind Mr Anonymous Coward, so allow me to repost unmasked:
Being one of the two moderators who deemed the GP worthy of a +1 insightful, allow me to elaborate:
No, the GP never made such claims. The GP however rejected the widespread myth that Linux is created by a rag tag band of volunteer programmers.
Figuring out who's behind the contributions is no easy task and requires a lot of digging, a quick scan of the changelog won't provide you with any trustworthy numbers.
Actual numbers are few and far between, but back in February LWN.net conducted a study "Who wrote 2.6.20?" and dared - after some hesitation - to conclude that:
Trust me, you don't need to read a book to make that happen ;-)
But back onto the topic: Of course you're right, no book will suit everyone in the audience. But, does the world really need any more reviews of "Teach yourself <insert a dicipline it'll take you a life-time to master properly> in <insert a ridiculous short amount of time>", reviewed by absolute beginners? There's plenty of such books, finding them really isn't that hard. The difficult part is finding the real gems, those books that'll bring you further once you've gotten the basics right.
Does anyone around here know of any numbers backing up the claimed high values for MTBF? I'm not unwilling to accept that the values are indeed high, but I'm looking for something closer to reality than the Wikipedia article arriving at an expected lifetime of 26,600 years.
The flash memory modules I've encountered have guaranteed a minimum of 100.000 write cycles per data memory byte before failure (NDAs prohibit me from listing the specific devices, but I suspect that this number is nothing out of the ordinary).
With a page size of 1024 bytes, a 64GB drive would hold 64 million pages. If we assume that all updates require a full page erase-write, but that a clever algorithm distributes updates evenly, this leaves us with a guaranteed life-time of 6.4 * 10^12 (6,400,000,000,000) updates before memory failures start rolling in.
That's without doubt more than sufficient for desktop usage, but let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years.
Now, assuming that you're able to feed the drive at 100MB/s is probably way off, but on the other hand your wear levelling algorithm will probably be far from perfect.
Reeducate the user, you say. Surely you must be joking, right?
Let's ignore for a moment that Leopard may have a few bugs that will have to be ironed out. That's only to be expected with *_any_* newly released OS and the reason why no sane person would ever dare to update the OS on a mission critical machine within the first few months of the release.
However, if you can't rely on your OS to perform a simple file move without risking data corruption, then the right solution is definitely not to verify every single operation by hand. Automating tedious tasks is exactly what computers do best, and that the OS ensures the integrity of the copy before throwing away the original is definitely something you should expect.
From TFA:
Eventually it will get to a level when it is usable by professional people
Assuming of course that their requirements are the same ten years from now.
Discuss...
No, please don't. Please stop your trolling. Please refrain from dragging MS into each and every discussion. It only derails the discussion and lowers the overall quality of this site.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the limitations of the Express version as well as of the cost of the professional versions. While not as rich on features as its siblings, the Express versions are in fact rather powerful. If you really can't do with the Express version, then you're most likely a professional developer and the $700 per license won't matter anyway.
Yes, as the Jamie Cansdale story illustrates, the license is not without restrictions. Btw. if I remember the story right Jamie Cansdale was selling a unit test add-in for the Express version - I'm slightly puzzled though, the Express version works nicely with the NUnit framework which is open source and free. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of open source build tools developed for VS that'll work nicely with the Express edition, e.g. NAnt and CruiseControl.NET (I'll leave it to you to do the google'ing).
Ah, you're one of these googler-linkers, where you find a post, pick out tiny things, take 2 minutes to google it, and then post a link, as if to prove a point.
Eh? No. I was just somewhat puzzled by the "insightful" moderation (quite a lot puzzled actually) and chose to comment on a few of the points where we obviously disagree, providing links to relevant information in case you actually cared.
QFT :)
Sorry, but as long as OSX refuses to install on anything but Apple hardware it doesn't look open to me at all. I fail to see why it should matter whether or not it's partly derived from an open source distribution.
And so would Office 2007 had Adobe not threatened to take legal action.
You probably haven't been looking?
To those who'd like to know how this is done: You'll find the source code for the 'hack' here. Be aware though that it relies on an older version of the Windows SDK and you'll need to tweak a header file or two, but you'll find all the missing details in the h2vista thread (as well as a bit of noise).
I can't comment on the quality of ATI's *nix drivers, but FWIW I've never had any trouble with their win32 drivers. My x800xt has served me well the last three years and it still ticks on nicely.
However, much to my regret the ATI of today seems to be a mere shadow of its former self. Given ATI's failure to meet expected release dates with the last two generations, the somewhat disappointing performance of both families when finally released, and the latest string of stories of senior employees signing off, I can't help but think of Netscape's fall from grace and Jamie Zawinski's letter of resignation:
JWZ of course wrote the piece before Firefox saw the light of dawn, so...