That is total 100% delusion. My 9 year old have a eeepc netbook, running Ubuntu. I am ashamed of the poor user experience.
One example among many: when an app freezes (and wine apps do freeze often), the close box doesn't do anything, there is no "right-click/kill app", and no key combo gives you a way to kill the app. My 9child told me that, in those case, he would just reboot the netbook. I had to run a Terminal and launch xkill. Ugly. And I had to manually add a "kill app" widget to the gnome toolbar.
Everything is like that on the netbook. Firefox is sloooow as hell, the gnome panel is incredibly hard to configure. I could rant for hours, but at the end, the linux desktop sucks badly.
And your are doing a disservice to the community by pretending that the desktop is superior to windows. It is full of bug, and each new version bring more bugs and bloat.
It is pretty hard to get any kind of context that would make his original sentence un-moronic.
> or it implicitly sponsors murder by eventually releasing them and allowing some to inevitably kill again.
That makes no sense. With that kind of reasoning, I could say that, if the state don't kill every baby at birth, it is implicitly sponsoring murder, because some babies will grow up as murderers.
It is not that murder is acceptable, it is just that state cannot prevent it. Not exactly the same, by any stretch of imagination.
Thank you very much, but I don't want you to break up you collection of Juvenile Commenter Awards, even if I can understand that it start to take quite a big amount of space...
The ruling party don't want to have a real voting, because it will impose members to be specific on an issue that they know is not popular. Hence, they choose to use a way where only the members present vote, which is ridiculous.
The head of the session choose, at any time, to call for a vote, and only the present deputy.
Opposition party members saw that there wasn't a lot of right-wing party members, so they called other members, and *hide* behind a curtain, until the vote was called. At that very moment they entered the hemicycle (the voting place) and outnumbered the others.
Yes. That is my tax euros at work. Ridiculous. They are supposed to be 580, and only 40 were present for that fundamental vote. And they are paid >10K euro per month. All of them.
Of course, the govt will put the text again in a couple of weeks, and will be careful to have maximum of right-wing party present.
And I don't trust all left-wing to be present to vote no: they already failed to vote against sarkozy on the latest european treaty (which was rejected by the population, and passed by the elected "representatives" with the help of the left [they needed 2/3rd for that one]).
> If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the debacle is neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since the US had very little to do with it
If you actually believe that, you should spend some time doing research before posting about issues you don't know anything about. Sincerely.
Oh, and you are the one that said "Don't kid yourself - murder is acceptable in every country" in another thread. Yeah.
So, you are NOT American, but you seem to try to be act as like an even worse caricature of their right-wing extremists. Aren't you Canadian, by chance ?
> They removed the DRM from Sims 3 and just released a tool to retroactively remove DRM from older games.
Uh ? Did you actually _read_ the article ? They offer you a tool to deactivate *computers*, so you can install the game again. They didn't removed DRM.
PS: I bought one game with SecuROM. I will never ever buy any game with DRM.
So, we agree, creationism could ONLY be presented as a counter example, to show what science is not.
However, in that case, I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or the Invisible Pink Unicorn) would be a more appropriate example, as a science classroom is not a place to bash religion.
> While I think the evangelical movement is disturbing I don't think their views should be silenced
Their view are not science, and should not be even addressed in a science classroom. There should be no mention of creationism in a biology book. Maybe in a generic science book, as a counter-example to show what untestable stuff is.
They can have theological courses, full of creationism, and other untestable "theories".
Well, I didn't dig into the details of that guy's post, I was just too lazy to try to remember all the issues I had with memory fragmentation on windows, a few years ago (About his post, I think wanted to say 'libc' instead of 'os'. also his "possibly hitting virtual memory" is wrong, as it has nothing to do with allocation, in particular because windows overcommit memory)
Anyway, to make a long story short, we had a software that failed with exhausted memory, after hours of running, but I couldn't find any memory leak. I spent a few nights working on the issue, and finally discovered that the windows heap became fragmented.
Note that the memory exhaustion wasn't a physical memory exhaustion, but address space exhaustion.
It came from the fact that we had several memory usage patterns that clashed together.
* A lot of temporary allocation in loops, that were only partially removed after loop execution (ie: a few allocation were not temporary). Something like:
loop 1000 time
50 temporary allocations
1 non temporary allocation end loop remove temporary allocations
At the end, you easily end up with memory where you use a few bytes every Ks.
* data structures that doubled their size when filled, code like:
add_byte: aByte
if not enough space
allocate twice the space
copy data structure
delete previous data
end if
append byte at the end.
This made the application ask for larger and larger contiguous blocks of memory, so, after a few hours, we could easily ask for allocation for say 100 megabytes, but the heap was composed of hundred of thousands of very little allocations scattered apart, and the 100Mb allocation failed even if we the total of allocated memory was, say, 400mb. (We scatter those all over the 31 bits address space reserved for the app. 31 because we couldn't use large address space and were limited to 2Gb).
Using the Windows Low Fragmentation Heap was not an option, as the app was running on Win2k.
...by not forwarding his email to his current address.
"I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things."
He'll probably learn about the missed opportunity by reading slashdot...
While the original poster is nonsensical, don't think that virtual memory magically takes care of fragmentation. I had programs fails under windows, due to memory fragmentation.
> It is actually, now more then ever, in the government's best interest for AIG to make every attempt to go after any and all money it can, from all sources.
So, you're saying that it seems correct that the government sues itself for money ?
Mmm. Why not ? I must confess that insanity sorta make sense these days...
Retention bonuses are a way to pay someone something, with a better tax structure, and without having it correlated to any kind of performance. I have seen money given to people under the pretense of "retention bonuses", where the guys that signed the contract had already resigned. The company was just buying silence/goodwill in that case.
In another case I saw, the company fucked the guy over, and, to avoid a delicate and deadly judicial mess, paid him a retention bonus while he was leaving.
Note that, in those cases, the company paid those bonuses over two years...
I am not a specialist in "retentions bonuses", but the few I saw were not retention, just loopholes exploitation. I bet AIG's ones were of that kind. I mean, if a company really wants to retain someone, it gives him a objective-based bonus, structured as such he gets a big bonus even if the evaluation is biased. Or, simpler, just give the guy a big salary...
> > So if I buy fire insurance on your house, am I gambling?
> Yes, you are. You are betting on it burning down, while the insurance company is betting against that outcome.
No you aren't. You are just refusing to take a specific risk (in that case, the risk of losing all you assets in a fire). So you are paying someone to take that risk away from you.
(Furthermore, my house is insured. But you can be sure as hell that I am NOT betting that it will burn, in the sense that I would lose A LOT of irreplaceable stuff, and my family would suffer quite a big traumatic stress)
Like all risk situations, the one buying risk must be very careful in pricing it. In particular, he should be careful that the risks in his portfolio are not correlated. That is, events must be mostly independent of each others. If there is a greater cause (say a war) that causes most of the houses he insures to be burnt, the insurer should write into the contract that this risk is not taken into account (because that is not the risk he is taking), or HE is gambling.
Why ? Because the insurer must put assets in front of each of the risk insured. If your house is worth 400K$, and there is a 1/100000 chance of it buring during the life of your contract, he should put aside roughly 4$ for your contract. If he doesn't do that,. he IS gambling.
Of course, AIG was guilty of undervaluation of the price of credit risk, because they choose to ignore the risk of a financial collapse WHILE INSURING AGAINST IT. Furthermore, as they under-evaluated the risks, they didn't allocate the assets to cover it...
The very very funny thing in all this is that Europe implemented a regulatory framework for banks, called Basel 2, that US refused to follow (because, you know, regulation is bad for businesses). Under that accord, banks have very stringent credit risk disclosure requirements, and need to allocate capital for such risk with very specific rules. As a way to avoid freezing such amount of capital, banks had the idea to sell the risk to insurance companies. Of course, in Europe, insurance companies have the same kind of regulatory framework that is slowly put in place (this one is called Solvency II). So, guess what ? US banks and financial companies were pretty quick to "steal that business", thanks to their lacks of regulation...
The only ones that were gambling here were the insurance companies.
> Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?
Based on what I read in google gmail labs groups:
"Google could've at least sent a warning to our emails. If google comes up with something like this in the future and it is actually stable, all of us(customers) who purchased this free infinite SMS messaging, should recieve the future app FREE.",
I'd say that some of those customers have the letters M-O-R-O-N painter on their foreheads...
Slashdot Mirror
> while we may have superiority on the desktop
That is total 100% delusion. My 9 year old have a eeepc netbook, running Ubuntu. I am ashamed of the poor user experience.
One example among many: when an app freezes (and wine apps do freeze often), the close box doesn't do anything, there is no "right-click/kill app", and no key combo gives you a way to kill the app. My 9child told me that, in those case, he would just reboot the netbook. I had to run a Terminal and launch xkill. Ugly. And I had to manually add a "kill app" widget to the gnome toolbar.
Everything is like that on the netbook. Firefox is sloooow as hell, the gnome panel is incredibly hard to configure. I could rant for hours, but at the end, the linux desktop sucks badly.
And your are doing a disservice to the community by pretending that the desktop is superior to windows. It is full of bug, and each new version bring more bugs and bloat.
It is pretty hard to get any kind of context that would make his original sentence un-moronic.
> or it implicitly sponsors murder by eventually releasing them and allowing some to inevitably kill again.
That makes no sense. With that kind of reasoning, I could say that, if the state don't kill every baby at birth, it is implicitly sponsoring murder, because some babies will grow up as murderers.
It is not that murder is acceptable, it is just that state cannot prevent it. Not exactly the same, by any stretch of imagination.
+1. I can't understand how anybody can be proud of such an action.
Thank you very much, but I don't want you to break up you collection of Juvenile Commenter Awards, even if I can understand that it start to take quite a big amount of space...
I don't like Sarkozy at all, but I don't think he really is a big user of the 49.3 article:
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/connaissance/stat-49-3.pdf
(now, passing the European treaty despite the rejection of the referendum, that was a total negation of democracy...)
The ruling party don't want to have a real voting, because it will impose members to be specific on an issue that they know is not popular. Hence, they choose to use a way where only the members present vote, which is ridiculous.
The head of the session choose, at any time, to call for a vote, and only the present deputy.
Opposition party members saw that there wasn't a lot of right-wing party members, so they called other members, and *hide* behind a curtain, until the vote was called. At that very moment they entered the hemicycle (the voting place) and outnumbered the others.
Yes. That is my tax euros at work. Ridiculous. They are supposed to be 580, and only 40 were present for that fundamental vote. And they are paid >10K euro per month. All of them.
Of course, the govt will put the text again in a couple of weeks, and will be careful to have maximum of right-wing party present.
And I don't trust all left-wing to be present to vote no: they already failed to vote against sarkozy on the latest european treaty (which was rejected by the population, and passed by the elected "representatives" with the help of the left [they needed 2/3rd for that one]).
> If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the debacle is neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since the US had very little to do with it
If you actually believe that, you should spend some time doing research before posting about issues you don't know anything about. Sincerely.
Oh, and you are the one that said "Don't kid yourself - murder is acceptable in every country" in another thread. Yeah.
So, you are NOT American, but you seem to try to be act as like an even worse caricature of their right-wing extremists. Aren't you Canadian, by chance ?
> Besides! This is Slashdot! No one ever reads TFA! :)
Fair enough. I concur that if people start reading articles, /. won't be /. anymore.
Congrats for you +5 score, thought. Moderators don't read articles either, anyway...
Yes. And ?
Sure. Communist China or ex-USSR invading or nuking Communist North Korea...
You are not fan of geopolitical plausibility, are you ?
> So instead, you go to the pickle factory in the middle of the night and steal a jar?
Almost. He goes to the factory at night and "steal" a COPY of the jar.
Weird, isn't it ?
> The very *existence* of North Korea is, itself, a giant example of nuclear powers showing immense restraint
You mean that the fact that the US didn't invade a sovereign foreign country with no reasons means that it showed "immense restraint" ?
I don't think words have the same meaning to both of us, so don't bother replying.
> They removed the DRM from Sims 3 and just released a tool to retroactively remove DRM from older games.
Uh ? Did you actually _read_ the article ? They offer you a tool to deactivate *computers*, so you can install the game again. They didn't removed DRM.
PS: I bought one game with SecuROM. I will never ever buy any game with DRM.
So, we agree, creationism could ONLY be presented as a counter example, to show what science is not.
However, in that case, I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or the Invisible Pink Unicorn) would be a more appropriate example, as a science classroom is not a place to bash religion.
> While I think the evangelical movement is disturbing I don't think their views should be silenced
Their view are not science, and should not be even addressed in a science classroom. There should be no mention of creationism in a biology book. Maybe in a generic science book, as a counter-example to show what untestable stuff is.
They can have theological courses, full of creationism, and other untestable "theories".
Well, I didn't dig into the details of that guy's post, I was just too lazy to try to remember all the issues I had with memory fragmentation on windows, a few years ago (About his post, I think wanted to say 'libc' instead of 'os'. also his "possibly hitting virtual memory" is wrong, as it has nothing to do with allocation, in particular because windows overcommit memory)
Anyway, to make a long story short, we had a software that failed with exhausted memory, after hours of running, but I couldn't find any memory leak. I spent a few nights working on the issue, and finally discovered that the windows heap became fragmented.
Note that the memory exhaustion wasn't a physical memory exhaustion, but address space exhaustion.
It came from the fact that we had several memory usage patterns that clashed together.
* A lot of temporary allocation in loops, that were only partially removed after loop execution (ie: a few allocation were not temporary). Something like:
loop 1000 time
50 temporary allocations
1 non temporary allocation
end loop
remove temporary allocations
At the end, you easily end up with memory where you use a few bytes every Ks.
* data structures that doubled their size when filled, code like:
add_byte: aByte
if not enough space
allocate twice the space
copy data structure
delete previous data
end if
append byte at the end.
This made the application ask for larger and larger contiguous blocks of memory, so, after a few hours, we could easily ask for allocation for say 100 megabytes, but the heap was composed of hundred of thousands of very little allocations scattered apart, and the 100Mb allocation failed even if we the total of allocated memory was, say, 400mb. (We scatter those all over the 31 bits address space reserved for the app. 31 because we couldn't use large address space and were limited to 2Gb).
Using the Windows Low Fragmentation Heap was not an option, as the app was running on Win2k.
See http://www.abstraction.net/content/articles/memory%20management%20options%20in%20win32.htm for a better article on CRT Heaps.
Cheers,
...by not forwarding his email to his current address.
"I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things."
He'll probably learn about the missed opportunity by reading slashdot...
While the original poster is nonsensical, don't think that virtual memory magically takes care of fragmentation. I had programs fails under windows, due to memory fragmentation.
See http://xania.org/200512/crt-heap-fragmentation-in-windows for an example of memory fragmentation.
> "Here's a bonus tacked on to the top of your salary. It is earmarked for you to spend on our competitors' products. What am I missing?
The PR disaster, of course.
> He was talking about YOU buying fire insurance for HIS house
Sorry, missed that. I wholeheartedly agree with you, then.
Naked CDS are gambling plain and simple. They should never ever have been allowed as a financial instrument.
At least, in a classic derivative market, you have margin calls that will bankrupt the speculator, while with CDS, well, it is the Far West...
> It is actually, now more then ever, in the government's best interest for AIG to make every attempt to go after any and all money it can, from all sources.
So, you're saying that it seems correct that the government sues itself for money ?
Mmm. Why not ? I must confess that insanity sorta make sense these days...
Retention bonuses are a way to pay someone something, with a better tax structure, and without having it correlated to any kind of performance. I have seen money given to people under the pretense of "retention bonuses", where the guys that signed the contract had already resigned. The company was just buying silence/goodwill in that case.
In another case I saw, the company fucked the guy over, and, to avoid a delicate and deadly judicial mess, paid him a retention bonus while he was leaving.
Note that, in those cases, the company paid those bonuses over two years...
I am not a specialist in "retentions bonuses", but the few I saw were not retention, just loopholes exploitation. I bet AIG's ones were of that kind.
I mean, if a company really wants to retain someone, it gives him a objective-based bonus, structured as such he gets a big bonus even if the evaluation is biased. Or, simpler, just give the guy a big salary...
> > So if I buy fire insurance on your house, am I gambling?
> Yes, you are. You are betting on it burning down, while the insurance company is betting against that outcome.
No you aren't. You are just refusing to take a specific risk (in that case, the risk of losing all you assets in a fire). So you are paying someone to take that risk away from you.
(Furthermore, my house is insured. But you can be sure as hell that I am NOT betting that it will burn, in the sense that I would lose A LOT of irreplaceable stuff, and my family would suffer quite a big traumatic stress)
Like all risk situations, the one buying risk must be very careful in pricing it. In particular, he should be careful that the risks in his portfolio are not correlated. That is, events must be mostly independent of each others. If there is a greater cause (say a war) that causes most of the houses he insures to be burnt, the insurer should write into the contract that this risk is not taken into account (because that is not the risk he is taking), or HE is gambling.
Why ? Because the insurer must put assets in front of each of the risk insured. If your house is worth 400K$, and there is a 1/100000 chance of it buring during the life of your contract, he should put aside roughly 4$ for your contract. If he doesn't do that,. he IS gambling.
Of course, AIG was guilty of undervaluation of the price of credit risk, because they choose to ignore the risk of a financial collapse WHILE INSURING AGAINST IT. Furthermore, as they under-evaluated the risks, they didn't allocate the assets to cover it...
The very very funny thing in all this is that Europe implemented a regulatory framework for banks, called Basel 2, that US refused to follow (because, you know, regulation is bad for businesses). Under that accord, banks have very stringent credit risk disclosure requirements, and need to allocate capital for such risk with very specific rules. As a way to avoid freezing such amount of capital, banks had the idea to sell the risk to insurance companies. Of course, in Europe, insurance companies have the same kind of regulatory framework that is slowly put in place (this one is called Solvency II). So, guess what ? US banks and financial companies were pretty quick to "steal that business", thanks to their lacks of regulation...
The only ones that were gambling here were the insurance companies.
Smashing is not vey efficient. One can do a much better job...
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
> Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?
Based on what I read in google gmail labs groups:
"Google could've at least sent a warning to our emails. If google comes
up with something like this in the future and it is actually stable,
all of us(customers) who purchased this free infinite SMS messaging,
should recieve the future app FREE.",
I'd say that some of those customers have the letters M-O-R-O-N painter on their foreheads...