At at the origin of the AK clatter...
...there will be Captain America, souvenir-hunting.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
We are used to having the US presidents and their assorted court jesters and sycophants doing one or several of the following:
0) Criminally inflaming patriotic jingoism out of pure stupidity
1) Mass murder on a colossal scale because they just feel like it (last one did for at least 1'000'000 sand denizens I hear; counter still going up)
2) Destruction of public property on a colossal scale (small fish start at 30'000 USD per US citizen of cash burnt)
3) Creation of economic instability of enormous proportions (bubbles, inflation and the whole shebang)
4) Nepotism that make Nero blush (small fish start at several hundred billion USD)
5) Fomenting wars and right-wing takeovers in faraway countries that are not even on a US-centric map (latest is something called "Georgia"; whatever it is, anyone in there soon will be dead)
6) Generally behaving like they need .45 Aspirin
SO WHO CARES ABOUT THE SHIRTS!
"If you didn't try to fragment the JVM world Sun would be more approachable."
Stop talking outta your nether regions and stop calling for abject obeisance and communist party style votes.If they have a beef with Sun's political or technical agenda, they can say so.
"On another note, stop biting the hand that feeds, morons!"
Because they are sponsoring the servers: http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
Still clutching at the "credit crisis" straw? After all the printing/pumping of fresh money into anything that looks sickly and with interest rates going down to zero (aka. "economic suicide"), claiming this is a "credit crisis" is like claiming your patient, passing out from blood loss, is probably suffering kind of poisoning and might be in need of leeches. To me it looks like an "amortisation crisis", with the right-hand side of the balance sheets all going into the red zone (leaving only debt) simply because most of the goodies we pretended to have on our left-hand side of the balance sheets turned out to be actually wortheless.
But yeah, I suspect that when this is over, Western IT might have to deal with manuals in Mandarin instead of the other way round.
As expected and as seen time and again in history, a diarrhea of meaningless legalese is being used to justify whatever power upwardly mobile sociopaths deem just and proper to arrogate themselves. I'm sadly afraid one cannot hope for some Dubya-style Texan Terminal Justice for these "legal experts", but a cushy post at the American Enterprise Institute or a professorship at UC Berkeley cannot be considered just punishment.
"all crisp bags with the same brand and expiration date would be pulled from its shelves"
Because the other two supervisors also lost their phones at the same exact moment.
Waiting for the activation of ambulance-chasing lawyers to liberate a few million USD because of "irreparable psychological harm" to the end consumer.
"He said it was important for companies to continue to spend on R&D and upgrade plant so that they are positioned to take advantage of the upturn when it does come."
Only if you have enough capital stashed away (which is wise) to "upgrade plant" while the customer is staying away, waiting for better times. If this is not the case, you may well turn up on the auction block while the recession is still going on.
>> Hum ... now where did I save the Nuke warhead blueprints? Better ring up the server in Tehran to track down where my files are stored.
You are late to the party. Well-informed rumor has it that the nuke crap has already been sold off to at least Turkey by a level "really not too far below POTUS" for quick cash & hookers from the Clinton administration onwards.
>> I don't think the speed issue is a sufficient disadvantage now.
Think about what the kernel has to do whenever a TCP connection is opened: managed the initial packet exchange (possibly waiting for a long time in case of SYN w/o ACKs), set up queue buffers, set up the TCP state machines (whatever these are), finally hand the client socket to your application, which then has to proceed to do something special, hopefully not create two specialized threads to work with that socket.
In case you don't need all that stuff and it is sufficient to regard the network as just a work queue with incoming 64K contextless packets, use UDP. The kernel will just have to copy the packet into userspace and you app can handle them as fast as they come in.
Loadbalancers on high-traffic websites. They are there for a reason.
>> why do we continue to use UDP connections for
I would venture simply because you don't want to suffer the useless TCP connection setup overhead. DNS is just a directory lookup service and apparently suffers from lots of stupid optimization tricks that were relevant when a "DNS server" had to be 30-kg machine in the basement. Still, one wants to avoid the situation where hundreds or thousands of clients per seconds set up and tearing down TCP connections. So the correct way to do is to pack your queries and answers into the 64K offered by connectionless/fire-and-forget UDP. If a query or answer gets lost on the wy, you can simply query again. Perfect. UDP packets may even pass through a congested network where TCP won't even be able to work at all. This is also why SNMP for example uses UDP for short queries and notifications.
>> Microsoft said it's turned to the courts having attempted to "engage in licensing discussions" with TomTom for "more than a year."
So why hasn't there been any mention of Microsoft's moves in the press/blogs? What is the advantage to TomTom of hiding the fact that Microsoft tries to extract a bit of protection money? One might have started looking for some prior art. Of course, they could have fallen for the old SCO trick of "we will show you but you will have to sign an NDA first".
...all life of any interest in this universe has taken place in the hot, fast and young universe before inflation took over, all in less than one of your gigantic so-called "seconds", you sad representatives of glacially slow scrapyard hobos! Enjoy your cosmic horror show.
"I'll patiently ask if someone can give me a sane reason why Acrobat should have Java scripting functionality? No seriously, I'm genuinely interested to know - I've probably overlooked something obvious."
Indeed. PDF means Postscript. Postscript already _is_ a general programming language.
Now, why have Javascript/Ecmascript (not Java!) in addition? Probably because if you want to attract someone who can do "scripts" it's more likely that he will be attracted to Ecmascripting than Postscripting. Can anyone write Postscript anyway?
Reminds me of the good old times where Miss Teacher somehow hot ahold of my 10-year old extreme porn doodles which went missing during the break but somehow made the rounds, resulting in stern punishment and a sealed letter to the parents, probably outlining my imminent way into hell or something. I still carry that around.
Goggles icon because we need those which automatically turn to nuclear-blast-level filtering mode whenever government-unmandated flesh scenes become apparent so as to keep us all innocent and fluffy forever.
Congrats for an eminently reasonable position.
It also hear the ex-Soviet navy has a few radioactive rustbuckets hanging in shallow water up North / already dumped onto the sea bottom with minimal supervision and leaching into the foodchain. Apparently no-one gives a f*ck?
We will now retune to Andrew's "Climate Change is a Global Conspiracy!!1!" attitude...
Anyone over the age of 18 getting his/her knickers in a twist about simulo-rape by cel-animated 2D protagonists should seek out the next psychiatrist's couch as he/she has clearly been a victim of grooming by the pink mental rays coming out of politician's behinds whenever they are looking for easily sellable ideas to divert from any real problems coming our way.
So how is the financial meltdown coming?
"Patents as knowledge-sharing tools may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, patents do give their owners the right to exclude others from using a technology. But even in this case, denying use is very different from denying to others knowledge of the new technology, which patents by law are required to disclose."
And then again, if you find out how a wheel looks and find a way to actually build one from an obfuscated patent filing entilted "Supportive rotary devices which are ALL MINE!" -- but you are ultimately forbidden to do so, what's the use?
As I recall, it is recommended practice at MS to avoid reading patents or looking for patents covering the same areas as one is working on because a) they are impossible to understand b) if the judge finds out that you checked them out before going to work on your new project you are just making your case worse.
Precise gutshots for anyone extolling "Intellectual Property", please.
"It seems that, like fractals, which are infinitely complex at whatever scale they are examined, there will always be smaller bits of atoms inside the current smallest bits you are looking at. All you need is an ever-bigger hammer to deconstruct them and the LHS is just a waystation on the path to the ELHC (Even Larger Hadron Collider)."
That's what happens when you have pundits who should first consult a physics manual before pulling out an article about "waste" out of their nether regions. Planck length. Look it up.
And of course there will never be a larger hadron collider. Because you want to get clean collisions when going to higher energies, so back to leptons it will be.
"How on earth is mission critical software STILL being written that is susceptible to buffer overflows?"
I would guess:
1) Old, old code, and old, old libraries, written by Uncle Fester a few decayears ago
2) People coming out of Uni having caught all the bad habits about how to write "efficient C code". They possibly might think they can do multithreading, too.
3) People a long time out of Uni never having been un-taught all the bad habits about how to write "efficient C code". They possibly might think they know how to program.
4) C code
And also:
Quality Assurance not implemented or degenerated to ticking off boxes. Possibly handled by reconverted beancounters.
Mine's the one with "I worked with Recycled Cobol Monster" on the back.
It's not like the US Navy today has more to do than blow away Somali pirates from time to time or maybe deliver force packages onto goats, women and children through their own air arm for in support of their own infantry arm fighting against random sand denizens.
Yes, a railgun will come in handy ...
In spite of the say-so of lowlife politicians trying to divert from the sub-basement ideas they deploy on their respective homelands, standard Israeli paranoid casus belli production and breathless reporting by various pundits (including the regular total fscking retardos at The Economist and the BBC) who seem to have forgotten that reporting is not the same as Fearmongering in Abject Submission to Special Interests Groups ("FASSIG"), El Baradei recently had to say that, "for Iran to have weapons capacity, it would have to eject IAEA inspectors, leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), reconfigure production to refine uranium to the high degree needed for bomb fuel and fit the material into a warhead" and that it would take 2-5 years. At least. The Murrican Intelligence Community agreed in 2007.
...did anyone else get one of those warnings along the lines that the Googeloïd Search Engine *might* have consented to give you one more result for your query (which was concerning a problem with a SATA drive, in case you were wondering) but *as* that page was listed in a the IWF blocking list, Googeloïd sadly *cannot* show the corresponding link in its search results (even though I am not even using Google from the UK). It then proceeds to give you a link to a vanilla protest page at chillingeffects.org.
I have moved our small dev team from CVS to subversion and, by golly, am gonna stay on it. I don't know where the desire to do "still better" would come from. The idea that svn is somehow connected to the "Big Corporate Repository" is totally idiotic; now there is a confusion between a technical implementation and political structure.
"It tends to be the case that companies within a sector compete on customer service, where the competition has none, there's no incentive for them to excel in it."
There will be very obliging low-paid customer service representatives with excellent diligence real soon now.
"Ahh I'd forgotten about Saikano - there's a manga that you can't read vol 3 on the bus. That was an awsome manga, anime wasn't upto much though."
What, because of the tearful underage shagging? So that's why the grannies are throwing dirty looks at me.
What about reading the obligatory "bondage + underage incest" printed out from an arbitrary rapidshare download, then. I would avoid the ones which also throw in a dog or two cause one has to draw the line somewhere...
In any case -- politicians expressing moral outrage/disgust in public to troll for a bigoted electorate are the most base creatures yet.
Imagine "The Internets" as a walled garden of "Microsoft Network" hosted content, accessible from dial-in POPs installed in each country, using proprietary "de facto" standards which are based on septic, festering, semi-disclosed specifications "available under reasonable licensing conditions". Said Internets being brought down regularly by worms, the "desktops" of the connectionati being mercilessly eaten from within by rogue code blooming out kernel-referenced DLLs...
"the one passenger who turned on his cell phone so his GPS could be used to locate his body"
So this is a GPS+cell phone combo (A hefty affair. Can you take these on planes these days without risiking an impromptu proctological examination by TSA gorillas?)
So the GPS module determines current position. But then it has to do something with that data, like send it out over the cellular network. More likely the GPS would just have told the dead passenger where he currently was, which would be pointless of course.
On the other hand, this is probably not "real GPS". Instead the user hoped that cell phone position tracking using base station triangulation would enable friends and family to locate his cell-phone equipped mortal remains - as long as they were not underwater. It is unfortunate that this is apparently also called "Cell Phone GPS" by marketdroids.
"And this is why Linux is not mainstream. It is simply too hard to do everyday tasks with. "
OH SH*T MAN CERN HAS FINALLY OPENED THAT TIMEWARP TUNNEL BACK TO THE NINETIES QUICK CLOSE IT NOW THERE ARE ALREADY HOLLOW VOICES COMING OUT OF THAT HOLE OHMYGOD WE ARE SO FRACKED.
>> The idea that you might "accidentally" come across child porn is laughable - has this happened to anybody? Certainly not me and nobody I know has ever come across any.
It can happen if you are visiting those semi-managed picture sites (cough). There are regular spambots posting child porn with links to "moar" or weirdos who seem to be bored with their basement lifestyle and feel the urge to piss off people "out there in the Internets". Once the moderator wakes up / has finished his schoolwork / comes home, the stuff gets deleted pretty quickly.
Now, I hear that even some kind of cartoons from the shores of Japan or even the fugly reuse of Simpson characters are considered child porn these days , so you might come accidentally across "CP" faster than you might think.
In any case, you know that you need to bash some law-and-order politicians' heads with a 5 kg crowbar when you catch yourself worrying about accidentally encountering <insert arbitrary type of content here>.
...to look at a website, then deface it repeatedly a few others later. Then blame the UN for not pulling down the website earlier. Then saying that there were actually bots among those surfers, so the defacement was entirely justified. Then retreating to moral high ground because, as defacers, they previously had suffered at the hand of Microsoft.
>> This is yet another transparent play by corporations to be allowed to import foreigners to do jobs for half the pay of Americans.
If Americans can't be arsed to do the job that apparently can be done for the correct market price (apparently half the going rate) by "foreigners" ... so be it!
Because of course, America is a burnt cookie in that case anyway.
>> Paulson told them that they would have to take the funds whether they were needed or not
So your ex-chairman stuffs you full of dollars you actually don't need, whether you want or not. This either means a big party with stolen money is in the pipeline or someone is telling lies like there is no tomorrow. Probably both.
>> GS were one of the few banks that made a net profit in 2008.
How can they know that in the first place in January 2009? Probably didn't yet check their books yet. Or they don't care. Or maybe they just booked the 10 billions to the lower right end of the balance sheet.
>> that doesn't mean their IT analysts are suddenly irrelevant.
They have been irrelevant from the beginning I guess.