Posts by Kanhef 615 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2007
A study with methodological errors, written up in a paper with multiple analytical errors (severe enough that some scientists say it should not have been published), by a biased group with a history of similarly flawed analyses and questionable use of statistics. Move along, nothing to see here.
Hopefully in a couple of years we'll see different scientists re-do the experiment properly and publish results that actually mean something.
The PowerPC chips were problematic, particularly on heat - even the G4 laptops were uncomfortably warm - so I can understand the shift to a different architecture. I'm just disappointed they didn't pick another sane and properly-designed one, such as ARM. Compared to either, x86/x64 is a 35-year-old steaming pile of crap, with one layer of (mostly) backwards-compatible cruft bolted on after another.
To elaborate on his stock market example, if you look at prices on a minute-by-minute basis, there's a tremendous amount of random fluctuation (i.e., lots of noise). If you only look at daily closing prices, you have a few orders of magnitude less data to process, and it's just as good for making medium- and long-term predictions. Of course, it's easy to go too far; monthly stock market updates might not provide enough data to extrapolate from with an acceptable degree of confidence. And there are exceptions: an automated arbitrage trading program might be able to make use of price updates as often as every second.
As for log files, many of them are useless, and most will never be looked at. But when security breaches happen, they're essential in figuring out how someone got into the system and what they accessed.
The point here is that companies need to work on collecting better quality data, not more of it.
If the current trend continues (which it probably won't), Chrome will pass 50% market share in two years, and IE will be dead and forgotten in five.
Safari usage shows a similar jaggedness, which suggests a 'use PCs at work but Macs at home' demographic. The Firefox line has become relatively smooth, though; anyone have an interpretation of what that means?
Would you mind spelling them out at least once? It makes the article much more comprehensible to people who don't happen to work in the same field. I was rather confused as to why Microsoft has an Estimated Retail Price division, and why they cared about Cardiac Rhythm Management software.
When an account is deactivated, remove it from other people's 'friend' lists, and remove everyone from their own 'friend' list. That eliminates this technique entirely, far more effective than some warning that most people will ignore. Even if users are aware of what's happening, it doesn't matter much if they still can't 'unfriend' the account in question.
Of course, this requires Facebook to delete information, so it will never happen.
Even if dates are stored in a discrete year/month/day format, a competent programmer would never have let this happen. Any function that creates or modifies such a date should normalize it into a valid form. (For example, a user should be able to add 60 days to a date and get the correct result.) This is not difficult:
While day is greater than numDaysInMonth: subtract numDaysInMonth from day, increment month.
Proper handling of invalid months is left as an exercise for the reader, should take about 5 minutes. Add another 5 if you want to make if bulletproof and handle negative values as well. First-year CS students can do this; for a company such as Microsoft to screw it up requires sheer incompetence.
The article states that Arctic sea ice reached a minimum in 2007; this does not say anything about what has happened since then other than that it has not gotten as low again yet. You've assumed it's been continuously increasing for the last five years, which is not the case. The years with the lowest minimum sea ice extent are, in order: 2007, 2011, 2008, 2010, 2009, 2005, 2006, 2002, 2004, 1995. While 2007 was the absolute minimum, every year since then has still been lower than the previous record (2005).
(Data: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/archives/index.html)
"The moisture lost to the Arctic in the form of melting sea ice has to end up somewhere" - that would be the Arctic Ocean. More exposed ocean water does mean more evaporation and eventually precipitation, but there isn't necessarily any relationship between the quantity of sea ice lost and the increased quantity of precipitation.
Nice to see so many people thinking about how this can be used to benefit humanity, not just high boffinry. The trick will be to get the cost of manufacturing it low enough.
Drinking pure water generally isn't a problem; you can get enough of trace minerals through food, unless you're on an unusually restricted diet.
Most of that time is spent copying OS data from one place on the drive to another, which is much faster than reading it from a CD or DVD. There's also a tool to create an image of the drive with apps etc. installed. The refresh/reset will take longer, but that's still faster than re-installing everything by hand.
If they're really clever, OS/security updates will be applied to the clean backup copy as well, so they won't need to be downloaded again after a reset.
If you look at the comments in his source code, you'll note that it cancels the requests before they can be completed if the site hasn't been cached. So it doesn't pollute its results if run repeatedly, and doesn't leave traces of having been run (aside from the script itself being cached, of course).
I've worked with a few beekeepers, and the design of hives is quite simple; any half-decent carpenter can build them. Making the wax comb foundation is a bit trickier, but I'm sure someone could set up an operation with support from a microlending bank. Honey yields might not be great with that many hives close together, but it's essentially free.
It's about time boffins took this idea seriously. Assuming extraterrestrial life exists, and developed independently (as opposed to the far-fetched 'mysteriously seeded from outer space' theory), there's no reason it needs to be remotely similar to life as we know it. Many years ago, Isaac Asimov hypothesized on the various liquid media life could potentially exist in. Depending on temperature range, these include water, ammonia, hydrocarbons, and silanes (like hydrocarbons, but replacing carbon with silicon). Ammonia-based life might function somewhat like ours, but the others would have a truly alien biology, unlike anything we've ever seen.
Privoxy (www.privoxy.org) is a locally-run, content-modifying web proxy designed to block ads and privacy/tracking issues. More technical to set up and use than most browser plugins (regexes are everywhere!), but offers more control and finesse than, say, NoScript. Among other things, it can block elements by URL pattern, not just host. Exorcises annoyances such as <blink>, onunload events, JS and HTML content cookies, banner ads by size or link, Google/Yahoo/MSN text ads. Can bypass click-tracking redirection URLs. Also removes/edits HTTP headers, including the ETags mentioned by AC 19:52 .
Not mentioned in this article are the Flash-based 'zombie' cookies. They can be at least partially dealt with by not loading every Flash object automatically. Some browsers include this as a feature; Safari users can install the ClickToPlugin extension (hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin).
Don't serve third-party ads. Having no advertisements at all would be ideal, but many web sites depend on them as their only source of revenue. So turn them into first-party ads by getting the ad content, running it through a malware scanner or three, and host them on the site itself. In addition to blocking poisoned ads, this would get rid of ad network tracking, and allow highly-targeted advertising (e.g., on social networks) without sharing personal information with other companies. Everyone wins.
Some reports suggest that this has been going on for more than just a month, so perhaps they could be criticized for not acting sooner. But it's good to see that they're going beyond the usual 'oops, sorry' response and are offering to compensate victims. That, and having outside experts confirm that the vulnerability has been fixed, should win back a lot of customers.
Maple, Mathematica, etc. are great - if you give them the problem in a form they can understand. Presented as an image, it's a good bit more challenging. Conventional captcha-solvers can stop once they've identified all the characters. This requires also parsing the correct mathematical meaning, which is sensitive to the spatial layout (e.g., 112 is different from 11^2 (11 squared = 121) and from 11_2 (11 base 2 = 3), and then solve it.
The best captchas I've seen are semantics-based, asking questions such as "what is the domain name of this site?". Answering them correctly requires understanding natural language, which is trivial for humans, but almost impossible for computers. Specialized knowledge also works well; in this case, anyone who needs truly random data has most likely studied calculus, and if necessary can look it up or ask a colleague who remembers it better.
It's hideous. In addition to all the Microsoft-only stuff, the same complex style tags are used over and over. Turning it into plain HTML reliably reduces file size by 80%. It sounds like they've found a way to automate that sort of process.
'Structured' files are typically binary formats, where data is stored at fixed offsets within the file. Unlike XML, there's no way to shorten those without corrupting the file.
(pics from better scanners, not the Gizmodo ones), it's really not worth the outrage people are working themselves into. It's still crummy black-and-white, there's not enough detail to really be interesting and the weird traces from clothing make the whole thing rather unattractive. Just two minutes of searching online will find erotica with more definition and far better lighting. It reminds me more of C-3PO than naked people.
The arguments to PolicyNodeImpl() are anonymized (bad code style) and its visibility is changed, the assignment of isImmutable was moved, and braces are added to if statements (good code style), but otherwise the code is identical, so someone clearly copied it. I'm sure there's a version control system somewhere that can identify who did it.
That said, I'd still like to have the original code as well, to see how much "adjusting" Oracle did for their presentation of it.
I wholeheartedly agree with the court's ruling; a sentence restricting computer use for a crime completely unrelated to computers makes no sense. But it doesn't explicitly say if such a sentence would be valid for a computer-related crime. I'd need to read the whole ruling to be more certain, but from the excerpts it sounds like this court would allow the first part of it. The prohibition against using any computer with hackerware on it, knowingly or not, and the vagueness of the terms used, is far too broad and should not be allowed under any circumstances.
The Zune was Microsoft's attempt to imitate the iPod, and it failed miserably; this will be no different. Users who want the features of an iPad will buy one, not wait the year or so Microsoft will take to produce a clone, and even longer for a similar marketplace of third-party apps to form. Microsoft cannot survive by continuing to imitate the success of its rivals; they must develop something new, something even better than what anyone makes. They have rarely done this over the last decade, and I expect this trend will continue unless there is a dramatic change in leadership.
Ballmer's comment about "user familiarity" is ironic, coming from the company that imposed the horrid 'ribbon' interface.
They aren't publishing the names of every player, just the people who post on their forum. Using the forum is entirely optional; if you don't want your name out there, don't post on it (only browsing doesn't require an account). Looks like a game account is necessary to register on the forum, but AFAIK there is no publicly-visible connection between them unless you choose to mention it.
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