@ all re Margaret Hamilton I discovered her and her work recently. Amazing woman whose engineering talent we should probably aspire to emulate where possible. Today, there's people trying to figure out how to eliminate interface errors, recovery properly, etc. which she invented and did successfully with 1960's hardware. Anyone interested can read this fascinating paper[^] on their work. The fun part is that, by Richard Gabriel's classification, this crew stayed on The Right Thing throughout their work. Each problem was noted, understood, and mitigated with new methods/tech. They always tried to find the best approach to everything. They weren't afraid to throw away what wasn't good enough. They eventually developed methods to automate coding, testing and so on albeit with rigid modeling language. Here's what a NASA 2003 report said of the results: "Her unique ideas included: using priority displays, establishing hard requirements on the engineering of all components and subsystems to eliminate interface errors with the flight software at the systems level, debugging all components and testing before assembly, and simulating every conceivable situation at the systems level before releasing the code. This made it possible to identify potential anomalies and resulted in ultra-reliable code. No software bug was ever found on any manned space flight Apollo mission. She demanded that the flight code be designed to work right the first time." Great stuff. If I get enough time or funding, I plan to revitalize those efforts in a more usable way. She succeeded in semi-automating design and automating about everything else. There were performance and usability issues. I think, leveraging modern work, the best route to building on her work is to integrate a modeling language for arbitrary systems, a system-grade functional programming language (eg Habit from HASP project), powerful metaprogramming (eg Semantic Designs or Racket), and code generation (eg Esterel SCADE, Perfect Developer). This would let system be specified at a high level with safe, fast, low-level code generated through human directed, verified transformations. Being modular and functional, it could leverage any number of existing or future tools for static analysis, test generation, optimization, and so on. What do you all think? Does this combination sound worth putting effort into? And clearly I'm t

Reminded me of this scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley. Jobs basically describes how he created a cult that would think 60-80 hours was showing a lack of loyalty. "90 hours a week and loving it... some of them work more than 90 hours a week..." Of course, to heck with that: I hope dude's company gets some sense or bankrupts. Nick P

Thought you all might like this link. It seems pretty accurate. Hacker Life Cycle article

There are two possibilities: true randomness exists; only appears to be random. Truth is we can't know the answer. Just look at computer pseudo-random number generators: they take an initial value (seed), then produce a stream of apparently random numbers. Many random sources also don't *appear* random, like consecutively similar dice rolls. At the core of the universe, there could be true randomness or a glorified PRNG. Without access to the internals, there's no way we can determine which is correct.

Glad I could help. :)

That's one of the best of its kind. I was going to recommend IronKey, but I'm also unsure of client-side requirements. (I've only used them on machines I have full access to.) Some I found on search that *may* work right and without admin access: Omziff portable encryption http://www.xtort.net/xtort-software/omziff/ [^] Rohos Minidrive says it creates a "hidden and encrypted" partition, and comes with a tool to access it without administrative rights. I don't know its crypto credentials, but I know it won't need admin to run. Look into it. http://www.rohos.com/free-encryption/[^]

I'm with the guys saying custom build. Don't get it from a vendor like Alienware, as their premiums will hurt your budget. Look at extremetech.com's gaming and bang-for-buck custom builds for inspiration. Additionally, be sure to check eBay. I often find underpriced systems on eBay. Last year I was looking for a cheap computer to do home server work. I found a system with AMD-64, 2GB+ RAM, gaming graphics card, 100GB-200GB SATA drive, etc. for $300 in good condition from a reputable seller. I gave the full specs to a builder friend of mine and he said it was a good deal. I passed on it for a nearly new Dell Laptop (mine broke while looking for gaming rig...). Someone else got a good deal (or steal). So, be sure to check the big auction and used resellers just in case. ;)

Well, it could be problems with the protocol you are using and a good integrity check would be nice. I'm unfamiliar with your WinRAR verification, as I don't use it. Is that supposed to verify the 24GB file that is extracted or act as a CRC32 checksum of sorts for the 11 you downloaded? If possible, you should have the source MD5 their copies of the 11 files, then MD5 each one after you download. This will ensure the same thing was delivered. If the downloads are getting corrupted, then choosing a different protocol (FTP or SCP?) might work out. Of course, it might be messed up at the source or a problem with how your machine is handing the VM. I've had trouble moving VM's. If I didn't use the clone feature, the new copy often screwed up. Virtualization has gotten complex enough that this problem could have many causes. (sighs)

VMware is more advanced than VirtualBox, from the networking and integration capabilities down to guest support. For instance, you can run almost any kind of guest on a given host, even 64-bit linux on 32-bit windows. Even with VirtualBox out, VMWare Server/Workstation/Player are still the preferred choice for most developers and security researchers, in particular. While VirtualBox can do a lot of this, and do it fast, VMWare Workstation & Server seem to handle virtually anything I throw at them (even some 3D stuff). I could use virtualbox for some stuff, but VMware is a high quality product and they are aiming for a lot more than speed.

I've been doing everything 32-bit on my setup. I've heard of lots of trouble caused by mixing 32- and 64-bit guest and host OS's. A year or so ago I was looking into 64-bit Windows host for 32-bit and 64-bit guest OS's, and I saw a tremendous number of support issues on the forums compared to the 32-bit stuff. Have you run into any problems? Or have they fixed most of that stuff? If so, then I'd buy an upgrade.

Hardware is very similar to my setup, although I use VMWare w/ VMWare Tools. Host is usually WinXP with any unneeded bloat removed. I can't help but wonder, though, if you meant 2GB and 1GB of RAM respectively for your VM's. Only 1_MB_ or 2_MB_ of RAM seems like it would make the system just a little sluggish. I mean, maybe you could run MenuetOS (Kolibri) or DOS on that, but not much more... ;)

I see, and I agree with the your last sentence. I haven't used either for quite a while now. I prefer good old fashioned email, IM and well-moderated forums. ;)

I am only venturing a guess here, as this is not my area of expertise, but I don't think that's a problem with D3D vs. OpenGL. First reason is that many of the best looking games on the market use DirectX technologies. Alternative explanations could be your drivers, how your software is using D3D, or an issue caused by graphics card. As for quality/speed ratio, you can adjust for such tradeoffs using either technology.

In many web servers, disk access and network throughput are more important. Most computers today come with fast processors and plenty of RAM. The hard drives and such are usually the bottleneck, as Moore's law doesn't apply to them. (too bad)

That's funny and true, but kind of irrelevant. NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards do have what's called massively parallel processing hardware, and they get plenty of work done. The reason it's irrelevant is that this hardware was designed specifically for the visual processing algorithms they run, which are usually "embarrassingly parallel" as HPC people call it. This is very different from general purpose applications, many of which are quite serial (one-at-a-time style). Researchers have put years of effort into putting general purpose computations on graphics cards, and the only ones they can still reliably extract better performance out of are the streaming and data-parallel algorithms. Again, unlike most apps. (for a good example, see RapidMind platform or BrookGPU) To original poster: yes, it matters, but not for now. Right now, the processors only have two or four cores that are compatible with single core instruction sets (x86, mainly). I noticed a performance drop on some apps in the change from P4 3.0GHz to Core Duo with two 1.6GHz cores. Some software just can't use both cores, so it just slows down. This isn't a big problem right now, as desktop systems usually have hundreds of threads going at the same time and adding a few dedicated cores that can run more simultaneous threads will definitely help. Sun's T1 processor is excellent example, with 64 simultaneous threads in hardware for server apps. However, if they keep dividing the chips and produce 16-64 core designs with weak processing units and little dedicated memory, that will be a serious problem. We currently don't have the technology to make general-purpose software work efficiently on that many cores. It may even be impossible. ;)

"MySpace kicks their arse in every area including making money." (Paul Watson) What are you talking about Paul? Coming from an application developer, that statement is hard to believe. I remember when MySpace was just cluttered pages full of user-submitted HTML, with not much in line of extra features. I didn't use it for chat much because I couldn't integrate it well with everything else like I do email and IM. Facebook took an alternative approach with their popular API and tried to create a more open platform for developers. The result was that, when I first checked it out, there were tools for doing almost everything with my FaceBook account. I often didn't even have to visit the facebook site! MySpace and Facebook have both come a long way since then. MySpace is certainly more popular and successful, but I think Facebook is still better from developer's standpoint. MySpace has followed their lead a bit, and it would be great to see them do more in that area. Then, I might be a MySpace fanbois. Maybe...

Depends on many factors. Since everyone else will be answering your main question, I'm going to answer a related one. "What's the best personal web server?" My answer: Mbedthis AppWeb. It simply rocks. It is a small, high-performance, personal web server good for desktop implementations or SME businesses that don't need something like IIS or Apache. It supports SSL and PHP, among other things, and runs on numerous operating systems. I was creating and testing web pages and got tired of FrontPage PWS's lack of features. I didn't want to pay for IIS and Apache seemed quite complicated to setup right on Windows. I found AppWeb on Wikipedia and have been using it ever since, with much satisfaction. Anyone looking for a personal or small business web server should definitely consider AppWeb. It served me well. ;)

No, then it would be Comcast, cuz almost everyone around here hitches a ride on that one.

You beat me to it... $20 says he chose the title just to get these reactions. And now for the final question: "So, when can she expect the other 10%?"

This crap starting to remind me of a soap I saw. Parents used to watch them, and all this "I'm sorry, but he's not really your father" stuff was repeated over and over. I figured I just had to mention the one that really took on a new spin. Doctor is talking to this chick about her child and confusion over identity of its parents. She looks at her lover and asks the doc, "So, he's not really the father?" The Doctor then delivers this whopper: "That's not really the case. You see, DNA tests indicate that... your not the mother." LMAO! Just when u thought it couldn't get any worse... Did she hallucinate 9 months of pregnancy and painful childbirth? I'd be quicker to believe in the scientific validity of a Michael Bay movie's action sequences than that one....