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Comment Re:Next Fedora (Score 1) 425

by jgarra23 (#27099827) Attached to: How many torrents are you seeding right now?
Fail. You can't copy the car, and it can't be in two places at one time. If you take it, your neighbour might get back and need to use it. You might also wreck it and your neighbour would lose their car. None of this applies to digital copies.

Fail, you CAN copy the car by building an exact copy. Sure it takes a while but so did copying megabytes 15 years ago.

Comment Re:I blame the American Dream (tm) (Score 4, Insightful) 1104

by jgarra23 (#25060805) Attached to: Who do you blame for the US Financial Situation

I agree. I work my fucking ass off to get where I'm at today. I probably have assets worth around 1.5 million so while I'm richer than most people on the planet, I'm probably not rich by say, the rich celebrity democrats in California and NYC. Plus I give ~20k a year to charities. Not for the tax deductions (which mean squat really) but I've always gave o charities my time and money. I like to consider myself rich, I never have to want for anything but I'm certainly not greedy. I never earned a cent from any ill-gotten gains, why the fuck blame me?

Why not blame the asshole middle and lower class who live beyond their means and then expect me to fucking bail them out? At my lowest point I was living in a gutter (literally) and my bed was a gravel walkway. No one gave me a free ride, I have medical issues to this day I deal with because I didn't want to mooch off people when I had nothing and I knew other people needed it more.

So before you blame me, ask yourself, can you afford that 5$-a-day latte on your 10$/hr job? Why are your credit cards maxed out? Why don't you ever save? When you're free of your self-induced economic problems you can come knocking on my door bitching but until then keep stealing from your workplace, keep running up those credit bills, keep mooching off society with govt. healthcare, keep living beyond your means you greedy liberal fucks.
Space

Submission + - First Evidence of Another Universe? 2

Submitted by blamanj
blamanj writes: Three months ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton thinks she knows what that means. (Subscription req'd at New Scientist site, there's also an overview here.) According to string theory, there are many universes besides our own. Her team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of gravitational interactions, they can be observed, and they're willing to make a prediction. The recently discovered void is in the northern hemisphere. They contend another one will be found in the southern hemisphere.
Security

Submission + - Apple Adds Memory Randomization (ALSR) to Leopard

Submitted by
.mack
.mack writes: "Apple has announced plans to add code-scrambling diversity to Mac OS X Leopard, a move aimed at making the operating system more resilient to virus and worm attacks. The security technology, known as ASLR (address space layout randomization), randomly arranges the positions of key data areas to prevent malware authors from predicting target addresses. Another new feature coming in Leopard is Sandboxing (systrace), which limits an application's access to the system by enforcing access policies for system calls."

Google's Ban of an Anti-MoveOn.org Ad 476

Posted by kdawson from the trademarks-are-not-political dept.
Whip-hero writes in with an Examiner.com story about Google's rejection of an ad critical of MoveOn.org. The story rehashes the controversy over MoveOn.org's ad that ran in the NYTimes on the first day of testimony of Gen. Petraeus's Senate testimony. The rejected ad was submitted on behalf of Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins — its text is reproduced in the article. The implication, which has been picked up by many blogs on the other side of the spectrum from MoveOn.org, is that Google acted out of political favoritism. Not so, says Google's policy counsel: Google's trademark policy allows any trademark holder to request that its marks not be used in ads; and MoveOn.org had made such a request.
Google

Submission + - Google Earth Spills Secret Chinese Submarine Beans

Submitted by techavenger
techavenger writes: A new Chinese nuclear ballistic missile submarine is evident in Google Earth imagery. The submarine appears to be about 35 feet longer than the unsuccessful Xia-class sub because of an extended midsection that houses the missile launch tubes and part of the reactor compartment, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists.
Software

Submission + - Excel 2007 Multiplies Oddly

Submitted by
dsmall
dsmall writes: "Excel Thinks 65,535 = 100,000 Microsoft Working To Fix Spreadsheet Problems

POSTED: 12:42 pm EDT September 28, 2007

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp.'s Excel 2007 spreadsheet program is going to have to relearn part of its multiplication table.

In a blog post, Microsoft employee David Gainer said that when computer users tried to get Excel 2007 to multiply some pairs of numbers and the result was 65,535, Excel would incorrectly display 100,000 as the answer.

Gainer said Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6,425 and 20.4 by 3,212.5, but the program appears to be able to handle 16,383.75 times 4.

"Further testing showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well," Gainer wrote Tuesday.

He said Excel was actually performing the calculations correctly, but when it comes time to show the answer on the screen, it messes up.

Gainer said the bug is limited to six numbers from 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535, and six numbers from 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536 and that Microsoft is working hard to fix the problem.

This short summary is Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All rights Reserved

==================================================================================



Here is the actual blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/ :

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 6:51 PM Calculation Issue Update

Yesterday we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers around 65,535. The Excel team would like to provide a description of the issue and explain what we're doing about it.

Background Yesterday evening we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers around 65,535. The first example that we heard about was =77.1*850, but it became clear from our testing as well as additional reports that this was just one instance where Excel 2007 would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535. The majority of these additional reports were focused on multiplication (ex. =5.1*12850; =10.2*6425; =20.4*3212.5 ), but our testing showed that this really didn't have anything do to with multiplication — it manifested itself with many but not all calculations in Excel that should have resulted in 65,535 (=65535*1 and =16383.75*4 worked for instance). Further testing showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well. This issue only exists in Excel 2007, not previous versions.

The Problem This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame. Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below). The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel's memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet. Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains "=850*77.1", and A2 contains "=A1*2", A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).

So what, specifically, are the values that cause this display problem? Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers (floating point on wikipedia) that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem. You can't actually enter these numbers into Excel directly (since Excel will round to 15 digits on entry), but any calculation returning one of those results will display this issue if the results of the calculation are displayed in a cell. All other calculation results are not affected.

The Solution We take calculation in Excel very seriously and we do everything we can in order to ensure that calculation is correct for all cases. We've come up with a fix for this issue and are in the final phases of a broad test pass in order to ensure that the fix works and doesn't introduce any additional issues — especially any other calculation issues. This fix then needs to make its way through our official build lab and onto a download site — which we expect to happen very soon. We'll add another post once that's taken place with a link to the download.

Posted by David Gainer | 159 Comments

=================================================================== Note (from Dave Small): In my testing with a small (non-Excel) calculator:

77.1 X 850 = 65535,
10.2 X 6,425 = 65535,
20.4 X 3,212.5 = 65535,
Of course, 65535 = $ FFFF = $1111 1111 1111 1111,
and, 65536 = $1 0000 = $0001 0000 0000 0000 0000
(I usually separate out the binary into hex digits for readability.)
The blog entry seems convinced that the problem is in floating point conversion. I find myself wondering if the programmers simply have a .Word 16-bit value and don't realize the significance of these numbers.
I do not have Excel 2007 and cannot test it, but it would certainly be interesting to check numbers around 32767 and 4 billion (e.g., a .Long full of 1's).
Thanks,

— Dave"
Music

Submission + - Radiohead offers "pay what you want" digit

Submitted by SilentChris
SilentChris writes: Radiohead has announced that in 9 days they will be releasing their latest album through their website. The interesting part: you'll pay what you want. A physical version will be released in December for $82. No word yet on DRM, but given Radiohead's recent penchant for selling on MP3 sites, there's a good chance there won't be any. The best part: the record labels are completely uninvolved with this new venture.
The Courts

Submission + - SFLC files first U.S. GPL violation lawsuit (lwn.net)

Submitted by FPCat
FPCat writes: The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a GPL violation lawsuit. "The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed the first ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under GPL version 2."
Intel

Submission + - Intel Demos Core 2 Extreme QX9650, Benchmarks

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel let a few members of the press get some hands-on time with their new 45nm quad-core processor, code-named Penryn today at IDF. Dual quad-core 3.4GHz processors were configured in a Seabird chipset-based dual socket system based on the Intel's Skulltrail platform, for a total of eight cores. The benchmark numbers look pretty sharp as does the system. The new Core 2 Extreme QX9650 was also on tap, clocking in at 3GHz with a full 12MB of on chip cache.

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