Explain to me why the "Baroque" is overly complicated?
That's not quite got the sense of it spot on. Baroque is really exactly the right word for it though. Baroque is an over ornamented style; wherever there is any space, they would put some decoration in (similar to the later Gothic style).
If you take the ARM architecture (IIRC) there are four conditional flags on each instruction. If you set them to 'never' then the instruction becomes a NOOP. That means the ARM has 2^28 different NOOP's.
The point is that is simple to disassemble ARM instructions. However, the price of this simplicitly is that there are 2^28-1 redundant instructions. So clearly ARM code can be compressed relatively easily; and the cache bandwidth saved might be a bigger win than the decompression time.
The thing is, what you have then looks much more like x86. Harder to decode but no idle bits. We may be getting back to the RISC/CISC argument in that it may be that interpreting CISC codes with a RISC like engine (P4 style) may actually be better than a pure RISC design. As we all well know, Linus is a pragmatist, real world efficiency beats architectural purity.
I recall that DEC actually ended up porting VMS to the Alpha because they were waiting on MS for their promised NT release.
I don't believe that for a minute. Just look at the PALcode on Alpha: it was designed to allow porting tricky VAX/VMS features (like atomic queue manipulation instructions) to a RISC architecture.
Besides, VMS on Alpha shipped months *before* any released version of NT.
And, from what I understand, it relied heavily upon the ability of the early Alpha chip to run in some FX!32 compatibility mode to emulate the x86 instruction set.
The compatibility mode was all in software; at that time Alpha had a sufficient performance gap to emulate an x86 at a tolerable speed.
What really happened was that the speed gap lowered, and AMD became a serious competitor to Intel in the high x86 space. Once that happened, the motivation for Microsoft to maintain multiple architectures went away.
credit cards pose a secutiry risk (both for in-country and foreigners), independent of how good encryption is, there is always the human factor on the other side.
No. You don't need to give your credit card number in a micropayment system. There are perfectly good (in one sense) micropayment systems in use today - premium rate phone lines. If I really wanted to I could use a contract-free prepayed phone, and not give *anyone* my card details.
That's only a problem if you are a retailer. If so, you should (in theory) be selling enough that the fluctuations are small. And it really makes no sense to commit fraud by taking a (say) 1.0001% transaction charge instead of the agreed 1%.
Why is it that the other player was necessarily called female player twice? We already knew she was a woman.
I think the point might be that if you're trying to impersonate someone, picking the same sex is a good start. I presume he had to ring a call centre to get the password reset.
Why in the world don't they just make the roads bigger? Doesn't that seem to be the logical route, rather than rely on high technology?
This is central London; it's an old city, with really expensive real estate, stuffed full of heritage sites. We're only talking about an area of a few square miles.
You can say 'misleading advertising', and unlimited access has been investigated before. However, that doesn't really carry a lot of weight, compared with the contractual terms.
The advertising standards body is pretty toothless. About all that it is empowered to do is get the offending advertisement removed.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc.
That's kind of the point of this story. In the UK, that's exactly what they do.The 'unlimited' residential package is invariably at a price point below the SOHO package.
We had all the thing before with unmetered dialup. Folks with very high online times got dropped by their ISPs, and the T&C's got changed. Margins are very tight for ISP's, and this sort of thing is going to happen. It may suck that companies have to unilaterally tweak their T&C's but unfortunately it is economic reality these days.
As someone living out in the sticks, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who find cable broadband expensive. They almost certainly are living close enough to an exchange to get ADSL, whereas a lot of folks have neither option available.
we wouldn't have to pull down our pants and pee in a jar to get a job today.
That's not common practice where you come from is it? I thought random drug testing was only for Olympic atheletes. I'd certainly tell my firm to stuff their job if they tried to pull a stunt like that.
I believe you are free to insult Moslems, since religions have no legal protection (except for the outmoded blasphemy law). Otherwise you could invent a crackpot religion and claim legal protection.
And, of course, you can still be transported for life for expressing republican views. Although we seem to be running out of colonies lately...
The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges.
Fine. Let them be pissed, it's not my problem.
This is not new. All console makers do the same thing. The XBox costs more than $149 to make, but MS sells them as loss leaders so they can make money on the games. Sony does the same. Nintendo does the same.
This wouldn't be the same Nintendo that got recently bitchslapped by the EU for price fixing by any chance?
Yet most people would agree that hacking/chipping consoles so you can play stolen games is illegal, even if you don't think it's unethical.
A lot of people think chipping DVDs is in some way illegal or immoral. It doesn't make it so.
If printer manufacturers want to make money on services, they can do it honestly like mobile phone telcos do by getting me to sign a contract. Otherwise they can take a hike.
It's extremely cool when someone VIOLATES the DMCA and could have potentially ruined their livelihood and end up in jail. Personally I don't understand how someone would be stupid enough to crack a program and release it non-anonymously
Simple. He's posting from a UK site, and has broken no local law. He might need to take legal advice before visiting the US though. MS lawyers might try some stunt but if I were them, I would just wait for the legislation to come into force then tweak the format again.
They're saying that they've invested over 15 million USD in the game already and will continue to invest over 5 million USD/year! That sounds like a horrific amount of money for them to try and make back.
That sounds like the story of so many.com era companies. "We've spent a truckload of our investors money developing a hi-tech product, so it will obviously start paying back bigtime, or we're in deep shit."
Slashdot Mirror
Explain to me why the "Baroque" is overly complicated?
That's not quite got the sense of it spot on. Baroque is really exactly the right word for it though. Baroque is an over ornamented style; wherever there is any space, they would put some decoration in (similar to the later Gothic style).
If you take the ARM architecture (IIRC) there are four conditional flags on each instruction. If you set them to 'never' then the instruction becomes a NOOP. That means the ARM has 2^28 different NOOP's.
The point is that is simple to disassemble ARM instructions. However, the price of this simplicitly is that there are 2^28-1 redundant instructions. So clearly ARM code can be compressed relatively easily; and the cache bandwidth saved might be a bigger win than the decompression time.
The thing is, what you have then looks much more like x86. Harder to decode but no idle bits. We may be getting back to the RISC/CISC argument in that it may be that interpreting CISC codes with a RISC like engine (P4 style) may actually be better than a pure RISC design. As we all well know, Linus is a pragmatist, real world efficiency beats architectural purity.
I recall that DEC actually ended up porting VMS to the Alpha because they were waiting on MS for their promised NT release.
I don't believe that for a minute. Just look at the PALcode on Alpha: it was designed to allow porting tricky VAX/VMS features (like atomic queue manipulation instructions) to a RISC architecture.
Besides, VMS on Alpha shipped months *before* any released version of NT.
And, from what I understand, it relied heavily upon the ability of the early Alpha chip to run in some FX!32 compatibility mode to emulate the x86 instruction set.
The compatibility mode was all in software; at that time Alpha had a sufficient performance gap to emulate an x86 at a tolerable speed.
What really happened was that the speed gap lowered, and AMD became a serious competitor to Intel in the high x86 space. Once that happened, the motivation for Microsoft to maintain multiple architectures went away.
Read the article and the company's website.
So? 1 is much more like 0 than 1000 is.
credit cards pose a secutiry risk (both for in-country and foreigners), independent of how good encryption is, there is always the human factor on the other side.
No. You don't need to give your credit card number in a micropayment system. There are perfectly good (in one sense) micropayment systems in use today - premium rate phone lines. If I really wanted to I could use a contract-free prepayed phone, and not give *anyone* my card details.
how do I know that their RNG isn't rigged?
That's only a problem if you are a retailer. If so, you should (in theory) be selling enough that the fluctuations are small. And it really makes no sense to commit fraud by taking a (say) 1.0001% transaction charge instead of the agreed 1%.
List the top ten sites that you cannot live without? I bet google is on it if not in position 1.
OK. If you really think you couldn't live without Google how much would you pay if Google started charging money for searches?
Personally, I blame it on Flouridation.
;)
You can avoid this by not seeing the Rocky Horror Show too often
Why is it that the other player was necessarily called female player twice? We already knew she was a woman.
I think the point might be that if you're trying to impersonate someone, picking the same sex is a good start. I presume he had to ring a call centre to get the password reset.
How can you trust a browser that intentionally doesn't show you what you asked for?
Sigh. If you install the special Bork edition what do you expect? Juvenile would be when you roll it out to all your users as the default browser.
Why in the world don't they just make the roads bigger? Doesn't that seem to be the logical route, rather than rely on high technology?
This is central London; it's an old city, with really expensive real estate, stuffed full of heritage sites. We're only talking about an area of a few square miles.
Its a prediction that has held pretty true. Its a good benchmark but is not a true Law.
The majority of laws are empirical in nature. Even Newton's laws of motion don't come from the theory, rather they are axioms that underly it.
You can say 'misleading advertising', and unlimited access has been investigated before. However, that doesn't really carry a lot of weight, compared with the contractual terms.
The advertising standards body is pretty toothless. About all that it is empowered to do is get the offending advertisement removed.
IMO, this is a blow for the British telecommuters out there. All I know is if Earthlink had the same policy I wouldn't be able to work.
No. You wouldn't be able to work from home without paying at the business rate. Big difference.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc.
That's kind of the point of this story. In the UK, that's exactly what they do.The 'unlimited' residential package is invariably at a price point below the SOHO package.
We had all the thing before with unmetered dialup. Folks with very high online times got dropped by their ISPs, and the T&C's got changed. Margins are very tight for ISP's, and this sort of thing is going to happen. It may suck that companies have to unilaterally tweak their T&C's but unfortunately it is economic reality these days.
As someone living out in the sticks, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who find cable broadband expensive. They almost certainly are living close enough to an exchange to get ADSL, whereas a lot of folks have neither option available.
historically, "our son of a bitch" governments have been common
Iraq being a good example of this...
we wouldn't have to pull down our pants and pee in a jar to get a job today.
That's not common practice where you come from is it? I thought random drug testing was only for Olympic atheletes. I'd certainly tell my firm to stuff their job if they tried to pull a stunt like that.
First, you agreed to the EULA and the BSA can hold it to you.
This is in the UK, remember. It's not really been tested in court but I think legal consensus is that they are unenforceable.
It's much more likely that they would get a written statement from a disgruntled employee and ask a magistrate for a warrant.
I believe you are free to insult Moslems, since religions have no legal protection (except for the outmoded blasphemy law). Otherwise you could invent a crackpot religion and claim legal protection.
And, of course, you can still be transported for life for expressing republican views.
Although we seem to be running out of colonies lately...
The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges.
Fine. Let them be pissed, it's not my problem.
This is not new. All console makers do the same thing. The XBox costs more than $149 to make, but MS sells them as loss leaders so they can make money on the games. Sony does the same. Nintendo does the same.
This wouldn't be the same Nintendo that got recently bitchslapped by the EU for price fixing by any chance?
Yet most people would agree that hacking/chipping consoles so you can play stolen games is illegal, even if you don't think it's unethical.
A lot of people think chipping DVDs is in some way illegal or immoral. It doesn't make it so.
If printer manufacturers want to make money on services, they can do it honestly like mobile phone telcos do by getting me to sign a contract. Otherwise they can take a hike.
WTF? How many clients are willing to assign an employee to work with/at the software/website vendor full-time? None, in my experience.
No probably not. Most are quite happy spending months trying to get so-called bespoke software doing what they want instead of what they asked for.
On the other hand, they are perfectly happy to pay for the privilege of beta test shrinkwrapped code. Go figure.
It's extremely cool when someone VIOLATES the DMCA and could have potentially ruined their livelihood and end up in jail. Personally I don't understand how someone would be stupid enough to crack a program and release it non-anonymously
Simple. He's posting from a UK site, and has broken no local law. He might need to take legal advice before visiting the US though. MS lawyers might try some stunt but if I were them, I would just wait for the legislation to come into force then tweak the format again.
Coincidentally, it appears that the EUCD (Euro-DMCA) was meant to be implemented by now. However, it appears that the Patent Office had been lobbied into oblivion.
Protecting their sources is only a right in the minds of the journalists.
.se address, this ruling is likely relevant. Your jurisdiction may vary of course.
Not so, the European Court of Human Rights has upheld that right.
Since the OP has a
They're saying that they've invested over 15 million USD in the game already and will continue to invest over 5 million USD/year! That sounds like a horrific amount of money for them to try and make back.
.com era companies. "We've spent a truckload of our investors money developing a hi-tech product, so it will obviously start paying back bigtime, or we're in deep shit."
That sounds like the story of so many
I'm pretty sure that show is ad-free (atleast in the initial airing), except for a small mention about Ford sponsoring it.
Actually, the running time was a bit of a joke over here (UK) because the BBC took the series, so no ad breaks; just 50 minute hours.