Indeed. So-called "non-lethal" projectile and chemical weapons are not really non-lethal. That's propaganda: it's what the police call them to make them sound safe. Aw, a fluffy little bean bag. Aw, a plastic bullet. How much can a little thing like that hurt.
The reality is organ damage, serious wounds, broken bones, spinal injury, miscarriage, blindness, and death. And that's when the police don't deliberately aim for maximum injury, or fire at point blank range - the sadistic bastards.
Some weapons manufacturers more accurately label those same weapons "less lethal", meaning they still kill people, but they're not specifically designed for killing.
Such weapons are meant to be used by professional, trained officers in the correct way: such as aiming at people's legs, or the ground, and from a minimum distance. They come with specific instructions to this effect, and warnings of what will happen when these instructions are ignored. Police officers routinely ignore them.
When a police officer aims the same projectile weapons at someone's head, or at their neck, they are intending to kill that person or break their spine, and sometimes they succeed. Disturbingly, police actually do that in crowd control situations.
Even when they hit your back or legs, they can cause severe organ damage and/or broken bones.
And we haven't discussed the chemical weapons, yet. Exercise for the reader.
I've never been by coach either. I've always flown, but I'm not going to do that this time.
Strange. Now when I look it's UKP49 and the fastest journey is 8 hours 45 minutes. The fastest return is 7 hours 15 minutes and that's overnight, so I suspect night time traffic and/or ferry scheduling are much better, or there's a glitch in their web server's duration calculation because of the timezome.
(When I did the query before, the Eurolines / National Express coach service said the fastest service was 10 hours 30 minutes. I said 11 because that was about average. I must have made a mistake with the query.)
The trip from London Victoria to Dover is 1 hour 55 minutes for the coach schedule, and from Dover to Brussels it's 6 hours 40 minutes, whereas Brussels back to Dover is 3 hours 45 minutes. Calais time isn't given. Ferry scheduling must be playing a big part. Which is good, 'cos I might be able to recharge my laptop batteries and get some non-coach rest:) Especially as I'm travelling from Bristol, not London.
If you're right about one hour from Calais, then I should be driving instead -- if the ferry isn't too expensive for a car, that is. But I'll probably take the coach anyway.
There is a coach route via Amsterdam, but it is much slower. I go to Amsterdam often though, so thanks for the pointer. In fact, now I think I will return via Amsterdam so I can drop in on my friends:)
Actually the price for a flight is about UKP120* from London. Go from London City, it's cheaper than Heathrow to Brussels. Coaches from the biggest cities to London are on special offer at UKP1-5 right now.
It's still a bit much. Coach all the way to Brussels is UKP52 from London.
-- Jamie
* - why does slashdot eat my pound signs?
-- Jamie
To put this into perspective for US readers, Brussels is two hours from London by train.
To add a little more perspective, the cheapest fare now for that journey is $455 US dollars (249 pounds sterling). It's cheaper to fly, unless you book the train the recommended 30 to 90 days in advance. (No wonder Eurostar haven't got the passenger numbers they were hoping for!)
It's a very fast train. I'd be surprised if there are trains that fast anywhere in the US.
The journey by coach is 11 hours. The fare is a more modest $95 (52 pounds).
Microsoft have already filed patents for an algorithm that's required to use the next.doc format.
Also the techniques for decoding/encoding a JPEG file, and for encoding an MP3 file or GIF file, and for rendering a.ttf font as the font author intended, those things are well known for being patented already. People have been threatened, sued, and lost or settled over all those things.
File format patents are not new, and they're a serious problem already.
You haven't seen the products that haven't been released because of software patents, have you?
Neither have I, but I can tell you: I have worked on one such product. Patent concerns have and are impeding its creation and its release as free software. There are two more products that I'm actively planning, that will face similar problems. I am in the EU, by the way.
KDE, Gnome and Gimp will survive even a heavy onslaught of litigation. But components of them may well disappear, and there are other components which have not been created specifically because of existing patent problems.
But that's exactly the effect that software patents have. That's what they do!
Not just in the free software community, but in commercial non-free software as well: I have seen good, sensible functions not used in many a commercial product, precisely because (x) patented them.
Did you mix up copyright and patenting? Copyright let you place restrictions on your unique software. Patents let you place restrictions over broad functions, so that competitors can't use those functions, or anything similar.
In practice competitors do use the same broad functions despite patents. However, they do so by either being very large businesses with big legal teams and strong patent portfolios of their own, or they simply hope not to be sued. Because there is no way to be sure of not being sued, if you operate in a country where any kind of idea may be patented.
When businesses survive by hoping not to be sued, that is not a healthy way to run a marketplace. Healthy markets with healthy results are based on the open sharing of information, not perpetually trying to hide what you do.
What's unreasonable is that it prevents me from making money from my products.
What's unreasonable is I can sit in my home and develop some great new software and then I can't publish it if it's the kind of software which is against the interests of established big business. I can't sell it: as a small business, I'd lose more from litigation than I'd gain from sales. Even some big businesses are uneasy with all the work they have to put into patent defense.
If I produce an excellent product, I can sell it - to a big company with a strong legal team. I can't run a small shop selling controversial software products, all I can do is pass it on to a big company for them to decide what they want to do with it. Or maybe I can sell it under the radar. Be careful not to advertise too much. (That doesn't seem reasonable to me). Or look small but grow fast, so I can become a big company myself if I'm lucky. (But I don't want to run a big company; why should I have to?)
The core of this issue is that patents favour businesses who retain a large legal department. Exactly the sort of business I don't want to have to be.
That strongly favours big business structures. It's not good for everyone who might actually want to use my products, because it doesn't motivate people like me to invent cool stuff, in fact it demotivates - because I'm not motivated by the idea of getting sued (and losing) for being too clever.
And I'm not motivated by the creation of big businesses, or pouring my heart into creating for one. That's not what I want to do. It's not the world I want to create for our children, having seen the consequence of a big business dominated world to date. And there are lots of creative, technically proficient people of a similar mind.
There's nothing unreasonable about fair competition, when the results are good. This is not fair competition, though, and the results are not good: this is the long arm of patent law acting in the interest of big business at the expense of small business and individuals, and at the expense of spirited individual invention.
It's natural and traditional for established big businesses to fight and get their way. It's good that they do: not all that is created in that way is bad. But that doesn't make it ok for the law to strongly penalise spirited independent inventors. That's not good for anyone, really.
I know people who do this in real life, and they're not all homophobic.
I agree. These days in the places I travel, "gay" has a much more fun, cheery flair to it, even when used to diss something, than I recall from school (13 years ago, Wales). Back then, people said "gay" as an insult and they meant as in queer, as in homosexual etc. All homosexual-related terms were universally used as insults. Bisexual was strangely a word nobody used for anything, and transgender was unheard of.
I'm pretty sure that if there were a gay person in the room, they wouldn't do it, because then they'd suddenly realize that it's insulting. But when among straight males, they figure "no one's going to get offended".
That's just the trouble. They do it when they don't realise 5% of the room (or whatever it is) are, in fact, gay or bisexual, because most non-straights are very quiet about it, because it isn't universally accepted as ok, so they end up insulting people unintentionally.
Imagine the guy at work whose parents have disowned him for being gay, who feels that life is harder than it should be because those who should care for him reject him, that it's better not to tell people at work, that he thanks god each day that the suicidal thoughts he had as a teenager didn't win, and he hasn't said anything to the folks in the room. Do those unintentional insults create a welcoming environment? Does it create an environment where he's likely to talk about it? Would those people even say the things they do, if they thought for a moment about how much they don't know about the people around, or even think they do know, because the people play along uncomfortably?
If people used "that's so female" to diss products and people regularly, would that be ok? Ignore the feminist backlash -- would it be ok in terms of its effect on how people treat one another away from the spaces where they say that? I don't think so.
Homosexuality is still far from general acceptance, yet it is good, because it does no harm and makes people happy. Homophobia still exists, and causes very much harm. That's why we still have to make a special effort to accept homosexuality, and reject homophobia, with our words, actions, and laws.
I know an excellent Electronic Engineer who works with high speed RF and digital circuits, who wouldn't be able to handle Java programming. He cannot handle VHDL and that is somewhat closer to circuit design.
Electronics takes a different kind of thinking than programming, and some people have a distinct aptitude for the former.
The problem with NAFTA and the WTO is that we gave away the farm. We didn't insist that other countries rise to our level (i.e., with labor standards, environmental standards, etc.) and as a result, we're grossly mismatched. You can't expect any part of our economy to compete with another country that doesn't have similar regulation. Just not going to happen.
On the other hand, sometimes governments do steal property from businesses, or intimidate them, and it's not necessarily a good thing. Cronyism and corrupt officials exist everywhere, at all levels (not just the rich), so NAFTA's mechanisms are not entirely without merit.
The danger to workers in the USA isn't unfair trade relationships with other countries. It's inappropriate relationships with wealth and power in your own country. Next time you notice a huge trade or budget deficit, at any level, ask yourself this: if every government in the world is in debt at the same time (and that is possible), who do they owe it to? What does that mean in terms of power and influence? And is that good for workers?
In India call centre workers get paid more than fully qualified doctors.
The "resource drain" is that fewer Indians will train to become doctors. In the long run, it will hurt them due to fewer doctors.
Whether this "resource drain" is a significant problem remains to be seen. It might not be. It might be vastly outweighed by the benefits of all the work coming in. But it is there.
They get the choice between sharing the code, or writing afresh for increased monetary cost. How is increasing the options available to a business anti-business?
The internal USR 56k modems go for $80 here and are not winmodems. Is there an additional $90 worth of circuitry/plastic/shielding that goes into the external?
Yes. Long ago, when there were no winmodems and no DSL or cable, USR made Sportster and Courier modems.
Despite coming from the same manuacturer, at the same time and for many years, Couriers had an excellent reputation for solid reliable communication, whereas Sportsters, ok for your occasional surfer, where on the whole quite awful. The difference was in the reliability and speed over whatever flaky analogue connection you had at hand, as well as fancier features which folk who just connect to ISPs never use.
Nowadays not many people use their modems over international and poor quality telephone lines, or with weird other modems that don't conform to standards, or indeed simply use the older, slower standards, which may not be well tested with a modern modem. Try to imagine that.
Long, >0.5 second delays means more powerful echo cancelling algorithms. Long analogue lines means better equalisation too. Both need better quality (more expensive) electronics, otherwise the elecronics wrecks the signal quality so the DSP algorithms can't get anything useful out of the subtler parts of the signal. Both need a more powerful DSP chipset.
Crappy lines also means better algorithms for selecting the best modulation schemes for those lines, and adapting as conditions change. Only the better modems will adapt the speed upwards during a call when conditions improve, for exmaple. (Line conditions do change, for example as the weather changes or the lines heat up during a call).
It is possible to implement a modem without certain features that make it more robust. V.34 in particular (the 33.6k standard) has several optional capabilities which improve performance over bad lines.
It may interest you that current 56k analogue-side modems need less DSP processing power than their earlier V.34 33.6k cousins. I am not sure, but that is what I have read and it makes a lot of sense to me. That means that although you buy a cheap modern modem that is capable of 33.6k and has the benefit of modern day chip speeds, it may still not have the processing power of the very expensive older models - simply because it doesn't need that for what it is most likely to be used for - "56k" connection to an ISP over a local analogue loop and an otherwise digital network.
Some people still need the best connections over international or really bad links, with maximum reliability and connecting to older, even obscure modems. I'm certain, if the application were mission critical (e.g. bank or trade transactions in real time) and that given the choice between a Courier and Sportster at least, they'd choose the former for those kinds of calls.
Of course you are also paying for the Courier reputation as well. But that is not a bad thing, if it is important to you to have a brand whose reputation is (supposedly) based on repeatable quality.
I agree that DSL electronics are fairly high precision and the DSP in them much more powerful than older modems. However, DSL is always run over a single local loop, needs to operate with only one, not too complex standard. It is optimised for one signalling method, and despite the speed it is not the most dense of signalling methods: consider how hardly anyone has the fastest DSL available in principle over their lines - and how much it costs to get that. Consider: DSL does not run over very long distances, and certainly not over international distances.
Software is more than GNOME, GNU, KDE, Linux, PHP and whatever other big-name projects you can think of.
Software is, ultimately, the programming of forces of nature. We will see a time come to light when all material construction, all manipulation of space and time, is fundamentally the movement of information between one form and another.
There is a long path to travel between now and a future where all things are understood to be, essentially, computers. Closer to present times, you may expect to see the intellectual endevour of programming becomes more and more a basic part of making the machines we rely on in modern - and yes, eventually - even the poorest societies.
Software at its heart is the construction of complex information processes from mathematical fundamentals. Today we have cellphones and the internet. Tomorrow, who knows - teleportation, personal power generators, individually crafted weapons, and defensive mechanisms.
In a utopic future, you are always able to grow your food on your little patch of private land. But if you want to visit your friends 1000 miles away, you need technology. Today that technology is managed by large institutions - governments, businesses - on a far larger scale than local cohesive communities. Tomorrow, you may expect the distribution of technology to change as smaller communities are more and more able to create their own high technologies.
Today, you cannot build a silicon chip without multi-billion dollar factories, intense pollution, and a deep hierarchy separating rich from poor, so that the many poor feed resources up to the apex of the pyramid, where high technologies - such as your cellphone - are created.
Today, war wages riot through many of the richest countries - in terms of natural resources - precisely because those resources are so sought after. No, I don't mean Iraq, although there are many seeking resources who will find them there. Civil war in many of the African countries is supported by our technological dependence on oil. Social instabilities are - literally - fueled by a continual striving for those who are resource rich yet need to sell those resources, because they are fiscally (and one might say morally) poor.
It is widely commented that poverty is a product of war, and poverty is not solved without solving the problems of war. It is - though less commonly - often noted that war revolves around competition for natural resources: land, water, mineral resources, geographic safety, trading routes, and so on.
I believe that war does not reflect a fundamental failure of the human psyche, but rather is a product of certain social instabilities which either flourish or die out according to the situation. Much as a cloud may precipitate rain or simply blow by, according to delicate balances one way or the other.
One of these social forces is the distribution of wealth, and of desire. It is not a simple of matter of "levelling out" wealth, but rather rigging the systems through which the imbalances of wealth are maintained, so that for the most part, people aren't too bothered by the perceived injustices, rather than being so bothered they catalyse into war.
In any case, individuals do not make for wars. It is an epiphenomenon: the result of many collective decisions. It takes two to tango. It takes two million to have a world wide war. To avoid war, alter the systems which govern the epiphenomenon.
As an individual, I don't know what the best possible role to play in this is. I wager that not only does no other individual, but that the aggregate collectives do not have the self-awareness to deduce those answer either.
Yet, as an individual, I know this much: I have been shown how to use software to make machines which can make people's lives happier, and easier. I have been shown how to develop the most amazing, fantastic technologies - yes, teleportation, personal force fields and being fully independent of others for your basic resource need
I mean what advantages does this development give to Linux users?
It makes Brazil one of those nice places where an individual can develop things independently and share their work, and are encouraged to, legally?
Unlike the USA, Japan and (as of next week) EU, where individuals and small businesses are selectively persecuted, and always under threat.
There they have a system called "patents on virtually every widely used idea", most of which are harmless but a few are selectively enforced. Much like bad laws - everyone ignores them but a few targetted folk are persecuted with severe and often unreasonable consequences.
The lie of the land at the moment suggests a minor brain drain, from Europe to Brazil, precisely because of their more enlightened approach to creativity and development.
I'm not going to take a chance on offending or bothering a lawyer client or a retail customer who may be a fundamentalist or a member of any other group with prejudices against non-conformists. As said elsewhere, it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what others (customers and clients) think.
What about clients with prejudices against black, female and/or homosexual people? Do you also support those prejudices for the sake of business?
I expect you don't, although you may as many do. If you don't, where do you draw the line at what is "acceptable" prejudice?
Then perhaps it would be appropriate to point out to the MEPs that the proposed mechanism would not actually product Open Source developers, and to lobby for a mechanism that _would_ specifically protect the needs of European open source developers even if it granted software patent rights in general?
I would not care less if all the closed source developers get wrapped up in patents, so long as open source developers are allowed to share our work.
That even seems like quite a fair compromise: Voluntary disclosure of your secrets in exchange for not being bound by the patent system. After all, there is no need (or justification) for patents to provide an incentive for disclosure or trade secrets, among those who voluntarily disclose their trade secrets anyway.
That's no different from real cash & goods, which change hands tax-free in the black economy.
It would be illegal, with considerable penalties for not declaring your emails, and yes from time to time they would demand access to and audit your logs, and also cross reference them against the logs of other people.
Just like the tax authorities do already with other kinds of tax.
I believe video coprocessors tend to be quite specialised for video ops.
Even if they weren't, programming a maths coprocessor is very different from programming an FPGA, and the things you can do are very different.
An FPGA is a programmable logic circuit, and you can connect almost any kind of digital electronics to it. From flashing lights to memory to network interfaces to bus interfaces (like PCI and USB) to whatever else turns you on.
How do you get a PCB like that made with all those components and connectors for just £100? Is it just a 2 layer board?
Also, you didn't mention how much the Virtex cost. Last time I looked, which was about a year ago, they were many hundreds of pounds from RS. I've been told that with FPGAs the real price depends on where you buy them and your relationship with the supplier. How much did you get yours for?
I know that NT has been able to pin user buffers forever, and that can be used for synchronous I/O. It's not suitable for asynchronous I/O, though: it's no good "hoping" the user doesn't overwrite buffers until the TCP transmitted data has been acknowledged. Applications are often written to assume they can call the equivalent of the unix write() call, and then overwrite their application buffer to prepare for another write.
You said that all kernel components handle buffers in the same way, and thus all network cards handle zero-copy sends. In fact this is not true for all supported network cards: some cards simply don't have the hardware to transmit a packet that is in physically discontiguous memory. And that's what you have when doing zero-copy sends from user buffers. So, either NT's kernel or the vendor-supplied device driver must copy the data into contiguous memory, or onto the card itself (typical for ISA cards). When that happens it isn't zero-copy any more, although it is transparent to the application -- just like the Linux and BSD mechanisms!
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. So-called "non-lethal" projectile and chemical weapons are not really non-lethal. That's propaganda: it's what the police call them to make them sound safe. Aw, a fluffy little bean bag. Aw, a plastic bullet. How much can a little thing like that hurt.
The reality is organ damage, serious wounds, broken bones, spinal injury, miscarriage, blindness, and death. And that's when the police don't deliberately aim for maximum injury, or fire at point blank range - the sadistic bastards.
Some weapons manufacturers more accurately label those same weapons "less lethal", meaning they still kill people, but they're not specifically designed for killing.
Such weapons are meant to be used by professional, trained officers in the correct way: such as aiming at people's legs, or the ground, and from a minimum distance. They come with specific instructions to this effect, and warnings of what will happen when these instructions are ignored. Police officers routinely ignore them.
When a police officer aims the same projectile weapons at someone's head, or at their neck, they are intending to kill that person or break their spine, and sometimes they succeed. Disturbingly, police actually do that in crowd control situations.
Even when they hit your back or legs, they can cause severe organ damage and/or broken bones.
And we haven't discussed the chemical weapons, yet. Exercise for the reader.
Here's a fairly good and accurate article.
-- Jamie
I've never been by coach either. I've always flown, but I'm not going to do that this time.
Strange. Now when I look it's UKP49 and the fastest journey is 8 hours 45 minutes. The fastest return is 7 hours 15 minutes and that's overnight, so I suspect night time traffic and/or ferry scheduling are much better, or there's a glitch in their web server's duration calculation because of the timezome.
(When I did the query before, the Eurolines / National Express coach service said the fastest service was 10 hours 30 minutes. I said 11 because that was about average. I must have made a mistake with the query.)
The trip from London Victoria to Dover is 1 hour 55 minutes for the coach schedule, and from Dover to Brussels it's 6 hours 40 minutes, whereas Brussels back to Dover is 3 hours 45 minutes. Calais time isn't given. Ferry scheduling must be playing a big part. Which is good, 'cos I might be able to recharge my laptop batteries and get some non-coach rest :) Especially as I'm travelling from Bristol, not London.
If you're right about one hour from Calais, then I should be driving instead -- if the ferry isn't too expensive for a car, that is. But I'll probably take the coach anyway.
There is a coach route via Amsterdam, but it is much slower. I go to Amsterdam often though, so thanks for the pointer. In fact, now I think I will return via Amsterdam so I can drop in on my friends :)
-- Jamie
Actually the price for a flight is about UKP120* from London. Go from London City, it's cheaper than Heathrow to Brussels. Coaches from the biggest cities to London are on special offer at UKP1-5 right now.
It's still a bit much. Coach all the way to Brussels is UKP52 from London.
-- Jamie
* - why does slashdot eat my pound signs? -- Jamie
To put this into perspective for US readers, Brussels is two hours from London by train.
To add a little more perspective, the cheapest fare now for that journey is $455 US dollars (249 pounds sterling). It's cheaper to fly, unless you book the train the recommended 30 to 90 days in advance. (No wonder Eurostar haven't got the passenger numbers they were hoping for!)
It's a very fast train. I'd be surprised if there are trains that fast anywhere in the US.
The journey by coach is 11 hours. The fare is a more modest $95 (52 pounds).
-- Jamie
Microsoft have already filed patents for an algorithm that's required to use the next .doc format.
Also the techniques for decoding/encoding a JPEG file, and for encoding an MP3 file or GIF file, and for rendering a .ttf font as the font author intended, those things are well known for being patented already. People have been threatened, sued, and lost or settled over all those things.
File format patents are not new, and they're a serious problem already.
-- Jamie
Your sample is biased.
You haven't seen the products that haven't been released because of software patents, have you?
Neither have I, but I can tell you: I have worked on one such product. Patent concerns have and are impeding its creation and its release as free software. There are two more products that I'm actively planning, that will face similar problems. I am in the EU, by the way.
KDE, Gnome and Gimp will survive even a heavy onslaught of litigation. But components of them may well disappear, and there are other components which have not been created specifically because of existing patent problems.
-- Jamie
But that's exactly the effect that software patents have. That's what they do!
Not just in the free software community, but in commercial non-free software as well: I have seen good, sensible functions not used in many a commercial product, precisely because (x) patented them.
Did you mix up copyright and patenting? Copyright let you place restrictions on your unique software. Patents let you place restrictions over broad functions, so that competitors can't use those functions, or anything similar.
In practice competitors do use the same broad functions despite patents. However, they do so by either being very large businesses with big legal teams and strong patent portfolios of their own, or they simply hope not to be sued. Because there is no way to be sure of not being sued, if you operate in a country where any kind of idea may be patented.
When businesses survive by hoping not to be sued, that is not a healthy way to run a marketplace. Healthy markets with healthy results are based on the open sharing of information, not perpetually trying to hide what you do.
-- Jamie
What's unreasonable is that it prevents me from making money from my products.
What's unreasonable is I can sit in my home and develop some great new software and then I can't publish it if it's the kind of software which is against the interests of established big business. I can't sell it: as a small business, I'd lose more from litigation than I'd gain from sales. Even some big businesses are uneasy with all the work they have to put into patent defense.
If I produce an excellent product, I can sell it - to a big company with a strong legal team. I can't run a small shop selling controversial software products, all I can do is pass it on to a big company for them to decide what they want to do with it. Or maybe I can sell it under the radar. Be careful not to advertise too much. (That doesn't seem reasonable to me). Or look small but grow fast, so I can become a big company myself if I'm lucky. (But I don't want to run a big company; why should I have to?)
The core of this issue is that patents favour businesses who retain a large legal department. Exactly the sort of business I don't want to have to be.
That strongly favours big business structures. It's not good for everyone who might actually want to use my products, because it doesn't motivate people like me to invent cool stuff, in fact it demotivates - because I'm not motivated by the idea of getting sued (and losing) for being too clever.
And I'm not motivated by the creation of big businesses, or pouring my heart into creating for one. That's not what I want to do. It's not the world I want to create for our children, having seen the consequence of a big business dominated world to date. And there are lots of creative, technically proficient people of a similar mind.
There's nothing unreasonable about fair competition, when the results are good. This is not fair competition, though, and the results are not good: this is the long arm of patent law acting in the interest of big business at the expense of small business and individuals, and at the expense of spirited individual invention.
It's natural and traditional for established big businesses to fight and get their way. It's good that they do: not all that is created in that way is bad. But that doesn't make it ok for the law to strongly penalise spirited independent inventors. That's not good for anyone, really.
-- Jamie
I know people who do this in real life, and they're not all homophobic.
I agree. These days in the places I travel, "gay" has a much more fun, cheery flair to it, even when used to diss something, than I recall from school (13 years ago, Wales). Back then, people said "gay" as an insult and they meant as in queer, as in homosexual etc. All homosexual-related terms were universally used as insults. Bisexual was strangely a word nobody used for anything, and transgender was unheard of.
I'm pretty sure that if there were a gay person in the room, they wouldn't do it, because then they'd suddenly realize that it's insulting. But when among straight males, they figure "no one's going to get offended".
That's just the trouble. They do it when they don't realise 5% of the room (or whatever it is) are, in fact, gay or bisexual, because most non-straights are very quiet about it, because it isn't universally accepted as ok, so they end up insulting people unintentionally.
Imagine the guy at work whose parents have disowned him for being gay, who feels that life is harder than it should be because those who should care for him reject him, that it's better not to tell people at work, that he thanks god each day that the suicidal thoughts he had as a teenager didn't win, and he hasn't said anything to the folks in the room. Do those unintentional insults create a welcoming environment? Does it create an environment where he's likely to talk about it? Would those people even say the things they do, if they thought for a moment about how much they don't know about the people around, or even think they do know, because the people play along uncomfortably?
If people used "that's so female" to diss products and people regularly, would that be ok? Ignore the feminist backlash -- would it be ok in terms of its effect on how people treat one another away from the spaces where they say that? I don't think so.
Homosexuality is still far from general acceptance, yet it is good, because it does no harm and makes people happy. Homophobia still exists, and causes very much harm. That's why we still have to make a special effort to accept homosexuality, and reject homophobia, with our words, actions, and laws.
-- JamieGiven compression rate possible with voice, a 1 minute recording is a bit under 1 MB
Did you know that uncompressed telephone voice is 0.48 MB per minute? :)
Using the GSM voice codec, which is old and very widely used, that compresses to 0.06 MB per minute.
-- Jamie
I know an excellent Electronic Engineer who works with high speed RF and digital circuits, who wouldn't be able to handle Java programming. He cannot handle VHDL and that is somewhat closer to circuit design.
Electronics takes a different kind of thinking than programming, and some people have a distinct aptitude for the former.
What part of the economy can we be competitive in with the current trade agreements. We have a 500 ***billion*** trade deficit right now!!!!!!
Dude, please understand what trade deficit means before you go picking on trade agreements. (Not that I am a fan of the current ones). America's Maligned and Misunderstood Trade Deficit.The problem with NAFTA and the WTO is that we gave away the farm. We didn't insist that other countries rise to our level (i.e., with labor standards, environmental standards, etc.) and as a result, we're grossly mismatched. You can't expect any part of our economy to compete with another country that doesn't have similar regulation. Just not going to happen.
As a matter of principle you did insist on a rise in environmental standards with NAFTA. Hence the formation of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.
However in reality, NAFTA has worked as a tool for lowering of environmental standards, in all countries involved, due to the way it allows big business to sue governments for protecting the environment & health of its citizens. See: Billion Dollar NAFTA Challenge To California MTBE Ban, Canada's First Province-Wide Ban of Cosmetic Pesticides Threatened Under NAFTA, and Metalclad vs. Mexico: The Toxicity of NAFTA's Ruling.
On the other hand, sometimes governments do steal property from businesses, or intimidate them, and it's not necessarily a good thing. Cronyism and corrupt officials exist everywhere, at all levels (not just the rich), so NAFTA's mechanisms are not entirely without merit.
The danger to workers in the USA isn't unfair trade relationships with other countries. It's inappropriate relationships with wealth and power in your own country. Next time you notice a huge trade or budget deficit, at any level, ask yourself this: if every government in the world is in debt at the same time (and that is possible), who do they owe it to? What does that mean in terms of power and influence? And is that good for workers?
The "resource drain" is that fewer Indians will train to become doctors. In the long run, it will hurt them due to fewer doctors.
Whether this "resource drain" is a significant problem remains to be seen. It might not be. It might be vastly outweighed by the benefits of all the work coming in. But it is there.
Yeah, but they're not required to share the code.
They get the choice between sharing the code, or writing afresh for increased monetary cost. How is increasing the options available to a business anti-business?
The internal USR 56k modems go for $80 here and are not winmodems. Is there an additional $90 worth of circuitry/plastic/shielding that goes into the external?
Yes. Long ago, when there were no winmodems and no DSL or cable, USR made Sportster and Courier modems.
Despite coming from the same manuacturer, at the same time and for many years, Couriers had an excellent reputation for solid reliable communication, whereas Sportsters, ok for your occasional surfer, where on the whole quite awful. The difference was in the reliability and speed over whatever flaky analogue connection you had at hand, as well as fancier features which folk who just connect to ISPs never use.
Nowadays not many people use their modems over international and poor quality telephone lines, or with weird other modems that don't conform to standards, or indeed simply use the older, slower standards, which may not be well tested with a modern modem. Try to imagine that.
Long, >0.5 second delays means more powerful echo cancelling algorithms. Long analogue lines means better equalisation too. Both need better quality (more expensive) electronics, otherwise the elecronics wrecks the signal quality so the DSP algorithms can't get anything useful out of the subtler parts of the signal. Both need a more powerful DSP chipset.
Crappy lines also means better algorithms for selecting the best modulation schemes for those lines, and adapting as conditions change. Only the better modems will adapt the speed upwards during a call when conditions improve, for exmaple. (Line conditions do change, for example as the weather changes or the lines heat up during a call).
It is possible to implement a modem without certain features that make it more robust. V.34 in particular (the 33.6k standard) has several optional capabilities which improve performance over bad lines.
It may interest you that current 56k analogue-side modems need less DSP processing power than their earlier V.34 33.6k cousins. I am not sure, but that is what I have read and it makes a lot of sense to me. That means that although you buy a cheap modern modem that is capable of 33.6k and has the benefit of modern day chip speeds, it may still not have the processing power of the very expensive older models - simply because it doesn't need that for what it is most likely to be used for - "56k" connection to an ISP over a local analogue loop and an otherwise digital network.
Some people still need the best connections over international or really bad links, with maximum reliability and connecting to older, even obscure modems. I'm certain, if the application were mission critical (e.g. bank or trade transactions in real time) and that given the choice between a Courier and Sportster at least, they'd choose the former for those kinds of calls.
Of course you are also paying for the Courier reputation as well. But that is not a bad thing, if it is important to you to have a brand whose reputation is (supposedly) based on repeatable quality.
I agree that DSL electronics are fairly high precision and the DSP in them much more powerful than older modems. However, DSL is always run over a single local loop, needs to operate with only one, not too complex standard. It is optimised for one signalling method, and despite the speed it is not the most dense of signalling methods: consider how hardly anyone has the fastest DSL available in principle over their lines - and how much it costs to get that. Consider: DSL does not run over very long distances, and certainly not over international distances.
Just a few thoughts of mine, take as you like :)
-- Jamie
Software is more than GNOME, GNU, KDE, Linux, PHP and whatever other big-name projects you can think of.
Software is, ultimately, the programming of forces of nature. We will see a time come to light when all material construction, all manipulation of space and time, is fundamentally the movement of information between one form and another.
There is a long path to travel between now and a future where all things are understood to be, essentially, computers. Closer to present times, you may expect to see the intellectual endevour of programming becomes more and more a basic part of making the machines we rely on in modern - and yes, eventually - even the poorest societies.
Software at its heart is the construction of complex information processes from mathematical fundamentals. Today we have cellphones and the internet. Tomorrow, who knows - teleportation, personal power generators, individually crafted weapons, and defensive mechanisms.
In a utopic future, you are always able to grow your food on your little patch of private land. But if you want to visit your friends 1000 miles away, you need technology. Today that technology is managed by large institutions - governments, businesses - on a far larger scale than local cohesive communities. Tomorrow, you may expect the distribution of technology to change as smaller communities are more and more able to create their own high technologies.
Today, you cannot build a silicon chip without multi-billion dollar factories, intense pollution, and a deep hierarchy separating rich from poor, so that the many poor feed resources up to the apex of the pyramid, where high technologies - such as your cellphone - are created.
Today, war wages riot through many of the richest countries - in terms of natural resources - precisely because those resources are so sought after. No, I don't mean Iraq, although there are many seeking resources who will find them there. Civil war in many of the African countries is supported by our technological dependence on oil. Social instabilities are - literally - fueled by a continual striving for those who are resource rich yet need to sell those resources, because they are fiscally (and one might say morally) poor.
It is widely commented that poverty is a product of war, and poverty is not solved without solving the problems of war. It is - though less commonly - often noted that war revolves around competition for natural resources: land, water, mineral resources, geographic safety, trading routes, and so on.
I believe that war does not reflect a fundamental failure of the human psyche, but rather is a product of certain social instabilities which either flourish or die out according to the situation. Much as a cloud may precipitate rain or simply blow by, according to delicate balances one way or the other.
One of these social forces is the distribution of wealth, and of desire. It is not a simple of matter of "levelling out" wealth, but rather rigging the systems through which the imbalances of wealth are maintained, so that for the most part, people aren't too bothered by the perceived injustices, rather than being so bothered they catalyse into war.
In any case, individuals do not make for wars. It is an epiphenomenon: the result of many collective decisions. It takes two to tango. It takes two million to have a world wide war. To avoid war, alter the systems which govern the epiphenomenon.
As an individual, I don't know what the best possible role to play in this is. I wager that not only does no other individual, but that the aggregate collectives do not have the self-awareness to deduce those answer either.
Yet, as an individual, I know this much: I have been shown how to use software to make machines which can make people's lives happier, and easier. I have been shown how to develop the most amazing, fantastic technologies - yes, teleportation, personal force fields and being fully independent of others for your basic resource need
I mean what advantages does this development give to Linux users?
It makes Brazil one of those nice places where an individual can develop things independently and share their work, and are encouraged to, legally?
Unlike the USA, Japan and (as of next week) EU, where individuals and small businesses are selectively persecuted, and always under threat.
There they have a system called "patents on virtually every widely used idea", most of which are harmless but a few are selectively enforced. Much like bad laws - everyone ignores them but a few targetted folk are persecuted with severe and often unreasonable consequences.
The lie of the land at the moment suggests a minor brain drain, from Europe to Brazil, precisely because of their more enlightened approach to creativity and development.
-- Jamie
I prefer the term Shared Knowledge.
Think about corporate press: "XYZ corp. has been building on our Shared Knowledge portfolio for maximum return on investment blah blah."
vs. "XYZ corp. has been building on our Intellectual Property portfolio for maximum return on investment blah blah."
Which one is more inspiring?
I'm not going to take a chance on offending or bothering a lawyer client or a retail customer who may be a fundamentalist or a member of any other group with prejudices against non-conformists. As said elsewhere, it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what others (customers and clients) think.
What about clients with prejudices against black, female and/or homosexual people? Do you also support those prejudices for the sake of business?
I expect you don't, although you may as many do. If you don't, where do you draw the line at what is "acceptable" prejudice?
-- Jamie
Then perhaps it would be appropriate to point out to the MEPs that the proposed mechanism would not actually product Open Source developers, and to lobby for a mechanism that _would_ specifically protect the needs of European open source developers even if it granted software patent rights in general?
I would not care less if all the closed source developers get wrapped up in patents, so long as open source developers are allowed to share our work.
That even seems like quite a fair compromise: Voluntary disclosure of your secrets in exchange for not being bound by the patent system. After all, there is no need (or justification) for patents to provide an incentive for disclosure or trade secrets, among those who voluntarily disclose their trade secrets anyway.
-- Jamie
That's no different from real cash & goods, which change hands tax-free in the black economy.
It would be illegal, with considerable penalties for not declaring your emails, and yes from time to time they would demand access to and audit your logs, and also cross reference them against the logs of other people.
Just like the tax authorities do already with other kinds of tax.
-- Jamie
I believe video coprocessors tend to be quite specialised for video ops.
Even if they weren't, programming a maths coprocessor is very different from programming an FPGA, and the things you can do are very different.
An FPGA is a programmable logic circuit, and you can connect almost any kind of digital electronics to it. From flashing lights to memory to network interfaces to bus interfaces (like PCI and USB) to whatever else turns you on.
How do you get a PCB like that made with all those components and connectors for just £100? Is it just a 2 layer board?
Also, you didn't mention how much the Virtex cost. Last time I looked, which was about a year ago, they were many hundreds of pounds from RS. I've been told that with FPGAs the real price depends on where you buy them and your relationship with the supplier. How much did you get yours for?
Thanks,
-- Jamie
Well, duh, you should be writing "&" instead of "&" in the URLs.
I know that NT has been able to pin user buffers forever, and that can be used for synchronous I/O. It's not suitable for asynchronous I/O, though: it's no good "hoping" the user doesn't overwrite buffers until the TCP transmitted data has been acknowledged. Applications are often written to assume they can call the equivalent of the unix write() call, and then overwrite their application buffer to prepare for another write.
You said that all kernel components handle buffers in the same way, and thus all network cards handle zero-copy sends. In fact this is not true for all supported network cards: some cards simply don't have the hardware to transmit a packet that is in physically discontiguous memory. And that's what you have when doing zero-copy sends from user buffers. So, either NT's kernel or the vendor-supplied device driver must copy the data into contiguous memory, or onto the card itself (typical for ISA cards). When that happens it isn't zero-copy any more, although it is transparent to the application -- just like the Linux and BSD mechanisms!
have a nice day,
-- Jamie