At the end of July, Thing.net will terminate its contract with Broadview and move its operations to Germany, where internet expression currently benefits from a friendlier legal climate than in the US,
I think these people are in for a rude awakening. AFAIK, Germany doesn't even have a parody exemption, and mere mention of a corporate trademark on your web site can make you subject to large fines.
If you want to get this kind of message out, don't introduce a single point of failure (web hosting). Instead, make it funny, put it in the form of a press release, make it easy to cut-and-paste, and people will be mailing it around widely. Bonus points if you can get various news wires to pick it up. If you need pictures, make them free of any trademarks, potential copyright issues, or other obstacles and you can host them on Flickr.
Google is offering to sell ads. That's their business. I don't see a problem with that. Of course, health care companies can use that to get their message out, just like right wing politicians, open source nerds, on-line pharmacies, and herbal viagra salesmen can use it to get their message out.
Google were evil if they tried to pick and choose who can use them to advertise.
Now, it was perhaps in bad taste for Google to advertise specifically to the health care industry, but that's still this side of evil, in particular since Sicko really is not completely accurate.
I bought a copy of Parallels at some point and they just lost my mailing address from their system. Repeated requests to their customer support E-mail have remained unanswered (except for the automated answer).
I wouldn't give that company another dime.
Now that VMware is out, it's a more convenient solution anyway, since it's cross-platform.
Apoptosis is not "unwanted cell suicide". Apoptosis is an essential part of growth and maintenance of organisms. Without apoptosis, your body would be a lump of flesh. If you simply turned off apoptosis in adulthood, your immune system would go haywire, viruses would proliferate, and so would cancer cells.
Some specific forms of apopotosis may be harmful in some cases, but that's rare.
My opinion is that they should have first shipped it without any of the x86 stuff as a pure supercomputing processor, and write a solid C and fortan compilers for it.
That doesn't work. The market for a machine that requires Intel C and Intel Fortran to run fast is tiny because people use many different compilers and languages in the real world. The consequence of that is that the volume remains low and the prices remain high. High prices mean that the thing doesn't give the best overall bang for the buck. So, the only people buying are people that need really high single CPU performance. But the people who need really high single CPU performance are usually the people whose code doesn't parallelize well anyway.
While it may have failed, their first superscaler chip failed horribly as well. They'll be pillaging the Itanium IP for decades to come.
I don't think so. I think the future is going to be a combination of multicore and vectorized/SIMD architectures. EPIC/VLIW and superscalar approaches are going to disappear: EPIC/VLIW imposes too much of a burden on software and can't take sufficient advantage of dynamic parallelism, and multicore is ultimately more flexible and easier to compile for than superscalar architectures.
The fact that IA-64 wasn't RISC is irrelevant to the point.
Well, actually, the IA-64 is a RISC architecture, in particular, it's a VLIW RISC.
They got fuckstomped by the market, because it wasn't what the market wanted.
Yes, and, more precisely, what the market didn't want was the VLIW aspect of IA-64, because that required everybody to rewrite their compilers. If IA-64 had just been a RISC, it would probably have taken over by now.
IA64 was not a RISC version of x86-like chips, it was a completely new architecture coming out of VLIW work at HP. IA64 architectures had failed once before, and it was a stupid idea for Intel to push them so heavily (personally, I think they will never work because they push too much complexity into software). Switching to IA64 meant that many compilers couldn't be made to work at all, and many other compilers would generate inefficient output.
Intel should be developing a conservative RISC processor, an instruction set similar to PPC but a bit more friendly to transitioning from x86. The adaptation of existing compiler back-ends would be fairly simple. Furthermore, the chip should have backwards compatibility, either through JIT-support or through a small (not necessarily hugely efficient) instruction set translator in the chip.
Itanium is a lesson in how not to handle technological transitions. Itanium was picked by geeks who had no idea of what the market wanted or needed, and Intel marketing and management blindly believed what they were hearing from the geeks. (Another company that works like that is Microsoft, which is why they keep churning out such bad software.)
According to the article, they are using 1200 different frequency as selective targeting and shape the output to their decided products.
Yes, that's what they say. However, that is not how your kitchen microwave works. Your kitchen microwave does not use "specific" frequencies or identify bonds "by frequency", it uses frequencies that heat water non-specifically.
So, they got the description of the kitchen microwave wrong, in a pretty basic way, which is kind of worrisome for a company that claims to be an expert on microwave-based recycling.
"Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?"
Here are some suggestions:
- stop trying to win in the market through sleazy business practices
- stop trying to kill open source through FUD; either deliver something that's obviously paying money for, or join open source
- stop delivering products many years late
- stop having your executives perform monkey dances (and fire any that have the bad taste to do it)
- fire the old-timer multi-zillionaires; they make any newcomer feel like a peasant, and they have far too much influence
- stop filing patents on inventions others have made decades earlier
- start making products that matter, as opposed to useless variants of outdated products and "me too" versions of Google and Apple products
Personally, I don't give a damn whether I work in a cubicle or a private office, or whether my company gives me free food or not, but I do care whether I have to be embarrassed mentioning who I'm working for.
It isn't anti-competitive, because Apple isn't the dominant player.
Apple isn't the dominant player in MP3 players? What, have you been living under a rock??
It isn't just the fact that Apple is MAKING people, through a 95% OS market share like Microsoft, use iTunes or iPods.
No, Apple is simply MAKING people use iTunes through their 80% MP3 player market share, and they are trying to leverage that near-monopoly into the phone market.
You say iPods and iTunes suck "badly technically", so feel free to back that up if you like.
I have three Macs and about 10000 tracks, so I speak from experience. iTunes uses non-standard RSS feeds. It uses a less widely adopted audio format by default. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple on-line music stores. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple codecs. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple MP3 players. Its tags are inconsistent, it misidentifies CD covers. Sometimes it just hangs. iPods are similarly dumbed down so as to not interfere with Apple's business model. The iPod shuffle can't even sync with dynamic playlists. Dynamic playlist updating appears at haphazard times. Multi-track editing is a usability nightmare.
But that's not the worst. The worst is that iTunes loses tracks and duplicates tracks. There are hundreds of scripts and add-ons trying to fix some of these problems, but none of them really work. And all of them are hampered by the slow API calls into iTunes. Some are trying to go around iTunes by hacking the XML files directly, with predictably dangerous consequences.
And, in case you're wondering, yes, I'm moving to another music library manager, but given the mess that iTunes made out of my library, that's taking a while.
The DRM in Vista, and especially the Zune player and marketplace, is anti-competitive
So is Apple's.
Apple can get away with it,
Apple has such a large fraction of the MP3 business that Apple should not be allowed to get away with it much longer. iPod/iTunes are getting to be a real nuisance because so much stuff depends on it and because they really suck pretty badly technically.
No, I don't want an iPhone: I think it's underpowered and overpriced. But the release of the iPhone will hopefully cause other manufacturers to make thinner phones with nicer screens and better user interfaces.
Paying people to edit articles on Wikipedia raises questions of bias and propaganda. What's next? Is the German government going to pay people to have its view on taxes, education, religion, etc. edited into Wikipedia?
If the German government wants to support Wikipedia, they should donate hardware and bandwidth.
with virtualization users are able to bypass the DRM that keeps Vista proprietary
The term "proprietary" just means that Microsoft owns the copyright and patents related to Vista and controls the future development of Vista and its APIs. Whether you can virtualize it doesn't change it. Microsoft could give Vista away as freeware and it would still be proprietary.
The difference is that Apple doesn't have a 95% market share, so they aren't bound by the same anti-competitive regulations.
I see nothing particularly anti-competitive about prohibiting virtualization. What makes Microsoft anti-competitive is their bundling and tying contracts with PC distributors.
So you have a more plausible explanation for the bizarre EULA flip-flopping?
Sure: it circumvents Windows product activation, permits people to circumvent software license restrictions, and enables DRM circumvention (including circumventing audio and video DRM restrictions), and that's just for starters. I don't like any of those features, but I don't see anything intrinsically anti-competitive about them either.
The fact that they make Windows hard to use for Macintosh and Linux users just gives you an incentive to kick the Windows habit, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I use tin foil hats and a cone of silence. Both are easy to use and effective, and they stop security holes immediately at the source.
Note that the company only claims a 15-20x improvement for a customer (who may have been using a really bad TCP stack), not relative to TCP FAST.
At the end of July, Thing.net will terminate its contract with Broadview and move its operations to Germany, where internet
expression currently benefits from a friendlier legal climate than in the US,
I think these people are in for a rude awakening. AFAIK, Germany doesn't even have a parody exemption, and mere mention of a corporate trademark on your web site can make you subject to large fines.
If you want to get this kind of message out, don't introduce a single point of failure (web hosting). Instead, make it funny, put it in the form of a press release, make it easy to cut-and-paste, and people will be mailing it around widely. Bonus points if you can get various news wires to pick it up. If you need pictures, make them free of any trademarks, potential copyright issues, or other obstacles and you can host them on Flickr.
Google is offering to sell ads. That's their business. I don't see a problem with that. Of course, health care companies can use that to get their message out, just like right wing politicians, open source nerds, on-line pharmacies, and herbal viagra salesmen can use it to get their message out.
Google were evil if they tried to pick and choose who can use them to advertise.
Now, it was perhaps in bad taste for Google to advertise specifically to the health care industry, but that's still this side of evil, in particular since Sicko really is not completely accurate.
I bought a copy of Parallels at some point and they just lost my mailing address from their system. Repeated requests to their customer support E-mail have remained unanswered (except for the automated answer).
I wouldn't give that company another dime.
Now that VMware is out, it's a more convenient solution anyway, since it's cross-platform.
We already have, pre 9/11 even:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103639/
There are various Bluetooth presence software add-ons that will lock your laptop, cell phone, PDA, etc. when it's out of range.
Apoptosis is not "unwanted cell suicide". Apoptosis is an essential part of growth and maintenance of organisms. Without apoptosis, your body would be a lump of flesh. If you simply turned off apoptosis in adulthood, your immune system would go haywire, viruses would proliferate, and so would cancer cells.
Some specific forms of apopotosis may be harmful in some cases, but that's rare.
My opinion is that they should have first shipped it without any of the x86 stuff as a pure supercomputing processor, and write a solid C and fortan compilers for it.
That doesn't work. The market for a machine that requires Intel C and Intel Fortran to run fast is tiny because people use many different compilers and languages in the real world. The consequence of that is that the volume remains low and the prices remain high. High prices mean that the thing doesn't give the best overall bang for the buck. So, the only people buying are people that need really high single CPU performance. But the people who need really high single CPU performance are usually the people whose code doesn't parallelize well anyway.
While it may have failed, their first superscaler chip failed horribly as well. They'll be pillaging the Itanium IP for decades to come.
I don't think so. I think the future is going to be a combination of multicore and vectorized/SIMD architectures. EPIC/VLIW and superscalar approaches are going to disappear: EPIC/VLIW imposes too much of a burden on software and can't take sufficient advantage of dynamic parallelism, and multicore is ultimately more flexible and easier to compile for than superscalar architectures.
The fact that IA-64 wasn't RISC is irrelevant to the point.
Well, actually, the IA-64 is a RISC architecture, in particular, it's a VLIW RISC.
They got fuckstomped by the market, because it wasn't what the market wanted.
Yes, and, more precisely, what the market didn't want was the VLIW aspect of IA-64, because that required everybody to rewrite their compilers. If IA-64 had just been a RISC, it would probably have taken over by now.
IA64 was not a RISC version of x86-like chips, it was a completely new architecture coming out of VLIW work at HP. IA64 architectures had failed once before, and it was a stupid idea for Intel to push them so heavily (personally, I think they will never work because they push too much complexity into software). Switching to IA64 meant that many compilers couldn't be made to work at all, and many other compilers would generate inefficient output.
Intel should be developing a conservative RISC processor, an instruction set similar to PPC but a bit more friendly to transitioning from x86. The adaptation of existing compiler back-ends would be fairly simple. Furthermore, the chip should have backwards compatibility, either through JIT-support or through a small (not necessarily hugely efficient) instruction set translator in the chip.
Itanium is a lesson in how not to handle technological transitions. Itanium was picked by geeks who had no idea of what the market wanted or needed, and Intel marketing and management blindly believed what they were hearing from the geeks. (Another company that works like that is Microsoft, which is why they keep churning out such bad software.)
Wasn't the old Microsoft slogan "Your potential, our gain."? I thought that was pretty self-explanatory.
According to the article, they are using 1200 different frequency as selective targeting and shape the output to their decided products.
Yes, that's what they say. However, that is not how your kitchen microwave works. Your kitchen microwave does not use "specific" frequencies or identify bonds "by frequency", it uses frequencies that heat water non-specifically.
So, they got the description of the kitchen microwave wrong, in a pretty basic way, which is kind of worrisome for a company that claims to be an expert on microwave-based recycling.
umm... according to the TFA '1200 different frequencies within the microwave range' is used to crack the plastics.
And, as I was saying, contrary to what they claim in TFA, that is nothing like a kitchen microwave works.
I'm sure it helps to stick the stuff into a blender first.
Just like the 2450MHz frequency magnetron in your kitchen microwave oven which is specific to water (H2O) molecules
The 2.45GHz frequency isn't "specific to water": water doesn't have a resonance there, and it will heat many other kinds of molecules.
I'm not sure how much I'd trust the rest of their process if they don't even seem to understand how microwave ovens work.
That sort of thing is not permitted in Utah, you insensitive clod!
"Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?"
Here are some suggestions:
- stop trying to win in the market through sleazy business practices
- stop trying to kill open source through FUD; either deliver something that's obviously paying money for, or join open source
- stop delivering products many years late
- stop having your executives perform monkey dances (and fire any that have the bad taste to do it)
- fire the old-timer multi-zillionaires; they make any newcomer feel like a peasant, and they have far too much influence
- stop filing patents on inventions others have made decades earlier
- start making products that matter, as opposed to useless variants of outdated products and "me too" versions of Google and Apple products
Personally, I don't give a damn whether I work in a cubicle or a private office, or whether my company gives me free food or not, but I do care whether I have to be embarrassed mentioning who I'm working for.
It isn't anti-competitive, because Apple isn't the dominant player.
Apple isn't the dominant player in MP3 players? What, have you been living under a rock??
It isn't just the fact that Apple is MAKING people, through a 95% OS market share like Microsoft, use iTunes or iPods.
No, Apple is simply MAKING people use iTunes through their 80% MP3 player market share, and they are trying to leverage that near-monopoly into the phone market.
You say iPods and iTunes suck "badly technically", so feel free to back that up if you like.
I have three Macs and about 10000 tracks, so I speak from experience. iTunes uses non-standard RSS feeds. It uses a less widely adopted audio format by default. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple on-line music stores. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple codecs. iTunes makes it hard to use non-Apple MP3 players. Its tags are inconsistent, it misidentifies CD covers. Sometimes it just hangs. iPods are similarly dumbed down so as to not interfere with Apple's business model. The iPod shuffle can't even sync with dynamic playlists. Dynamic playlist updating appears at haphazard times. Multi-track editing is a usability nightmare.
But that's not the worst. The worst is that iTunes loses tracks and duplicates tracks. There are hundreds of scripts and add-ons trying to fix some of these problems, but none of them really work. And all of them are hampered by the slow API calls into iTunes. Some are trying to go around iTunes by hacking the XML files directly, with predictably dangerous consequences.
And, in case you're wondering, yes, I'm moving to another music library manager, but given the mess that iTunes made out of my library, that's taking a while.
Jeff Jones is "strategy directory at Mirosoft's Trustworthy Computing group".
What that report and its blatant misuse of statistics shows is only one thing: Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group employs morons.
Whether those techniques work at all in real world settings, and whether they work in a legal setting, are unresolved questions.
It will take many years before such techniques can be used in the real world, even if they work.
The DRM in Vista, and especially the Zune player and marketplace, is anti-competitive
So is Apple's.
Apple can get away with it,
Apple has such a large fraction of the MP3 business that Apple should not be allowed to get away with it much longer. iPod/iTunes are getting to be a real nuisance because so much stuff depends on it and because they really suck pretty badly technically.
No, I don't want an iPhone: I think it's underpowered and overpriced. But the release of the iPhone will hopefully cause other manufacturers to make thinner phones with nicer screens and better user interfaces.
Paying people to edit articles on Wikipedia raises questions of bias and propaganda. What's next? Is the German government going to pay people to have its view on taxes, education, religion, etc. edited into Wikipedia?
If the German government wants to support Wikipedia, they should donate hardware and bandwidth.
with virtualization users are able to bypass the DRM that keeps Vista proprietary
The term "proprietary" just means that Microsoft owns the copyright and patents related to Vista and controls the future development of Vista and its APIs. Whether you can virtualize it doesn't change it. Microsoft could give Vista away as freeware and it would still be proprietary.
The difference is that Apple doesn't have a 95% market share, so they aren't bound by the same anti-competitive regulations.
I see nothing particularly anti-competitive about prohibiting virtualization. What makes Microsoft anti-competitive is their bundling and tying contracts with PC distributors.
So you have a more plausible explanation for the bizarre EULA flip-flopping?
Sure: it circumvents Windows product activation, permits people to circumvent software license restrictions, and enables DRM circumvention (including circumventing audio and video DRM restrictions), and that's just for starters. I don't like any of those features, but I don't see anything intrinsically anti-competitive about them either.
The fact that they make Windows hard to use for Macintosh and Linux users just gives you an incentive to kick the Windows habit, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing.