Indeed, but they also have to comply with the law of every country that they do business in. And, soon Twitter's international HQ will be based in the E.U., so they will be subject to more regulation (they do say they're already E.U. Data Protection compliant).
I doubt Facebook would close an account just because some random person emails them saying that the owner of said account broke their Terms Of Service. Also Facebook might face some legal problems if they deleted the account when they had knowledge that it was subject to a court order. Imagine the non-internet scenario: you are facing divorce, so you store some documents relevant to the legal proceedings with a lawyer for safe keeping. Your spouse's attorney knows of the existence of the documents, requests them during discovery, the judge agrees they are relevant and orders you to provide access to them. I suspect the court would not look kindly on the actions of your lawyer if, finding out about this, he then destroyed (or disabled access to) the documents due to a violation of his "Terms of Service".
Did Obama ever actually claim "the economy has recovered"?
Anyway, it's all about how you define "recovered" - some economists argued that the economy had "recovered" once it showed 3 months of consecutive growth. See this businessinsider article for an example of that usage. The man on the street may well argue that "recovered" means the jobless % returns to previous levels, but others are arguing that may not happen at all in the "jobless recovery". So, by what metric is "recovered" measured? Profitability? Employment? CEO salaries? Salaries for everyone else? Economic growth? Consumption? House sales? The deficit? And over what time period is this metric to be measured?
Possibly already fixed: "Some drivers (e.g. the e1000 network driver) have already switched off the ASPM where the PCI-E v1.1 feature is known to not work" Phoronix If not, report it and that driver will get ASPM blacklisted.
If the firmware has given us control of PCIe capabilities then it's
valid for an operating system to configure ASPM more aggressively than
the firmware did. A small number of devices object to this and exhibit
various failure modes. Windows provides a mechanism to disable ASPM in
the driver, indicated by the Needs=PciASPMOptOut statement in the.inf
file. Trawling through Windows drivers has indicated the following set
of hardware that disables ASPM in Windows but doesn't currently disable
it in Linux. It makes sense for us to mimic Windows in this situation.
(V2: send the version that actually builds)
SNES emulation may itself be a poor example. Like most old systems, programmers used various low-level tricks to increase performance. Worse still, the cartridge based nature of the console allowed extra game-specific hardware coprocessors to be shipped with different games! These kind of tricks are much less used now due to better hardware and compatibility concerns, so programmers tend to stick to published APIs. This makes new hardware more amenable to emulation at the API level e.g.OpenGL - we can now emulate two player Mario Kart 64 on a cell phone in HD and it is smooth and playable.
Possibly because Google didn't actually create most of Android, or even own it eg. the Linux kernel, they just bundle together source code and release that. Also android licensers often want to modify the user interface and add their own base GUI apps. Google can not offer patent protection for a user interface that it has no control over. On the other hand they could offer patent protection for an unmodified android install, it would even be a good way to encourage the manufacturers not to divert from the mainline
The third article has an update stating that Apple didn't litigate this case
Not quite. The update states:
the nature of Apple's involvement may have been limited to that of an initial complainant (who according to nt-k also filed an indictment) as opposed to that of a party litigating a case all the way through. That's what my sources say, and it's possible.
"may have been.. it's possible", says Mr Florian Mueller... Anything is possible, I would prefer him to report the facts rather than his speculative opinion.
He didn't say U.S. workers were greedy, he said that $15/hour+benefits "cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar". And he is right. People do not realise how low Chinese wages are. A factory worker gets about $0.50/hr. They work 100 hours a week. They have limited benefits, but sometimes the employment does include housing and food. They have massive factories where tens of thousands of young people (mostly women) do nothing but eat, sleep and work. The pay at Foxconn - generally recognised as being one of the better employers - was less than $150/month before the string of worker suicides. Imagine what conditions and pay are like with a worse employer. Americans are not willing to work under these conditions and pay, and even if they were, it wouldn't be financially viable for most of them.
The hard disk industry is extremely competitive - one hard disk is much like another, and there is little customer loyalty. Paying for idle production capacity is generally wasted money, since you need to pay for wages, factories, tooling for the factories etc. The lifetime of an established production line is, at best, a couple of years. Think of all the industrial robots and other custom hardware that is required to build a modern hard disk, and then consider that this equipment needs updating every 12 months or so to keep up with the latest developments and processes. That is why it is too expensive to have idle production capacity in this particular industry.
Whether it is a good idea to export jobs to China in the long term is a separate issue.
By default rsync just checks modification time and file size to determine whether a file has changed, so it is reasonably quick. ZFS remote snapshots do look cool though.
Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations.
A business person will tell you that your main area of potential expansion is not your existing market - it is the new customers that you haven't attracted yet. And that means opening up to new markets.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS.
I disagree. Android and iOS certainly have the advantage at the moment, but they are inherently limited by the nature of their distributions - being originally created for cellphones with limited hardware capabilities meant compromises. The new Galaxy Tab is supposed to have a dual-core 1.4 GHz CPU with 1GB of memory. Within a few years we'll have tablets with quad-cores and 4GB memory. With that kind of hardware, there is no need to accept the Android limitations - it is capable of running a full Linux distribution with proper C library and everything else. The problem is that Linux GUI apps haven't been created or optimised for touch screens, and so that is where Canonical is heading. I also expect that at some point Apple will get OS X running on the iPad. I wouldn't be surprised to see Chrome OS for tablets either.
The people who want to cripple economies (just some economies, of course, but not poor, third-world, developing economies like China's)
Strawman alarmist argument... Please show us all of these scientists who want to cripple economies and destroy the world. The economy wasn't crippled with SO2 controls (despite alarmist claims it would be). The economy wasn't crippled with CFC controls (despite alarmist claims it would be).
never seems to touch on the actual issue (too many people feverishly reproducing in places where they still do things like scrape rainforests down to the ground to get one season's wood and cowpasture
So, if the increase in CO2 was primarily caused by people in South America having kids and cutting down the rain forests, then presumably your solution would be population control and protecting the rainforests? Anyway... Global deforestation (of all types of forest, not just rainforest) accounts for something like 6%-17% of CO2 emissions, it is significant of course, but it is certainly not the singular issue that you suggest it is.
I was shocked to see a Slashdot skeptic call someone a denier, after all the skeptic claims that the word "deny" is inextricably linked to the Holocaust... That you then went on to attack him for using the "d" word, not even realising that he is a fellow skeptic, well that was just hilarious.
At first I thought you were going for +5 Funny, but reading your responses, it seems this was completely unintentional. Brilliant.
If you have more than one server then it's pretty easy to set up rsync with rolling backups (rsnapshot or rdiff-backup or whatever) which is more of a proper backup solution. It's also probably a bit easier to administrate than a clusterfs.
Having said that, Hadoop's HDFS looks quite good. AFAIK it is pretty robust, and it runs on top of an existing FS so you won't need to repartition, which is useful. FUSE file system driver, and Java, will be a bit slower than in-kernel, but probably not an issue for bulk data storage.
Oh, and another option is the Distributed Replicated Block Device. Though this is basically network RAID and not replication on a per file basis.
You are correct about inflation and the mixed payment of principal and interest. But even when the interest rate is linked to inflation it does not take 25 years to break even.
If inflation is 3% (historical figure) and loan rate is inflation+5%=8% (not bad, the average personal loan rate at the moment is 12%) then after 15 years of monthly payments ($771.82) the lender has $172k (total amount paid to the lender+compound inflation). $100k at 3% inflation is worth $156k after 15 years. $172k>$156k So, under this scenario, after 15 years the lender has already passed the breakeven point.
Of course, there are other costs to lenders which this calculation ignores, but the principle is always that the lender must break even before 25 years, otherwise he would not make a profit.
Of course it is. There isn't even a question about it.
Actually, there has been a debate over the last couple of decades. It has been traditionally agreed that substance dependence requires signs of withdrawal. However, with cannabis, signs of withdrawal only occur in some users. Compare that to 100% of heroin addicts who would show signs of withdrawal. What percentage of cannabis users would show signs of withdrawal? I don't know the figure, but the fact that the majority would show no signs at all means that, under the traditional classification, it would not be considered as a physiologically addictive substance. Quote:
"When human subjects were administered daily oral doses of 180-210 mg of THC - the equivalent of 15-20 joints per day - abrupt cessation produced adverse symptoms, including disturbed sleep, restlessness, nausea, decreased appetite, and sweating. The authors interpreted these symptoms as evidence of physical dependence. However, they noted the syndrome's relatively mild nature and remained skeptical of its occurrence when marijuana is consumed in usual doses and situations. Indeed, when humans are allowed to control consumption, even high doses are not followed by adverse withdrawal symptoms. "
It depends what you mean by "addictive". The current arguments are that cannabis isn't physiologically addictive but it is psychologically addictive for certain groups of users. That means there is a lack of symptoms of physical dependence and withdrawal, but some people become obsessed with it, think about it all the time, etc. Kind of like women. Or the internet.
I agree with the point - I actually think RedHat support is a pretty good deal when compared to similar offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle etc. But I still disagree that "Linux is free if your time is worthless". When accounting, we don't lump TCO in with the purchase cost of any other operating system, so why single out Linux? We never hear anyone say, "Windows is only $200 if your time is worthless".
Hmmm? I didn't do the math, I just plugged the values into the first Google result for "loan calculator".... Here's another set of figures from another loan company calculator:
$100k loan amount
5.5%
25 years repayment
= $607/month, total amount=$181k, of which total interest=$81k,
The figures are a little different, I don't know exactly why, it's probably due to some different terms in the loan agreement..
Because the lender doesn't pay interest on the money they borrow in order to lend to the student.
You assume that the lender is just a middle man. At some point there is a "lender" who has to have the actual cash. If the lender is a government or national bank, then perhaps they do not pay interest.
And there's no opportunity cost in not lending it out as credit card debt or anything.
Why would government be concerned with this? This should not be a concern for student loans.
$100,000 today is worth exactly $100,000 in 12 years time.
I pointed out profit is offset by inflation. However, student loan interest rate can also be linked to inflation e.g. the UK is switching 2011 student loan rates to RPI+3%.
It is possible to writeoff a debt and still have made a profit. Remember that interest and repayments have already been paid on the loan for 20 years. The final total repayment for a loan is always higher than the loaned amount, so the lender breaks even a lot earlier than the point at which the loan is fully paid off. After that it's all profit.
Example:
$100k loan over 25 years at 5.5%
Total repayment = $184k
Monthly payment = $687
100k/687=145 months=12 years.
So the original $100k is paid back after 12 years, and the next 13 years of payments are profit (offset by inflation). This is why lending money has traditionally been very profitable!
(Disclaimer: These figures are for a standard commercial loan. I have no idea whether repayments differ substantially for Stafford/Perkins/PLUS/whatever.)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, but they also have to comply with the law of every country that they do business in. And, soon Twitter's international HQ will be based in the E.U., so they will be subject to more regulation (they do say they're already E.U. Data Protection compliant).
I doubt Facebook would close an account just because some random person emails them saying that the owner of said account broke their Terms Of Service. Also Facebook might face some legal problems if they deleted the account when they had knowledge that it was subject to a court order. Imagine the non-internet scenario: you are facing divorce, so you store some documents relevant to the legal proceedings with a lawyer for safe keeping. Your spouse's attorney knows of the existence of the documents, requests them during discovery, the judge agrees they are relevant and orders you to provide access to them. I suspect the court would not look kindly on the actions of your lawyer if, finding out about this, he then destroyed (or disabled access to) the documents due to a violation of his "Terms of Service".
Did Obama ever actually claim "the economy has recovered"?
Anyway, it's all about how you define "recovered" - some economists argued that the economy had "recovered" once it showed 3 months of consecutive growth. See this businessinsider article for an example of that usage. The man on the street may well argue that "recovered" means the jobless % returns to previous levels, but others are arguing that may not happen at all in the "jobless recovery". So, by what metric is "recovered" measured? Profitability? Employment? CEO salaries? Salaries for everyone else? Economic growth? Consumption? House sales? The deficit? And over what time period is this metric to be measured?
Possibly already fixed: "Some drivers (e.g. the e1000 network driver) have already switched off the ASPM where the PCI-E v1.1 feature is known to not work" Phoronix If not, report it and that driver will get ASPM blacklisted.
If the firmware has given us control of PCIe capabilities then it's valid for an operating system to configure ASPM more aggressively than the firmware did. A small number of devices object to this and exhibit various failure modes. Windows provides a mechanism to disable ASPM in the driver, indicated by the Needs=PciASPMOptOut statement in the .inf
file. Trawling through Windows drivers has indicated the following set
of hardware that disables ASPM in Windows but doesn't currently disable
it in Linux. It makes sense for us to mimic Windows in this situation.
(V2: send the version that actually builds)
Matthew Garrett, these patches did get noticed by Phoronix.
LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy S2, HTC Amaze, HTC Sensation, Motorola Droid 3, ...?
SNES emulation may itself be a poor example. Like most old systems, programmers used various low-level tricks to increase performance. Worse still, the cartridge based nature of the console allowed extra game-specific hardware coprocessors to be shipped with different games! These kind of tricks are much less used now due to better hardware and compatibility concerns, so programmers tend to stick to published APIs. This makes new hardware more amenable to emulation at the API level e.g.OpenGL - we can now emulate two player Mario Kart 64 on a cell phone in HD and it is smooth and playable.
Possibly because Google didn't actually create most of Android, or even own it eg. the Linux kernel, they just bundle together source code and release that. Also android licensers often want to modify the user interface and add their own base GUI apps. Google can not offer patent protection for a user interface that it has no control over. On the other hand they could offer patent protection for an unmodified android install, it would even be a good way to encourage the manufacturers not to divert from the mainline
In actual fact, Arabs and Jews are genetically the same people:
" What they revealed was that Arabs and Jews are essentially a single population, and that Palestinians are slap bang in the middle of the different Jewish populations (as shown in this figure)." http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html?m=1
The third article has an update stating that Apple didn't litigate this case
Not quite. The update states:
the nature of Apple's involvement may have been limited to that of an initial complainant (who according to nt-k also filed an indictment) as opposed to that of a party litigating a case all the way through. That's what my sources say, and it's possible.
"may have been.. it's possible", says Mr Florian Mueller... Anything is possible, I would prefer him to report the facts rather than his speculative opinion.
He didn't say U.S. workers were greedy, he said that $15/hour+benefits "cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar". And he is right. People do not realise how low Chinese wages are. A factory worker gets about $0.50/hr. They work 100 hours a week. They have limited benefits, but sometimes the employment does include housing and food. They have massive factories where tens of thousands of young people (mostly women) do nothing but eat, sleep and work. The pay at Foxconn - generally recognised as being one of the better employers - was less than $150/month before the string of worker suicides. Imagine what conditions and pay are like with a worse employer. Americans are not willing to work under these conditions and pay, and even if they were, it wouldn't be financially viable for most of them.
The hard disk industry is extremely competitive - one hard disk is much like another, and there is little customer loyalty. Paying for idle production capacity is generally wasted money, since you need to pay for wages, factories, tooling for the factories etc. The lifetime of an established production line is, at best, a couple of years. Think of all the industrial robots and other custom hardware that is required to build a modern hard disk, and then consider that this equipment needs updating every 12 months or so to keep up with the latest developments and processes. That is why it is too expensive to have idle production capacity in this particular industry.
Whether it is a good idea to export jobs to China in the long term is a separate issue.
By default rsync just checks modification time and file size to determine whether a file has changed, so it is reasonably quick. ZFS remote snapshots do look cool though.
Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations.
A business person will tell you that your main area of potential expansion is not your existing market - it is the new customers that you haven't attracted yet. And that means opening up to new markets.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS.
I disagree. Android and iOS certainly have the advantage at the moment, but they are inherently limited by the nature of their distributions - being originally created for cellphones with limited hardware capabilities meant compromises. The new Galaxy Tab is supposed to have a dual-core 1.4 GHz CPU with 1GB of memory. Within a few years we'll have tablets with quad-cores and 4GB memory. With that kind of hardware, there is no need to accept the Android limitations - it is capable of running a full Linux distribution with proper C library and everything else. The problem is that Linux GUI apps haven't been created or optimised for touch screens, and so that is where Canonical is heading. I also expect that at some point Apple will get OS X running on the iPad. I wouldn't be surprised to see Chrome OS for tablets either.
The people who want to cripple economies (just some economies, of course, but not poor, third-world, developing economies like China's)
Strawman alarmist argument... Please show us all of these scientists who want to cripple economies and destroy the world. The economy wasn't crippled with SO2 controls (despite alarmist claims it would be). The economy wasn't crippled with CFC controls (despite alarmist claims it would be).
never seems to touch on the actual issue (too many people feverishly reproducing in places where they still do things like scrape rainforests down to the ground to get one season's wood and cowpasture
So, if the increase in CO2 was primarily caused by people in South America having kids and cutting down the rain forests, then presumably your solution would be population control and protecting the rainforests? Anyway... Global deforestation (of all types of forest, not just rainforest) accounts for something like 6%-17% of CO2 emissions, it is significant of course, but it is certainly not the singular issue that you suggest it is.
I was shocked to see a Slashdot skeptic call someone a denier, after all the skeptic claims that the word "deny" is inextricably linked to the Holocaust... That you then went on to attack him for using the "d" word, not even realising that he is a fellow skeptic, well that was just hilarious.
At first I thought you were going for +5 Funny, but reading your responses, it seems this was completely unintentional. Brilliant.
If you have more than one server then it's pretty easy to set up rsync with rolling backups (rsnapshot or rdiff-backup or whatever) which is more of a proper backup solution. It's also probably a bit easier to administrate than a clusterfs.
Having said that, Hadoop's HDFS looks quite good. AFAIK it is pretty robust, and it runs on top of an existing FS so you won't need to repartition, which is useful. FUSE file system driver, and Java, will be a bit slower than in-kernel, but probably not an issue for bulk data storage.
Oh, and another option is the Distributed Replicated Block Device. Though this is basically network RAID and not replication on a per file basis.
The moderators must have understood that inflation makes little difference to the breakeven calculation.
You are correct about inflation and the mixed payment of principal and interest. But even when the interest rate is linked to inflation it does not take 25 years to break even.
If inflation is 3% (historical figure) and loan rate is inflation+5%=8% (not bad, the average personal loan rate at the moment is 12%) then after 15 years of monthly payments ($771.82) the lender has $172k (total amount paid to the lender+compound inflation). $100k at 3% inflation is worth $156k after 15 years. $172k>$156k So, under this scenario, after 15 years the lender has already passed the breakeven point.
Of course, there are other costs to lenders which this calculation ignores, but the principle is always that the lender must break even before 25 years, otherwise he would not make a profit.
Of course it is. There isn't even a question about it.
Actually, there has been a debate over the last couple of decades. It has been traditionally agreed that substance dependence requires signs of withdrawal. However, with cannabis, signs of withdrawal only occur in some users. Compare that to 100% of heroin addicts who would show signs of withdrawal. What percentage of cannabis users would show signs of withdrawal? I don't know the figure, but the fact that the majority would show no signs at all means that, under the traditional classification, it would not be considered as a physiologically addictive substance. Quote:
"When human subjects were administered daily oral doses of 180-210 mg of THC - the equivalent of 15-20 joints per day - abrupt cessation produced adverse symptoms, including disturbed sleep, restlessness, nausea, decreased appetite, and sweating. The authors interpreted these symptoms as evidence of physical dependence. However, they noted the syndrome's relatively mild nature and remained skeptical of its occurrence when marijuana is consumed in usual doses and situations. Indeed, when humans are allowed to control consumption, even high doses are not followed by adverse withdrawal symptoms. "
- Lynn Zimmer, Associate Professor of Sociology Queens College and John P. Morgan, Professor of Pharmacology, City University Medical School
It depends what you mean by "addictive". The current arguments are that cannabis isn't physiologically addictive but it is psychologically addictive for certain groups of users. That means there is a lack of symptoms of physical dependence and withdrawal, but some people become obsessed with it, think about it all the time, etc. Kind of like women. Or the internet.
I agree with the point - I actually think RedHat support is a pretty good deal when compared to similar offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle etc. But I still disagree that "Linux is free if your time is worthless". When accounting, we don't lump TCO in with the purchase cost of any other operating system, so why single out Linux? We never hear anyone say, "Windows is only $200 if your time is worthless".
Hmmm? I didn't do the math, I just plugged the values into the first Google result for "loan calculator".... Here's another set of figures from another loan company calculator:
$100k loan amount
5.5%
25 years repayment
= $607/month, total amount=$181k, of which total interest=$81k,
The figures are a little different, I don't know exactly why, it's probably due to some different terms in the loan agreement..
Because the lender doesn't pay interest on the money they borrow in order to lend to the student.
You assume that the lender is just a middle man. At some point there is a "lender" who has to have the actual cash. If the lender is a government or national bank, then perhaps they do not pay interest.
And there's no opportunity cost in not lending it out as credit card debt or anything.
Why would government be concerned with this? This should not be a concern for student loans.
$100,000 today is worth exactly $100,000 in 12 years time.
I pointed out profit is offset by inflation. However, student loan interest rate can also be linked to inflation e.g. the UK is switching 2011 student loan rates to RPI+3%.
It is possible to writeoff a debt and still have made a profit. Remember that interest and repayments have already been paid on the loan for 20 years. The final total repayment for a loan is always higher than the loaned amount, so the lender breaks even a lot earlier than the point at which the loan is fully paid off. After that it's all profit.
Example:
(Disclaimer: These figures are for a standard commercial loan. I have no idea whether repayments differ substantially for Stafford/Perkins/PLUS/whatever.)