Remember, the 10M lines is just the kernel in Linux, not an entire distro (ie: kernel + GNU stuff + X + apps + all the other stuff), so a total count of Windows LOC would be comparing apples and oranges.
IE: How many LOC are in NTOSKRNL + Drivers would be a better comparison.
My point wasn't based on Infiniband or Myrinet, or any other interconnect. It just seems to me that all of this is a solution desperately searching for a problem.
Different technologies exist for a reason: they do what they are designed for as optimally as possible. Trying to make one network technology that does "Everything" is doomed to epic failure. It will become a compromise that does lots of things, and few of them well.
This seems like a total kludge being put together by networking equipment vendors to find a way to differentiate their products and return to the days where a 10 Base-T hub was $1000.
Network gear is now mostly a commodity, except at the super high end.
The vendors hate that - so they are trying to push the host's functionality into the LAN gear instead. They don't want to provide "dumb pipes" any longer, they want to monkey around with the traffic and protocols, and provide virtual servers and such in their boxes.
Really, it's just an attempt to make the servers the commodity and their gear the expensive part.
Except... you already can implement this yourself with existing equipment and software, with much better control and no vendor lock-in. For low-end solutions, a Linux cluster works great behind an UltraMonkey front end. For higher-end ones, well, that's what IBM z-series mainframes are for.
Quite likely it's due to the chance to decompress a bit that creativity occurs outside of normal hours. It's really hard to focus and think up anything actually creative when the PHBs are bugging the hell out of you, or the phone is ringing with someone panicing about what is usually a non-issue.
It's why great authors often are almost recluses while working on a book.
Stress, meetings, coworkers, etc. do more to kill creativity than anything else.
Creativity requires being relaxed and focused on the actual problem to be solved. Normal office life is the exact opposite of that environment.
"A" is often a short prefix for "anti" or "un". So, athiest (A-Theist) means just an anti-theist, or one who is not a theist. It's the same construction as "atypical" for "not typical" or "asymmetric" for "not symmetric".
5 years in a real prison is appropriate for this type of behavior. It's very disruptive and denies others their rights to communicate and to use the systems and connections that they are paying for.
I can't stand Scientology at all. That said, vigilante censorship is just plain wrong. There is no excuse for this type of asshattery whatsoever. My position would be exactly the same if it were Scientology DDOS-ing him.
Freedom of speech and religion don't just apply to popular speech and religions, they apply to everyone. It's great to argue against their points, expose their agendas, and debate. It's not okay to ever try to forcibly shut them down.
Any employer must pay a 50% payroll tax (as opposed to the normal 7.5%) for all H1B employees, with a further provision that all H1B paychecks be issued through the INS, with the employer paying the agency the full amount of the paycheck, plus a handling fee.
Any violations of prevailing wage shall be a felony, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 5-years.
1. Cut the bullshit. 2. Do the work, and focus on it. 3. Make your product reflect your vision. 4. Sell to users who want simple "just works" apps. 5. Minimize overhead relentlessly, eliminate buracracy. (See #1) 6. Avoid expensive outside PR and other overhead (See #1 and #5) 7. Keep the vulture capitalists at bay. (See #1, #3, #5, and #6) 8. Start small and assemble team sharing common basic vision. (See #1, #3, #5, #7) 9. Profit.
It all makes sense, at least at a small scale. Overhead, indecision, and excessive levels of non-productive activity hurt productivity. Without productivity, you end up without a product, or end up with a poor one. With too much overhead, you need higher revenues just to break even.
Some organization and rules are necessary, but keep them minimal and focused on the end result. Push decisions as close to the actual work as possible to avoid paralysis, but keep a feedback loop in place to correct bad decisions.
Really, it all boils down to two words: "Work Efficiently".
I'd expect that after a short period of time getting the system running, you'd see an improvement in the metrics. Help-desk support productivity is strongly enhanced by rapid access to answers - either in a knowledge base or via an interactive chat. Hopefully your management isn't overly guided by day-to-day metrics and can occasionally think more strategically.
Not everyone knows all the questions to all the answers, but over any decent-sized operation SOMEBODY will. The idea is to leverage that "institutional knowledge" against customer questions, each of which has the potential to add to that knowledge base.
The biggest drawback is keeping the information organized for easy retrieval - ie: the most commonly-encountered questions and answers on top, good search capability, etc.
Also, create a metric showing who is most effectively posting to the knowledgebase and how well it is impacting the other metrics (ie: call volume, time, etc). One or two people who are "experts" that post answers that strongly improve other employees' productivity may not have that contribution reflected in "their numbers" and appear to be inefficient, whereas their real impact on the company is overwhelmingly positive, and their loss would greatly harm the company.
Lennon was a very vocal socialist, nearly a communist in general outlook toward the end of his career.
The FBI had a very thick case file on him, but could never show any actual criminal activity, and the Nixon administration tried to deport him from the USA.
Terrorists are most certainly not all religious. I guess you forget about groups like the Red Army Faction? They were not for any "god" - but they were for full-blown communism. Those asshats blew up a lot of people in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s.
They sure don't seem to be terrorists from what anyone has presented. Everyone has the right to be a left-wing, right-wing, religious, gay, slashdot, anti-slashdot, or whatever other type of wingnut they want. So long as they are peaceful about it, that is.
Perhaps the "limited options" were there for a reason - those were the only valid reasons for entry in the first place. Anyone who didn't match probably shouldn't have been entered in the first place.
Being politically active is not terrorism. Terrorism is violence with the aim of influencing public behavior in such a way as to subvert either the popular will or to force a government to give concessions to the group in question.
These lists could be a really useful tool for stopping stupid asshats who are planning attacks, but that utility is lost if they are full of garbage data. From many descriptions, they are becoming about as good as randomly flipping through a phone book.
Purging the garbage is an excellent idea, both to protect innocent people's rights and to make the lists themselves a useful resource.
It's the maximum possible penalty, but not all cases get the max.
I'd hope the sentence is served in a cell at a SuperMax prison in total isolation, 1 hour per week out of the cell, and guards who don't even talk to the prisoners. Exactly the same place that John Gotti, the Unabomber, and other great folks got to enjoy their time away from the stress of the real world.
I have less than zero sympathy for anyone who "hacks" or does dirty tricks in an attempt to influence elections.
It's no different from what the Nixon "dirty tricks squad" pulled in Watergate, really.
Who says the warrant has to be stored at the court? It could be stored at a 24-hour facility, or electronically for immediate retrieval. My concern is treating the metadata about the warrant the same as the warrant itself.
If the warrant turns out to be faulty, rescinded, or otherwise invalid later, then toss the case. Real bad guys WILL be caught again later, it's in their nature to do something that makes it inevitable.
The root problem in this case really boils down to whether the officers should be allowed to treat someone's word that a warrant exists as if that were the actual warrant. The correct course of action would be to have kept him in sight until a copy of the actual warrant was in the officer's possession. This is especially so now that police vehicles are routinely equipped with computer and communications gear that can immediately transfer the warrant to the officer on the scene.
Basically, they jumped the gun (no pun intended) here and ended up executing a non-existent warrant.
My bet is that it was a very small pistol - maybe something like a.22 or.25 with a short barrel. Those bullets sometimes don't penetrate bone on a glancing impact.
A 9mm or a.45 would have been a much more tragic outcome.
Cue South Park's portrayal of Johnnie Cochran and the Chewbacca defense in 5, 4, 3....
Seriously though, all of these DRM schemes (Real, CSS itself, FairPlay, whatever) are attempts to tie the license to a copyrighted work to a specific device as opposed to a person. Therein lies the root of the entire problem.
It's not so much how the content is encrpted or what it works with or doesn't. That's the big red herring in all of these arguments. The important question is "what do customers actually buy?"
Are you buying a physical copy? That is the old model - go to the store, buy a disk, and it plays on all your devices. If it breaks or wears out, you buy another.
Are you buying a license to use the work instead? If so, the customer's rights are seperate from the physical copies. See, for example, site licenses for software, where you may have one CD and 100 licenses that can be moved from device to device as needed.
The whole idea behind these DRM schemes is an attempt to sell copies under the "old model" when the market is demanding the second, and is enabled by current technology such that it's now feasible for things to work that way. Indeed, it appears that the *AA are really trying to combine the worst aspects of both models to create a "third way" that really boils down to rent-seeking instead of sales. In other words, content is never purchased, but is merely rented.
The solution is a model where the works are licensed to an individual. The *AA could easily provide a "registration service" for specific works that could be referred to if a question as to licensing ever arose.
Copyright is not per se a bad thing at all, but the abuse of it to generate repeat sales of the same works to the same individual IS flat-out evil.
If someone comes to you, DO NOT attack them! Be nice, assist in getting any secret data purged, and sign a confidentiality agreement, and give the guy a nominal reward.
Raiding the house of someone who does the right thing is a pretty strong incentive to never help out again, and a strong incentive for others to do so as well. It also feeds the radical opponents' propaganda machine with fresh fodder and lets them become the "persecuted good guys".
So don't do it. Know who your friends are, and don't mess with them. Or they may stop being your friend.
Western societies and governments have enough enemies already, and there is no need to create any more.
All of the DRM approaches that I've seen appear to be very much designed without regard to the collateral damage that they do to the end-user. What's needed is a way to ensure that the purchaser or successors in interest are protected.
First off, the notion of "licensed not sold" is what appears to be at the heart of the problem. There is a fundamentally evil component to the model itself that is based on a "screw the customer" attitude. It really seems to be a concerted effort to ignore the parts of copyright that limit the holder's exclusive rights and protect the customer.
There's nothing wrong with protecting against piracy and non-paid copies floating around. What is wrong is tying the functionality of the product to "activation" schemes that could be turned off at any future time, or at any point deny a legitimate licensee from using the product.
There has to be a way to protect both sides' interests. Perhaps any product that requires any sort of activation or remote key must carry an obligation on the publisher to escrow a fully-functional set of keys and/or an unencumbered version of the program with a responsible third party would be effective, along with a hard requirement to release to each and every licensee a copy of the unencumbered version upon withdrawl of the product from the market. In other words, the DRM must be a temporary measure to prevent lost sales to piracy, and it may not be used to prevent the customer from exercising their rights.
The Wal-Mart shutdown of the DRM servers is the type of practice that must be absolutely forbidden, possibly under penalty of massive fines and/or prison time for the individuals responsible for such a decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Her next cycle? This is a Federal judge, who has a life term, and can only be removed by impeachment, and who's salary can never be decreased.
OMFG - this addition is just so horrid that everyone's going to give up on PHP and start coding Web apps in C++ through CGI interfaces again. /Sarcasm
Seriously, who cares what charater they are using? Developers are smart enough to adapt.
Remember, the 10M lines is just the kernel in Linux, not an entire distro (ie: kernel + GNU stuff + X + apps + all the other stuff), so a total count of Windows LOC would be comparing apples and oranges.
IE: How many LOC are in NTOSKRNL + Drivers would be a better comparison.
My point wasn't based on Infiniband or Myrinet, or any other interconnect. It just seems to me that all of this is a solution desperately searching for a problem.
Different technologies exist for a reason: they do what they are designed for as optimally as possible. Trying to make one network technology that does "Everything" is doomed to epic failure. It will become a compromise that does lots of things, and few of them well.
This seems like a total kludge being put together by networking equipment vendors to find a way to differentiate their products and return to the days where a 10 Base-T hub was $1000.
Network gear is now mostly a commodity, except at the super high end.
The vendors hate that - so they are trying to push the host's functionality into the LAN gear instead. They don't want to provide "dumb pipes" any longer, they want to monkey around with the traffic and protocols, and provide virtual servers and such in their boxes.
Really, it's just an attempt to make the servers the commodity and their gear the expensive part.
Except... you already can implement this yourself with existing equipment and software, with much better control and no vendor lock-in. For low-end solutions, a Linux cluster works great behind an UltraMonkey front end. For higher-end ones, well, that's what IBM z-series mainframes are for.
What a great solution in search of a problem.
Quite likely it's due to the chance to decompress a bit that creativity occurs outside of normal hours. It's really hard to focus and think up anything actually creative when the PHBs are bugging the hell out of you, or the phone is ringing with someone panicing about what is usually a non-issue.
It's why great authors often are almost recluses while working on a book.
Stress, meetings, coworkers, etc. do more to kill creativity than anything else.
Creativity requires being relaxed and focused on the actual problem to be solved. Normal office life is the exact opposite of that environment.
"A" is often a short prefix for "anti" or "un". So, athiest (A-Theist) means just an anti-theist, or one who is not a theist. It's the same construction as "atypical" for "not typical" or "asymmetric" for "not symmetric".
5 years in a real prison is appropriate for this type of behavior. It's very disruptive and denies others their rights to communicate and to use the systems and connections that they are paying for.
I can't stand Scientology at all. That said, vigilante censorship is just plain wrong. There is no excuse for this type of asshattery whatsoever. My position would be exactly the same if it were Scientology DDOS-ing him.
Freedom of speech and religion don't just apply to popular speech and religions, they apply to everyone. It's great to argue against their points, expose their agendas, and debate. It's not okay to ever try to forcibly shut them down.
Even easier:
Any employer must pay a 50% payroll tax (as opposed to the normal 7.5%) for all H1B employees, with a further provision that all H1B paychecks be issued through the INS, with the employer paying the agency the full amount of the paycheck, plus a handling fee.
Any violations of prevailing wage shall be a felony, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 5-years.
The basic philosophy here is:
1. Cut the bullshit.
2. Do the work, and focus on it.
3. Make your product reflect your vision.
4. Sell to users who want simple "just works" apps.
5. Minimize overhead relentlessly, eliminate buracracy. (See #1)
6. Avoid expensive outside PR and other overhead (See #1 and #5)
7. Keep the vulture capitalists at bay. (See #1, #3, #5, and #6)
8. Start small and assemble team sharing common basic vision. (See #1, #3, #5, #7)
9. Profit.
It all makes sense, at least at a small scale. Overhead, indecision, and excessive levels of non-productive activity hurt productivity. Without productivity, you end up without a product, or end up with a poor one. With too much overhead, you need higher revenues just to break even.
Some organization and rules are necessary, but keep them minimal and focused on the end result. Push decisions as close to the actual work as possible to avoid paralysis, but keep a feedback loop in place to correct bad decisions.
Really, it all boils down to two words: "Work Efficiently".
I'd expect that after a short period of time getting the system running, you'd see an improvement in the metrics. Help-desk support productivity is strongly enhanced by rapid access to answers - either in a knowledge base or via an interactive chat. Hopefully your management isn't overly guided by day-to-day metrics and can occasionally think more strategically.
Not everyone knows all the questions to all the answers, but over any decent-sized operation SOMEBODY will. The idea is to leverage that "institutional knowledge" against customer questions, each of which has the potential to add to that knowledge base.
The biggest drawback is keeping the information organized for easy retrieval - ie: the most commonly-encountered questions and answers on top, good search capability, etc.
Also, create a metric showing who is most effectively posting to the knowledgebase and how well it is impacting the other metrics (ie: call volume, time, etc). One or two people who are "experts" that post answers that strongly improve other employees' productivity may not have that contribution reflected in "their numbers" and appear to be inefficient, whereas their real impact on the company is overwhelmingly positive, and their loss would greatly harm the company.
Lennon was a very vocal socialist, nearly a communist in general outlook toward the end of his career.
The FBI had a very thick case file on him, but could never show any actual criminal activity, and the Nixon administration tried to deport him from the USA.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. The idea is to whack FRIVOLOUS lawsuits filed to intimidate or as a political tool.
Poor people have difficulty suing already - unless it's a personal injury case that's pretty clear-cut, lawyers won't take them on contingency anyhow.
Stopping cases such as this one, or SCO vs. Everyone, or some of the RIAA cases is a good thing.
Terrorists are most certainly not all religious. I guess you forget about groups like the Red Army Faction? They were not for any "god" - but they were for full-blown communism. Those asshats blew up a lot of people in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s.
Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology.
They sure don't seem to be terrorists from what anyone has presented. Everyone has the right to be a left-wing, right-wing, religious, gay, slashdot, anti-slashdot, or whatever other type of wingnut they want. So long as they are peaceful about it, that is.
Perhaps the "limited options" were there for a reason - those were the only valid reasons for entry in the first place. Anyone who didn't match probably shouldn't have been entered in the first place.
Being politically active is not terrorism. Terrorism is violence with the aim of influencing public behavior in such a way as to subvert either the popular will or to force a government to give concessions to the group in question.
These lists could be a really useful tool for stopping stupid asshats who are planning attacks, but that utility is lost if they are full of garbage data. From many descriptions, they are becoming about as good as randomly flipping through a phone book.
Purging the garbage is an excellent idea, both to protect innocent people's rights and to make the lists themselves a useful resource.
Uh, only for OFFICIAL BUSINESS, not their actual personal lives.
It's the maximum possible penalty, but not all cases get the max.
I'd hope the sentence is served in a cell at a SuperMax prison in total isolation, 1 hour per week out of the cell, and guards who don't even talk to the prisoners. Exactly the same place that John Gotti, the Unabomber, and other great folks got to enjoy their time away from the stress of the real world.
I have less than zero sympathy for anyone who "hacks" or does dirty tricks in an attempt to influence elections.
It's no different from what the Nixon "dirty tricks squad" pulled in Watergate, really.
Who says the warrant has to be stored at the court? It could be stored at a 24-hour facility, or electronically for immediate retrieval. My concern is treating the metadata about the warrant the same as the warrant itself.
If the warrant turns out to be faulty, rescinded, or otherwise invalid later, then toss the case. Real bad guys WILL be caught again later, it's in their nature to do something that makes it inevitable.
The root problem in this case really boils down to whether the officers should be allowed to treat someone's word that a warrant exists as if that were the actual warrant. The correct course of action would be to have kept him in sight until a copy of the actual warrant was in the officer's possession. This is especially so now that police vehicles are routinely equipped with computer and communications gear that can immediately transfer the warrant to the officer on the scene.
Basically, they jumped the gun (no pun intended) here and ended up executing a non-existent warrant.
My bet is that it was a very small pistol - maybe something like a .22 or .25 with a short barrel. Those bullets sometimes don't penetrate bone on a glancing impact.
A 9mm or a .45 would have been a much more tragic outcome.
Seriously though, all of these DRM schemes (Real, CSS itself, FairPlay, whatever) are attempts to tie the license to a copyrighted work to a specific device as opposed to a person . Therein lies the root of the entire problem.
It's not so much how the content is encrpted or what it works with or doesn't. That's the big red herring in all of these arguments. The important question is "what do customers actually buy?"
Are you buying a physical copy? That is the old model - go to the store, buy a disk, and it plays on all your devices. If it breaks or wears out, you buy another.
Are you buying a license to use the work instead? If so, the customer's rights are seperate from the physical copies. See, for example, site licenses for software, where you may have one CD and 100 licenses that can be moved from device to device as needed.
The whole idea behind these DRM schemes is an attempt to sell copies under the "old model" when the market is demanding the second, and is enabled by current technology such that it's now feasible for things to work that way. Indeed, it appears that the *AA are really trying to combine the worst aspects of both models to create a "third way" that really boils down to rent-seeking instead of sales. In other words, content is never purchased, but is merely rented.
The solution is a model where the works are licensed to an individual. The *AA could easily provide a "registration service" for specific works that could be referred to if a question as to licensing ever arose.
Copyright is not per se a bad thing at all, but the abuse of it to generate repeat sales of the same works to the same individual IS flat-out evil.
ever goes unpunished.
If someone comes to you, DO NOT attack them! Be nice, assist in getting any secret data purged, and sign a confidentiality agreement, and give the guy a nominal reward.
Raiding the house of someone who does the right thing is a pretty strong incentive to never help out again, and a strong incentive for others to do so as well. It also feeds the radical opponents' propaganda machine with fresh fodder and lets them become the "persecuted good guys".
So don't do it. Know who your friends are, and don't mess with them. Or they may stop being your friend.
Western societies and governments have enough enemies already, and there is no need to create any more.
All of the DRM approaches that I've seen appear to be very much designed without regard to the collateral damage that they do to the end-user. What's needed is a way to ensure that the purchaser or successors in interest are protected.
First off, the notion of "licensed not sold" is what appears to be at the heart of the problem. There is a fundamentally evil component to the model itself that is based on a "screw the customer" attitude. It really seems to be a concerted effort to ignore the parts of copyright that limit the holder's exclusive rights and protect the customer.
There's nothing wrong with protecting against piracy and non-paid copies floating around. What is wrong is tying the functionality of the product to "activation" schemes that could be turned off at any future time, or at any point deny a legitimate licensee from using the product.
There has to be a way to protect both sides' interests. Perhaps any product that requires any sort of activation or remote key must carry an obligation on the publisher to escrow a fully-functional set of keys and/or an unencumbered version of the program with a responsible third party would be effective, along with a hard requirement to release to each and every licensee a copy of the unencumbered version upon withdrawl of the product from the market. In other words, the DRM must be a temporary measure to prevent lost sales to piracy, and it may not be used to prevent the customer from exercising their rights.
The Wal-Mart shutdown of the DRM servers is the type of practice that must be absolutely forbidden, possibly under penalty of massive fines and/or prison time for the individuals responsible for such a decision.
Nope - but I know how the guys in the political world work. ANY link, however tenuous, is enough to start an everlasting investigation.
Most of these are just witch hunts done for political advantage.
It's what they've done to every administration since Nixon.
The missing part of the recipe is that KFC pressure frys their chicken, and without a pressure fryer, you can't duplicate the result.