Do you really want all your accountants to have to drop to a command line, enter some arcane command, and know the root password to their box just to install some update to a custom software package?
Yes, since that way they are less likely to stuff things up by installing spyware, trojans, whatever.
Having the IT department do any installs seems a much better idea.
No, I say it as if it might have been a good idea that shouldn't have been done away with. And that it's sad that people just treat "corporates should put shareholder value above all else" as an indisputable fact and a good thing at that...
The French system is different from the US/UK system. In the US/UK systems, the shareholders interest come first before the law. They can lay people off, off-shore jobs, merge, etc. if they think that is what will best enhance shareholder value. This is a good thing because it makes company's more competitive and, because the guarantee of control is there, it is easier to raise funds from investors for new job-creating project/companys/IPOs.
So the whole idea of a corporate charter is just silly?
The license says you can, and more than that it is completely within the spirit of the GPL. I'd go as far as saying its one of the cases that motivates people to use the GPL over other licenses (always being able to merge changes from other public forks and branches).
But the interpretation makes no sense. The conclusion is irrelevant if the premises are flawed.
There is no extinction level (or even civilisation ending level) event that has a 100% probability of occuring within 45,500 years. I'm pretty sure John Young knows that and hence that particular interpretation is ridiculous.
It's exactly the same as arguing that because I say the odds of the coin I'm about to flip coming up heads is 50% that I am really saying there is a 100% chance of flipping a head in two coin tosses.
And if we are free to choose out own timer then we also choose one that starts 45,499 years ago, no? Hence your interpretation is that 2005 is the year we all die?
I do have to point out that, given mass extinction impacts happen periodically about every 65M years
There are only six data points to go on which makes concluding they are periodic events a little bit of a leap. Sure they are on average about 65 million years apart - which lets you say that the probabality of one happening in any given year is one in one hundred million or so (we can include the time since the last and the time before the first). I can't see how it lets you conclude any sort of periodic occurance though.
44 million years is the shortest gap, and 135 million years (the gap between the two most recent) the longest which doesn't seem very periodic.
Plus of course the Ordovician-Silurian event (well events, but lets ignore that) are generally accepted as resulting from the onset and then ending of a long ice age.
If you exlcude the Devonian to Carboniferous extenction, which took about 3 million years and hence is stretching the meaning of "event" then the average gap becomes 80 million years.
You can try to explain the occurances and argue for some kind of solar system cycle (passing through the plane of the galaxy disturbing the Oort cloud, for example) but if you get 65 million years as the period then the extinction events are evidence against the theory.
How are we at T=0. What happened yesterday that reset some magial timer?
45,500 seems a little short to guarantee something like that. The planet is 5 orders of magnitude older than that time period, it's such a tiny little spec of time.
That such an event happens about every 45,500 years (though how you get such precision to 500 years in such a estimate I don't know) seems much more reasonable.
Though impact estimates I've seen have put mass extinction level impacts at once every 50-100 million years which is a tad less frequent than every 45,500 years.
Another "Arizona meteor crater" event will certainly happen again, but while it would not be nice to be nearby it wouldn't wipe out humanity. After all a slightly bigger one hit just under 100 years ago and we're still here posting on slashdot.
Considering how dispersed people are on the globe I find the 1/455 figure laughable. Wiping out modern civilisation is one thing, but wiping out humanity is a whole new ball game.
After all at those odds the chance that humans have survived the 2.5 million years from our prehistoric origins to posting on slashdot is 0.00000000000000000000013%. But here we are.
You say it is guarenteed to happen once every 45,500 years. The fact it is guaranteed to happen means the probability changes every second in which it doesn't happen and hence it makes no sense to assign a probability to time slices. After all if it hasn't happened for 45,498 years the probability of it happening this year is 50%... Whereas if it happened last year the probability is 1/45500 (unless it's "once and only once" in which case there's a 45499/45500 chance you might be completely safe).
But very few things are guaranteed to happen so it's pretty much irrelevant to reality. Some people would say nothing it guaranteed to happen (God could click his fingers tomorrow and turn every atom in the Universe into an eternal angel, or the robots could reboot the matrix while everyone sleeps...)
It will happen in any one so the probability is 100% which makes the odds 1:0 or 1:1 depending on how you choose to specify them. The odds that it will happen in a single specified 100 year period is 1 in 455. Assuming the event can only happen once.
But the inverse doesn't hold.
If you flip a coin what is the probability that a head will come up? 50%.
If you flip a coin twice what is the probability that a head will come up? Hint: it's not 100%, as you can demonstrate by flipping a (fair) coin a few times for yourself and noticing that sometimes you get two tails in a row.
Feel free to notice that it should be a 100 year period and 455 such periods. The numbers got switched in my post...
So while I think my math is fine, the data used is just garbage, instead use:
1-(454/455)^455 = 63% of such an event occuring.
Of course I probably got the numbers wrong again:) After all I haven't even glanced at the article, since from the summary the claim look ridiculously stupid...
As an unimportmant note, can I BEG you people not to compare Mandela to PKK/KADEK? I don't remember Mandela ordered black people to burn schools, kill teachers, kill all village only because they participated in election...
No, he just used car bombs outside civilian bars and attacked a nuclear power plant...
In particular, the stock implementation of a plain vanilla PCI/33 core requires 90K gates. How does it compare to the 15K gates? Answer: it's nowhere close.
But they speced a 1500K gate chip that can be had for $75 each in quantities of 25.
Which I agree is not going to make a cost effective video card. It also isn't as expensive as your original post made out.
Then again the thing is being proposed by someone who makes his living designing graphic ASICs and FPGAs who is working to convince a company with 15 years of graphic hardware development to do the project. Possibly they know something I don't about the feasability of this.
People mentioned that the FPGA will be used. Very well, this will take care of experimenting. However FPGAs are very expensive. The cheapest (and a fairly small) one can be had for maybe $30; medium sized one, better suited for this task, will cost you about $500. The largest ones cost $10,000 per chip and you can safely forget about even their existence:-)
Except that the chip they mention in the spec can be had for $75 each in very small quantities.
And you can get a single FPGA (ie. no bulk purchase, one single tiny chip) at digikey for less than $10, only 15K gates mind you...
Great for playing with, not so viable for a commercial video card - but you have to start somewhere...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.
For instance - they call themselves "progressive", while in reality, they are for BIG GOVERNMENT !
When have "progressives" ever not been for big government?
Of course the term has been used by many different ideologies, just like here in Oz the main conservative party is the "Liberal Party", but left-of-centre-left (and sometimes far left) is the common group is identifies.
Slashdot Mirror
My 7 year old PC (300mhz PII) runs everything I need on a daily basis pretty well.
Firefox, wily, gcc, python, perl, MS office, gimp and so on.
Do you really want all your accountants to have to drop to a command line, enter some arcane command, and know the root password to their box just to install some update to a custom software package?
Yes, since that way they are less likely to stuff things up by installing spyware, trojans, whatever.
Having the IT department do any installs seems a much better idea.
Because Europe has no import duties, tariffs, or sales taxes.
Or just download linux.
Or if you must have MS Windows just download XP x64
But how do you play minesweeper during meetings?
Yes, I'm aware this is the first time a Macworld keynote hasn't been broadcast on the web live.
The keynote at MacWorld Expo 1985 was broadcast on the web live?
I missed that... wonder if my C-64 could have handled it.
Every one else considers the fourth largest producer of oil to be "one of the biggest producers of oil in the world".
No, I say it as if it might have been a good idea that shouldn't have been done away with. And that it's sad that people just treat "corporates should put shareholder value above all else" as an indisputable fact and a good thing at that...
The French system is different from the US/UK system. In the US/UK systems, the shareholders interest come first before the law. They can lay people off, off-shore jobs, merge, etc. if they think that is what will best enhance shareholder value. This is a good thing because it makes company's more competitive and, because the guarantee of control is there, it is easier to raise funds from investors for new job-creating project/companys/IPOs.
So the whole idea of a corporate charter is just silly?
The license says you can, and more than that it is completely within the spirit of the GPL. I'd go as far as saying its one of the cases that motivates people to use the GPL over other licenses (always being able to merge changes from other public forks and branches).
Debian unstable.
But the interpretation makes no sense. The conclusion is irrelevant if the premises are flawed.
There is no extinction level (or even civilisation ending level) event that has a 100% probability of occuring within 45,500 years. I'm pretty sure John Young knows that and hence that particular interpretation is ridiculous.
It's exactly the same as arguing that because I say the odds of the coin I'm about to flip coming up heads is 50% that I am really saying there is a 100% chance of flipping a head in two coin tosses.
And if we are free to choose out own timer then we also choose one that starts 45,499 years ago, no? Hence your interpretation is that 2005 is the year we all die?
I do have to point out that, given mass extinction impacts happen periodically about every 65M years
There are only six data points to go on which makes concluding they are periodic events a little bit of a leap. Sure they are on average about 65 million years apart - which lets you say that the probabality of one happening in any given year is one in one hundred million or so (we can include the time since the last and the time before the first). I can't see how it lets you conclude any sort of periodic occurance though.
44 million years is the shortest gap, and 135 million years (the gap between the two most recent) the longest which doesn't seem very periodic.
Plus of course the Ordovician-Silurian event (well events, but lets ignore that) are generally accepted as resulting from the onset and then ending of a long ice age.
If you exlcude the Devonian to Carboniferous extenction, which took about 3 million years and hence is stretching the meaning of "event" then the average gap becomes 80 million years.
You can try to explain the occurances and argue for some kind of solar system cycle (passing through the plane of the galaxy disturbing the Oort cloud, for example) but if you get 65 million years as the period then the extinction events are evidence against the theory.
How are we at T=0. What happened yesterday that reset some magial timer?
45,500 seems a little short to guarantee something like that. The planet is 5 orders of magnitude older than that time period, it's such a tiny little spec of time.
That such an event happens about every 45,500 years (though how you get such precision to 500 years in such a estimate I don't know) seems much more reasonable.
Though impact estimates I've seen have put mass extinction level impacts at once every 50-100 million years which is a tad less frequent than every 45,500 years.
Another "Arizona meteor crater" event will certainly happen again, but while it would not be nice to be nearby it wouldn't wipe out humanity. After all a slightly bigger one hit just under 100 years ago and we're still here posting on slashdot.
Considering how dispersed people are on the globe I find the 1/455 figure laughable. Wiping out modern civilisation is one thing, but wiping out humanity is a whole new ball game.
After all at those odds the chance that humans have survived the 2.5 million years from our prehistoric origins to posting on slashdot is 0.00000000000000000000013%. But here we are.
You don't.
You say it is guarenteed to happen once every 45,500 years. The fact it is guaranteed to happen means the probability changes every second in which it doesn't happen and hence it makes no sense to assign a probability to time slices. After all if it hasn't happened for 45,498 years the probability of it happening this year is 50%... Whereas if it happened last year the probability is 1/45500 (unless it's "once and only once" in which case there's a 45499/45500 chance you might be completely safe).
But very few things are guaranteed to happen so it's pretty much irrelevant to reality. Some people would say nothing it guaranteed to happen (God could click his fingers tomorrow and turn every atom in the Universe into an eternal angel, or the robots could reboot the matrix while everyone sleeps...)
It will happen in any one so the probability is 100% which makes the odds 1:0 or 1:1 depending on how you choose to specify them. The odds that it will happen in a single specified 100 year period is 1 in 455. Assuming the event can only happen once.
But the inverse doesn't hold.
If you flip a coin what is the probability that a head will come up? 50%.
If you flip a coin twice what is the probability that a head will come up? Hint: it's not 100%, as you can demonstrate by flipping a (fair) coin a few times for yourself and noticing that sometimes you get two tails in a row.
Feel free to notice that it should be a 100 year period and 455 such periods. The numbers got switched in my post...
:) After all I haven't even glanced at the article, since from the summary the claim look ridiculously stupid...
So while I think my math is fine, the data used is just garbage, instead use:
1-(454/455)^455 = 63% of such an event occuring.
Of course I probably got the numbers wrong again
Maybe you should learn some statistics...
The probability is not 100% it is in fact 20%.
Chance of no event in a 455 year period: 454/455 = 99.8%
Chance of no event in 100 such periods: (454/455)^100 = 80.3%
Hence chance of an event in 100 such periods: 19.7%
Using your whacked out mathematics I guess in 100000 years the probability of at least one event is 200%?!?
Saunas can reach 100C, it's common even.
The humidity is kept low to avoid scalding. A sauna is not a steam bath.
A Finish Sauna at 90C is considered "moderate".
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mk/mk-histor y.html
Koeberg was the nuclear plant, I don't think it was online at the time, they just showed they could take it...
As an unimportmant note, can I BEG you people not to compare Mandela to PKK/KADEK? I don't remember Mandela ordered black people to burn schools, kill teachers, kill all village only because they participated in election...
No, he just used car bombs outside civilian bars and attacked a nuclear power plant...
In particular, the stock implementation of a plain vanilla PCI/33 core requires 90K gates. How does it compare to the 15K gates? Answer: it's nowhere close.
But they speced a 1500K gate chip that can be had for $75 each in quantities of 25.
Which I agree is not going to make a cost effective video card. It also isn't as expensive as your original post made out.
Then again the thing is being proposed by someone who makes his living designing graphic ASICs and FPGAs who is working to convince a company with 15 years of graphic hardware development to do the project. Possibly they know something I don't about the feasability of this.
People mentioned that the FPGA will be used. Very well, this will take care of experimenting. However FPGAs are very expensive. The cheapest (and a fairly small) one can be had for maybe $30; medium sized one, better suited for this task, will cost you about $500. The largest ones cost $10,000 per chip and you can safely forget about even their existence :-)
:(
Except that the chip they mention in the spec can be had for $75 each in very small quantities.
And you can get a single FPGA (ie. no bulk purchase, one single tiny chip) at digikey for less than $10, only 15K gates mind you...
Great for playing with, not so viable for a commercial video card - but you have to start somewhere...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.
Hey! My games machine has one of those
SLC flash will give you 100,000 writes...
For instance - they call themselves "progressive", while in reality, they are for BIG GOVERNMENT !
When have "progressives" ever not been for big government?
Of course the term has been used by many different ideologies, just like here in Oz the main conservative party is the "Liberal Party", but left-of-centre-left (and sometimes far left) is the common group is identifies.