I didn't see that he was "mouthing off" about anything. He was just saying that this is hardly the news of the century that a verifiable HIV cure would be. No doubt it will get tested on humans if the animal testing goes well, and no doubt that there will be willing, informed volunteers if it gets to that stage. He wasn't saying this was a bad thing, just that it wasn't yet a verified good thing.
By the way, with the drug cocktails currently available, HIV is not necessarily a short-term death sentence. Many people are able to live for quite a long time with consistent drug therapy. It just happens to be very expensive, which means (fair or not) that many young prostitutes will contract HIV and die while Magic Johnson progresses to old age.
There are a lot of fundamentalist religious groups in the world who would love to see a "super-AIDS" wipe out the homosexuals and scare the rest of us into monogamy or abstinence.
It's fallacious to confuse religions with their Eric Rudolphs and Osama bin Ladens. These people are what we call "terrorists," and their religion, the world over, is hate, regardless of national origin, ethnicity, sexual preferences or professed faith. Tell me some groups you affiliate with, and I'm sure I could find you some bad apples of the same ilk.
This wouldn't be a problem except that virus is an irregular noun. It's a neuter noun that is declined like a masculine second declension noun (except the accusative case which is also virus).
Please tell me that you have really advanced degrees in English and Latin or something, because if this is just a hobby, I'll be really depressed.
Who would've thought IBM would someday be the darling of grassroots hackers? I can just see the headline in a Linux Journal story 10-15 years from now: "Microsoft and Linus Torvalds team up in opposing RMS lawsuit against all Linux vendors not using the 'GNU' prefix." And the sub-headline, "Microsoft promises to indemnify customers of its own distribution against any legal actions taken by RMS."
Yes, you can buy a car without a stereo. Most people don't, so most cars you see on a lot have a stereo. But the better analogy is, can you buy a car without a Sony stereo, and the answer is certainly "Yes."
I saw this on a movie, but I don't remember which one. Somebody wanted into a network at a hospital, so he listened to somebody log on, then imitated the sound to log on.
A few years ago, someone said "650KB ought to be enough for anybody"
First, no, he didn't. That's not even what he was purported to say. Depending on who you ask, it was either 64K or 640K, both of which were common at some point. 650K never was, so at least get your inaccurate quotes right. I'd be willing to bet that you've never even seen a computer with less than a Meg of memory. Second, what does that have to do with anything? It's not like a bunch of rogue terrorists got together and breached the 640K memory barrier. Do you think they are going to somehow build a bomb that well-funded governments have not been able to? Your argument doesn't make any sense. Also, what's your point about the US being the only superpower? It would be a lot easier to steal fissile material from somewhere else and get it into the US than it would be to steal it from the DOE.
No, the only danger is that if somebody does breach security, they would have access to more material. With lots of sites, there are lots of different security systems, meaning more potential points of failure. It's not like it's a distributed system where you have to get all of the material for it to be useful. By consolidating, you reduce your number of potential points of failure and have a single system to concentrate on. Think about it, if you have some highly-critical data, and somebody getting any of it is pretty much as bad as somebody getting all of it, would you rather have it sitting on one computer that you lock down like crazy, or on a couple of hundred that you have to try to lock down individually?
If you are a professional chip designer, then I'm sure you know more about it than I do. Show me your credentials and I will defer to your experience. However, I do have a EE degree, so I am not totally clueless about pipelines. So, if you are a professional chip designer, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but instructions will take different numbers of clock cycles to execute based on their complexity, at least on all of the processors I've worked with. You can't just say "I will divide every instruction into n stages to match my clock speed." There have to be logical stages to divide the instruction into. A 200-stage pipeline will only benefit instructions that can be usefully divided into 200 stages. I do not see how you can do that with basic memory movement commands, unless you had slow memory and missed the cache at every level every single time and ended up with like 195 wait states every time. Also, a 200-stage pipeline would be terribly complex and require a huge chip, which would not be a worthwhile tradeoff for the 99% of instructions that would leave 90% of the pipeline unused.
A 200-stage pipeline will only realize a performance gain on instructions that take 200 cycles to execute. The bulk of instructions that a CPU executes tend to end up being pushing words around. Even on a bloated Pentium, that does not take 200 cycles.
Honestly, the guy is selling you a CD with OpenOffice burned on it for about $10. What's the big deal about that? Maybe I am familiar with it, but don't have the bandwidth, and I think it's worth the $10. Maybe I don't know I can download it for free, but dropping the $10 introduces me to something new that I had no idea existed. If you think the $10 is too much, lowball him on your bid and see if you get lucky. The guy appears to be getting a lot of positive feedback, so maybe a lot of people who would otherwise be locked into the Microsoft rut have found a viable alternative, and have decided that $10 was a fair price for enlightenment. Now, if he doesn't include the proper license, or in any other way breaks the law, then he has a problem. Otherwise, he's probably just an evangelist making a few bucks off of his preaching.
If there were no patents, nobody would even think of calling it "stealing"...
And if there were no patents, nobody would even think of making the investment to invent anything anyway, so there would be nothing to "steal" or "infringe" or whatever and dweebs in their mothers' basements wouldn't have any computers to get to Slashdot and complain about it.
Do you have a three-year-old? Because you sound an awful lot like Winnie the Pooh.
Pooh: Well, Jagulars always yell "Halloo!" And then, when you look up, they drop on you. Piglet: [Stuttering] I-I-I'm looking down, Pooh.
Wow, it is way too late (in the day and in the week) for me to still be sitting at work. The minute I start hallucinating about pink elephants and striped weasels, I'm going home.
If an extreme bad example were going to bring the entire USPTO to its knees, Pat.
6,368,277 would have already done it. By the way, this example not withstanding, I disagree with your stance that patent & trademarks are inherently "Bad Things." Like any good thing, patents can be abusede by unethical individuals or companies, and can be used to a bad end. The same can be said of computers, televisions, the internet and cars.
Also, to be clear, I don't consider reverse engineering to be "a right" as the poster does.
You're obviously not an engineer. The right to reverse enngineer is the right to figure out how something works, and to an engineer, that's about on the same level as the right to breathe. Unfortunately, the DMCA is already pretty much suffocating us.
From the point of view of a very limited life span we can never even come close to witnessing an even small fraction of the number of states for the universe.
However, if you had an unlimited life span, you could do some pretty amazing stuff. Like, I don't know, maybe insult everyone in the entire Universe in alphabetical order.
[Sorry, I know bad jokes like that belong on the main page with the leftist politics and karma whoring, but I just couldn't resist this once] [Hangs head in shame]
There is the analysis required to even determine that the incoming instructions require sin/cos. Then there has to be a lookup into a rule table for how to rewrite the gates to optimize for this. Then that rule needs to be applied. You have to be able to show me that this can all be done faster and cheaper than a x86 at 4Ghz just ramming it through. Maybe it can, but I am skeptical.
You are making the assumption that all of this is done on the fly. It's not. The compiler would, at compile time, locate candidates for hardware optimization, or the programmer would specify them explicitly. Also, it wouldn't use a "lookup table." It would basically be Verilog or VHDL, which would compile into netlists, which are placed and routed, all as part of the build process. So, the compiled program includes instructions to reconfigure the dynamic portion of the processor. Sure, each reconfiguration has some overhead attached to it, but remember that computers excel at repetitive tasks. You configure, for example, a Laplace transform circuit once, and use it multiple times throughout your program. Since the configurable portion has enough space to handle a number of special instructions, you put your heaviest, most-used instructions in hardware, and you are now doing complex transforms in a handful of cycles instead of hundreds (or more). Remember that executing an instruction in hardware is orders of magnitude faster than doing it in software. So, for sufficiently complex operations, you could realize huge, huge performance gains, even if you had to reconfigure the dynamic instruction every single time. I attended school at a place where some grad students were doing research into this very technology, and although I was a freshman at the time, I knew enough to understand how they could claim significant speed gains.
I've sometimes had problems getting a sound card to work in Linux (other have worked out of the box with no problem at all). However, Windows 95 is NOT immune to sound problems. The first time I built a computer, I bought a plain old PCI SoundBlaster 16 sound/game card because I didn't want to use the crappy on-board system my MOBO came with. I installed Windows 95 as my OS, and it had an IRQ conflict between the two cards, and refused to release either. So, I go into my hardware profile and disable the crappy on-board card so the SoundBlaster will work, then (of course) reboot. What happens when I reboot? It autodetects the stupid on-board soundcard that I had disabled and sets up the same conflict. I played with it for months and could never get it to work. Now, two points. First, maybe there is some registry hack that I didn't know about that would have allowed me to permanently disable the card I wanted to get rid of, but if the point is that Windows "just works," I shouldn't have had to know that. The highly superior Windows 95 operating system should have just done it for me. Second, this was not an issue of the manufacturer just not writing a supported driver (as is usually the case with Linux sound). The fact that it kept re-installing hardware that I kept disabling is, in my mind, a design flaw. I've had problems with devices in Linux, but I haven't had problems with devices for which drivers have been provided.
1. Mood related shuffle. Depending on the reading from my Bluetooth mood ring, my portable music player chooses an appropriate genre
Could be a bad idea, as it would set up a positive feedback loop, which could cause emotionally unstable people to crack. For example, the iPod detects that you are depressed, so it starts playing "Pictures of You" from the Cure or something. You get more depressed. It senses this, and starts playing some dark, creepy goth tunes. Deeper in depression, it reaches deep into the forgotten depths of your music library, but still can't find anything dark and depressing enough to match your mood, so it cranks the EVIL filter to its highest setting and locates a Mariah Carey song you once accidentally downloaded looking for something else, and then WHAM! All of the sudden we have an epidemic of iPod-induced suicides (or homicides, depending on your particular reaction to Mariah Carey).
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, with the drug cocktails currently available, HIV is not necessarily a short-term death sentence. Many people are able to live for quite a long time with consistent drug therapy. It just happens to be very expensive, which means (fair or not) that many young prostitutes will contract HIV and die while Magic Johnson progresses to old age.
Yeah, but he died poor, because he couldn't get a patent and everybody else ripped off his work.
Who would've thought IBM would someday be the darling of grassroots hackers? I can just see the headline in a Linux Journal story 10-15 years from now: "Microsoft and Linus Torvalds team up in opposing RMS lawsuit against all Linux vendors not using the 'GNU' prefix." And the sub-headline, "Microsoft promises to indemnify customers of its own distribution against any legal actions taken by RMS."
Yes, you can buy a car without a stereo. Most people don't, so most cars you see on a lot have a stereo. But the better analogy is, can you buy a car without a Sony stereo, and the answer is certainly "Yes."
I saw this on a movie, but I don't remember which one. Somebody wanted into a network at a hospital, so he listened to somebody log on, then imitated the sound to log on.
Get into nuclear weapons. There are people who do that for a living.
No, the only danger is that if somebody does breach security, they would have access to more material. With lots of sites, there are lots of different security systems, meaning more potential points of failure. It's not like it's a distributed system where you have to get all of the material for it to be useful. By consolidating, you reduce your number of potential points of failure and have a single system to concentrate on. Think about it, if you have some highly-critical data, and somebody getting any of it is pretty much as bad as somebody getting all of it, would you rather have it sitting on one computer that you lock down like crazy, or on a couple of hundred that you have to try to lock down individually?
I think OpenBSD is supposed to be the be-all end-all of security.
If you are a professional chip designer, then I'm sure you know more about it than I do. Show me your credentials and I will defer to your experience. However, I do have a EE degree, so I am not totally clueless about pipelines. So, if you are a professional chip designer, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but instructions will take different numbers of clock cycles to execute based on their complexity, at least on all of the processors I've worked with. You can't just say "I will divide every instruction into n stages to match my clock speed." There have to be logical stages to divide the instruction into. A 200-stage pipeline will only benefit instructions that can be usefully divided into 200 stages. I do not see how you can do that with basic memory movement commands, unless you had slow memory and missed the cache at every level every single time and ended up with like 195 wait states every time. Also, a 200-stage pipeline would be terribly complex and require a huge chip, which would not be a worthwhile tradeoff for the 99% of instructions that would leave 90% of the pipeline unused.
A 200-stage pipeline will only realize a performance gain on instructions that take 200 cycles to execute. The bulk of instructions that a CPU executes tend to end up being pushing words around. Even on a bloated Pentium, that does not take 200 cycles.
Honestly, the guy is selling you a CD with OpenOffice burned on it for about $10. What's the big deal about that? Maybe I am familiar with it, but don't have the bandwidth, and I think it's worth the $10. Maybe I don't know I can download it for free, but dropping the $10 introduces me to something new that I had no idea existed. If you think the $10 is too much, lowball him on your bid and see if you get lucky. The guy appears to be getting a lot of positive feedback, so maybe a lot of people who would otherwise be locked into the Microsoft rut have found a viable alternative, and have decided that $10 was a fair price for enlightenment. Now, if he doesn't include the proper license, or in any other way breaks the law, then he has a problem. Otherwise, he's probably just an evangelist making a few bucks off of his preaching.
If an extreme bad example were going to bring the entire USPTO to its knees, Pat. 6,368,277 would have already done it. By the way, this example not withstanding, I disagree with your stance that patent & trademarks are inherently "Bad Things." Like any good thing, patents can be abusede by unethical individuals or companies, and can be used to a bad end. The same can be said of computers, televisions, the internet and cars.
No, it would only support 170 times the weight of the Post-it note, which would be like the weight of your shoe or something.
[Sorry, I know bad jokes like that belong on the main page with the leftist politics and karma whoring, but I just couldn't resist this once] [Hangs head in shame]
You worked for AOL and you LOGGED IN to tell about it? You must have some kind of natural asbestos skin or something. My hat's off to you.
I've sometimes had problems getting a sound card to work in Linux (other have worked out of the box with no problem at all). However, Windows 95 is NOT immune to sound problems. The first time I built a computer, I bought a plain old PCI SoundBlaster 16 sound/game card because I didn't want to use the crappy on-board system my MOBO came with. I installed Windows 95 as my OS, and it had an IRQ conflict between the two cards, and refused to release either. So, I go into my hardware profile and disable the crappy on-board card so the SoundBlaster will work, then (of course) reboot. What happens when I reboot? It autodetects the stupid on-board soundcard that I had disabled and sets up the same conflict. I played with it for months and could never get it to work. Now, two points. First, maybe there is some registry hack that I didn't know about that would have allowed me to permanently disable the card I wanted to get rid of, but if the point is that Windows "just works," I shouldn't have had to know that. The highly superior Windows 95 operating system should have just done it for me. Second, this was not an issue of the manufacturer just not writing a supported driver (as is usually the case with Linux sound). The fact that it kept re-installing hardware that I kept disabling is, in my mind, a design flaw. I've had problems with devices in Linux, but I haven't had problems with devices for which drivers have been provided.