Do you ever say "fuck you" to someone at work? If you do, then I guess you're in a suitably menial position where that sort of conduct doesn't matter.
There is a certain modicum of dignitiy and respect that is expected of people in professional positions (using that word in its proper sense, not its bastardized form - e.g., "professional basketball"). I would think that the members of the United States Senate and especially the Vice President could exercise enough self control to prevent any immature, rude, destructive outbursts while they were at work. That Dick Cheney feels so insecure and threatened in his current position (defending a war that most people have finally realized is simply indefensible) is no excuse for his piss poor sense of judgement and irresponsible lack of respect for his peers.
I used to drive a 4 cylinder 1992(?) Saab 900; it averaged 27 unti it was totaled. I've got a 4 cylinder gasoline VW Golf now and don't yet have enough entries on the mileage sheet to bring it up and enter it into the spreadsheet.
Shit, back in the day. My primary desktop at home is still a BP6 w/ 2 Celeron 400s. With my nVidia FX 5200 I can actually play Castle Wolfenstein (it only gets slow when there are lots of things going on) quite well at 1024x768.
That said, I *just* ordered the components to build a single proc Opteron 142 system (Aus SK8V & PC2700 RAM; all told almost exactly $500). Needless to say, I'm expecting a significant boost in system performance.
I just re-thunk the story. I guess it's not out of date - just not clear. The info was taken down, but has already been allowed to be reposted. I assumed that it was still down...
Here's Google's cache of the offending press release. Judging from the story link, this looks like the censored text:
"The ACLU has led opposition to controversial portions of the Patriot Act, filing a challenge to Section 215, another provision that allows the FBI to gain access to sensitive records, and filing briefs before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oppose expanded wiretaps. With support from a broad right-left coalition, the ACLU has also encouraged passage of approximately 300 local resolutions against anti-civil liberties portions of the law, and has urged Congress to leave in place the "sunsets" for Patriot Act provisions set to expire in 2005."
"The parties have agreed to a briefing schedule in the case. The ACLU will file a summary judgment motion on May 17, 2004; the government will respond on June 7, 2004; all briefing will be completed in July 2004. The court is likely to schedule arguments in the case in late summer 2004. The case is assigned to Judge Victor Marrero."
But wait! I went to the ACLU's actual page and found the same text. Cruising through the most recent press releases turned up a new release that tells the story. Long story short, this story's already out of date (the info has been reinstated)!
That doesn't mean that the government didn't fuck up, just that at least one judge hasn't lost his/her mind.
I like the aesthetics of my Netgear WG602 (b/g) and I believe it has the same external antenna everyone's talking about on the Airport. It works just fine w/ 128bit WEP and our G3 iBook and didn't cost anywhere near as much as an Airport AP.
Can you give a little more detail how exactly you did this? I'm curious, but not knowlegeable enough about the "uunet dialup acct" and "ppp multilink." Did you have a device with multiple RJ11 connectors?
You can blame them if they're pricing like the are and there's no one there to undercut them. The market is clearly not competitive (i.e. the labels wield monopoly pricing power) if there aren't other firms willing to take less profit. I'd say all the labels agreeing to raise prices sounds like an illegal cartel, to me.
Okay. What was the fundamental increase in the cost of placing these goods on the market? How many time does the price of a good go UP when the costs of production haven't changed (or are decreasing)? Answer, when those charging for the good have monopoly power (i.e. the oligopoly of the labels). These guys are clearly not pricing competitively because if they were the price certainly wouldn't be going up for no other reason than a desire to increase profits.
The government should break out the Sherman Act on these labels.
Oh, absolutely. I think collusion is actually a very hard thing to prove in any case. Furthermore, according to the info phamNewan provided earlier in this thread it seems highly unlikely that any collusion was involved at all. It highly looks like independent business decisions were made and because of the economics of manufacturing RAM (wafer size, thin margins, royalties) the same decision was reached independantly by each manufacturer. I think this may go to trial, but that Rambus is going to lose.
Nice to know. If this is the major reason behind *all* the manufacturers declining to manufacture as much Rambus memory, then Rambus doesn't have a case at all. The key to the manufacturer's defense here is not the fixed costs of re-tooling a fab (which they clearly invested in), but the lower per-piece profit on Rabmus RAM.
Can one fab manufactur both types of RAM with little-to-no downtime involved with switching setups? If so, this makes the manufacturer's case very easy: It was more profitable to produce non-RDRAM than it was RDRAM, so more non-RDRAM was produced.
If they had RDRAM-equipped fabs sitting idle, though, it's going to be dueling economists and their market analyses to decide what the best production schedule was (at the time). The memory industry seems pretty competitive to me (a total outsider), so I think if there were RDRAM fabs sitting idle it's going to be a pretty hard thing to justify.
"The latest suit is largely based on evidence acquired as part of the Federal Trade Commission's 2002 complaint that Rambus behaved illegally when it got chip makers to include its patented technology into standards so that it could collect royalties."
Ironically, most of the posts in this story corroborate the plaintiff's charge - that manufacturers limited production to create an artificial scarcity which drove prices of Rambus memory up. You can't counter the argument that nobody adopted Rambus technology because it was too expensive when the charge is that it was collusion on the part of manufacturers to artificially drive up price and prevent widespread adoption. Talk about logically shooting yourself in the foot...
Reading the article, it sounds like memory manufacturers could have colluded against Rambus. In my book, if none of the manufacturers independently wanted to produce Rambus memory and they communicated this fact that amongst themselves, that's not collusion. The details of who said what and at what time, though, are definitely something that will be worked out over the coming years. Depending on the nature of the communications and their timing, this could in fact be determined to look like collusion. If each firm can individually show why they didn't care to produce more Rambus memory, though, I think the case will fail.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I like Rambus, their practices, or anything - just that they perhaps do have a case. Only time will tell.
I've done this on a non-Samsung LCD monitor. Just plug in both cables and use the monitors input selector button to switch between the two inputs (machines).
I for one am not completely satisfied with Safari and Mail and use Thunderbird and Mozilla in OS X (I know I should use Firefox, but just don't, okay?). For the record, I have an iBook G3 900 and the software doesn't seem too slow.
Mail.app's handling of multiple mailboxes is horrendous - it puts all the mail from multiple inboxes into ONE inbox! Holy cow, Batman, which acid monkey dreamed that one up?
Safari's right-click menus are generally useless. The options are poor and they seemed to have chosen different labels just to be different. When you right click in Mozilla, the options are ordered well (most importantly 'back' is right at the top) and textually make better sense to me.
Mail.app opens too many simultaneous connections. I had to alter my Courier IMAP server to allow 16 connections per IP in order to get my mail. What would happen if I didn't run my own server? No mail.
If Thunderbird would let you have multiple accounts with the same server I'd be totally happy. This is especially important for when you're accessing various IMAP stores through SSH - all the servers become localhost!
I use tar.gz releases of Mozilla. I can't be bothered to wait for them to trickle down...
Re:The C++ Programming Language
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm just learning C++, basically as an advanced beginner programmer (I already know Perl pretty well). I have Stroustrup's book, as well as one called "Data Structures and Other Objects Using C++" by Michael Main & Walter Savitch. Even for a beginner, Stroustrup's presentation is FAR superior to the one in Main & Savitch. The explanation of points is clear and there is some design chit-chat that doesn't distract much at all from whatever the section its in is really discussing. It's maybe a little bit advanced for me, but I'm here to learn, right?
My parents (Albany, NY area) have a Time Warner DVR that they find works just fine. Which programs you can time-shift are not restricted and they seem happy with it.
I live in Northern VA and have Comcast. I have a Series 2 TiVo, so I haven't seen or used Comcast's DVR offerings, but judging by what you get with a Time Warner DVR you'll have to pry my TiVo out of my cold, dead fingers. The interface on the Time Warner DVR is nowhere near as pretty, efficient or intuitive as TiVo's; its ability to manage what you want to record is far inferior; there's no 30-second skip hack; the remote control can't really be operated without looking - it's got a horrendous layout. Basically, I would say don't waste your time and money with anything but TiVo.
As far as Comcast's service goes, I have both TV and cable modem and have no major complaints. Outages are very rare and seem to be repaired rather quickly when they do occur. I've heard really bad things about Cox down in Alexandria, though, so be wary. In general, I think service is very specific to neighborhood-level infrastrucutre, so ask around the area immediately around where you're going to see what people think.
Not so fast. If patents and trade secrets (closed source) are used to restrict the dissemination and use of ideas, then free markets do not necessarily improve global knowledge and products. Closed source and restrictive licensing leads to each firm re-inventing the wheel for itself. This unnecessarily duplicates effort and reduces the efficiency of society.
I got bored and stopped reading your post after the first few paragraphs, but I don't think the article addressed the notion of monopoly so much as it did the benefits of open knowledge maintained on a pride-based, volunteer basis. The article was really geared toward contemplating the strength and power of non-monetary motivations, leading the reader to think about the corresponding societal implcations of such alternative forms of motivation to do work.
I tried to write something that was quick to read, but to the point. Who knows, maybe someone will notice. I'm not holding my breath, though.
=====
Despite the fact that Microsoft's software is widely known to contain many security vulnerabilities, the U.S. government and military heavily rely on Microsoft's Windows operating system to peform vital government functions.
It is relatively easy to find security vulnerabilities in software when you have access to the source code of that software (source code is what defines software; people read and write source code).
In light of this fact, Microsoft has claimed that sharing information about its software with competitors could damage national security.
More important than any competitor to Microsoft, China now has the source code to Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Shouldn't the U.S. government move in the direction of open software that is not ultimately controlled by any one entity? As a concerned and informed citizen, I would wholeheartedly suggest Senator Warner support open source software and vote against bills like the DMCA that stifle the progress of open source software.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you ever say "fuck you" to someone at work? If you do, then I guess you're in a suitably menial position where that sort of conduct doesn't matter.
There is a certain modicum of dignitiy and respect that is expected of people in professional positions (using that word in its proper sense, not its bastardized form - e.g., "professional basketball"). I would think that the members of the United States Senate and especially the Vice President could exercise enough self control to prevent any immature, rude, destructive outbursts while they were at work. That Dick Cheney feels so insecure and threatened in his current position (defending a war that most people have finally realized is simply indefensible) is no excuse for his piss poor sense of judgement and irresponsible lack of respect for his peers.
I used to drive a 4 cylinder 1992(?) Saab 900; it averaged 27 unti it was totaled. I've got a 4 cylinder gasoline VW Golf now and don't yet have enough entries on the mileage sheet to bring it up and enter it into the spreadsheet.
Check out the DPReview of the Nikon D70. It apparently had a very good initial and sustained FPS.
Shit, back in the day. My primary desktop at home is still a BP6 w/ 2 Celeron 400s. With my nVidia FX 5200 I can actually play Castle Wolfenstein (it only gets slow when there are lots of things going on) quite well at 1024x768.
That said, I *just* ordered the components to build a single proc Opteron 142 system (Aus SK8V & PC2700 RAM; all told almost exactly $500). Needless to say, I'm expecting a significant boost in system performance.
I just re-thunk the story. I guess it's not out of date - just not clear. The info was taken down, but has already been allowed to be reposted. I assumed that it was still down...
Okay, back to work.
Here's Google's cache of the offending press release. Judging from the story link, this looks like the censored text:
"The ACLU has led opposition to controversial portions of the Patriot Act, filing a challenge to Section 215, another provision that allows the FBI to gain access to sensitive records, and filing briefs before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oppose expanded wiretaps. With support from a broad right-left coalition, the ACLU has also encouraged passage of approximately 300 local resolutions against anti-civil liberties portions of the law, and has urged Congress to leave in place the "sunsets" for Patriot Act provisions set to expire in 2005."
"The parties have agreed to a briefing schedule in the case. The ACLU will file a summary judgment motion on May 17, 2004; the government will respond on June 7, 2004; all briefing will be completed in July 2004. The court is likely to schedule arguments in the case in late summer 2004. The case is assigned to Judge Victor Marrero."
But wait! I went to the ACLU's actual page and found the same text. Cruising through the most recent press releases turned up a new release that tells the story. Long story short, this story's already out of date (the info has been reinstated)! That doesn't mean that the government didn't fuck up, just that at least one judge hasn't lost his/her mind.
I like the aesthetics of my Netgear WG602 (b/g) and I believe it has the same external antenna everyone's talking about on the Airport. It works just fine w/ 128bit WEP and our G3 iBook and didn't cost anywhere near as much as an Airport AP.
Can you give a little more detail how exactly you did this? I'm curious, but not knowlegeable enough about the "uunet dialup acct" and "ppp multilink." Did you have a device with multiple RJ11 connectors?
You can blame them if they're pricing like the are and there's no one there to undercut them. The market is clearly not competitive (i.e. the labels wield monopoly pricing power) if there aren't other firms willing to take less profit. I'd say all the labels agreeing to raise prices sounds like an illegal cartel, to me.
Okay. What was the fundamental increase in the cost of placing these goods on the market? How many time does the price of a good go UP when the costs of production haven't changed (or are decreasing)? Answer, when those charging for the good have monopoly power (i.e. the oligopoly of the labels). These guys are clearly not pricing competitively because if they were the price certainly wouldn't be going up for no other reason than a desire to increase profits.
The government should break out the Sherman Act on these labels.
Oh, absolutely. I think collusion is actually a very hard thing to prove in any case. Furthermore, according to the info phamNewan provided earlier in this thread it seems highly unlikely that any collusion was involved at all. It highly looks like independent business decisions were made and because of the economics of manufacturing RAM (wafer size, thin margins, royalties) the same decision was reached independantly by each manufacturer. I think this may go to trial, but that Rambus is going to lose.
Nice to know. If this is the major reason behind *all* the manufacturers declining to manufacture as much Rambus memory, then Rambus doesn't have a case at all. The key to the manufacturer's defense here is not the fixed costs of re-tooling a fab (which they clearly invested in), but the lower per-piece profit on Rabmus RAM.
Can one fab manufactur both types of RAM with little-to-no downtime involved with switching setups? If so, this makes the manufacturer's case very easy: It was more profitable to produce non-RDRAM than it was RDRAM, so more non-RDRAM was produced.
If they had RDRAM-equipped fabs sitting idle, though, it's going to be dueling economists and their market analyses to decide what the best production schedule was (at the time). The memory industry seems pretty competitive to me (a total outsider), so I think if there were RDRAM fabs sitting idle it's going to be a pretty hard thing to justify.
Read more carefully next time.
"The latest suit is largely based on evidence acquired as part of the Federal Trade Commission's 2002 complaint that Rambus behaved illegally when it got chip makers to include its patented technology into standards so that it could collect royalties."
Ironically, most of the posts in this story corroborate the plaintiff's charge - that manufacturers limited production to create an artificial scarcity which drove prices of Rambus memory up. You can't counter the argument that nobody adopted Rambus technology because it was too expensive when the charge is that it was collusion on the part of manufacturers to artificially drive up price and prevent widespread adoption. Talk about logically shooting yourself in the foot...
Reading the article, it sounds like memory manufacturers could have colluded against Rambus. In my book, if none of the manufacturers independently wanted to produce Rambus memory and they communicated this fact that amongst themselves, that's not collusion. The details of who said what and at what time, though, are definitely something that will be worked out over the coming years. Depending on the nature of the communications and their timing, this could in fact be determined to look like collusion. If each firm can individually show why they didn't care to produce more Rambus memory, though, I think the case will fail.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I like Rambus, their practices, or anything - just that they perhaps do have a case. Only time will tell.
I've done this on a non-Samsung LCD monitor. Just plug in both cables and use the monitors input selector button to switch between the two inputs (machines).
I use tar.gz releases of Mozilla. I can't be bothered to wait for them to trickle down...
I'm just learning C++, basically as an advanced beginner programmer (I already know Perl pretty well). I have Stroustrup's book, as well as one called "Data Structures and Other Objects Using C++" by Michael Main & Walter Savitch. Even for a beginner, Stroustrup's presentation is FAR superior to the one in Main & Savitch. The explanation of points is clear and there is some design chit-chat that doesn't distract much at all from whatever the section its in is really discussing. It's maybe a little bit advanced for me, but I'm here to learn, right?
My parents (Albany, NY area) have a Time Warner DVR that they find works just fine. Which programs you can time-shift are not restricted and they seem happy with it.
I live in Northern VA and have Comcast. I have a Series 2 TiVo, so I haven't seen or used Comcast's DVR offerings, but judging by what you get with a Time Warner DVR you'll have to pry my TiVo out of my cold, dead fingers. The interface on the Time Warner DVR is nowhere near as pretty, efficient or intuitive as TiVo's; its ability to manage what you want to record is far inferior; there's no 30-second skip hack; the remote control can't really be operated without looking - it's got a horrendous layout. Basically, I would say don't waste your time and money with anything but TiVo.
As far as Comcast's service goes, I have both TV and cable modem and have no major complaints. Outages are very rare and seem to be repaired rather quickly when they do occur. I've heard really bad things about Cox down in Alexandria, though, so be wary. In general, I think service is very specific to neighborhood-level infrastrucutre, so ask around the area immediately around where you're going to see what people think.
Not so fast. If patents and trade secrets (closed source) are used to restrict the dissemination and use of ideas, then free markets do not necessarily improve global knowledge and products. Closed source and restrictive licensing leads to each firm re-inventing the wheel for itself. This unnecessarily duplicates effort and reduces the efficiency of society.
I got bored and stopped reading your post after the first few paragraphs, but I don't think the article addressed the notion of monopoly so much as it did the benefits of open knowledge maintained on a pride-based, volunteer basis. The article was really geared toward contemplating the strength and power of non-monetary motivations, leading the reader to think about the corresponding societal implcations of such alternative forms of motivation to do work.
Not my site (100% bitmaps), but it's nothing all that special.
or it's batteries die.
I tried to write something that was quick to read, but to the point. Who knows, maybe someone will notice. I'm not holding my breath, though.
=====
Despite the fact that Microsoft's software is widely known to contain many security vulnerabilities, the U.S. government and military heavily rely on Microsoft's Windows operating system to peform vital government functions.
It is relatively easy to find security vulnerabilities in software when you have access to the source code of that software (source code is what defines software; people read and write source code).
In light of this fact, Microsoft has claimed that sharing information about its software with competitors could damage national security.
More important than any competitor to Microsoft, China now has the source code to Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Shouldn't the U.S. government move in the direction of open software that is not ultimately controlled by any one entity? As a concerned and informed citizen, I would wholeheartedly suggest Senator Warner support open source software and vote against bills like the DMCA that stifle the progress of open source software.
Wood's been done, too:
the case project.