Last night I dug up this passage from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and typed it in:
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustraphobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York was gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Of course, Dent's thoughts were of complete and utter physical destruction of the entire planet. However, the comparison is not totally unjustified since many of us feel that the entire culture of the world has changed in an irreversable way. In a sense, the old Earth is gone.
It Will Never See Widespread Acceptance. Why? It's GPL'd. So, until Linux conquers the desktop, or Netscape recaptures the browser market it's irrelevant.
PNG and JPEG are in IE because of the license. If they were GPL, all the MS browsers would be supporting GIF and some other alternative for lossy.
I didn't download IVM, but I decided to take a look at the instruction set. I gave up because it was taking too long to download! It looks like it has thousands of instructions. The JVM has less than 256. Something tells me IVM won't be targeting the embedded market.:)
Don't get me wrong. There is a market for embedded C or C++ virtual machines. I know because I'm working on one for my own use, and other parties have expressed interest to me. But I don't expect to bring in big bucks with it. MS CLR will probably win on Windows, and the JVM will win every place else. The smart money is on tools and languages that target the installed base. Sound familiar?
The counterpoint to that is that they can detect whether or not your data is encrypted. If it's encrypted, they'll decrypt it, and if they can't decrypt it, they've got you on a violation for not using back-doored software.
The counter-counterpoint to that is to just use the backdoored software, but to encrypt what you send through it (2 layers).
Then technicly you are not violating the law. So, if they are stupid enough to pass this law maybe they are not smart enough to consider the possibility that the "plaintext" is not really plaintext.
If they bring you up on charges of nothing other than not using backdoored software, then you know that they decrypted your messages. If that required a warrant, you could get the case thrown out on that technicality alone. Not requiring a warrant makes that defense impossible. I have not had time to digest the bill, but it appears to be written so that they would have to justify that it was in the interest of national security for them to know what you said to your aunt Martha.
Of course, the real terrorists will also use the backdoored software, but they will stego everything they send through it. Well, here on Slashdot, it's almost a truism that these laws don't work... would that it were the same in the larger world.
OK. For a while, I've been reluctant to say this, but if they are going to punish innocent people with these stupid laws, I might as well go ahead and get myself labeled as a "subversive".
During the time period that 128-bit encryption was restricted, I used to fill out the online form with the following information:
Name: Hafez the Enforcer.
Address: 1 Jihad Way, Baghdad, AL
Of course, Iraq was never available as an option, so I always put Alabama which is kind of silly, but anyhow the point is this: How did they know I wasn't a foreign national who had just signed up for an ISP account? They didn't. That was my little protest against that stupid law.
This shit reminds me of what happened after OK City. They passed some kind of "anti terrorist legislation". Well... excuse me, but last time I checked it was already illegal to blow up a building and kill a whole bunch of people.
I dare say that it's our PARTIOTIC DUTY to violate these laws EN MASSE. Let's point the guns at Bin Laden and his kind, not ourselves.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This act was obviously planned by a close and disciplined group. Such groups need money to operate
Wow! It just occurs to me... There was money to be made (by the terrorists) through short selling. I hope the financial institutions involved can dilegently investigate any suspicious short sales in the days leading up to this attack.
This just occured to me. I hope it is not just occuring to the investigators. Large short sales of insurance companies and other businesses housed in the WTC could lead us straight to the terrorist "network".
The Kamikaze strategy doesn't work. It takes the most fervent, dedicated supporters of the cause and kills them. These are the people who might have done something for their movement.
Seeing the smoke come out of the WTC reminds me of a smoking WW2 aircraft carrier... what was it, the Intrepid? Enterprise? Maybe both of them. They were hit by Kamikazes. It didn't stop us. It didn't win the war for Japan. It won't win the war for these guys. Stand fast America. This could be the last desperate act of a desperate band of dispicable international criminals. They know nothing. They create nothing. They contribute nothing, and now they are nothing.
Furthermore, most of these people can't separate the concept of the operating system from the computer.
Which is exactly why MS doesn't have a monopoly. The iMac didn't run Windows, and that didn't hurt it, and your statement is the reason why that didn't hurt it. Judge Jackson just kept redefining the "PC market", making it a narrow enough definition to fit his well documented bias.
That said, the bundling of IE is one case where I think there is a legitimate wrong. IANAL, but I don't think you need to be a monopoly for that kind of predatory pricing to be wrong. Of course, if that's true, what does it say about Intel and IBM funding RedHat prior to IPO? Why haven't the battered shells of SCO and other commercial Unix vendors filed suit?
The thing is, there is no scientific reason why humans can not eventually do this
Replicator technology is really a non-destructive form of transporter technology. Many say that transporter technology will never work because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
That said, I think we could make reasonable copies as opposed to exact copies. In other words, you wouldn't have the exact alignment of each and every molecule in the beer, but you would have the exact composition of the beer which is all anybody really wants anyway.
As for the economic issue, there are some resources that will always be scarce. In particular, time and space will remain finite for the forseeable future. The economics of scarcity will play out in the supply and demand for time (labor) and space (real estate) and anything that closely relates. So, the replicated beer will be free, but you will still need replicator repairmen unless you want to bother your neighbor to replicate you a new replicator.
Of course, that takes energy which is also likely to remain in short supply. Even Mr. Fusion needs banana peels and soda cans to power it, so in regards to the economics of scarcity... reports of its death are greatly exagerated.
I think maybe guys like Noga just don't know when to quit. OK, he wrote an OS. Great, but then he has to name it LegOS; just to see how far he can take it. It seems like that's what it's all about with hackers sometimes: "how much can I tease the lion before it will break the bars on its cage, come out and bite me".
So, is it really all about curiosity and fun, or does the same "because it's there" mentality also cover the area of corporate lawyers. Yeah, let's tweak the corporate lawyers "because they're there". That's not smart, it's not constructive, it's not even nice.
It's probably Legos fault for not drawing the line sooner. That's what happens sometimes when you try to be a "nice guy". People walk all over you, tweak your nose, spill milk on you, take your lunch money--just because they can. Hmmm... maybe hackers are taking *revenge* for their childhood struggles. At any rate, If I were Lego I'd order a cease and desist on the trademark infringement, and make sure people knew that using a 3rd party OS voided the warranty. I wouldn't knock myself out to maintain backward compatability for the next release, but at the same time I wouldn't knock myself out trying to encrypt the code or enforce some DMCA-style anti-cracking law. In other words, I'd walk that "fine line" like they were talking about.
Use a sample (no matter how small) from an OALed recording without asking, and your finished work must be licensed under the OAL and given away.
OK, I'm going to toss a WAV file up on my website somewhere and make sure that sample N has the same sample value as sample N of some other WAV that is under the OAL. Then I'm gonna thumb my nose at the EFF and all the other AIP (Anti-Intellectual Property) imbecils we've had to put up with for the past several years.
Slashdot posting an article by Brett Glass, with a link to an essay by Brett Glass!? Is It Happening? Are the Slashdot editors finally waking up and realizing that OSS runs business into the ground, that the only reason so much of the Internet is built on OSS is because of fat defense contracts and stuff that leaked in from the traditional business model? What is waking them up? Perhaps IBM selling SourceForge services and not paying LNUX is waking them up. LNUX fired developers Friday and Slashdot knows it might be next. Maybe Hemos and CmdrTaco actually want to have jobs and not just be "new new economy" losers standing in the unemployment line. Well sorry, it's probably too late for you guys. You've spent the last few years at the forefront of the AIP movement, it's a little to late to change your tune now.
Of course, Slashdot always has been less leftist on the week-ends, probably because conservatives don't goof off as much during the week.
Being slightly more objective, I agree that for a 0% bug rate, C and C++ are not the solution
This reminds me of how things were in tech support. Everybody thought USRobotics modems were bad. So did I until I heard that USR had a *huge* chunk of the modem market. Then I realized that the only reason we dealt with so many crappy USR modems is simply that there were so *many* USR modems.
Same thing applies here. There is a lot of crappy C and C++ because there is so much of it. Let Haskell, OCaml or any of these functional languages become dominant in the industry, and we will see just how crappy they can be.
Beautful girl in Times Square: OK... but I don't see what the big fuss is. We were doing something, we did something else for a while, and now we're going to do the first thing again.
1. There is an OSS solution that needs just a little bit more push to fulfill my needs. The biggest example of this for me was Gifsicle. All it needed was a Win32 build and a couple of minor bugfixes. The cost of supplying those things was far exceeded by the cost of re-writing it from scratch, and there were no cheap alternatives that did the same thing.
2. To demonstrate programming skill. Obviously the only way to show people your skill is to show them your code. As long as you are going to show them the code, you might as well make sure that you can still use it in the future (not under an NDA) and most OSS licenses fulfill that need which brings us to...
3. To avoid being tied down to one employer. The more you work with OSS, and the more popular it is, the less you are tied to your employer. If all your work is in-house or NDA, the employer has a tremendous power over you. Get layed off and you may have to develop a whole new set of skills. In this regard, OSS acts as a kind of informal labor union with all the associated inefficencies. Developers who really want to break free are better off figuring out a way to own their IP, but many see that as too difficult so OSS gives them entry into a kind of "guild" that can convey certain advantages as described above.
4. The classic reason, which is that you enjoy it. Personally, I find that this only holds true when there is a small ammount of effort, perhaps a single night's work. I have a hard time imagining this drive becoming so powerful that I would be moved to make signficant contributions to something as arcane as kernel code without financial compensation.
...in another 6 months they'll release a study claiming that coffee could help prevent cancer. It'll all balance out. Yeah, I know this is a bit jaded, but what do you expect after years of studies claiming that such-n-such harms you, followd by another round of studies claimng that such-n-such is good for you?
As a general rule, you need at least a lifetime to really figure it out. Some of this stuff *should* be obvious. Did we really need the surgeon general to tell us that chronic smoke inhalation isn't good for us? For centuries people have witnessed others who drank themselves to death, so we pretty much knew excessive alcohol consumption wasn't good either.
In modern times, the 1st world has developed the ability to feed itself so that gluttony is now affordable. But that's one of the 7 deadly sins, so once again it should have occured to us that eating 6 big macs for breakfast and never exercising wasn't such a good idea.
Most everything else is so subtle that you just shouldn't worry about it.
...Simple programs have fewer bugs (because there are fewer lines of code which can be wrong), run faster (because there are fewer machine instructions)...
int main(void)
{
unsigned long *foo,i;
for (i=0;i<0xFFFFFFFFUL;++i)
for (;;)
{
*(++foo)=0;
}
}
It wasn't even really the Concorde's problem either. A few years ago I went to an air show on the local base. All around, there were all these propoganda signs warning about the evils of FOD. I asked my Dad what FOD was, and he didn't know. Eventually, we discovered that it's military speak for Foreign Object Damage. The military is very sensitive to the fact that debris such as sticks, nuts and bolts, sheet metal, or seagulls can cause damage to engines. They do everything they can to prevent that from happening.
The Concorde ran over a hunk of metalic debris on the runway which got thrown up by the wheels and punctured the engine. In other words, it got FODed. The "fix" for the Concorde involves wrapping critical components in Kevlar. They really ought to have had a FOD education campaign like the US military.
Hey, this is great. Maybe HP will take a meaningless drop tomorrow. You can buy it, and then cash out when it rises back to its normal level after all the idiots realize it's not HWP. HP, unlike HWP, is not a bad stock to own. P/E 10. Crappy dividend though.
This makes me wonder, how many Crusoe processors could you put in a box (all other components equal) and equal this power consumption? Would the performance of such a box meet or exceed the performance of an Itanium box for real-world servers?
Imagine if you are next told in your end-user license agreement that you can never resell the software you have purchased
Well, if it's OEM that's already true. This is of course, so counterintuitive, so contrary to the way that commerce has been conducted for thousands of years, that few people even consider the possibility.
I frequently come accross OEM Windows CDs at second-hand stores, flee markets, etc. The people who are selling them are usually not selling "warez" or other contraband. When the OEM clause is mentioned to them, they are usually shocked.
I'm squarely against Microsoft on this particular point, but let's not single them out. Instead, let's make make restrictions against selling parts of a system illegal. The OEM, however, should be able to disclaim liability in such cases. Otherwise we would have people re-selling cars without brakes and then trying to sue General Motors. I can't think of any other real pitfalls in making the OEM clause illegal.
Link? Note to/. editors. It would be nice if you put [PDF, 830k] next to that link so that those of us who are either on a modem (that's me) or who don't have Acrobat (I wish that were me, but there are too many important PDFs I *have* to read. Oh, also the parenthetical text made the story difficult to follow.) could ignore it.
They Will Never Figure Out If Pluto Is A Planet... until they agree on the definition of a planet.
I mean, come one, how hard is it really? Mass and orbital excentricity. Pick two arbitrary numbers out of a hat. Problem solved. OK, OK, this might allow a gas cloud so you need a density factor, and you ought to limit the furthest approach too (a large body that passes by is not a planet).
The bottom line here is that it is not really rocket science to come up with a definition for "planet" and stick with it. Why do otherwise intelligent people insist on playing what is, in essence, a semantic game?
Slashdot Mirror
Last night I dug up this passage from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and typed it in:
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustraphobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York was gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Of course, Dent's thoughts were of complete and utter physical destruction of the entire planet. However, the comparison is not totally unjustified since many of us feel that the entire culture of the world has changed in an irreversable way. In a sense, the old Earth is gone.
It Will Never See Widespread Acceptance. Why? It's GPL'd. So, until Linux conquers the desktop, or Netscape recaptures the browser market it's irrelevant.
PNG and JPEG are in IE because of the license. If they were GPL, all the MS browsers would be supporting GIF and some other alternative for lossy.
I didn't download IVM, but I decided to take a look at the instruction set. I gave up because it was taking too long to download! It looks like it has thousands of instructions. The JVM has less than 256. Something tells me IVM won't be targeting the embedded market. :)
Don't get me wrong. There is a market for embedded C or C++ virtual machines. I know because I'm working on one for my own use, and other parties have expressed interest to me. But I don't expect to bring in big bucks with it. MS CLR will probably win on Windows, and the JVM will win every place else. The smart money is on tools and languages that target the installed base. Sound familiar?
The counterpoint to that is that they can detect whether or not your data is encrypted. If it's encrypted, they'll decrypt it, and if they can't decrypt it, they've got you on a violation for not using back-doored software.
The counter-counterpoint to that is to just use the backdoored software, but to encrypt what you send through it (2 layers).
Then technicly you are not violating the law. So, if they are stupid enough to pass this law maybe they are not smart enough to consider the possibility that the "plaintext" is not really plaintext.
If they bring you up on charges of nothing other than not using backdoored software, then you know that they decrypted your messages. If that required a warrant, you could get the case thrown out on that technicality alone. Not requiring a warrant makes that defense impossible. I have not had time to digest the bill, but it appears to be written so that they would have to justify that it was in the interest of national security for them to know what you said to your aunt Martha.
Of course, the real terrorists will also use the backdoored software, but they will stego everything they send through it. Well, here on Slashdot, it's almost a truism that these laws don't work... would that it were the same in the larger world.
OK. For a while, I've been reluctant to say this, but if they are going to punish innocent people with these stupid laws, I might as well go ahead and get myself labeled as a "subversive".
During the time period that 128-bit encryption was restricted, I used to fill out the online form with the following information:
Name: Hafez the Enforcer.
Address: 1 Jihad Way, Baghdad, AL
Of course, Iraq was never available as an option, so I always put Alabama which is kind of silly, but anyhow the point is this: How did they know I wasn't a foreign national who had just signed up for an ISP account? They didn't. That was my little protest against that stupid law.
This shit reminds me of what happened after OK City. They passed some kind of "anti terrorist legislation". Well... excuse me, but last time I checked it was already illegal to blow up a building and kill a whole bunch of people.
I dare say that it's our PARTIOTIC DUTY to violate these laws EN MASSE. Let's point the guns at Bin Laden and his kind, not ourselves.
This act was obviously planned by a close and disciplined group. Such groups need money to operate
Wow! It just occurs to me... There was money to be made (by the terrorists) through short selling. I hope the financial institutions involved can dilegently investigate any suspicious short sales in the days leading up to this attack.
This just occured to me. I hope it is not just occuring to the investigators. Large short sales of insurance companies and other businesses housed in the WTC could lead us straight to the terrorist "network".
That's nice to know, but I can hear the roar here in Springfield, VA (just outside the Beltway) and that's enough for me.
The Kamikaze strategy doesn't work. It takes the most fervent, dedicated supporters of the cause and kills them. These are the people who might have done something for their movement.
Seeing the smoke come out of the WTC reminds me of a smoking WW2 aircraft carrier... what was it, the Intrepid? Enterprise? Maybe both of them. They were hit by Kamikazes. It didn't stop us. It didn't win the war for Japan. It won't win the war for these guys. Stand fast America. This could be the last desperate act of a desperate band of dispicable international criminals. They know nothing. They create nothing. They contribute nothing, and now they are nothing.
Furthermore, most of these people can't separate the concept of the operating system from the computer.
Which is exactly why MS doesn't have a monopoly. The iMac didn't run Windows, and that didn't hurt it, and your statement is the reason why that didn't hurt it. Judge Jackson just kept redefining the "PC market", making it a narrow enough definition to fit his well documented bias.
That said, the bundling of IE is one case where I think there is a legitimate wrong. IANAL, but I don't think you need to be a monopoly for that kind of predatory pricing to be wrong. Of course, if that's true, what does it say about Intel and IBM funding RedHat prior to IPO? Why haven't the battered shells of SCO and other commercial Unix vendors filed suit?
The thing is, there is no scientific reason why humans can not eventually do this
Replicator technology is really a non-destructive form of transporter technology. Many say that transporter technology will never work because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
That said, I think we could make reasonable copies as opposed to exact copies. In other words, you wouldn't have the exact alignment of each and every molecule in the beer, but you would have the exact composition of the beer which is all anybody really wants anyway.
As for the economic issue, there are some resources that will always be scarce. In particular, time and space will remain finite for the forseeable future. The economics of scarcity will play out in the supply and demand for time (labor) and space (real estate) and anything that closely relates. So, the replicated beer will be free, but you will still need replicator repairmen unless you want to bother your neighbor to replicate you a new replicator.
Of course, that takes energy which is also likely to remain in short supply. Even Mr. Fusion needs banana peels and soda cans to power it, so in regards to the economics of scarcity... reports of its death are greatly exagerated.
I think maybe guys like Noga just don't know when to quit. OK, he wrote an OS. Great, but then he has to name it LegOS; just to see how far he can take it. It seems like that's what it's all about with hackers sometimes: "how much can I tease the lion before it will break the bars on its cage, come out and bite me".
So, is it really all about curiosity and fun, or does the same "because it's there" mentality also cover the area of corporate lawyers. Yeah, let's tweak the corporate lawyers "because they're there". That's not smart, it's not constructive, it's not even nice.
It's probably Legos fault for not drawing the line sooner. That's what happens sometimes when you try to be a "nice guy". People walk all over you, tweak your nose, spill milk on you, take your lunch money--just because they can. Hmmm... maybe hackers are taking *revenge* for their childhood struggles. At any rate, If I were Lego I'd order a cease and desist on the trademark infringement, and make sure people knew that using a 3rd party OS voided the warranty. I wouldn't knock myself out to maintain backward compatability for the next release, but at the same time I wouldn't knock myself out trying to encrypt the code or enforce some DMCA-style anti-cracking law. In other words, I'd walk that "fine line" like they were talking about.
Use a sample (no matter how small) from an OALed recording without asking, and your finished work must be licensed under the OAL and given away.
OK, I'm going to toss a WAV file up on my website somewhere and make sure that sample N has the same sample value as sample N of some other WAV that is under the OAL. Then I'm gonna thumb my nose at the EFF and all the other AIP (Anti-Intellectual Property) imbecils we've had to put up with for the past several years.
Slashdot posting an article by Brett Glass, with a link to an essay by Brett Glass!? Is It Happening? Are the Slashdot editors finally waking up and realizing that OSS runs business into the ground, that the only reason so much of the Internet is built on OSS is because of fat defense contracts and stuff that leaked in from the traditional business model? What is waking them up? Perhaps IBM selling SourceForge services and not paying LNUX is waking them up. LNUX fired developers Friday and Slashdot knows it might be next. Maybe Hemos and CmdrTaco actually want to have jobs and not just be "new new economy" losers standing in the unemployment line. Well sorry, it's probably too late for you guys. You've spent the last few years at the forefront of the AIP movement, it's a little to late to change your tune now.
Of course, Slashdot always has been less leftist on the week-ends, probably because conservatives don't goof off as much during the week.
Being slightly more objective, I agree that for a 0% bug rate, C and C++ are not the solution
This reminds me of how things were in tech support. Everybody thought USRobotics modems were bad. So did I until I heard that USR had a *huge* chunk of the modem market. Then I realized that the only reason we dealt with so many crappy USR modems is simply that there were so *many* USR modems.
Same thing applies here. There is a lot of crappy C and C++ because there is so much of it. Let Haskell, OCaml or any of these functional languages become dominant in the industry, and we will see just how crappy they can be.
Sailor: Kiss me! It's VJ Day! The war is over!!!
Beautful girl in Times Square: OK... but I don't see what the big fuss is. We were doing something, we did something else for a while, and now we're going to do the first thing again.
...would otherwise *not* do Open Source.
1. There is an OSS solution that needs just a little bit more push to fulfill my needs. The biggest example of this for me was Gifsicle. All it needed was a Win32 build and a couple of minor bugfixes. The cost of supplying those things was far exceeded by the cost of re-writing it from scratch, and there were no cheap alternatives that did the same thing.
2. To demonstrate programming skill. Obviously the only way to show people your skill is to show them your code. As long as you are going to show them the code, you might as well make sure that you can still use it in the future (not under an NDA) and most OSS licenses fulfill that need which brings us to...
3. To avoid being tied down to one employer. The more you work with OSS, and the more popular it is, the less you are tied to your employer. If all your work is in-house or NDA, the employer has a tremendous power over you. Get layed off and you may have to develop a whole new set of skills. In this regard, OSS acts as a kind of informal labor union with all the associated inefficencies. Developers who really want to break free are better off figuring out a way to own their IP, but many see that as too difficult so OSS gives them entry into a kind of "guild" that can convey certain advantages as described above.
4. The classic reason, which is that you enjoy it. Personally, I find that this only holds true when there is a small ammount of effort, perhaps a single night's work. I have a hard time imagining this drive becoming so powerful that I would be moved to make signficant contributions to something as arcane as kernel code without financial compensation.
...in another 6 months they'll release a study claiming that coffee could help prevent cancer. It'll all balance out. Yeah, I know this is a bit jaded, but what do you expect after years of studies claiming that such-n-such harms you, followd by another round of studies claimng that such-n-such is good for you?
As a general rule, you need at least a lifetime to really figure it out. Some of this stuff *should* be obvious. Did we really need the surgeon general to tell us that chronic smoke inhalation isn't good for us? For centuries people have witnessed others who drank themselves to death, so we pretty much knew excessive alcohol consumption wasn't good either.
In modern times, the 1st world has developed the ability to feed itself so that gluttony is now affordable. But that's one of the 7 deadly sins, so once again it should have occured to us that eating 6 big macs for breakfast and never exercising wasn't such a good idea.
Most everything else is so subtle that you just shouldn't worry about it.
int main(void)
{
unsigned long *foo,i;
for (i=0;i<0xFFFFFFFFUL;++i)
for (;;)
{
*(++foo)=0;
}
}
Well, so much for those arguments. :)
It wasn't even really the Concorde's problem either. A few years ago I went to an air show on the local base. All around, there were all these propoganda signs warning about the evils of FOD. I asked my Dad what FOD was, and he didn't know. Eventually, we discovered that it's military speak for Foreign Object Damage. The military is very sensitive to the fact that debris such as sticks, nuts and bolts, sheet metal, or seagulls can cause damage to engines. They do everything they can to prevent that from happening.
The Concorde ran over a hunk of metalic debris on the runway which got thrown up by the wheels and punctured the engine. In other words, it got FODed. The "fix" for the Concorde involves wrapping critical components in Kevlar. They really ought to have had a FOD education campaign like the US military.
Hey, this is great. Maybe HP will take a meaningless drop tomorrow. You can buy it, and then cash out when it rises back to its normal level after all the idiots realize it's not HWP. HP, unlike HWP, is not a bad stock to own. P/E 10. Crappy dividend though.
This makes me wonder, how many Crusoe processors could you put in a box (all other components equal) and equal this power consumption? Would the performance of such a box meet or exceed the performance of an Itanium box for real-world servers?
My reply to post #2239121 violated the lameness filter. Something about postsubj compression filter. That lameness filter is, well... lame.
"Yes, and I am able to compress all of Slashdot down to 10 bytes."
FIRST POST
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Well, what do you know, he's right!
Imagine if you are next told in your end-user license agreement that you can never resell the software you have purchased
Well, if it's OEM that's already true. This is of course, so counterintuitive, so contrary to the way that commerce has been conducted for thousands of years, that few people even consider the possibility.
I frequently come accross OEM Windows CDs at second-hand stores, flee markets, etc. The people who are selling them are usually not selling "warez" or other contraband. When the OEM clause is mentioned to them, they are usually shocked.
I'm squarely against Microsoft on this particular point, but let's not single them out. Instead, let's make make restrictions against selling parts of a system illegal. The OEM, however, should be able to disclaim liability in such cases. Otherwise we would have people re-selling cars without brakes and then trying to sue General Motors. I can't think of any other real pitfalls in making the OEM clause illegal.
Link? Note to /. editors. It would be nice if you put [PDF, 830k] next to that link so that those of us who are either on a modem (that's me) or who don't have Acrobat (I wish that were me, but there are too many important PDFs I *have* to read. Oh, also the parenthetical text made the story difficult to follow.) could ignore it.
"You're keeping it a secret, right?"
"Yeah. We just told the editors of Slashdot and a few close friends."
They Will Never Figure Out If Pluto Is A Planet... until they agree on the definition of a planet.
I mean, come one, how hard is it really? Mass and orbital excentricity. Pick two arbitrary numbers out of a hat. Problem solved. OK, OK, this might allow a gas cloud so you need a density factor, and you ought to limit the furthest approach too (a large body that passes by is not a planet).
The bottom line here is that it is not really rocket science to come up with a definition for "planet" and stick with it. Why do otherwise intelligent people insist on playing what is, in essence, a semantic game?