That is as BAD a generalization as any one an American makes.
Owing to hundreds of years of immigration, the US is one of the most diverse nations on Earth, despite the effort of the likes of WalMart and McDonalds to homogenize us.
"does the same job" can be a diffuse and difficult thing to measure. Witness the return of Dell support to America - because Indian workers weren't well-rooted in American culture. The same would happen if the tables were turned. Last I heard, American workers were incredibly productive.
As for overpriced, it goes with the cost of living. But that same cost of living sells lots of products for the very same companies that want to outsource. The article says that Indian companies buy US goods, but do Indian consumers? If an American company shifts an American job to India, does it also shift that purchase of its product? Will an Indian consumer base arise as fast as the American consumer base is destroyed?
This IS the point, and the whole point. IMHO, read the constitution and THIS is what you come to.
Let's phrase it a different way:
A person can be supporting his/her self and family OR advancing the Arts and Sciences. The purpose of Copyrights and Patents as put forth in the Constitution is to remove the devilment behind that 'OR' decision. Even if it's not enough incentive to enable and Artist/Scientist/Engineer to make a life wholly supported that way, it's got to be worthwhile, as opposed to putting in a few more hours at a day job.
The other side comes from the phrase, "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Patents and Copyrights are SUPPOSED to release that stuff into the Public Domain, so others can use it as a basis for further works. THIS is the single most broken aspect of current IP law, IMHO.
I have this completely unsubstantiated theory about elevator controllers:
The programmer put a back-door into the software. Tap the button with the right rhythm, no doubt his favorite applicable song, and the elevator comes immediately to that floor.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story reminiscent of this, set on the moon. Two explorers in a dusty area, and some of the dust sticks to their faceplates. Wiping the dust off builds electrostatic charge, attracting more dust, so they're soon blind.
***SPOILER ALERT*** (and suggestion)
Since rubbing causes static electicity, they rub their faceplates together. One charges one polarity, the other the opposite. So one faceplate comes out even dustier, the other clean. The explorer with the clean faceplate can lead the other back to the vehicle.
Actually I always though static electricity came from rubbing dissimilar materials, so I wouldn't expect rubbing two identical-material faceplates to do squat. But there may be a lesson here. If the primary problem is really electrostatic, might there be some sort of electrostatic solution? (on future rovers) The most extreme would be an ion-wind generator with the 'benign' (dustwise) polarity attached to the panel. Another might be a charged wiper blade. I'm sure there could be other simpler electrostatic-based solutions.
we got 1D and were THRILLED! The characters came out in one line, and it really forced you to improve your reading speed, because it didn't scroll up.
And we were LUCKY, and we knew it! There were two standards in the competing generation. One standard showed one letter at a time, and you had to build words and sentences in your head. The other standard was Morse code with dots and dashes in a 1D line.
And of course the generation before THAT was 0D. Though they did get the option for the light to blink in Morse, ASCII, or EBCDIC.
As an email originator, you have an envelope, a From: address, and a ReplyTo: address. I'm pretty sure that they're not going to filter on the ReplyTo: address, but From: and envelope are a different matter.
I have an email vanity domain, and they forward it all to my ISP's POP box. One of the things I like about Exim is that it can easily and *thoroughly* rewrite addresses, including the envelope. My outgoing email goes through my ISP's relay, but in every way except headers, it looks like it came from my vanity domain.
It looks to me as if this scheme will break my current vanity domain usage. Further, it looks to me as if it will require care to make *any* vanity domain usage work.
BTW, the other reason for a vanity domain is to keep your email address constant even when changing ISPs.
Blue Man Group and those little notes are only part of the story of the Intel Inside campaign, the part that the public sees.
The other part is based on the razor-thin profit margins in the PC arena. IIRC, Intel Inside is a co-marketing agreement. Co-market, play those little notes and display the Intel logo as part of your ad, and you get a nice co-marketing fee from Intel. With next-to-no profit margin, that co-marketing fee just might be your profit, or a large part thereof.
Maybe the days of "You MUST use our CPUs in 100% of your products!" are gone, but I'll bet the days of, "You must use our CPUs in 100% of your products in order to participate in Intel Inside!" are still here.
Reference to "The Demon with the Glass Hand," an Outer Limits episode starring Robert Culp.
His hand was a computer, and the fingers were computing elements. He needed to get all five fingers in order to make the computer whole and save Mankind from the aliens. He talked to his hand, and it answered.
There have been many security comparisons between Linux and Windows, and the conclusions have always been mixed. One reason is because of the scope of the included software - because it's "free" Linux distributions usually include the kitchen sink, so there are more packages to count security exposures in. Another reason is multiple counting - one exposure across multiple distributions. Yet another factor not well estimated has been the severity of the exposures.
But these security exposures have all been in an environment where Linux source was generally available for inspection, and Windows source wasn't. A corollary of this is that most of the Linux exposures have been proactively reported, prior to being exploited. With Windows that's not so clear.
In the future, there's not reason to expect Linux security exposures to change significantly, except through becoming a bigger target because of increased usage. But the fundamentals of bugs, bug reporting, bug fixing, and security haven't changed.
The future story for Windows is different now, because some source has become available. *Maybe* some people will begin proactive security work on the source, and *maybe* Microsoft will roll that work into fixes. But for certain, others wearing differnt color hats will be examining that code for security exposures, too.
Suspending the "right to drive" has become crippling, because the US has become so terribly addicted to underpriced transportation. In most places today, outside of a major cities, it's nearly impossible to live without access to a motor vehicle. Outside of mid-sized cities, you lose public buses, as well as subways, making private motor vehicles a practical necessity.
Can't get to work. Can't get to the grocery. Practically nothing is in walking distance, any more. Most of the area (not necessarily population) of the US needs a car to live.
Not to mention that in the US we're just plain addicted to our cars and trucks. Years back I saw an editorial cartoon. It featured a man in a car in a traffic jam. The same thought-bubble pointed to every car, "If we had public transportation, I'd have this road to myself."
Forget the spammers, Contact the pen1s enlargement people.
Tell them that in spite of the fact that maybe in the future you will be looking to enlarge your pen1s, their use of spam as an advertising technique has prompted you to cross them off of your list of acceptable business providers. Spam operates in the statistical mud of return rates, and it can only do so because bulk email is "free". To stop spammers, we have to make sure their income becomes less than their expenditures. Adding postage to email is an example of the latter. "Educating" businessmen about the downside of advertising through spam would be an example of the former.
Since spam does "work" with such small return percentages, it wouldn't take much complaint mail to give them the message about what we don't like in our inboxes.
My spam filtration works pretty well, but a few leak through every day. But that's not so much that I can't take a few minutes and answer every single one, especially if I had a canned response ready. I should do that. We ALL should do that. Then they'd get the message, and find a different way of advertising.
I get worried whenever Internet access gets put into context with TV and voice delivery by the "wrong" people. To those people, uplink is how you transmit your requests for data to be shipped down. To those people, highly asymmetric links are just fine because they're all that anyone "needs," even good because it limits the bandwidth resources available to crackers and spammers.
The Internet was originally about end-to-end, and peer communication. Some peers were bigger, and had more connections than others, and were called servers. But in a more fundamental way, they were still peers.
Look at Wondershaper. It exists because cable (at least, don't know about DSL) ISPs have broken the end-to-end model. Cable ISPs "optimize" for download to the point that multiple streams have difficulty sharing the link. It's tweaked and tuned to become a 'broadcast on request' medium.
I have little hope for "Big Broadband" to be significantly better. That's in nobody's interest except us rabble.
I'll grant your point on Centrino, and then some. IMHO, Centrino is a big problem for Intel, because it exposes the mess they've made of P4 by chasing clock speed above all else. Clock for clock, watt for watt, Centrino is the best thing Intel makes, and if they didn't watch it, it would take over the X86 server market.
I didn't say the other chips weren't profitable. They are. They just aren't *obscenely* profitable. The Xeons aren't 'just a few dollars more', a quick check on pricewatch (for lack of a quickly accessible better source) shows a 3.0GHz P4 at $214 and the Xeon 3.0GHz, 'slow' fsb, for $440.
They make money on your thousands of garden-variety Pentia, but they *mint* money on the hundred Xeons.
As for the HPC market... Yes, AMD is going after that. Opteron is a natural for NUMA. But that wasn't what I said about going after the Xeon market. The HPC market may be spectacular, but it isn't big. The Xeon market may not be spectacular from a computing standpoint, but it is for profits. They can sell into the HPC market as an aside to the Xeon market. Besides, the price gap between X86 and X86-64 isn't anything like the gap between X86 and IA-64. It isn't stupid to buy X86-64 as a fast X86, even if you don't use 64-bitness.
Intel's model for profitabilty is simple. They make their profit on Xeons, where until recently they have had no competition.
A friend once told me that the Celeron is priced, "one penny above variable cost," or essentially the lowest they could get away with without getting in dumping/antitrust problems. Note that a Celeron can only pay for its wafers and processing, not its own manufacturing line. Intel has managed to keep AMD pretty much in that market, except that AMD has to buy the manufacturing line at those prices, too.
In that respect, Intel is a lot like Microsoft. Microsoft makes so much money on Windows and Office that they can afford to lose it everywhere else. Intel makes that kind of money on Xeon, and gets the lion's share of its profit there.
People have criticized AMD for not going after IA-64 harder with Opteron/Athlon-64, or not flooding it into the mainstream market. But the IA-64 market is a hard nut to crack, and for a newcomer there's no money to be made there. AMD can't take on the mainstream market without at least a dozen fabs to handle the volume - which would just plummet prices through total Intel/AMD CPU overcapacity. Take a look at what they're doing - they're going after Xeon - and trying to get a piece of the profit in a market that's consistent with their fab capacity.
Bursting into flames has everything to do with one specific feature, and nothing to do with overall design quality. Specifically, the Pentia you're talking about has a fast-acting, sensitive temperature sensor connected to clock-throttling circuitry. When the chip gets too hot, the clocking is cut back to reduce power. FWIU, AMD has merely an on-chip temperature sensing diode.
AMD would do well to pick up Intel's design on this feature, but I'll bet it's patented.
But it is a single, specific feature. Other than that it's a very nice feature to have, it says *nothing* about other measures of quality in either CPU.
If you want to talk about other measures of quality, ask which CPU just plain runs well with today's compiler output, and which CPU requires new compiler generations in order to get decent performance.
I prefer the version, with many attributions, that:
Power attracts the corruptible.
I wish there were an effective way to draft our government. I worry about the competence issue, and I wonder if it would reduce corruption. Just how honest is the average citizen? If the average citizen were honest, would the drop in corruption balance the presumed drop in competence as a result of drafting government?
I seem to remember that an essential part of the Compaq clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS was monitoring cameras and a videotape record to show that only the correct information ever crossed the "Chinese Wall".
A few years back, I was trying to purchase a piece of software for business use, and vetting it with company lawyers was an essential part of the process. The author had developed it while working for a company, and that company had been sold several times. Eventually he took the program on his own, and was selling it as shareware. The ownership of the program was so murky the lawyer wouldn't let me buy it.
The lawyer used a phrase, "Fruit of the forbidden tree," that is probably relevant here. If an NTFS spec is derived from stolen source code, that spec is tainted, and any future code written based on it is tainted, too.
If you really want a clean NTFS spec, find a legit way to get access to the object code without signing or clicking the license, (I've seen any number of ways to avoid clicking the "I agree!" button.) and disassemble, then document. Preferably with a video record.
and I bought the other two episodes, too. Unfortunately, I forget their names.
In retrospect, I preferred the episodic form to the straight-line 32 levels of Doom II. Only problem was that you lost all of you accumulated booty when you started the next episode.
My favorite game of that era was Hexen, and its hubs were an interesting compromise between episodes and straight-line levels.
Slashdot Mirror
You bet! Regulations about chemical safety, for instance, (like methyl-iso-cyanate) are completely unnecessary. Just ask the people of Bhopal.
That is as BAD a generalization as any one an American makes.
Owing to hundreds of years of immigration, the US is one of the most diverse nations on Earth, despite the effort of the likes of WalMart and McDonalds to homogenize us.
"does the same job" can be a diffuse and difficult thing to measure. Witness the return of Dell support to America - because Indian workers weren't well-rooted in American culture. The same would happen if the tables were turned. Last I heard, American workers were incredibly productive.
As for overpriced, it goes with the cost of living. But that same cost of living sells lots of products for the very same companies that want to outsource. The article says that Indian companies buy US goods, but do Indian consumers? If an American company shifts an American job to India, does it also shift that purchase of its product? Will an Indian consumer base arise as fast as the American consumer base is destroyed?
This IS the point, and the whole point. IMHO, read the constitution and THIS is what you come to.
Let's phrase it a different way:
A person can be supporting his/her self and family OR advancing the Arts and Sciences. The purpose of Copyrights and Patents as put forth in the Constitution is to remove the devilment behind that 'OR' decision. Even if it's not enough incentive to enable and Artist/Scientist/Engineer to make a life wholly supported that way, it's got to be worthwhile, as opposed to putting in a few more hours at a day job.
The other side comes from the phrase, "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Patents and Copyrights are SUPPOSED to release that stuff into the Public Domain, so others can use it as a basis for further works. THIS is the single most broken aspect of current IP law, IMHO.
I have this completely unsubstantiated theory about elevator controllers:
The programmer put a back-door into the software. Tap the button with the right rhythm, no doubt his favorite applicable song, and the elevator comes immediately to that floor.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story reminiscent of this, set on the moon. Two explorers in a dusty area, and some of the dust sticks to their faceplates. Wiping the dust off builds electrostatic charge, attracting more dust, so they're soon blind.
***SPOILER ALERT*** (and suggestion)
Since rubbing causes static electicity, they rub their faceplates together. One charges one polarity, the other the opposite. So one faceplate comes out even dustier, the other clean. The explorer with the clean faceplate can lead the other back to the vehicle.
Actually I always though static electricity came from rubbing dissimilar materials, so I wouldn't expect rubbing two identical-material faceplates to do squat. But there may be a lesson here. If the primary problem is really electrostatic, might there be some sort of electrostatic solution? (on future rovers) The most extreme would be an ion-wind generator with the 'benign' (dustwise) polarity attached to the panel. Another might be a charged wiper blade. I'm sure there could be other simpler electrostatic-based solutions.
we got 1D and were THRILLED! The characters came out in one line, and it really forced you to improve your reading speed, because it didn't scroll up.
And we were LUCKY, and we knew it! There were two standards in the competing generation. One standard showed one letter at a time, and you had to build words and sentences in your head. The other standard was Morse code with dots and dashes in a 1D line.
And of course the generation before THAT was 0D. Though they did get the option for the light to blink in Morse, ASCII, or EBCDIC.
Maybe. It depends on the implementation.
As an email originator, you have an envelope, a From: address, and a ReplyTo: address. I'm pretty sure that they're not going to filter on the ReplyTo: address, but From: and envelope are a different matter.
I have an email vanity domain, and they forward it all to my ISP's POP box. One of the things I like about Exim is that it can easily and *thoroughly* rewrite addresses, including the envelope. My outgoing email goes through my ISP's relay, but in every way except headers, it looks like it came from my vanity domain.
It looks to me as if this scheme will break my current vanity domain usage. Further, it looks to me as if it will require care to make *any* vanity domain usage work.
BTW, the other reason for a vanity domain is to keep your email address constant even when changing ISPs.
Did you ever read Roddenberry's version of the backstory behind, "City on the Edge of Forever?"
Blue Man Group and those little notes are only part of the story of the Intel Inside campaign, the part that the public sees.
The other part is based on the razor-thin profit margins in the PC arena. IIRC, Intel Inside is a co-marketing agreement. Co-market, play those little notes and display the Intel logo as part of your ad, and you get a nice co-marketing fee from Intel. With next-to-no profit margin, that co-marketing fee just might be your profit, or a large part thereof.
Maybe the days of "You MUST use our CPUs in 100% of your products!" are gone, but I'll bet the days of, "You must use our CPUs in 100% of your products in order to participate in Intel Inside!" are still here.
Because I forgot who wrote it, and wanted to include something besides just "Outer Limits."
Reference to "The Demon with the Glass Hand," an Outer Limits episode starring Robert Culp.
His hand was a computer, and the fingers were computing elements. He needed to get all five fingers in order to make the computer whole and save Mankind from the aliens. He talked to his hand, and it answered.
Yes.
Now read the last line in your referenced article, that the bug was very deep in the memory management code.
IMHO, most of the copious Windows bugs we've seen so far have been "shallow" ones. NOW we'll start seeing exploits based on "deep" bugs.
There have been many security comparisons between Linux and Windows, and the conclusions have always been mixed. One reason is because of the scope of the included software - because it's "free" Linux distributions usually include the kitchen sink, so there are more packages to count security exposures in. Another reason is multiple counting - one exposure across multiple distributions. Yet another factor not well estimated has been the severity of the exposures.
But these security exposures have all been in an environment where Linux source was generally available for inspection, and Windows source wasn't. A corollary of this is that most of the Linux exposures have been proactively reported, prior to being exploited. With Windows that's not so clear.
In the future, there's not reason to expect Linux security exposures to change significantly, except through becoming a bigger target because of increased usage. But the fundamentals of bugs, bug reporting, bug fixing, and security haven't changed.
The future story for Windows is different now, because some source has become available. *Maybe* some people will begin proactive security work on the source, and *maybe* Microsoft will roll that work into fixes. But for certain, others wearing differnt color hats will be examining that code for security exposures, too.
If the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution today, they'd have enumerated a Bill of Responsibilities as well as the Bill of Rights.
(But they'd have also been concerned about Privacy, and separation of Corporation and State, too.)
Suspending the "right to drive" has become crippling, because the US has become so terribly addicted to underpriced transportation. In most places today, outside of a major cities, it's nearly impossible to live without access to a motor vehicle. Outside of mid-sized cities, you lose public buses, as well as subways, making private motor vehicles a practical necessity.
Can't get to work.
Can't get to the grocery.
Practically nothing is in walking distance, any more.
Most of the area (not necessarily population) of the US needs a car to live.
Not to mention that in the US we're just plain addicted to our cars and trucks. Years back I saw an editorial cartoon. It featured a man in a car in a traffic jam. The same thought-bubble pointed to every car, "If we had public transportation, I'd have this road to myself."
Forget the spammers, Contact the pen1s enlargement people.
Tell them that in spite of the fact that maybe in the future you will be looking to enlarge your pen1s, their use of spam as an advertising technique has prompted you to cross them off of your list of acceptable business providers. Spam operates in the statistical mud of return rates, and it can only do so because bulk email is "free". To stop spammers, we have to make sure their income becomes less than their expenditures. Adding postage to email is an example of the latter. "Educating" businessmen about the downside of advertising through spam would be an example of the former.
Since spam does "work" with such small return percentages, it wouldn't take much complaint mail to give them the message about what we don't like in our inboxes.
My spam filtration works pretty well, but a few leak through every day. But that's not so much that I can't take a few minutes and answer every single one, especially if I had a canned response ready. I should do that. We ALL should do that. Then they'd get the message, and find a different way of advertising.
I get worried whenever Internet access gets put into context with TV and voice delivery by the "wrong" people. To those people, uplink is how you transmit your requests for data to be shipped down. To those people, highly asymmetric links are just fine because they're all that anyone "needs," even good because it limits the bandwidth resources available to crackers and spammers.
The Internet was originally about end-to-end, and peer communication. Some peers were bigger, and had more connections than others, and were called servers. But in a more fundamental way, they were still peers.
Look at Wondershaper. It exists because cable (at least, don't know about DSL) ISPs have broken the end-to-end model. Cable ISPs "optimize" for download to the point that multiple streams have difficulty sharing the link. It's tweaked and tuned to become a 'broadcast on request' medium.
I have little hope for "Big Broadband" to be significantly better. That's in nobody's interest except us rabble.
I'll grant your point on Centrino, and then some. IMHO, Centrino is a big problem for Intel, because it exposes the mess they've made of P4 by chasing clock speed above all else. Clock for clock, watt for watt, Centrino is the best thing Intel makes, and if they didn't watch it, it would take over the X86 server market.
I didn't say the other chips weren't profitable. They are. They just aren't *obscenely* profitable. The Xeons aren't 'just a few dollars more', a quick check on pricewatch (for lack of a quickly accessible better source) shows a 3.0GHz P4 at $214 and the Xeon 3.0GHz, 'slow' fsb, for $440.
They make money on your thousands of garden-variety Pentia, but they *mint* money on the hundred Xeons.
As for the HPC market... Yes, AMD is going after that. Opteron is a natural for NUMA. But that wasn't what I said about going after the Xeon market. The HPC market may be spectacular, but it isn't big. The Xeon market may not be spectacular from a computing standpoint, but it is for profits. They can sell into the HPC market as an aside to the Xeon market. Besides, the price gap between X86 and X86-64 isn't anything like the gap between X86 and IA-64. It isn't stupid to buy X86-64 as a fast X86, even if you don't use 64-bitness.
Intel's model for profitabilty is simple. They make their profit on Xeons, where until recently they have had no competition.
A friend once told me that the Celeron is priced, "one penny above variable cost," or essentially the lowest they could get away with without getting in dumping/antitrust problems. Note that a Celeron can only pay for its wafers and processing, not its own manufacturing line. Intel has managed to keep AMD pretty much in that market, except that AMD has to buy the manufacturing line at those prices, too.
In that respect, Intel is a lot like Microsoft. Microsoft makes so much money on Windows and Office that they can afford to lose it everywhere else. Intel makes that kind of money on Xeon, and gets the lion's share of its profit there.
People have criticized AMD for not going after IA-64 harder with Opteron/Athlon-64, or not flooding it into the mainstream market. But the IA-64 market is a hard nut to crack, and for a newcomer there's no money to be made there. AMD can't take on the mainstream market without at least a dozen fabs to handle the volume - which would just plummet prices through total Intel/AMD CPU overcapacity. Take a look at what they're doing - they're going after Xeon - and trying to get a piece of the profit in a market that's consistent with their fab capacity.
Bursting into flames has everything to do with one specific feature, and nothing to do with overall design quality. Specifically, the Pentia you're talking about has a fast-acting, sensitive temperature sensor connected to clock-throttling circuitry. When the chip gets too hot, the clocking is cut back to reduce power. FWIU, AMD has merely an on-chip temperature sensing diode.
AMD would do well to pick up Intel's design on this feature, but I'll bet it's patented.
But it is a single, specific feature. Other than that it's a very nice feature to have, it says *nothing* about other measures of quality in either CPU.
If you want to talk about other measures of quality, ask which CPU just plain runs well with today's compiler output, and which CPU requires new compiler generations in order to get decent performance.
You mean Sieg-El and Schuster? (Guess the second time means you can't get it right, every time.
I prefer the version, with many attributions, that:
Power attracts the corruptible.
I wish there were an effective way to draft our government. I worry about the competence issue, and I wonder if it would reduce corruption. Just how honest is the average citizen? If the average citizen were honest, would the drop in corruption balance the presumed drop in competence as a result of drafting government?
I seem to remember that an essential part of the Compaq clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS was monitoring cameras and a videotape record to show that only the correct information ever crossed the "Chinese Wall".
A few years back, I was trying to purchase a piece of software for business use, and vetting it with company lawyers was an essential part of the process. The author had developed it while working for a company, and that company had been sold several times. Eventually he took the program on his own, and was selling it as shareware. The ownership of the program was so murky the lawyer wouldn't let me buy it.
The lawyer used a phrase, "Fruit of the forbidden tree," that is probably relevant here. If an NTFS spec is derived from stolen source code, that spec is tainted, and any future code written based on it is tainted, too.
If you really want a clean NTFS spec, find a legit way to get access to the object code without signing or clicking the license, (I've seen any number of ways to avoid clicking the "I agree!" button.) and disassemble, then document. Preferably with a video record.
and I bought the other two episodes, too. Unfortunately, I forget their names.
In retrospect, I preferred the episodic form to the straight-line 32 levels of Doom II. Only problem was that you lost all of you accumulated booty when you started the next episode.
My favorite game of that era was Hexen, and its hubs were an interesting compromise between episodes and straight-line levels.