Zebra mussels continue their takeover of Lake Champlain. AFAIK, there is no effective remedy, even if you're willing to dump nasty stuff into the lake.
As for dodos, I heard an interesting story once upon a time - don't know if it's really true. There's a tree on the island where the dodos lived, and it's seeds had a really thick coat. The dodos ate the fruit, and the seeds passed, essentially untouched. The dodos would eat the seeds, again... and again... After something like a half-dozen passes through the dodo, the seed coat had been weakened enough that the seed could germinate.
Apparently the dodo was unique in this relationship with the seed. The youngest tree of this type dates back to the extinction of the dodo. Two for the price of one.
Not someTHING, she runs off with the crusty old High School janitor, who turns out to have been a Soviet spy who through some sort of bizarre logic realizes that he's a true-blue American Hero and thus fit for the heroine.
Vermont Cheddar cheese makes the BEST cheddite ray projector.
Not to mention another great Harry Harrison satire, "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers."
Clifford Simak's "Way Station" leads my list of books I'd like to see made into a movie. Two reasons - because the plot is relevant today, and because I think the book could be done well as a movie. It seems that most good books suffer badly when movie-fied.
In some cases, Linux beats Windows on 3D speed, though I can't cite the reference. It isn't across the board, by any means. But in some cases.
There's much touted that the nVidia drivers are single-source cross-compiled for the different platforms. Supposedly with minimal glue, the same source generates both Windows and Linux drivers.
There is also rumbling that the new ATI "Catalyst" drivers use the same philosophy, except that there are also Open Source drivers for the Radeon.
Now all I need is a separate GART driver for my nForce2 board so I can get hardware 3D out of my Radeon under Linux. For the moment, the nForce2 has *tied* its AGP support under Linux to nVidia graphics cards.
Two catch-phrases stuck with me from the movie. The first one was, "There is no spoon," because it was quoted here on/., and on second thought it was kind of amusing.
But the one that really stuck was, "Guns, lots of guns." The lobby scene was one of the most poetic sequences of violent overkill I've ever seen, right up there with the Diva/Lulu music/fight scene near the end of Fifth Element.
I am purposely avoiding reviews until I see the movie, so I haven't read the link, and skipped the earlier quote. But the action is OK if it has the poetry in motion of the first one. Hopefully they've broken some new ground, if they want my money on the third movie before it gets to second-run cheap seats.
How often are there really lawsuits over poor computer/software support?
From everything I've heard, Microsoft is seldom sued except by competitors or defunct business partners. As for support from others, I have no idea.
But it seems to me that this is more about deflection of blame than actually suing anyone. In this light, contracting out your support "so there's someone to blame or sue," should be grounds for firing, because it's a refusal to accept responsibility.
Open Source allows you to accept reponsibility for your IT infrastructure. You're on your own to develop resources and competence. I'll be a good support department with skills, pride, and morale can out-support just about any contract shop, just about any day. But that would require accepting responsibility and delivering, the subject of my occasional tirades about American business.
Drop back a moment and really, "Linux is free!" It really is.
Linux SUPPORT is not free.
The distinction needs to be made, especially in these License V6 days. But from a slightly different perspective, even in support, Linux gives you more choices. Certainly you can go to someone like RedHat and get Linux+support, and there are others who offer Linux support. By the same token, you can choose to build your support in-house. Having access to the source makes that truly possible. If you are big into home-grown and custom applications this can be a big win.
About one week before you get your Cease and Desist issued under the DMCA, because you had to crack the "protection mechanisms" of the box in order to boot an unsigned OS on it.
No, Microsoft is prying itself out of the driver's seat with stunts like License V6. With Microsoft diminishing, the Intel side of Wintel is coming to the front, and the key tool of their monopoly is IA64.
That only works if people actually buy the competitive products that are supposed to keep Intel honest.
One guy who got deservedly lambasted on Usenet years ago said, "I like having AMD and Cyrix around, since they keep Intel's prices down for me." AMD and Cyrix aren't in the business so others can buy Intel's chips more cheaply. For all of our innovation, we're in a really STUPID industry, because for practically its entire history, computing has simply moved from one monopoly to another. From IBM to Microsoft, and now it's apparent that Microsoft is on the wane, because Intel is emerging as the One Dominator. Only for intervals where one monopoly is falling and another rising do we have real competition. I know it's been Wintel for over a decade, but really Microsoft has been in the driver's seat. That's changing, right now.
Please don't get me started on IA64. I tend to go on minor tirades, though I guess I didn't on this particular thread. Let's just say that in no way do I disagree with you.
To bend over backwards in an attempt at fairness toward IA64, let's just say that the IA64 code generation of gcc is very immature, and perhaps time and a code fork will fix that. After all, that's what it took for X86.
Then for a mild bit the other direction, Intel's secrecy on portions of their documentation, Appendix H being the most notorious, probably didn't help gcc advance. Then remember that IA64 is simply *the most proprietary* architecture on the face of the Earth. NONE of the IP is cross-licensed, ONLY Intel and HP have rights. (IANAL, but this is from what I've read.) These remarks are aside from any performance, cost, heat, or particularly, compilability remarks that might be made.
I remember the first time I saw Zaxxon. My wife and I were with another couple going to a movie, and there was a Zaxxon machine in the lobby. It was the first time I'd seen a video game attempting or approximating a real perspective view.
Of course now it's cheesey, but at the time it was impressive. But the same could be said of Doom. But as someone once said, every year or so, it's kind of neat late at night to turn out the lights at night, set the sound, and go back to Episode 1.
My other old favorite was Atari Star Wars with the line-drawn graphics.
There are already proposals on the drawing board to put satellite-type radio services onto solar-powered high-altitude automated airplanes. They would then fly in circles giving coverage to a given area. Kind of a low-altitude non-orbital satellite, with lower latency, to boot.
Maybe the Internet could have been done without the military, but it clearly could not have been done by American business in the current (and recent past) climate.
American business can't cooperate and craft an Open Standards solution worth spit. Even the Internet which we sort of have, American business is busily trying to destroy.
They look at the huge pie that the Internet is today, and imagine that they can own it. They don't realize that a fundamental essence of its hugeness is it's very non-ownership. Either that or they'd rather have all of a small pie instead of a piece of a much, much bigger one. This seems to hold even when the piece of the bigger pie is bigger than the whole pie they could have on their own.
It seems to be conventional wisdom to criticize government for stupidity. IMHO, they have no monopoly on that property at all. I wonder if it's IP laws or what that allows stupid business practices to survive in the face of obviously better ways.
Last I heard, the non-military fuzz had been turned off for civilian GPS. I seem to remember hearing recently that the Europeans were thinking of launching their own GPS array, which would clearly make a fuzzed system non-competitive. I'm sure our military would rather own the satellites of a non-fuzzed system than have a ten-years-later system owned by someone else available.
As for the 600MpH/1000ft limit, I can't verify that. I can verify that when I attended the 2000 ISSCC, a coworker had a GPS and his laptop along, connected. By holding the GPS up to the window of the 747 he could chart the plane's progress on a map of the US on his laptop.
On my last flight, a few weeks ago, I seem to remember hearing that they didn't want us operating GPS on the plane at all, not just during takeoff and landing.
Never went to Dayton, though I grew up in Ohio. Best I can manage now is Hosstrader's, though maybe some time I can schedule a family visit home around Dayton.
As for thieves, at the last Hosstrader's they were looking for someone who stole some power pole transformers (pole pigs) from the fairgrounds at the previous hamfest. Quite a pickpocked job. Odd thing about it... If I saw someone coming up with a truck and loaded those transformers onto it, I'd probably assume that they were supposed to be doing that. I suspect that sometimes large-scale thievery is easier than small-scale, simple because it's so bold that nobody would question it.
Not to mention that a few seconds of Shada made it into "The Five Doctors" during Peter Davidson's stint. Evidently for some reason, it didn't work to have Tom Baker help with that episode, so they recycled a scene from Shada with Dr#4 and Romana#2 in a boat, and put them both on ice for the remainder of the episode using some sort of technobabble.
I don't dispute that. Even though it may not generate x86 code quite as good as icc, gcc isn't bad and is acceptable as the standard compiler for Linux. It's just that for IA64 the gulf in generated code quality between gcc and the Intel/HP compiler is much larger because it's a tougher target. There simply hasn't been much time for gcc on IA64 to mature, and Intel/HP have put a ton of resource into theirs.
As to the practical effect of this, I don't know. Since IA64 is currently targeted toward higher-end servers, it may not matter that things have to be a little different.
But how good would a recompile for Itanium with gcc really be? I've been under the impression that the only really decent compiler for IA64 came from Intel/HP. It's a tough target to compile for.
I understand what you were saying. I was merely adding that it's Intel that broke the compatibility, not AMD. For that matter, AMD simply CAN'T clone IA64, even if they wanted to. From an IP perspective, IA64 is the most locked-down architecture on the planet. Can you say proprietary?
(I'm not a fan of IA64. Only Intel could get away with IA64 without getting laughed out of the conferences. Only Intel could get away with IA64 without EVERYONE retreating in fear of lock-in and loss of control. I guess this is the indication that Microsoft's power is fading, because Intel is stepping in.)
Once you're out into the water, it becomes a matter for the federal government. He already said that the federal government chose to do nothing. So if the locals actually had begun sinking foreign ships to save the fisheries, their own government would have come after them.
The cynic would conclude that the government officials got more money from foreign fishers than local ones. The other cynical view would be that their hearts are in the right place, but they couldn't get their act together to do anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Zebra mussels continue their takeover of Lake Champlain. AFAIK, there is no effective remedy, even if you're willing to dump nasty stuff into the lake.
As for dodos, I heard an interesting story once upon a time - don't know if it's really true. There's a tree on the island where the dodos lived, and it's seeds had a really thick coat. The dodos ate the fruit, and the seeds passed, essentially untouched. The dodos would eat the seeds, again... and again... After something like a half-dozen passes through the dodo, the seed coat had been weakened enough that the seed could germinate.
Apparently the dodo was unique in this relationship with the seed. The youngest tree of this type dates back to the extinction of the dodo. Two for the price of one.
Never saw Blade. Maybe I should, sometime after the OT push at work ends and I can get a life, again.
Not someTHING, she runs off with the crusty old High School janitor, who turns out to have been a Soviet spy who through some sort of bizarre logic realizes that he's a true-blue American Hero and thus fit for the heroine.
Vermont Cheddar cheese makes the BEST cheddite ray projector.
Not to mention another great Harry Harrison satire, "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers."
Clifford Simak's "Way Station" leads my list of books I'd like to see made into a movie. Two reasons - because the plot is relevant today, and because I think the book could be done well as a movie. It seems that most good books suffer badly when movie-fied.
I'll give you two out of three - I didn't like Perelandra, much. Preachiest of the three.
On Star Trek once some aliens referred to us humans as, "ugly bags of mostly water."
Yes, sometimes.
In some cases, Linux beats Windows on 3D speed, though I can't cite the reference. It isn't across the board, by any means. But in some cases.
There's much touted that the nVidia drivers are single-source cross-compiled for the different platforms. Supposedly with minimal glue, the same source generates both Windows and Linux drivers.
There is also rumbling that the new ATI "Catalyst" drivers use the same philosophy, except that there are also Open Source drivers for the Radeon.
Now all I need is a separate GART driver for my nForce2 board so I can get hardware 3D out of my Radeon under Linux. For the moment, the nForce2 has *tied* its AGP support under Linux to nVidia graphics cards.
Two catch-phrases stuck with me from the movie. The first one was, "There is no spoon," because it was quoted here on /., and on second thought it was kind of amusing.
But the one that really stuck was, "Guns, lots of guns." The lobby scene was one of the most poetic sequences of violent overkill I've ever seen, right up there with the Diva/Lulu music/fight scene near the end of Fifth Element.
I am purposely avoiding reviews until I see the movie, so I haven't read the link, and skipped the earlier quote. But the action is OK if it has the poetry in motion of the first one. Hopefully they've broken some new ground, if they want my money on the third movie before it gets to second-run cheap seats.
How about tie this into Homeland Security and just install lethal booby-traps into the boxes.
"Breaking this seal will classify you as a Terrorist under DMCA and PATRIOT legislation, and you will be dealt with accordingly."
How often are there really lawsuits over poor computer/software support?
From everything I've heard, Microsoft is seldom sued except by competitors or defunct business partners. As for support from others, I have no idea.
But it seems to me that this is more about deflection of blame than actually suing anyone. In this light, contracting out your support "so there's someone to blame or sue," should be grounds for firing, because it's a refusal to accept responsibility.
Open Source allows you to accept reponsibility for your IT infrastructure. You're on your own to develop resources and competence. I'll be a good support department with skills, pride, and morale can out-support just about any contract shop, just about any day. But that would require accepting responsibility and delivering, the subject of my occasional tirades about American business.
Wait just a minute...
Drop back a moment and really, "Linux is free!" It really is.
Linux SUPPORT is not free.
The distinction needs to be made, especially in these License V6 days. But from a slightly different perspective, even in support, Linux gives you more choices. Certainly you can go to someone like RedHat and get Linux+support, and there are others who offer Linux support. By the same token, you can choose to build your support in-house. Having access to the source makes that truly possible. If you are big into home-grown and custom applications this can be a big win.
About one week before you get your Cease and Desist issued under the DMCA, because you had to crack the "protection mechanisms" of the box in order to boot an unsigned OS on it.
No, Microsoft is prying itself out of the driver's seat with stunts like License V6. With Microsoft diminishing, the Intel side of Wintel is coming to the front, and the key tool of their monopoly is IA64.
That only works if people actually buy the competitive products that are supposed to keep Intel honest.
One guy who got deservedly lambasted on Usenet years ago said, "I like having AMD and Cyrix around, since they keep Intel's prices down for me." AMD and Cyrix aren't in the business so others can buy Intel's chips more cheaply. For all of our innovation, we're in a really STUPID industry, because for practically its entire history, computing has simply moved from one monopoly to another. From IBM to Microsoft, and now it's apparent that Microsoft is on the wane, because Intel is emerging as the One Dominator. Only for intervals where one monopoly is falling and another rising do we have real competition. I know it's been Wintel for over a decade, but really Microsoft has been in the driver's seat. That's changing, right now.
Please don't get me started on IA64. I tend to go on minor tirades, though I guess I didn't on this particular thread. Let's just say that in no way do I disagree with you.
To bend over backwards in an attempt at fairness toward IA64, let's just say that the IA64 code generation of gcc is very immature, and perhaps time and a code fork will fix that. After all, that's what it took for X86.
Then for a mild bit the other direction, Intel's secrecy on portions of their documentation, Appendix H being the most notorious, probably didn't help gcc advance. Then remember that IA64 is simply *the most proprietary* architecture on the face of the Earth. NONE of the IP is cross-licensed, ONLY Intel and HP have rights. (IANAL, but this is from what I've read.) These remarks are aside from any performance, cost, heat, or particularly, compilability remarks that might be made.
I remember the first time I saw Zaxxon. My wife and I were with another couple going to a movie, and there was a Zaxxon machine in the lobby. It was the first time I'd seen a video game attempting or approximating a real perspective view.
Of course now it's cheesey, but at the time it was impressive. But the same could be said of Doom. But as someone once said, every year or so, it's kind of neat late at night to turn out the lights at night, set the sound, and go back to Episode 1.
My other old favorite was Atari Star Wars with the line-drawn graphics.
There are already proposals on the drawing board to put satellite-type radio services onto solar-powered high-altitude automated airplanes. They would then fly in circles giving coverage to a given area. Kind of a low-altitude non-orbital satellite, with lower latency, to boot.
(What happened to the 'post as AC' button?)
Maybe the Internet could have been done without the military, but it clearly could not have been done by American business in the current (and recent past) climate.
American business can't cooperate and craft an Open Standards solution worth spit. Even the Internet which we sort of have, American business is busily trying to destroy.
They look at the huge pie that the Internet is today, and imagine that they can own it. They don't realize that a fundamental essence of its hugeness is it's very non-ownership. Either that or they'd rather have all of a small pie instead of a piece of a much, much bigger one. This seems to hold even when the piece of the bigger pie is bigger than the whole pie they could have on their own.
It seems to be conventional wisdom to criticize government for stupidity. IMHO, they have no monopoly on that property at all. I wonder if it's IP laws or what that allows stupid business practices to survive in the face of obviously better ways.
Last I heard, the non-military fuzz had been turned off for civilian GPS. I seem to remember hearing recently that the Europeans were thinking of launching their own GPS array, which would clearly make a fuzzed system non-competitive. I'm sure our military would rather own the satellites of a non-fuzzed system than have a ten-years-later system owned by someone else available.
As for the 600MpH/1000ft limit, I can't verify that. I can verify that when I attended the 2000 ISSCC, a coworker had a GPS and his laptop along, connected. By holding the GPS up to the window of the 747 he could chart the plane's progress on a map of the US on his laptop.
On my last flight, a few weeks ago, I seem to remember hearing that they didn't want us operating GPS on the plane at all, not just during takeoff and landing.
Never went to Dayton, though I grew up in Ohio. Best I can manage now is Hosstrader's, though maybe some time I can schedule a family visit home around Dayton.
As for thieves, at the last Hosstrader's they were looking for someone who stole some power pole transformers (pole pigs) from the fairgrounds at the previous hamfest. Quite a pickpocked job. Odd thing about it... If I saw someone coming up with a truck and loaded those transformers onto it, I'd probably assume that they were supposed to be doing that. I suspect that sometimes large-scale thievery is easier than small-scale, simple because it's so bold that nobody would question it.
Now what do you do with your own pole pig?
Not to mention that a few seconds of Shada made it into "The Five Doctors" during Peter Davidson's stint. Evidently for some reason, it didn't work to have Tom Baker help with that episode, so they recycled a scene from Shada with Dr#4 and Romana#2 in a boat, and put them both on ice for the remainder of the episode using some sort of technobabble.
I don't dispute that. Even though it may not generate x86 code quite as good as icc, gcc isn't bad and is acceptable as the standard compiler for Linux. It's just that for IA64 the gulf in generated code quality between gcc and the Intel/HP compiler is much larger because it's a tougher target. There simply hasn't been much time for gcc on IA64 to mature, and Intel/HP have put a ton of resource into theirs.
As to the practical effect of this, I don't know. Since IA64 is currently targeted toward higher-end servers, it may not matter that things have to be a little different.
But how good would a recompile for Itanium with gcc really be? I've been under the impression that the only really decent compiler for IA64 came from Intel/HP. It's a tough target to compile for.
I understand what you were saying. I was merely adding that it's Intel that broke the compatibility, not AMD. For that matter, AMD simply CAN'T clone IA64, even if they wanted to. From an IP perspective, IA64 is the most locked-down architecture on the planet. Can you say proprietary?
(I'm not a fan of IA64. Only Intel could get away with IA64 without getting laughed out of the conferences. Only Intel could get away with IA64 without EVERYONE retreating in fear of lock-in and loss of control. I guess this is the indication that Microsoft's power is fading, because Intel is stepping in.)
Once you're out into the water, it becomes a matter for the federal government. He already said that the federal government chose to do nothing. So if the locals actually had begun sinking foreign ships to save the fisheries, their own government would have come after them.
The cynic would conclude that the government officials got more money from foreign fishers than local ones. The other cynical view would be that their hearts are in the right place, but they couldn't get their act together to do anything.