Interesting debate - for Slashdot. (I've RTFA and this subthread.)
Now apply the same reasoning to the government publishing information that was collected and generated using taxpayer-provided funds, and doing so in an encumbered format. (ie:.doc or.docx, etc.)
Compare and contrast the 2 sides of the analogy. Compare and contrast the outrage levels.
> However I think that we've kind of gotten beyond the point where benefiting a tiny minority of individuals can help enough people to > justify continuing our current model.
Gee, I wish I could agree with you. But the longer things go, the more I think TPTB grabbed Obama by the short-hairs and let him know what and how much reform they would accept. It certainly appears that your "tiny minority" is clearly In Charge.
The entire War on Drugs would be a farce, if only it weren't such a disaster with such bad side-effects. Not only does our drug policy not work, it has destabilized governments of many other nations, particularly in the western hemisphere south of the US, and is a root cause of a heck of a lot of deaths and human-rights violations. In addition, at least partly due to our drug policy, we have criminalized a larger percentage of our population than any first-world nation, perhaps the highest overall.
IMHO we should focus on treatment (demand reduction) and stopping crimes of financing (stealing money for the next fix) that harm uninvolved innocents, as well as any other related violent acts. Trying to restrict supply while taking a "Just Say NO!" policy on demand is not only doomed to failure, it HAS been failing for decades. The side-effect is that it raises the price of drugs, pushing a LOT of money into the drug business, and saps more money out of the "good" economy by people buying their drugs.
I'm in the silicon business. Not CPU, but still silicon.
It sounds as if AMD budgeted time for another pass at the design, and turned out not to need it. The amount of time they pulled out of the schedule looks more like a silicon pass than short-cutting testing and validation. Adding that extra pass, and making sure it was scheduled is probably a result of having been so badly burned last time, but that's good. You can always be a hero by doing better than plan.
Oh, come on. If you're going to be terse about printing a list, nothing beats APL.
Unfortunately I haven't touched APL in a quarter century, and can't remember how to print. However, if console output is sufficient, here's how to print the contents of "list" in APL.
Verilog is C-like in that it won't lift much of a finger to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot, and it leaves plenty of ammo lying around. With VHDL the language forces you to specify things much more clearly (and verbosely) up-front. If you're going to compare Verilog to C, then you can compare VHDL to Pascal and its ilk. (Or Ada, as someone else said.) Far from a perfect analogy, but also far from incorrect.
I've used both. I first tried learning Verilog by using it for a few months. Then I learned VHDL by using, producing a fairly good-sized functional macro for an ASIC. Some years later I took a Verilog course. It struck me that on one of my class projects, I got caught by a typo, misspelling a variable name on one particular use of a signal. Verilog implicitely declared the variable for me, and I had an open circuit to debug. VHDL would have stopped with a compile error.
But then again, decades ago I wrote fairly extensively in Modula-2. That included interrupt service routines and binary readers for legacy data. So I have a tolerance and preference for the more verbose, tight-laced languages.
>Can't we all realise that there's a market for both Windows and Linux?
Maybe *we* can, but from everything I've ever seen, Microsoft can't. There was an old adage that Bill Gates once foresaw a world with, "a computer on every desk, running Microsoft software." When that adage was delivered, they suggested that Gates had omitted the extra clause, "and ONLY Microsoft software." Most companies recognize that marketplaces are vibrant, with many players, and that winning 100% is only an amusing theoretical goal, never realizable. Microsoft doesn't work that way - they are really and practically after 100% of any market they play in, absolute dominance. An ecosystem is encouraged around them, but THEIR markets are THEIR markets and competition is not well tolerated. There is a squeak of an exception, in that enough competition is tolerated and even encouraged in order to keep the antitrust folks at bay. But Apple is good enough for that, and Linux is much more threatening to Microsoft's basic business model.
I'd be happy to live and let live, I just don't feel safe with my preferences when I know Microsoft is there, and wants to be my One and Only True Choice.
Reminds me of the "sentient meat animal" in "The Restaraunt At the End of the Universe." It was bred to want to be eaten, and told you so when brought out to your table as you placed your order. It even suggested its best parts, and how they should be cooked.
The difference between "insidious slavery" and our "base programming" is that one is directed by a selfish individual with a lower consideration of the programm-ee, and the other is at least undirected. Leap of Faith: If you're presuming to play god by directing evolution, at least be a "good" one.
Last I heard, the shuttles had full autolanding capability, with one exception. There is no computer control for lowering the landing gear - the controls for that are fully and only manual. That dates back to way-back-when days, when they didn't fully trust the computers. There are no provisions inside the shuttle whatsoever for raising the landing gear, that can only be one at the processing facilities on the ground. Therefore they wanted no chance whatsoever that the landing gear could be accidentally deployed, because if that happened, there would be 3 giant holes in the heat shield, and nothing they could do about it.
So everything from de-orbit through final approach and landing could be done automatically, they'd just have to do it on the belly.
This isn't necessarily bad, either. One of the big fears right now is that there is more space junk in the higher orbit where Atlantis and Hubble currently are. Even if Atlantis is damaged, we want it to come down, so it doesn't add to the space junk problem, itself. For the current situation, self-destruct is a really bad option, unless carried out during reentry. Short of complete success, I would think that a belly landing at Edwards would be the best option, since it would likely yield a whole bunch of either spare parts or museum fodder.
However, given that hard drives are already pretty solidly built, it may take a fair amount of force to compress them.
Never trust the silly software "drive compression" that comes with Windows, or can be had for Linux. Go for the forceful, hardware solution for better drive compaction.
> Maybe I was just not distracted because I haven't seen a lot of the other shows that these actors played in, thus I was not experiencing the "Agent Smith" phenomenon.
Now you're disillusioning me. I always thought that after Neo kicked Agent Smith in the 3rd Matrix movie, instead of falling into the Rabbit (Red Pill) Hole, he fell into the Hobbit Hole, and wound up on Middle Earth.
And that's the whole point... From what can be told, it appears that during the Inflationary Era the universe was expanding faster than light. The only reason that doesn't cause headaches is that space itself was expanding, so the objects in it weren't moving too fast. Only problem with the grandparent post is that he *under*estimated the speed.
Even now it's estimated that less than 10% of the universe is within our light-cone, meaning that 90%+ got away from us, and can never be observed.
> Who's going to want to buy it? I mean, it's a list of drug addicts--their CREDIT scores are going to suck!
It's *Virginia*, for Pete's sake. Since I visited there a year ago, I remember driving through Arlington and Alexandria - two bedroom suburbs of Washington, DC. Obviously politicians would want to keep their problems out of such a database - heck, anyone would. Most probably some politicians, political workers, lobbyists, and such are among those 8 million names. Their credit scores won't suck, and they have more reason to keep their names hidden.
I had a bit of an epiphany back in the 80's. A right-winger co-worker was ranting about "wealth redistribution" right as the savings and loan scandal was happening, and Resolution Trust was being set up to clean up the mess. The likes of Neal Bush, et al got away scott-free, and my tax dollars were backfilling the people who had gotten scammed. So effectively my tax dollars were "redistributed" to the scammers. Then go read a little on the good old "military-industrial complex" which dominates the DOD budget and the current banking bailout, and realize that there is and has been a heck of a lot of "uphill wealth redistribution" going on.
When I see pleas for the poor, I keep hearing about how much can be done with so little, and I don't begrudge it. The pleas of the wealthy are far more expensive.
It's not worth bothering to argue. The Right is always Right, and what the Right does is always Right, except when it's done by the Left, then it's Wrong. And I'm sure that someone is going to respond to this, telling me that I'm stooo-pid and wrong-thinking.
Guess what, and take this! (Not you, the guy who's telling my I'm stooo-pid) In a nation that can afford to have multiple multi-billion, there is NO EXCUSE for anyone lacking basic food, shelter, and clothing. At this point, I don't even care if we may consider them worthless do-nothings - if we have multiple multi-billionaires then we have so much excess that we can provide that pittance even for those we think are worthless. Anyone with a shred of self-respect will also climb out of that circumstance, given education and opportunity.
You disagree?
I presume you also call yourself a "Christian!" (Most of the Right seems to, these days.) Didn't the Original say, "As you have done to the least of these, so you have done to Me."
And if you're not a Christian, I suspect you'd have a really tough time explaining to say, "The Culture" of which Iaian Banks writes about "21st century economics," and how increasing the inequality of wealth is more important than survival or the poor. If you don't like Banks, how about Star Trek's Federation?
Please pardon me for venting, a head of steam has been building for a while - and "they" moan about the "liberal media!" while they've pretty much got an open mike.
Great "reflex comment" there. Because of course the way we have it must be the best possible way, musn't it? Unfortunately in general health statistics, the US is at or near the bottom of the industrialized world and below some number of third-world countries, while our expendatures per-capita are the highest in the world. It's a great position from which to criticize the way others do it.
Having voted for Jumpin' Jim Jeffords, I have to disagree with your opinion. My brother continues to say, and I have to agree, we still hold and follow the Republican values we were raised with, but the party has moved, and now we look more like Democrats.
While we're at it, pay absolutely no attention to the fact that medical care in the US is simply broken. I'm not saying insurance, government insurance, or any of that stuff, though it all is. But at the heart, medical care itself is fundamentally broken.
Until we fix medical care itself, we can't really fix the rest.
The Fix: Start with *primary care*, and do it right. Then get to the other stuff. But primary care should be... primary. Going straight to specialists, deferring care (for affordability reasons) until it becomes an emergency and is paid for by public dollars, and such practices drive costs up and don't do a good job.
Problem with The Fix: It's not as profitable as the way we do things today, and after all, profit IS the highest motive, isn't it?
As far as health goes, last I read the US is at the bottom of the "industrialized nations," and not even at the top of what we call the "third world."
Since there's always room for bad analogies on Slashdot...
This reminds me of "induced histamine response." I heard once that the really deadly flu variants don't kill directly themselves, rather they induce such a strong histamine response in the body that it kills itself with that response.
I read "War Year," and thought "Forever War" was his second - I never knew about the Robert Graham pseudonum. I agree that "Mindbridge" was also excellent, but you forget to mention, "All My Sins Remembered," which was just as well. It seems to be that by "All My Sins..." Haldeman had worked out all of his Viet Nam angst and hit bottom. Then fortunately he started learning to write, without being angst-driven.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting debate - for Slashdot. (I've RTFA and this subthread.)
Now apply the same reasoning to the government publishing information that was collected and generated using taxpayer-provided funds, and doing so in an encumbered format. (ie: .doc or .docx, etc.)
Compare and contrast the 2 sides of the analogy.
Compare and contrast the outrage levels.
> However I think that we've kind of gotten beyond the point where benefiting a tiny minority of individuals can help enough people to
> justify continuing our current model.
Gee, I wish I could agree with you. But the longer things go, the more I think TPTB grabbed Obama by the short-hairs and let him know what and how much reform they would accept. It certainly appears that your "tiny minority" is clearly In Charge.
There are really bigger issues behind this.
The entire War on Drugs would be a farce, if only it weren't such a disaster with such bad side-effects. Not only does our drug policy not work, it has destabilized governments of many other nations, particularly in the western hemisphere south of the US, and is a root cause of a heck of a lot of deaths and human-rights violations. In addition, at least partly due to our drug policy, we have criminalized a larger percentage of our population than any first-world nation, perhaps the highest overall.
IMHO we should focus on treatment (demand reduction) and stopping crimes of financing (stealing money for the next fix) that harm uninvolved innocents, as well as any other related violent acts. Trying to restrict supply while taking a "Just Say NO!" policy on demand is not only doomed to failure, it HAS been failing for decades. The side-effect is that it raises the price of drugs, pushing a LOT of money into the drug business, and saps more money out of the "good" economy by people buying their drugs.
I'm in the silicon business. Not CPU, but still silicon.
It sounds as if AMD budgeted time for another pass at the design, and turned out not to need it. The amount of time they pulled out of the schedule looks more like a silicon pass than short-cutting testing and validation. Adding that extra pass, and making sure it was scheduled is probably a result of having been so badly burned last time, but that's good. You can always be a hero by doing better than plan.
Shut off the computer and go to bed!
(It really was late at night when I finished the game, way back when...)
I see your list only had 3 forms of "granular", perhaps one of my favorite euphanisims.
And as skiing goes, ice isn't necessarily all bad. If you're after speed, for instance. Plus it opens up your window of appreciation.
Oh, come on. If you're going to be terse about printing a list, nothing beats APL.
Unfortunately I haven't touched APL in a quarter century, and can't remember how to print. However, if console output is sufficient, here's how to print the contents of "list" in APL.
list
Vermont ski areas have more words for "snow" than the Inuit.
But they all mean "ice".
Verilog is C-like in that it won't lift much of a finger to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot, and it leaves plenty of ammo lying around. With VHDL the language forces you to specify things much more clearly (and verbosely) up-front. If you're going to compare Verilog to C, then you can compare VHDL to Pascal and its ilk. (Or Ada, as someone else said.) Far from a perfect analogy, but also far from incorrect.
I've used both. I first tried learning Verilog by using it for a few months. Then I learned VHDL by using, producing a fairly good-sized functional macro for an ASIC. Some years later I took a Verilog course. It struck me that on one of my class projects, I got caught by a typo, misspelling a variable name on one particular use of a signal. Verilog implicitely declared the variable for me, and I had an open circuit to debug. VHDL would have stopped with a compile error.
But then again, decades ago I wrote fairly extensively in Modula-2. That included interrupt service routines and binary readers for legacy data. So I have a tolerance and preference for the more verbose, tight-laced languages.
>Can't we all realise that there's a market for both Windows and Linux?
Maybe *we* can, but from everything I've ever seen, Microsoft can't. There was an old adage that Bill Gates once foresaw a world with, "a computer on every desk, running Microsoft software." When that adage was delivered, they suggested that Gates had omitted the extra clause, "and ONLY Microsoft software." Most companies recognize that marketplaces are vibrant, with many players, and that winning 100% is only an amusing theoretical goal, never realizable. Microsoft doesn't work that way - they are really and practically after 100% of any market they play in, absolute dominance. An ecosystem is encouraged around them, but THEIR markets are THEIR markets and competition is not well tolerated. There is a squeak of an exception, in that enough competition is tolerated and even encouraged in order to keep the antitrust folks at bay. But Apple is good enough for that, and Linux is much more threatening to Microsoft's basic business model.
I'd be happy to live and let live, I just don't feel safe with my preferences when I know Microsoft is there, and wants to be my One and Only True Choice.
Reminds me of the "sentient meat animal" in "The Restaraunt At the End of the Universe." It was bred to want to be eaten, and told you so when brought out to your table as you placed your order. It even suggested its best parts, and how they should be cooked.
The difference between "insidious slavery" and our "base programming" is that one is directed by a selfish individual with a lower consideration of the programm-ee, and the other is at least undirected. Leap of Faith: If you're presuming to play god by directing evolution, at least be a "good" one.
Last I heard, the shuttles had full autolanding capability, with one exception. There is no computer control for lowering the landing gear - the controls for that are fully and only manual. That dates back to way-back-when days, when they didn't fully trust the computers. There are no provisions inside the shuttle whatsoever for raising the landing gear, that can only be one at the processing facilities on the ground. Therefore they wanted no chance whatsoever that the landing gear could be accidentally deployed, because if that happened, there would be 3 giant holes in the heat shield, and nothing they could do about it.
So everything from de-orbit through final approach and landing could be done automatically, they'd just have to do it on the belly.
This isn't necessarily bad, either. One of the big fears right now is that there is more space junk in the higher orbit where Atlantis and Hubble currently are. Even if Atlantis is damaged, we want it to come down, so it doesn't add to the space junk problem, itself. For the current situation, self-destruct is a really bad option, unless carried out during reentry. Short of complete success, I would think that a belly landing at Edwards would be the best option, since it would likely yield a whole bunch of either spare parts or museum fodder.
Two words: "drive compression"
However, given that hard drives are already pretty solidly built, it may take a fair amount of force to compress them.
Never trust the silly software "drive compression" that comes with Windows, or can be had for Linux. Go for the forceful, hardware solution for better drive compaction.
> Maybe I was just not distracted because I haven't seen a lot of the other shows that these actors played in, thus I was not experiencing the "Agent Smith" phenomenon.
Now you're disillusioning me. I always thought that after Neo kicked Agent Smith in the 3rd Matrix movie, instead of falling into the Rabbit (Red Pill) Hole, he fell into the Hobbit Hole, and wound up on Middle Earth.
And that's the whole point... From what can be told, it appears that during the Inflationary Era the universe was expanding faster than light. The only reason that doesn't cause headaches is that space itself was expanding, so the objects in it weren't moving too fast. Only problem with the grandparent post is that he *under*estimated the speed.
Even now it's estimated that less than 10% of the universe is within our light-cone, meaning that 90%+ got away from us, and can never be observed.
> Who's going to want to buy it? I mean, it's a list of drug addicts--their CREDIT scores are going to suck!
It's *Virginia*, for Pete's sake. Since I visited there a year ago, I remember driving through Arlington and Alexandria - two bedroom suburbs of Washington, DC. Obviously politicians would want to keep their problems out of such a database - heck, anyone would. Most probably some politicians, political workers, lobbyists, and such are among those 8 million names. Their credit scores won't suck, and they have more reason to keep their names hidden.
640kb ought to be enought for anyone.
My, oh my, how far we've come. 1000x isn't even minimal, any more.
Thank you. Well said.
I had a bit of an epiphany back in the 80's. A right-winger co-worker was ranting about "wealth redistribution" right as the savings and loan scandal was happening, and Resolution Trust was being set up to clean up the mess. The likes of Neal Bush, et al got away scott-free, and my tax dollars were backfilling the people who had gotten scammed. So effectively my tax dollars were "redistributed" to the scammers. Then go read a little on the good old "military-industrial complex" which dominates the DOD budget and the current banking bailout, and realize that there is and has been a heck of a lot of "uphill wealth redistribution" going on.
When I see pleas for the poor, I keep hearing about how much can be done with so little, and I don't begrudge it. The pleas of the wealthy are far more expensive.
It's not worth bothering to argue. The Right is always Right, and what the Right does is always Right, except when it's done by the Left, then it's Wrong. And I'm sure that someone is going to respond to this, telling me that I'm stooo-pid and wrong-thinking.
Guess what, and take this! (Not you, the guy who's telling my I'm stooo-pid)
In a nation that can afford to have multiple multi-billion, there is NO EXCUSE for anyone lacking basic food, shelter, and clothing. At this point, I don't even care if we may consider them worthless do-nothings - if we have multiple multi-billionaires then we have so much excess that we can provide that pittance even for those we think are worthless. Anyone with a shred of self-respect will also climb out of that circumstance, given education and opportunity.
You disagree?
I presume you also call yourself a "Christian!" (Most of the Right seems to, these days.) Didn't the Original say, "As you have done to the least of these, so you have done to Me."
And if you're not a Christian, I suspect you'd have a really tough time explaining to say, "The Culture" of which Iaian Banks writes about "21st century economics," and how increasing the inequality of wealth is more important than survival or the poor. If you don't like Banks, how about Star Trek's Federation?
Please pardon me for venting, a head of steam has been building for a while - and "they" moan about the "liberal media!" while they've pretty much got an open mike.
Great "reflex comment" there. Because of course the way we have it must be the best possible way, musn't it? Unfortunately in general health statistics, the US is at or near the bottom of the industrialized world and below some number of third-world countries, while our expendatures per-capita are the highest in the world. It's a great position from which to criticize the way others do it.
Having voted for Jumpin' Jim Jeffords, I have to disagree with your opinion. My brother continues to say, and I have to agree, we still hold and follow the Republican values we were raised with, but the party has moved, and now we look more like Democrats.
While we're at it, pay absolutely no attention to the fact that medical care in the US is simply broken. I'm not saying insurance, government insurance, or any of that stuff, though it all is. But at the heart, medical care itself is fundamentally broken.
Until we fix medical care itself, we can't really fix the rest.
The Fix: Start with *primary care*, and do it right. Then get to the other stuff. But primary care should be... primary. Going straight to specialists, deferring care (for affordability reasons) until it becomes an emergency and is paid for by public dollars, and such practices drive costs up and don't do a good job.
Problem with The Fix: It's not as profitable as the way we do things today, and after all, profit IS the highest motive, isn't it?
As far as health goes, last I read the US is at the bottom of the "industrialized nations," and not even at the top of what we call the "third world."
Didn't they put Randy Waterhouse on that job? (or was it his uncle?)
Since there's always room for bad analogies on Slashdot...
This reminds me of "induced histamine response." I heard once that the really deadly flu variants don't kill directly themselves, rather they induce such a strong histamine response in the body that it kills itself with that response.
I read "War Year," and thought "Forever War" was his second - I never knew about the Robert Graham pseudonum. I agree that "Mindbridge" was also excellent, but you forget to mention, "All My Sins Remembered," which was just as well. It seems to be that by "All My Sins..." Haldeman had worked out all of his Viet Nam angst and hit bottom. Then fortunately he started learning to write, without being angst-driven.