Hercules is a nice bit of software, but it's very slow. (Supposedly something like 50x slower than the real thing). There's no way I can see that someone would be using Hercules to run their payroll software
1) I seriously doubt it's really two orders of magnitude slower... It would have to be the most horribly written emulator ever.
2) We're still using 30+ year-old mainframes for some purposes. 20X overhead would be manageable.
Why does it in fact perform better than supposedly superior architectures for so many workloads?
Money. The explicit point in my previous post.
If these other architectures are inherently superior, why don't they run rings around x86 in spite of the difference in dollars spent?
Simple, when you have 100X as much money to spend, you can tune every little bit out of an lousy architecture. You get 100X as many people working on every little detail of the design, top of the line fabs, and perhaps just as importantly, updated versions every couple months.
In fact there have been innumerable times when a non-x86 chip has been released, that has run rings around the fastest Intel/AMD chips, but after a few month, newer x86 chips come out which take the lead back with a process shrink or clock increase.
It's like the psych tests you take for a government job: You basically answer what you believe they want to hear.
Unlike a psychological evaluation, if you like on your required PCI-DSS survey, you are in contractual violation, and will therefore be screwed by the respective credit card companies when someone breaks in and charges a few millions on those credit cards they pull from you...
The cost for this "certification" process? $100 a pop. I have no choice...get "certified" or lose my account.
You have a 3rd option. BRING YOUR SYSTEMS INTO COMPLIANCE.
Honestly, with a few exceptions, it's not all that difficult. Only store/display the last 4 digits of the CC#. Keep your server in a locked cabinet/closet. Use a password that is more than 7 digits, and change it every 3 months. Or better yet, call your bank, and get them to send you a copy of their latest, PCI-DSS complaint software that handles all these restrictions itself. Not a big frickin' deal for a small company.
And you're assuming your experience is at all typical. Get to be a larger company, and you begin to need to pay for outside companies to test your system security every 3 months, and have a CEO (with a lot to lose) sign on the dotted line that you are in compliance with PCI standards.
x86 isn't a passable architecture at all. What it has going for it, is MONEY. Intel, AMD, and others have dumped tons of money into it to keep it moving along, against all odds. This because the whole world is tied to, and fixated on x86, which itself came about way back when, because IBM wanted a second supplier, so x86 was the only chip out there with competition, and therefore no proprietary lock-in. Other companies like DEC, MIPS, ARM, etc., have patents on their tech, with no license agreements, so no real attempt to one-up them. x86 competition out the gate made it a healthy ecosystem, which then precluded all others, which then became self-sustaining.
The flat tax is a regressive tax. It puts the largest share of the tax burden on the poorest. You are penalized for having to spend all your income to live, and those who earn more than they can spend get that money completely tax free...
1) It's ridiculous to claim nobody is going to cheat once $NEW_TAX_SCHEME gets put in place. In fact sales tax is the easiest to cheat on, as you can order out-of-state, or out-of-country, and there's next to no chance of getting caught.
2) I can only assume you mean that SUPER-RICH are being punished, by being required to pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in taxes, compared to the rest of us. In fact they have some many tax shelters that they typically pay less, just ask Warren Buffet. And a regressive tax, levied only on sales, would only make that far worse.
3) If the US became a tax shelter, there would be more people putting money into the US, yes. However, that means far less income for the government. Beside, removing the tax-shelter loopholes from US tax law is the right way to fix the problems.
4) With income disparity of two orders of magnitude between 1st world, and 3rd world countries, the tax differences are insignificant.
5) Same as #3. Yes, becoming a tax shelter might have some benefits, but far more drawbacks, and closing loopholes in the law will accomplish the same thing, without the drawbacks.
6) Same as #4. With huge income disparities, outsourcing will continue, and no additional US jobs will be created.
Would no more tax holiday for GE really end up helping Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? Doubtful. "The average Joe should be in favor of lower corporate taxes," says Hodge, "because ultimately they are paying the corporate income tax. Either as workers, getting lower wages and fewer jobs, or as consumers, paying higher prices, or as retirees, getting lower dividends and earnings on their investments."
Sure, every time it's been tried, the country spirals into a massive recession, unemployment goes through the roof, and banks start failing left and right, but hey, that's just a coincidence. Sure, every credible economist in the country has long ago derided the notion, but hey, what do they know? Quick, find me a dead horse!
You have to pay taxes, follow the law, and have little political power because you don't have enough money. If you have enough money, company or no, you can pay your way into getting these perks. It just happens that companies typically have the most money.
That said, there are things you can do, and benefits to them. Investors don't have bad credit, the trusts they created, do. Got a couple houses? Create a couple trusts. Then, you can lose one, and keep the other.
If it makes them coil away in revulsion, even better. We'd be involved in fewer pointless wars if the public was faced with what it really looked like on a regular basis.
The history of public executions says the exact opposite is true, actually.
Hiding behind an excuse like the 'public wouldn't understand it' is the most puerile self serving bullshit I can imagine.
I don't think he suggested "hiding." His statement sounds more like a counterpoint to all the others here, screaming "war crime!" at the top of their lungs.
we don't need to write laws. The officers on the scene did not have the authority to release the photos
I wasn't saying otherwise. I was responding to your assertion that certain types of human deaths should be censored, and others should not. It's easy to air your dogma, and much harder to write a law that will classify it as good or bad in an objective fashion.
've seen the Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg videos. I think they should be required viewing for every adult of voting age in this country, because seeing those two videos provides context for foreign policy decisions we need to vote on.
Alcohol and illegal drugs are also something we vote on.
However, I can also see the difference between a major newsworthy event that should inform foreign policy and two ghouls in uniform getting their sick little jollies at the expense of grieving parents.
It's basically impossible to write laws based on motivation. If you're going to say it's okay to distribute videos of those who died in car accidents, fine. If not, also fine. But there's no way you can say you can do XYZ, but only if your motivation is socially acceptable, and doesn't bother anyone...
Javascript can get the software name including version string, and similar. Now this typically only checks that you have "Flash" version "5" or above, but it is possible to get totalitarian, and lock out everything but a few selected names and versions, then 3rd party plugins have to imitate that EXACT string to be allowed. It sucks, but it happens.
Freenet has been a joke for decades. No-one cares about it at this point, and it's insane to think anyone ever will. Its day in the sun was a over a decade ago, when nothing else was out there. Now, it's long forgotten, and for good reason.
Your main problem is in assuming that Freenet works. In fact Gnutella worked great, too, when there were very few people using it. Far more than Freenet, of course, but still, very few people. Your second problem is assuming that, just because something exists in software, that it's remotely practical. Many nice features fall to pieces because when the flood of users comes in, the feature turns out to be far more inconvenient than helpful, or may simply not work any longer.
China has rules and regulations, they just aren't enforced until there's a bit problem. Then you, like everyone else, are in violation of some many laws you get an automatic death penalty.
For larger companies, who can't continue to operate under the radar, the government is ever-present. You can't really have a large company without the Chinese government owning a major share of it.
The quickest way to sort out the human rights situation in China is to create a population with enough of a stake in society for it to be worth standing up and be counted.
Actually, the booming economy has undeniably lessened the popular unrest of the 80s, and the government sees it as necessary to ensure a continuously growing economy, to maintain their power over the people.
Almost every example in history of government overthrow is one of peoples being repressed and suffering. Keeping them fat and happy tends to keep them from demanding more from their government, not the other way around. Bread and Circuses is a decent example.
How long till the government detects that you are using PGP and takes you in for questioning solely based on that fact?
That's immensely nonsensical. If the government can detect that you are using PGP, they can damn well read the full text of your e-mails, and find out the much more incriminating information therein. You might as well run around in a war-zone without a bullet-proof vest, because people shooting at you just might notice you have a bullet-proof vest on, and shoot at you some more...
Once the admins and users will start getting jail time and huge fines more often, we would have already moved to more decentralized and anonymous P2P technologies
After Napster, there was Gnutella. Highly distributed technology, which certainly caught-on. Kazaa had a little bit of central control opportunities, but if you've experienced it, you're familiar with the same problems...
Bittorrent is actually the regression, driven mainly by hype more than real benefits over other P2P technologies. But it does have on thing to it's benefit, and that is trust... You don't search for file names across the whole network, you visit a website you trust, and download torrents submitted by other (trusted) users, any of whom can be kicked by the site admin if they post deceiving descriptions. Much noise has been made about cryptographic trust relationships, but the fact that none has ever materialized in P2P over the last decade+, indicates it's not as easy of a problem as people would like to believe.
For 98% of people, Reader is unnecessary and just opens up a ton of security holes.
While I still highly recommend any of the alternatives, I've seen several cases where websites are checking for that specific plug-in, and will not make any attempt to display the PDF, or offer any alternative links to the document, if Reader is not detected. Of course if more people dropped Adobe's crap, this would cease to be an acceptable way to display PDFs, but it should at least be noted that you might find just a few dark corners where the alternatives won't work for you.
And let me take a moment to rant on about what a dog Acrobat Reader is. I've seen innumerable systems that had plenty of free memory, UNTIL Reader started up, and grabbed a fricking half GB, and caused serious system swapping. Replacing Reader with XPDF always brings the very same system from dog slow, to lightning fast...
Actually there is. Watch this video: The battle of the diets: Is anyone winning at losing? by Christopher Gardner, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, a vegetarian, who presents the results of the largest and longest-ever comparison of four popular diets showing that Atkins was the most effective.
The study was done for 12 months... Others have gone to 24 months or more, so Gardner's is certainly NOT the longest. I'm not motivated to determine if his was the largest.
It states that "mean 12-month weight loss was significantly different between the Atkins and Zone diets (P.05)." However, the raw figures show that the difference in the two diets was not substantially outside the margin of error. I wish I had more time to review it and the other citation you provided.
Low carb diet is the best diet for losing weight because it works with the body's systems.
No research supports your statement. If there was some major difference between the various diets, it would long ago have been identified, and someone would be shouting from the rooftops about their peer-reviewed scientific paper proving their diet plan beats every other famous diet.
Does anyone wonder why scientists don't accept the amazing claims that low-carb diets are so much better for you? It's because they know WTF they are talking about, and there simply hasn't been any science which supports the far-fetched claim.
Flash dies once people stop producing websites that need Flash. It has absolutely nothing to do with XP, or IE9, or a new HTML standard.
On the contrary. Flash exists on the web, because people found it had the features they wanted. No matter how silly it may seem, that web designer wanted to animate the nav menu on that web page "just so" and HTML+JS didn't allow him to do that.
The popularity of CSS has certainly eaten into what was previously Javascript's primary use, links that DO SOMETHING on mouse-over. I fully expect that, when web devs find they can do X with HTML5 in a slightly different way than Flash, enough of them will like that way better, and make the switch. Once it starts, it will go quickly... Just a few major sites need to drop Flash, and suddenly Flash is no longer installed on absolutely everyone's PC, and being a not-so-large site, you'll have difficulty prodding users to install it, so any small decline in installed base will mean a large decline in the number of websites which will require Flash...
Slashdot Mirror
Youtube continues to serve the videos. They're only "linked" (embedded) from other sites.
Additionally, non-paywalled online videos in H.264 are gratis for the next several years at least, so it would make no difference.
1) I seriously doubt it's really two orders of magnitude slower... It would have to be the most horribly written emulator ever.
2) We're still using 30+ year-old mainframes for some purposes. 20X overhead would be manageable.
Patents from the 1980s are NUMEROUS. MP3 is from the 1980s in fact. The rules were very different back then...
Money. The explicit point in my previous post.
Simple, when you have 100X as much money to spend, you can tune every little bit out of an lousy architecture. You get 100X as many people working on every little detail of the design, top of the line fabs, and perhaps just as importantly, updated versions every couple months.
In fact there have been innumerable times when a non-x86 chip has been released, that has run rings around the fastest Intel/AMD chips, but after a few month, newer x86 chips come out which take the lead back with a process shrink or clock increase.
Unlike a psychological evaluation, if you like on your required PCI-DSS survey, you are in contractual violation, and will therefore be screwed by the respective credit card companies when someone breaks in and charges a few millions on those credit cards they pull from you...
You have a 3rd option. BRING YOUR SYSTEMS INTO COMPLIANCE.
Honestly, with a few exceptions, it's not all that difficult. Only store/display the last 4 digits of the CC#. Keep your server in a locked cabinet/closet. Use a password that is more than 7 digits, and change it every 3 months. Or better yet, call your bank, and get them to send you a copy of their latest, PCI-DSS complaint software that handles all these restrictions itself. Not a big frickin' deal for a small company.
And you're assuming your experience is at all typical. Get to be a larger company, and you begin to need to pay for outside companies to test your system security every 3 months, and have a CEO (with a lot to lose) sign on the dotted line that you are in compliance with PCI standards.
x86 isn't a passable architecture at all. What it has going for it, is MONEY. Intel, AMD, and others have dumped tons of money into it to keep it moving along, against all odds. This because the whole world is tied to, and fixated on x86, which itself came about way back when, because IBM wanted a second supplier, so x86 was the only chip out there with competition, and therefore no proprietary lock-in. Other companies like DEC, MIPS, ARM, etc., have patents on their tech, with no license agreements, so no real attempt to one-up them. x86 competition out the gate made it a healthy ecosystem, which then precluded all others, which then became self-sustaining.
The flat tax is a regressive tax. It puts the largest share of the tax burden on the poorest. You are penalized for having to spend all your income to live, and those who earn more than they can spend get that money completely tax free...
1) It's ridiculous to claim nobody is going to cheat once $NEW_TAX_SCHEME gets put in place. In fact sales tax is the easiest to cheat on, as you can order out-of-state, or out-of-country, and there's next to no chance of getting caught.
2) I can only assume you mean that SUPER-RICH are being punished, by being required to pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in taxes, compared to the rest of us. In fact they have some many tax shelters that they typically pay less, just ask Warren Buffet. And a regressive tax, levied only on sales, would only make that far worse.
3) If the US became a tax shelter, there would be more people putting money into the US, yes. However, that means far less income for the government. Beside, removing the tax-shelter loopholes from US tax law is the right way to fix the problems.
4) With income disparity of two orders of magnitude between 1st world, and 3rd world countries, the tax differences are insignificant.
5) Same as #3. Yes, becoming a tax shelter might have some benefits, but far more drawbacks, and closing loopholes in the law will accomplish the same thing, without the drawbacks.
6) Same as #4. With huge income disparities, outsourcing will continue, and no additional US jobs will be created.
Thankfully, the populace isn't that stupid.
Ah yes, good old "Voodoo Economics" at it's finest.
Sure, every time it's been tried, the country spirals into a massive recession, unemployment goes through the roof, and banks start failing left and right, but hey, that's just a coincidence. Sure, every credible economist in the country has long ago derided the notion, but hey, what do they know? Quick, find me a dead horse!
What you're talking about is a "moral hazard". It's a well-known concept.
Bush's fed chairman agreed with you, took it to the mat with Bear Sterns, and the US economy instantly crashed and burned.
Idealism must always be balanced against pragmatism...
You have to pay taxes, follow the law, and have little political power because you don't have enough money. If you have enough money, company or no, you can pay your way into getting these perks. It just happens that companies typically have the most money.
That said, there are things you can do, and benefits to them. Investors don't have bad credit, the trusts they created, do. Got a couple houses? Create a couple trusts. Then, you can lose one, and keep the other.
The history of public executions says the exact opposite is true, actually.
I don't think he suggested "hiding." His statement sounds more like a counterpoint to all the others here, screaming "war crime!" at the top of their lungs.
I wasn't saying otherwise. I was responding to your assertion that certain types of human deaths should be censored, and others should not. It's easy to air your dogma, and much harder to write a law that will classify it as good or bad in an objective fashion.
Alcohol and illegal drugs are also something we vote on.
It's basically impossible to write laws based on motivation. If you're going to say it's okay to distribute videos of those who died in car accidents, fine. If not, also fine. But there's no way you can say you can do XYZ, but only if your motivation is socially acceptable, and doesn't bother anyone...
Javascript can get the software name including version string, and similar. Now this typically only checks that you have "Flash" version "5" or above, but it is possible to get totalitarian, and lock out everything but a few selected names and versions, then 3rd party plugins have to imitate that EXACT string to be allowed. It sucks, but it happens.
function detectReal(redirectURL, redirectIfFound) {
pluginFound = detectPlugin('RealPlayer');
if(!pluginFound && detectableWithVB) {
pluginFound = (detectActiveXControl('rmocx.RealPlayer G2 Control') ||
detectActiveXControl('RealPlayer.RealPlayer(tm) ActiveX Control (32-bit)') ||
detectActiveXControl('RealVideo.RealVideo(tm) ActiveX Control (32-bit)'));
}
return redirectCheck(pluginFound, redirectURL, redirectIfFound);
Freenet has been a joke for decades. No-one cares about it at this point, and it's insane to think anyone ever will. Its day in the sun was a over a decade ago, when nothing else was out there. Now, it's long forgotten, and for good reason.
Your main problem is in assuming that Freenet works. In fact Gnutella worked great, too, when there were very few people using it. Far more than Freenet, of course, but still, very few people. Your second problem is assuming that, just because something exists in software, that it's remotely practical. Many nice features fall to pieces because when the flood of users comes in, the feature turns out to be far more inconvenient than helpful, or may simply not work any longer.
So, I still say there's nothing out there.
China has rules and regulations, they just aren't enforced until there's a bit problem. Then you, like everyone else, are in violation of some many laws you get an automatic death penalty.
For larger companies, who can't continue to operate under the radar, the government is ever-present. You can't really have a large company without the Chinese government owning a major share of it.
Actually, the booming economy has undeniably lessened the popular unrest of the 80s, and the government sees it as necessary to ensure a continuously growing economy, to maintain their power over the people.
Almost every example in history of government overthrow is one of peoples being repressed and suffering. Keeping them fat and happy tends to keep them from demanding more from their government, not the other way around. Bread and Circuses is a decent example.
PGP or at least GnuPG certain is.
That's immensely nonsensical. If the government can detect that you are using PGP, they can damn well read the full text of your e-mails, and find out the much more incriminating information therein. You might as well run around in a war-zone without a bullet-proof vest, because people shooting at you just might notice you have a bullet-proof vest on, and shoot at you some more...
After Napster, there was Gnutella. Highly distributed technology, which certainly caught-on. Kazaa had a little bit of central control opportunities, but if you've experienced it, you're familiar with the same problems...
Namely, this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/11/4/
Bittorrent is actually the regression, driven mainly by hype more than real benefits over other P2P technologies. But it does have on thing to it's benefit, and that is trust... You don't search for file names across the whole network, you visit a website you trust, and download torrents submitted by other (trusted) users, any of whom can be kicked by the site admin if they post deceiving descriptions. Much noise has been made about cryptographic trust relationships, but the fact that none has ever materialized in P2P over the last decade+, indicates it's not as easy of a problem as people would like to believe.
While I still highly recommend any of the alternatives, I've seen several cases where websites are checking for that specific plug-in, and will not make any attempt to display the PDF, or offer any alternative links to the document, if Reader is not detected. Of course if more people dropped Adobe's crap, this would cease to be an acceptable way to display PDFs, but it should at least be noted that you might find just a few dark corners where the alternatives won't work for you.
And let me take a moment to rant on about what a dog Acrobat Reader is. I've seen innumerable systems that had plenty of free memory, UNTIL Reader started up, and grabbed a fricking half GB, and caused serious system swapping. Replacing Reader with XPDF always brings the very same system from dog slow, to lightning fast...
I dunno. How many of them *do* we each get, anyhow?
At over an hour, I'm not watching that damn video. I was able to find the paper with a quick search, however: http://gornbein.bol.ucla.edu/assn6-Atkins%20vs%20Zone.pdf
The study was done for 12 months... Others have gone to 24 months or more, so Gardner's is certainly NOT the longest. I'm not motivated to determine if his was the largest.
It states that "mean 12-month weight loss was significantly different between the Atkins and Zone diets (P .05)." However, the raw figures show that the difference in the two diets was not substantially outside the margin of error. I wish I had more time to review it and the other citation you provided.
No research supports your statement. If there was some major difference between the various diets, it would long ago have been identified, and someone would be shouting from the rooftops about their peer-reviewed scientific paper proving their diet plan beats every other famous diet.
Does anyone wonder why scientists don't accept the amazing claims that low-carb diets are so much better for you? It's because they know WTF they are talking about, and there simply hasn't been any science which supports the far-fetched claim.
Cite: http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/update0904c.shtml
There's no law against lying. It's when you tell the truth (about something you weren't supposed to) that you can get in legal trouble.
On the contrary. Flash exists on the web, because people found it had the features they wanted. No matter how silly it may seem, that web designer wanted to animate the nav menu on that web page "just so" and HTML+JS didn't allow him to do that.
The popularity of CSS has certainly eaten into what was previously Javascript's primary use, links that DO SOMETHING on mouse-over. I fully expect that, when web devs find they can do X with HTML5 in a slightly different way than Flash, enough of them will like that way better, and make the switch. Once it starts, it will go quickly... Just a few major sites need to drop Flash, and suddenly Flash is no longer installed on absolutely everyone's PC, and being a not-so-large site, you'll have difficulty prodding users to install it, so any small decline in installed base will mean a large decline in the number of websites which will require Flash...