I completely agree. The last CPU I bought, a quad core Intel Q6600, I understood what it's core count, frequency, and cache were. Nowadays, there have been so many architecture redesigns, cache redesigns, DRAM redesigns, and in some cases frequency downclocks that I can't tell how much money I need to spend to achieve the same performance. I *think* the CPU is fast enough, so I'm not going to buy one until my applications are too slow, and I'll chalk up any slowness I experience in games to my 8800GT card instead.
If I knew what I could get with current-day CPUs, maybe I'd be willing to pay more. It seems like Intel should be focusing more on measuring and selling performance instead of selling numbers.
There are ATMs EVERYWHERE! Banks, convenience stores, gas stations. Plus, you can withdraw from those ATMs even if you're not a Chase Bank customer. And many banks will refund any fees charged by the ATM network.
Local electric is a better example, but there's no such thing as a local monopoly for banks anymore. I have nearly all of my banking assets in non-bricks-and-mortar banks.
It's so ironic that the same day Google releases one of the largest and most impactful open source projects, Microsoft declares the day "Global Anti-Piracy Day". Horray for Google -- thanks for making our cell phones more powerful at as low a cost to the user as possible. Now if only there were more free and open carriers around....
It is well understood by all who sell to the government that they will never allow you full monopoly powers. The government does not want to be enslaved by their need for a product, and thus can freely violate patents for the purposes of defense if it so chooses. This is old, old law, and anyone who sells patented defense products is well aware of it.
This ruling seems entirely consistent with DMCA. Patents create a government-sponsored monopoly on inventions. DMCA allows individuals and companies to create monopoly-like powers on copyrighted materials. It's crucial that the government be able to break its own sponsored monopolies to ensure it won't get unnecessarily squeezed and can still function. Informed private parties are well aware this is always a danger when selling to the government, and can simply choose not to if they don't want to be impacted by it.
16-bit as in 16-bit integer color per pixel, as opposed to 32-bit floating point color per pixel that all video cards have supported since the notorious NVIDIA GeForce FX/ATI Radeon 9700 series. This has nothing to do with 16-bit memory utilization/integer size vs. 32-bit.
But you alone do not set the price of the stock. The market and all of its players do. So, by selling a stock, you are not necessarily lowering its price, especially if you are selling it for economically irrational reasons like "morality" since it's an externality. If I know you are acting economically irrationally, it would actually be optimal for me to buy every stock you sell, and you can bet hedge funds already perform this kind of arbitrage on socially responsible funds, totally negating their effect.
Small companies are far more risky to invest in than large companies. Also, small companies have even less media attention and often significantly worse accounting controls. There are tons of poorly managed and/or environmentally unfriendly small companies, and it's far harder to do the due dilligence you are requiring on small ones (not to mention you have to invest in more small companies, and your transaction costs will be higher because these stocks aren't as liquid).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can improve the quality of life of millions throught the world, or impact the trading price of a stock for a few seconds or manybe even minutes before the market reaches its equilibrium. Given the amount of work you're expecting the Foundation to go through when they could better spend their time treating diseases or even making more money for itself, I think your statement is dead wrong.
No way. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation only has $31.6 billion under management as of August 2006. Let's say $3 billion (10% of their investments) is in companies you consider morally reprehensible. If they sold all of their stock in these companies in a single transaction, that wouldn't impact the trading value of these stocks for more than a few days. $3 billion is nothing.
If I was running a hedge fund, and I knew the GF was selling a stock only because some small portion of the public believed some company was not acting "morally" by operating a power plant in a developing nation, I would reprogram my hedge fund model to buy anything that GF sells, knowing the true market price of what they sell will tend to be higher than whatever GF is selling. I would then give 'ol Bill a high five for giving me a nice present. The losers in this scenario would be the GF and the small portion of the public that thought they meant a damn to the stock market.
My wife was born in Kiev and I spend a lot of time with ex-USSR immigrants (mostly Russian and Ukranian, although I also hang out with Armenians, Moldovians and Bulgarians). I am in no way Russian and was born in the US, so I don't spend much time with the previous generations (just my wife's parents and their friends). Our Russian friends in our social circle are in their twenties and thirties and are hard-working, well educated, and mostly successful. So my views are in no way representative of all Russians in the US.
The community I am part of greatly distrusts Putin and in fact all Russian politics. My friends favor Ukranian politics more since Ukranians can still influence the government (Orange Revolution), but in both Ukraine and Russia political leaders have very little experience being productive. Primarily, they excel at getting elected and remaining in power, not managing the government apparatus to help the people. These countries' leaders are focused on short-term survival and rarely consider the socio-economic/military conditions they create when they do things like support Iraqi and Iranian non-conventional weapons programs or criticize Israel when that clearly benefits the Chechen cause.
Overall, my friends want to see greater stability in their home countries; very, very few ever entertain the idea of going back because of the instability although many would like to help by starting a business. Also, most Russian immigrants in the US are Jews, a people who have not been treated well in that part of the world for quite a while. In many ex-USSR countries there has been a huge resurgence in Christianity, and it's not totally clear how that will play out for the very few Jews who remain or haven't already converted. I am sure many are afraid of Putin persecuting Jews if he found it politically convenient....
You can argue it, but a judge won't buy it. And you certainly can't claim damages on behalf of the entire open-source community.
Damages are supposed to be the amount you've lost as a result of the infringement. Given that in this case the GPL'd code was not for sale or under any other commercial license, the plaintiff would have a very difficult time suggesting the code had any significant net present value, let alone single-license value, that could possibly exceed the plaintiff's legal costs.
I read in some article (maybe it was here) that Apple is not yet certain whether they will include fast malloc() as the default. Personally, I'd be shocked if they did because I don't think most programmers would be too happy with memory management that didn't do its damnedest. A lot of today's apps run out of memory way faster than they run out of cycles, and the ones that don't typically use custom libraries/platforms anyway.
I guess that could be summed up as "benchmarking is totally useless for anything because everything depends on something else". I disagree, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere.:)
Yeah, I might have been wrong about that. Regardless, the PowerPC, just like x86-64 and Itanium, has to read/write twice as much data whenever it wants to read/write pointers. So a 64-bit platform is guaranteed to be less memory-efficient unless the 32-bit platform uses a lot of psuedo-64-bit hacks.
Apple certainly hasn't shown that. Don't assume it's true. Have they released any benches with Codewarrior vs Intel compiler? No. Why? It's safe to assume that whatever the results are, gcc makes Apple look better, because Apple developers sure as hell don't use gcc, and neither do Windows developers.
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I completely agree. The last CPU I bought, a quad core Intel Q6600, I understood what it's core count, frequency, and cache were. Nowadays, there have been so many architecture redesigns, cache redesigns, DRAM redesigns, and in some cases frequency downclocks that I can't tell how much money I need to spend to achieve the same performance. I *think* the CPU is fast enough, so I'm not going to buy one until my applications are too slow, and I'll chalk up any slowness I experience in games to my 8800GT card instead.
If I knew what I could get with current-day CPUs, maybe I'd be willing to pay more. It seems like Intel should be focusing more on measuring and selling performance instead of selling numbers.
There are ATMs EVERYWHERE! Banks, convenience stores, gas stations. Plus, you can withdraw from those ATMs even if you're not a Chase Bank customer. And many banks will refund any fees charged by the ATM network.
Local electric is a better example, but there's no such thing as a local monopoly for banks anymore. I have nearly all of my banking assets in non-bricks-and-mortar banks.
It's so ironic that the same day Google releases one of the largest and most impactful open source projects, Microsoft declares the day "Global Anti-Piracy Day". Horray for Google -- thanks for making our cell phones more powerful at as low a cost to the user as possible. Now if only there were more free and open carriers around....
It is well understood by all who sell to the government that they will never allow you full monopoly powers. The government does not want to be enslaved by their need for a product, and thus can freely violate patents for the purposes of defense if it so chooses. This is old, old law, and anyone who sells patented defense products is well aware of it.
This ruling seems entirely consistent with DMCA. Patents create a government-sponsored monopoly on inventions. DMCA allows individuals and companies to create monopoly-like powers on copyrighted materials. It's crucial that the government be able to break its own sponsored monopolies to ensure it won't get unnecessarily squeezed and can still function. Informed private parties are well aware this is always a danger when selling to the government, and can simply choose not to if they don't want to be impacted by it.
Everyone likes to be complemented, male or female. Complimenting someone's work, style, or wit should get you bonus points with just about everyone.
A good "family man" who has his idea at 4:45pm will write it down before he leaves. Problem solved, unless he's cognitively challenged.
16-bit as in 16-bit integer color per pixel, as opposed to 32-bit floating point color per pixel that all video cards have supported since the notorious NVIDIA GeForce FX/ATI Radeon 9700 series. This has nothing to do with 16-bit memory utilization/integer size vs. 32-bit.
But you alone do not set the price of the stock. The market and all of its players do. So, by selling a stock, you are not necessarily lowering its price, especially if you are selling it for economically irrational reasons like "morality" since it's an externality. If I know you are acting economically irrationally, it would actually be optimal for me to buy every stock you sell, and you can bet hedge funds already perform this kind of arbitrage on socially responsible funds, totally negating their effect.
Small companies are far more risky to invest in than large companies. Also, small companies have even less media attention and often significantly worse accounting controls. There are tons of poorly managed and/or environmentally unfriendly small companies, and it's far harder to do the due dilligence you are requiring on small ones (not to mention you have to invest in more small companies, and your transaction costs will be higher because these stocks aren't as liquid).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can improve the quality of life of millions throught the world, or impact the trading price of a stock for a few seconds or manybe even minutes before the market reaches its equilibrium. Given the amount of work you're expecting the Foundation to go through when they could better spend their time treating diseases or even making more money for itself, I think your statement is dead wrong.
No way. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation only has $31.6 billion under management as of August 2006. Let's say $3 billion (10% of their investments) is in companies you consider morally reprehensible. If they sold all of their stock in these companies in a single transaction, that wouldn't impact the trading value of these stocks for more than a few days. $3 billion is nothing.
If I was running a hedge fund, and I knew the GF was selling a stock only because some small portion of the public believed some company was not acting "morally" by operating a power plant in a developing nation, I would reprogram my hedge fund model to buy anything that GF sells, knowing the true market price of what they sell will tend to be higher than whatever GF is selling. I would then give 'ol Bill a high five for giving me a nice present. The losers in this scenario would be the GF and the small portion of the public that thought they meant a damn to the stock market.
My wife was born in Kiev and I spend a lot of time with ex-USSR immigrants (mostly Russian and Ukranian, although I also hang out with Armenians, Moldovians and Bulgarians). I am in no way Russian and was born in the US, so I don't spend much time with the previous generations (just my wife's parents and their friends). Our Russian friends in our social circle are in their twenties and thirties and are hard-working, well educated, and mostly successful. So my views are in no way representative of all Russians in the US.
The community I am part of greatly distrusts Putin and in fact all Russian politics. My friends favor Ukranian politics more since Ukranians can still influence the government (Orange Revolution), but in both Ukraine and Russia political leaders have very little experience being productive. Primarily, they excel at getting elected and remaining in power, not managing the government apparatus to help the people. These countries' leaders are focused on short-term survival and rarely consider the socio-economic/military conditions they create when they do things like support Iraqi and Iranian non-conventional weapons programs or criticize Israel when that clearly benefits the Chechen cause.
Overall, my friends want to see greater stability in their home countries; very, very few ever entertain the idea of going back because of the instability although many would like to help by starting a business. Also, most Russian immigrants in the US are Jews, a people who have not been treated well in that part of the world for quite a while. In many ex-USSR countries there has been a huge resurgence in Christianity, and it's not totally clear how that will play out for the very few Jews who remain or haven't already converted. I am sure many are afraid of Putin persecuting Jews if he found it politically convenient....
I met Matthew Lesko. He was at my friend's wedding. He's not crazy, but he did wear his suit. :)
Actually, Windows XP boot-up is multithreaded. I believe Linux boot-up is not.
ACK!
I need a land-based phone line for Tivo? Only use cell nowadays. Wouldn't want to have to pay $10-$20/month on top of the $300 lifetime service.
MythTV is looking cheaper and cheaper.
You can argue it, but a judge won't buy it. And you certainly can't claim damages on behalf of the entire open-source community.
Damages are supposed to be the amount you've lost as a result of the infringement. Given that in this case the GPL'd code was not for sale or under any other commercial license, the plaintiff would have a very difficult time suggesting the code had any significant net present value, let alone single-license value, that could possibly exceed the plaintiff's legal costs.
Staggering sum of money? What are the damages you claim when you give away your software for free?
ipconfig /renew
Or you could reboot if you don't know what you're doing.
You cannot enforce an NDA on a party for disclosing an illegal act.
This is the post everyone should read... why did you post it as an anonymous coward?
I read in some article (maybe it was here) that Apple is not yet certain whether they will include fast malloc() as the default. Personally, I'd be shocked if they did because I don't think most programmers would be too happy with memory management that didn't do its damnedest. A lot of today's apps run out of memory way faster than they run out of cycles, and the ones that don't typically use custom libraries/platforms anyway.
I guess that could be summed up as "benchmarking is totally useless for anything because everything depends on something else". I disagree, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere. :)
Yeah, I might have been wrong about that. Regardless, the PowerPC, just like x86-64 and Itanium, has to read/write twice as much data whenever it wants to read/write pointers. So a 64-bit platform is guaranteed to be less memory-efficient unless the 32-bit platform uses a lot of psuedo-64-bit hacks.
Apple certainly hasn't shown that. Don't assume it's true. Have they released any benches with Codewarrior vs Intel compiler? No. Why? It's safe to assume that whatever the results are, gcc makes Apple look better, because Apple developers sure as hell don't use gcc, and neither do Windows developers.