... but it should acutally worry Intel. Apple must have a pretty darn portable source base to be able to move to a radically different architecture this fast. And... the more you port, the easier it gets, as all the architecture-specific cruft gets whittled down to smaller and smaller pieces.
Apple is in an excellent position to say to Intel: "What have you done for us lately?", and knowing Intel as I do, I am sure they are already fully aware of that at decision making levels. Apple is not just talking transition, they are shipping code, and anybody can see that they could do it again without breaking stride.
So, my net take-away is this: 1) Intel is motivated to give Apple what they need, and 2) Apple users should not fear Apple switching again if it looks like it would benefit their users.
... the lawyers have to get paid in exactly the same specie as the class. Cash for the class, cash for the lawyers. Coupons for the class, the lawyers get coupons, and coupons only. *That* would fixed the f/u'd class action system pretty quickly.
We would be interested in speaking to any California residents that have experienced this problem before the EULA was changed. We have looked at many DRM cases and Sony went too far with this particular scheme. You can contact us at gw@classcounsel.com or by visiting our web site at http://www.classcounsel.com./
Also true on the USA side of the western pond. I would bet that is true for any law system that evolved out of the English court system. It is called "mitigation of damages" and if you think you have been damaged, you have a duty to mitigate, and can only seek relief for unmitigated damages over and above those you *could* have mitigated had you not sat on your thumbs.
One thing that got pounded into my wife's head during 1st year law school (yes, she is a software licensing attorney) is that some legal "terms of art" are good, and some are crap.
The crap comes about in the following way: 1) lawyer writes obtuse clause into a contract. 2) litigation occurs. 3) obtuse clause causes much confusion. 4) case is decided. 5) case is appealed, partly due to obtuse clause. 6) appellate court rules that obtuse clause means some specific thing. 7) obtuse cluase goes down as a precedent, and now future lazy lawyers re-instantiate obtuse clause because it has been held to mean something specific.
In her first year legal writing class, they were drilled to watch out for such crap, and replace it with simple, clear language that is damn difficult to misinterpret, thus short circuiting the whole obtuse clause scenario.
That said, there are indeed "terms of art" that are not crap, have long standing, are quite clear to a lawyer trained in the art, but to a mere programmer are utterly indistiguishable from modem noise.
That "no charge back" clause is wacko...
on
End User License Gems
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So, I have yet to see a product where the norm is to buy it with a credit card and where you actually get to read the ELUA before charging the card. Now, what happens if you charge the card to buy the product, read the ELUA and go "Holy cow! I don't agree to this!" but by then you can't do a charge back. How could that stand up in court?
But more to the point... how could that wash with with a Visa merchant account agreement? Seems to me that a quick call to Visa where you quote the ELUA and surrounding circumstances, and somebody's merchant account just got yanked.
Speaking as a dad to a 6 year old, it's fine by me if the DVD player sends most of its time on the family room shelf. Too much video rots the mind. But when we have a transcontinental flight, or a trans-California-central-valley car trip, that thing is wonderful.
We promised to print their answers, so here they are.
To whom did you promise, them, or us?
If us, then you did not print answers. You should have sent the entire interview back and said: "try again".
If them, then *why*? You call your selves journalists. Why give up editoriral control?
I hope you have learned that in the future you should tell all interviewees that you reserve the right to reject tripe and give them a chance to answer again or have the story dropped with a notice as to why. Or simply post it to a "hall of interview shame" section, not the front page, for crying out loud. You had options.
Nice theory....
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 3, Informative
... but how often do personal backups actually happen? I'm one of those guys that has been taking home backups seriously for a long time, and has a collection of obsolete tape units to prove it. And backups still do not happen often enough if it requires me handling tape.
Let's face it, discipline is a drag, that is why at work IT people are paid to schlepp around stacks of locked cases full of back up tapes to be shipped off site.
So... for my home file server, I went to RAID mirroring, with a 3rd drive in a drawer. A mount-copy-umount chron job copies to the drawer-drive. Drawer-drive gets swapped and taken off site "when I think of it". Because... RAID only protects you from falling over hard drives. It does not proctect you from:
1) Ooops, I wish I hadn't deleted that. 2) Gack! My house just burned down! And took 10 years of tax data with it! 3) Power supply goes wonky, causing both drives to scribble random scorfulentness everywhere.
A home RAID system does not need to be expensive. Who needs hot swap? Use cheapo PATA drives. A few hours of down time for the wife and kids is OK. It doesn't take a big, bad CPU, and software RAID works great.
made sure that the world has one telephone standard
...um... but there *isn't* one telephone standard. There are actually several telephone standards, with converters at the boundaries. Digial voice encoding has multiple standards. Ring-back has multiple standards. I'm not sure, but I think ringing voltage has multiple standards. Good gravy, even the number of digits in a phone number isn't standard.
Maybe you meant cell phone standards?? Oh wait...
This should have been modded "+1 funny", it sure made *me* laugh.
I thought he meant "spoon" in the veterinary medicine context -- a "spoon" is a specialized knife used to neuter male animals. A dull, rusty spoon seems quite in order to me.
Well, of course, the binary will be larger, by as much as 2x. This is hit in terms of disk space, but disk space is cheap. And also a hit in terms of distribution media space, but CD's are cheap. Notably, it should *not* be a hit in memory utilization, because only the code that you run will be loaded into memory. So it is easy to rationalize building Universal Binaries - the size impact should be minimal in any meaningful way.
But... in days gone by I managed a software validation lab. We did a lot of platform matrix testing -- the test matrix was different CPU's times different OS's times different service packs times different internationaliztion packs.... you get the idea. Just making sure "hello world" compiled and ran with our tools on all platforms, with the single thread C library, with the multi-thread C library, with the correct error messages in Japanese..., when mix-and-match linked with components from German Visual Studio... crikie...
Anyway, doubling the number of CPU's to test on just made life 2x nastier for developers. Let me tell you, any developer with a brain will want to drop the "ancient" platforms ASAP.
In truth, this whole thing has given me Irony Whiplash (tm). 20 years ago I was Mac fanatic. I was the first kid on the block with a Mac I: 68020, 128K and a floppy. My Palm Pilot is more powerful than that box. I ported GNU flex to System 7.0. But Apple lost its way, and I got tired of never having the aps I wanted, and of those that I could get being too expensive. I switched to PC's (Windows and later Linux, too), and even worked at Intel for 10 years on various CPU projects. Now, lately, all I do with my Windows PC at home is photo editing, e-mail, web surf, and a little video editing. That, and remove malware. I need Apple i-Life, I'm fed up with malware. I am switching back. I was about ready to buy an iMac G5 (like next *week*), but now I don't want to get caught cross-wise of a platform transition. Wow!!! They're better, and they are switching to a CPU family I used to help design! Great!... no wait... I need a machine now, and it will be an orphan.... this will be painful!!.. ARRGGHH!!
More like tarware. Microsoft is good a pushing technologies that are as sticky and messy and hard to get off of things as roofing tar. You can easily waste a couple of years of your life wading through a Microsoft created tar pit if you don't pick and choose carefully among their technologies.
Frankly, good suggestion. In fact, history is repeating itself.
In the early days of wireless, there was no licensing. It was OK for a while, but as wireless caught on, ship-to-shore, press wireless, and hams all started clobbering each other. The commerce department started issuing licenses, and setting aside frequencies. Eventually, the FCC was formed.
Something akin to a ham license for running a mail server makes sense to me. Kids as young as 7 get ham licenses. I had one at 14. I don't see a license with written exam and paper trail to be any burden to anyone with half a clue about configuring sendmail.
What inputs are acceptable. What inputs should be rejected. What inputs lead to undefined results. What guarantees do you make about the outputs.
A function makes a contract with the outside world. Make the contract clear. Then add assertions. Good assertions are often better than good comments anyway.
Yes, this is a "+5 funny" but in reality, most hibred crops are "copy protected". With maize (a.k.a. "corn" in the USA) for instance, it requires an extra cross to stabilize the hibred, but the unstabilized generation performs perfectly well. Don't do the cross, and you have very effective copy protection. The problem with those pesky soybeans is that they don't perform well as an unstabilized hibred.
Yes, what if it is cracked, or your house burns down, or the cpu goes nuts and scribbles on every online drive, or you decide "oooops, why did I delete that" a day after your sync-up cron job runs.
My solution on the home file server:
1) shares are all on a RAID 1 array consisting of two cheap ATA drives. Yes, I need to take a down time to swap a dead drive. I don't care, it is a *home* file server, not one with zillions of users.
2) the backup volume is an SATA drive in a swap drawer.
3) backup cron job does mount/backup/unmount. So backup volume is not mounted except when needed. Theory is that this will reduce likelyhood of random scribbles on all mounted drives.
4) "when I remember" I swap the backup volume in the draw for another one, and take the just removed drive to the bank and plop it into a safety deposit box. A rotation of 3 drives does quite nicely.
yea, I especially like the fact that with Outlook/Exchange (OK, 3 years ago when I used it) if you try to open a.txt file it prompts "Are you sure you want to open this attachement?" but if the e-mail contains VB-script, it just goes ahead and runs it as soon as it appears in the preview pane... *sheesh*
because: it's humor. and it *is* funny. not snort-earl-gray-through-my-nose funny, but a chuckle.
second: i'm only passingly familiar with Gentoo, so the story and the comments have given me a flavor of why i might want to try it someday. for instance, to make a minimal-footprint build on an old, cramped laptop or something. the experiment could be good humor, too.
for the record, i'm a Slackie... Slackware never surprises me. and that is good.
Although I feel the same way for the same reason, I do see some value in this. Competitions of any sort push the techno envelope in some direction according to the rules of the competition. Non-competition applications benefit from the learning.
In the case of combat robots, even R/C ones, there is a lot of work that goes into drive train reliability and basic survivabilty. And of course, doing it all at a reasonable cost so that when you get toasted by the other guy's flame thrower or buzz saw, it doesn't wipe out the development budget.
So, while I have little personal interest in creating a combat robot, especially an R/C one, I am quite happy to steal any good drive train and general reliability ideas that they come up with, especially the low-cost one.
I recall a product called "Magna-See" or some such. This was in the GCR tape era -- strictly 9 track, nobody was using less dense than 800 BPI in those days, in fact 800 BPI was hard to find, most were doing either 1600 BPI or GCR. I guess I am exposing myself as a youngster.
OH, BTW -- ssg r00lz! (ssg may have been called sgr back in the Univac III days...)
Slashdot Mirror
... but it should acutally worry Intel. Apple must have a pretty darn portable source base to be able to move to a radically different architecture this fast. And... the more you port, the easier it gets, as all the architecture-specific cruft gets whittled down to smaller and smaller pieces.
Apple is in an excellent position to say to Intel: "What have you done for us lately?", and knowing Intel as I do, I am sure they are already fully aware of that at decision making levels. Apple is not just talking transition, they are shipping code, and anybody can see that they could do it again without breaking stride.
So, my net take-away is this: 1) Intel is motivated to give Apple what they need, and 2) Apple users should not fear Apple switching again if it looks like it would benefit their users.
... the lawyers have to get paid in exactly the same specie as the class. Cash for the class, cash for the lawyers. Coupons for the class, the lawyers get coupons, and coupons only. *That* would fixed the f/u'd class action system pretty quickly.
We would be interested in speaking to any California residents that have experienced this problem before the EULA was changed. We have looked at many DRM cases and Sony went too far with this particular scheme. You can contact us at gw@classcounsel.com or by visiting our web site at http://www.classcounsel.com./
2. Extend
3. Extinguish
Or has everyone forgotten?
... not if you lose your merchant account over it. That would be painful.
Also true on the USA side of the western pond. I would bet that is true for any law system that evolved out of the English court system. It is called "mitigation of damages" and if you think you have been damaged, you have a duty to mitigate, and can only seek relief for unmitigated damages over and above those you *could* have mitigated had you not sat on your thumbs.
One thing that got pounded into my wife's head during 1st year law school (yes, she is a software licensing attorney) is that some legal "terms of art" are good, and some are crap.
The crap comes about in the following way: 1) lawyer writes obtuse clause into a contract. 2) litigation occurs. 3) obtuse clause causes much confusion. 4) case is decided. 5) case is appealed, partly due to obtuse clause. 6) appellate court rules that obtuse clause means some specific thing. 7) obtuse cluase goes down as a precedent, and now future lazy lawyers re-instantiate obtuse clause because it has been held to mean something specific.
In her first year legal writing class, they were drilled to watch out for such crap, and replace it with simple, clear language that is damn difficult to misinterpret, thus short circuiting the whole obtuse clause scenario.
That said, there are indeed "terms of art" that are not crap, have long standing, are quite clear to a lawyer trained in the art, but to a mere programmer are utterly indistiguishable from modem noise.
So, I have yet to see a product where the norm is to buy it with a credit card and where you actually get to read the ELUA before charging the card. Now, what happens if you charge the card to buy the product, read the ELUA and go "Holy cow! I don't agree to this!" but by then you can't do a charge back. How could that stand up in court?
But more to the point... how could that wash with with a Visa merchant account agreement? Seems to me that a quick call to Visa where you quote the ELUA and surrounding circumstances, and somebody's merchant account just got yanked.
Speaking as a dad to a 6 year old, it's fine by me if the DVD player sends most of its time on the family room shelf. Too much video rots the mind. But when we have a transcontinental flight, or a trans-California-central-valley car trip, that thing is wonderful.
To whom did you promise, them, or us?
If us, then you did not print answers. You should have sent the entire interview back and said: "try again".
If them, then *why*? You call your selves journalists. Why give up editoriral control?
I hope you have learned that in the future you should tell all interviewees that you reserve the right to reject tripe and give them a chance to answer again or have the story dropped with a notice as to why. Or simply post it to a "hall of interview shame" section, not the front page, for crying out loud. You had options.
... but how often do personal backups actually happen? I'm one of those guys that has been taking home backups seriously for a long time, and has a collection of obsolete tape units to prove it. And backups still do not happen often enough if it requires me handling tape.
Let's face it, discipline is a drag, that is why at work IT people are paid to schlepp around stacks of locked cases full of back up tapes to be shipped off site.
So... for my home file server, I went to RAID mirroring, with a 3rd drive in a drawer. A mount-copy-umount chron job copies to the drawer-drive. Drawer-drive gets swapped and taken off site "when I think of it". Because... RAID only protects you from falling over hard drives. It does not proctect you from:
1) Ooops, I wish I hadn't deleted that.
2) Gack! My house just burned down! And took 10 years of tax data with it!
3) Power supply goes wonky, causing both drives to scribble random scorfulentness everywhere.
A home RAID system does not need to be expensive. Who needs hot swap? Use cheapo PATA drives. A few hours of down time for the wife and kids is OK. It doesn't take a big, bad CPU, and software RAID works great.
Maybe you meant cell phone standards?? Oh wait...
This should have been modded "+1 funny", it sure made *me* laugh.
I thought he meant "spoon" in the veterinary medicine context -- a "spoon" is a specialized knife used to neuter male animals. A dull, rusty spoon seems quite in order to me.
Well, of course, the binary will be larger, by as much as 2x. This is hit in terms of disk space, but disk space is cheap. And also a hit in terms of distribution media space, but CD's are cheap. Notably, it should *not* be a hit in memory utilization, because only the code that you run will be loaded into memory. So it is easy to rationalize building Universal Binaries - the size impact should be minimal in any meaningful way.
But... in days gone by I managed a software validation lab. We did a lot of platform matrix testing -- the test matrix was different CPU's times different OS's times different service packs times different internationaliztion packs.... you get the idea. Just making sure "hello world" compiled and ran with our tools on all platforms, with the single thread C library, with the multi-thread C library, with the correct error messages in Japanese..., when mix-and-match linked with components from German Visual Studio... crikie...
Anyway, doubling the number of CPU's to test on just made life 2x nastier for developers. Let me tell you, any developer with a brain will want to drop the "ancient" platforms ASAP.
In truth, this whole thing has given me Irony Whiplash (tm). 20 years ago I was Mac fanatic. I was the first kid on the block with a Mac I: 68020, 128K and a floppy. My Palm Pilot is more powerful than that box. I ported GNU flex to System 7.0. But Apple lost its way, and I got tired of never having the aps I wanted, and of those that I could get being too expensive. I switched to PC's (Windows and later Linux, too), and even worked at Intel for 10 years on various CPU projects. Now, lately, all I do with my Windows PC at home is photo editing, e-mail, web surf, and a little video editing. That, and remove malware. I need Apple i-Life, I'm fed up with malware. I am switching back. I was about ready to buy an iMac G5 (like next *week*), but now I don't want to get caught cross-wise of a platform transition. Wow!!! They're better, and they are switching to a CPU family I used to help design! Great!... no wait... I need a machine now, and it will be an orphan.... this will be painful!!.. ARRGGHH!!
Is .NET another Microsoft vaporware?
More like tarware. Microsoft is good a pushing technologies that are as sticky and messy and hard to get off of things as roofing tar. You can easily waste a couple of years of your life wading through a Microsoft created tar pit if you don't pick and choose carefully among their technologies.
Frankly, good suggestion. In fact, history is repeating itself.
In the early days of wireless, there was no licensing. It was OK for a while, but as wireless caught on, ship-to-shore, press wireless, and hams all started clobbering each other. The commerce department started issuing licenses, and setting aside frequencies. Eventually, the FCC was formed.
Something akin to a ham license for running a mail server makes sense to me. Kids as young as 7 get ham licenses. I had one at 14. I don't see a license with written exam and paper trail to be any burden to anyone with half a clue about configuring sendmail.
What inputs are acceptable. What inputs should be rejected. What inputs lead to undefined results. What guarantees do you make about the outputs.
A function makes a contract with the outside world. Make the contract clear. Then add assertions. Good assertions are often better than good comments anyway.
Yes, this is a "+5 funny" but in reality, most hibred crops are "copy protected". With maize (a.k.a. "corn" in the USA) for instance, it requires an extra cross to stabilize the hibred, but the unstabilized generation performs perfectly well. Don't do the cross, and you have very effective copy protection. The problem with those pesky soybeans is that they don't perform well as an unstabilized hibred.
Yes, what if it is cracked, or your house burns down, or the cpu goes nuts and scribbles on every online drive, or you decide "oooops, why did I delete that" a day after your sync-up cron job runs.
My solution on the home file server:
1) shares are all on a RAID 1 array consisting of two cheap ATA drives. Yes, I need to take a down time to swap a dead drive. I don't care, it is a *home* file server, not one with zillions of users.
2) the backup volume is an SATA drive in a swap drawer.
3) backup cron job does mount/backup/unmount. So backup volume is not mounted except when needed. Theory is that this will reduce likelyhood of random scribbles on all mounted drives.
4) "when I remember" I swap the backup volume in the draw for another one, and take the just removed drive to the bank and plop it into a safety deposit box. A rotation of 3 drives does quite nicely.
Oh... and of course it is on a UPS.
yea, I especially like the fact that with Outlook/Exchange (OK, 3 years ago when I used it) if you try to open a .txt file it prompts "Are you sure you want to open this attachement?" but if the e-mail contains VB-script, it just goes ahead and runs it as soon as it appears in the preview pane... *sheesh*
because: it's humor. and it *is* funny. not snort-earl-gray-through-my-nose funny, but a chuckle.
second: i'm only passingly familiar with Gentoo, so the story and the comments have given me a flavor of why i might want to try it someday. for instance, to make a minimal-footprint build on an old, cramped laptop or something. the experiment could be good humor, too.
for the record, i'm a Slackie... Slackware never surprises me. and that is good.
have the child evaluated at the Family Hope Center
.. that misinterpreted the headline and thought I'd be getting speeding tickets on my cell phone as I drove past a trooper?
Ummm... no wait... I don't speed... I was thinking about that *neighbor* kid getting a speeding ticket....
Although I feel the same way for the same reason, I do see some value in this. Competitions of any sort push the techno envelope in some direction according to the rules of the competition. Non-competition applications benefit from the learning.
In the case of combat robots, even R/C ones, there is a lot of work that goes into drive train reliability and basic survivabilty. And of course, doing it all at a reasonable cost so that when you get toasted by the other guy's flame thrower or buzz saw, it doesn't wipe out the development budget.
So, while I have little personal interest in creating a combat robot, especially an R/C one, I am quite happy to steal any good drive train and general reliability ideas that they come up with, especially the low-cost one.
I recall a product called "Magna-See" or some such. This was in the GCR tape era -- strictly 9 track, nobody was using less dense than 800 BPI in those days, in fact 800 BPI was hard to find, most were doing either 1600 BPI or GCR. I guess I am exposing myself as a youngster.
OH, BTW -- ssg r00lz! (ssg may have been called sgr back in the Univac III days...)