Now go start bad-mouthing the medical profession for God's sake!
*LOL* I shared an apartment with med students when I was at college, let me tell you, don't get taken ill on a Monday morning, most of 'em are still drunk from the weekend!
Yeah, right, on what planet does anyone campaign to pay more tax?
Anyone who votes for a left-wing political party does. Of course, in many cases they are campaigning for other people to be made to pay more taxes, but it's the same difference.
This is the most annoying aspect of email in the workplace. CC'ing somebody's f***** boss as if the recipient is going to think "Ah, he's CC'd my boss, i'd better get a move on with this."
Actually, I prefer it when people cc: my manager. That way I don't have to tell her what I'm working on myself. She doesn't really care what I'm doing, so long as I'm doing something more-or-less useful. I'm in London, she's in NYC. It works pretty well.
Peter Moluneux has gone on record stating that creating a successful video game is too expensive for the smaller developers. According to this BBC article he suggests that the government helps the smaller developers to keep them afloat.
Let's face it, Peter Molyneux is overrated. Black and white was very pretty, sure, and it was a good idea, but it got tedious very quickly. It simply wasn't a very good game. He got lucky with a few games early on, that's all.
It's funny, he wants a handout now, but I didn't hear him campaigning for a windfall tax on the games industry in the boom of the late 90s.
Rumor is that it was cancelled by the Wachowski brothers in hopes of coming out with a Super Collectors Special Edition later
This is how it works:
Shoot a movie, but keep all the unused material from the cutting room floor
Every few months, splice some of these back into the film, think of a new name for the film like "Special Edition", "Director's Cut", "Colllector's Edition" or any combination of the above, or reformat it to widescreen. Sell this new film at full price in the stores.
PROFIT!!
Who are the customers? Die hard fans, and relatives who have no idea what to get someone for xmas/birthday but remember that they liked the film when it was on at the cinema. Don't get me wrong, I thought The Matrix was a good film, but it was never a cultural revolution, it was always a franchise.
The main cause of the earth's rotation slowing _during EL Nino years_ is the change in the angular momentum of the earth. This means, that as some point, the angular momentum will change BACK!! Hence, CONSERVATION of momentum. The net effect in the long run is no change in the earth's rotational period due to this phenomenon.
I don't think the conservation argument applies, because the Earth is not a closed thermodynamic system. There is energy coming in from the Sun. If that energy is converted into ocean currents that cancel each other out all well and good, but if the currents start to flow more westwards than eastwards or vice versa, then the rotation can be affected in such a way that there's no guarantee that it will be reset.
This is an interesting attempt not to make bigger programs, but tighter ones. Making the most of what you have. It feels like there is so much available on computers these days, that programs aren't concerned with getting the most out of it, just using as much of the bells and whistles as they can. Imagine using the same mentality on a modern computer!
I think JWZ said it best. Scroll down to the "Random Commentary" section.
. Linux is much better suited to the smaller end of Suns sales and they get most of the development for free. On the other hand Solaris is better tuned for the large end of Sun sales and if they remove the small end from their target it can only get better there.
It doesn't work like that. A big selling point of Solaris is that you can develop your app on little Ultra 5s and run it on big E15Ks seamlessly. For Sun to present a coherent product range, they have no choice but to maintain Solaris at the "low end" of the market. One of the keys to success for any platform is to keep your developers happy. No developers means no apps means no demand for your hardware from customers. But get it right - and Sun generally have in the past - and people will pick an app, then buy Suns to run it on.
Sun needs to realise without the free unixes they currently would be in a very poor position right now.
Yes and no. Sun has definitely benefited from free tools like GCC for people who don't want to spend $$$ on SPARCworks, and has also given away a lot of stuff (ever use NFS, NIS, SNMP, DHCP? Thank Sun for making large contributions to those). But high-end Linux is definitely hurting low-end Sun sales. It is in Sun's short to medium term best interest to put all their effort into Solaris. Remember you've got to survive the short term before you can even worry about the long term.
THe reason why Intel is not interested in the 64-bit desktop is because there isn't really a market for it.
In the consumer space you are correct, but I don't think Intel would sneeze at the workstation market than Sun et al sell into.
However, that does come at the price of legacy support. Of course at this time, I think that is not an issue, but it may hinder AMD's push into the high end.
...so I can say this: SCO are absolute motherfuckers.
OK, but think about this: If a company started using GPL code in a closed-source way, the Slashbots would be up in arms about it. Why then, are we so outraged at the mere idea that SCO might also seek to protect its licenced code?
Frankly, I don't trust most of the standard news stations or papers. Most have alterior motives, if they're not just plain ignorant. btw.. I also have a theory that the entire country is controlled by 2 companies that battle for the top position. See below...
But you don't have to get your news there, you can go right to the source. Read the Reuters Trust Principles. The majority of "retail" news outlets (TV, paper, web, etc) actually buy their news in a raw and objective form from a "wholesale" news service like Reuters (or Dow Jones or AP) then put their own editorial slant on it.
(Disclaimer: I am a Reuters employee, but not on the news side).
Have you ever noticed that when you know a lot about an event or person you are associated with that gets written up in the news paper it is --without exception--grossly wrong? I mean positively without exception its always got factual errors or exaggerations or misstatements. So do you suppose that when you dont know anything about a subject and you read an article, its somehow correct?
The problem is in the definition of "responsible". To a scientist, responsibility is about reporting the results as the experiment precisely and accurately. But a journalist interprets responsibility as being about putting a slant on things "is this good for society? should I let this scientist get away with doing this?". That's a fundamental and intractable difference between two world views.
Another problem is that many journalists - not all but many - were already broadly anti-science before going into the profession. Maybe they just hated science lessons at school, maybe they'd already decided that they were anti-nuclear and could never be persuaded otherwise, maybe they've already decided that corporate science is bad and only university science is good. Not only that, but only other scientists are really interested in good news about science, whereas scandal can sell papers.
Take 3 Mile Island, for example. The local population were exposed to no more radiation than a medical X ray. But to hear the press talk about it, it's as if it was as bad as Chernobyl. And they blame Chernobyl on failings in all nuclear technology, rather than untrained operators running unauthorized experiments. Fortunately, nowadays, you can get your science news direct from the lab rather than a mass-market paper.
Err, these are competing philosophies. You can't have both types of scheduling going on. Think about it: you have an interactive process which wants to use all the CPU all day long, and you have 6 server processes that want to have balanced scheduling for the clients they are handling. No matter what the scheduler chooses, it is being unfaithful to your bit for each process.
Check out the Solaris 9 Resource Manager, which can do both types. It allows you specify at a high level how much of the system's resources each group of processes gets under which conditions. You could say for example, group A (interactive) gets up to 100% unless group B (batch) needs some, in which case allow B up to 30% during the day and up to 70% at night. You could do this sort of thing in VMS over a decade ago. Also, even if the underlying OS doesn't give you the capability, an Oracle server running batch and interactive tasks can do it too.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently proposed a patch to offer interactive processes a boost, greatly benefiting the X desktop, as well as music and movie players. O(1) scheduler author Ingo Molnar merged Linus' patch into his own interactivity efforts, the end result nothing short of amazing... The upcoming 2.6 kernel is looking to be a desktop user's dream come true
The "feature" of biasing the scheduler either towards interactive proceses or to background processes has been around since NT 3.51, if I remember correctly. It was definitely in NT4, released in 1994 (again, IIRC). So, while this is welcome, it's not an innovation, and saying that Linus "proposed" it is misleading.
I was wondering if anyone has ever though about using their DNS servers to provide mirror information? A specially formated TXT-record could easily provide a DNS-cache-friendly mirror listing.
Akamai already do something like this, and they didn't need to extend the DNS protocol in any way. They even provide the mirrors for you, if you use their service, and take care of ensuring that users get redirected to the nearest mirror. Sure beats having to scroll through a long list like you have to on sites that mirror the old-fashioned way, particularly since a site physically close to you might actually have less bandwidth than a faraway one.
Right now everyone uses Sun machines to design, but you can get a cheaper Linux x86 machine that is four times faster. So it is my job to prove that Linux works. The problem is that I'm an analog circuit designer stuck in the role of sysadmin.
Most engineering work, whether it's CFD and FEA or ICE is bound by memory bandwidth, not CPU speed. It requires the construction of very large in-memory data structures, which see a combination of random access and sequential traversal. Before you assert that an x86 machine is 4x faster, benchmark it with the actual applications you use, don't rely on SPECmarks and the like, which can run entirely in cache, because benchmarks aren't representative of real applications. And if you've got UPA in your workstation (like say the old Ultra 1) then no bus-based x86 can match you for I/O. If you want workstation-class hardware, it costs more than a PC.
This is my experience: for benchmarks, my 1Ghz P3 beats my 225Mhz Octane easily, but for work, the Octane runs rings around the PC - one I/O bound task and the PC is almost unusable 'til it completes, but the Octane can max out its disks, run at 100% CPU and still remain responsive. I see similar comparing PC with Sun.
Secondly, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying a piece of hardware, you're buying a service. Support and maintenance you can get are far, far beyond what you can expect from an x86 vendor. If a part goes bad, you can get it replaced in a few hours. All the components in your machine have been certified as working together and working with the OS. And can your Linux vendor do this? (No, they can't even stabilise on one libc!) Running a network of workstations for your company's core business is a completely different game than running a network of PCs for ordinary office workers.
Maybe you've heard of it. Your grades are slipping because you play too much EverCrack? Too bad, quit playing EverCrack. Can't quit playing EverCrack? Seek out addiction counseling, it's availabe, often for free. Your ass is getting fat because you've eaten too many cheeseburgers? Quit eating cheesburgers every day.
Damn right, it's like that old joke:
Cute female student: I would do anything to pass this course. Old professor: Anything? Cute female student: Absolutely anything! Old professor: Would you... study?
You obviously don't understand GPL. Please get a fucking clue before posting again.
Yeah, I've read all that "help your friend" stuff. So, what are you saying, if I can "help my friends" by stealing cars, should I do it? Maybe they really, really need their crack, hmmm? The GNU people can wriggle all they like, but what they advocate is collectivization of property, plain and simple, and that dogma has been discredited time and time again.
It may or may not be fair, but fairness is the last thing the free market is concerned with.
Actually, the free market is all about fairness. It's blind to everything but the best product at the best price. I've found that most people are actually thinking of mercantilism when they attack capitalism.
The simple fact is that intellectual property cannot exist without a government mandate. There may be very good reasons that it exists, but that still does not make it a NATURAL right. Natural rights exist whether or not a government says they do.
On the contrary, IP is the most fundamental natural right. Do you own what's in your own head or not? Just as you do not lose ownership of a piece of land if you let someone walk on it, you do not lose ownership of an idea if you let someone know it.
The problem now is that people are claiming property to the very IDEAS being used to create particular products. Amazon's One-Click Patent is a wonderful example of this.
Well, you aren't supposed to be able to patent an idea, only the implementation of an idea. People who are patenting nebulous ideas are abusing the patent system, and the patent system is lax in letting them get away with it.
Now, Amazon could very easily protect and license their overall software package that is used to support their one-click check out. They could sell as many shrink wrapped licenses as they want and use Copyright to protect their "IP" from misappropriation.
Agreed.
Finally, IBM makes its money on SERVICE, not hardware. Sure it doesn't fully embrace all of the principles of the GPL, but they don't embrace all of the principles of proprietary software either. They embrace the principles of "let's get the customer's job done."
A few people have said that, but they're missing the point: whether it's hardware or services, IBM aren't making their money from software or operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Next you will tell me "Woz is nothing special", damn iconoclastic!
:-P
Man, I got a hell of a lot of ACs posting followups to that... you aren't all Lionhead employees are you?
Now go start bad-mouthing the medical profession for God's sake!
*LOL* I shared an apartment with med students when I was at college, let me tell you, don't get taken ill on a Monday morning, most of 'em are still drunk from the weekend!
Yeah, right, on what planet does anyone campaign to pay more tax?
Anyone who votes for a left-wing political party does. Of course, in many cases they are campaigning for other people to be made to pay more taxes, but it's the same difference.
This is the most annoying aspect of email in the workplace. CC'ing somebody's f***** boss as if the recipient is going to think "Ah, he's CC'd my boss, i'd better get a move on with this."
Actually, I prefer it when people cc: my manager. That way I don't have to tell her what I'm working on myself. She doesn't really care what I'm doing, so long as I'm doing something more-or-less useful. I'm in London, she's in NYC. It works pretty well.
Peter Moluneux has gone on record stating that creating a successful video game is too expensive for the smaller developers. According to this BBC article he suggests that the government helps the smaller developers to keep them afloat.
Let's face it, Peter Molyneux is overrated. Black and white was very pretty, sure, and it was a good idea, but it got tedious very quickly. It simply wasn't a very good game. He got lucky with a few games early on, that's all.
It's funny, he wants a handout now, but I didn't hear him campaigning for a windfall tax on the games industry in the boom of the late 90s.
I think that was how Neal Stephenson wrote it in "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" anyway.
Off the top of my head, Windows was a station wagon.
This is how it works:
Who are the customers? Die hard fans, and relatives who have no idea what to get someone for xmas/birthday but remember that they liked the film when it was on at the cinema. Don't get me wrong, I thought The Matrix was a good film, but it was never a cultural revolution, it was always a franchise.
The main cause of the earth's rotation slowing _during EL Nino years_ is the change in the angular momentum of the earth. This means, that as some point, the angular momentum will change BACK!! Hence, CONSERVATION of momentum. The net effect in the long run is no change in the earth's rotational period due to this phenomenon.
I don't think the conservation argument applies, because the Earth is not a closed thermodynamic system. There is energy coming in from the Sun. If that energy is converted into ocean currents that cancel each other out all well and good, but if the currents start to flow more westwards than eastwards or vice versa, then the rotation can be affected in such a way that there's no guarantee that it will be reset.
This is an interesting attempt not to make bigger programs, but tighter ones. Making the most of what you have. It feels like there is so much available on computers these days, that programs aren't concerned with getting the most out of it, just using as much of the bells and whistles as they can. Imagine using the same mentality on a modern computer!
I think JWZ said it best. Scroll down to the "Random Commentary" section.
. Linux is much better suited to the smaller end of Suns sales and they get most of the development for free. On the other hand Solaris is better tuned for the large end of Sun sales and if they remove the small end from their target it can only get better there.
It doesn't work like that. A big selling point of Solaris is that you can develop your app on little Ultra 5s and run it on big E15Ks seamlessly. For Sun to present a coherent product range, they have no choice but to maintain Solaris at the "low end" of the market. One of the keys to success for any platform is to keep your developers happy. No developers means no apps means no demand for your hardware from customers. But get it right - and Sun generally have in the past - and people will pick an app, then buy Suns to run it on.
Sun needs to realise without the free unixes they currently would be in a very poor position right now.
Yes and no. Sun has definitely benefited from free tools like GCC for people who don't want to spend $$$ on SPARCworks, and has also given away a lot of stuff (ever use NFS, NIS, SNMP, DHCP? Thank Sun for making large contributions to those). But high-end Linux is definitely hurting low-end Sun sales. It is in Sun's short to medium term best interest to put all their effort into Solaris. Remember you've got to survive the short term before you can even worry about the long term.
THe reason why Intel is not interested in the 64-bit desktop is because there isn't really a market for it.
In the consumer space you are correct, but I don't think Intel would sneeze at the workstation market than Sun et al sell into.
However, that does come at the price of legacy support. Of course at this time, I think that is not an issue, but it may hinder AMD's push into the high end.
If Apple/Motorola can do it, Intel can do it.
...so I can say this: SCO are absolute motherfuckers.
OK, but think about this: If a company started using GPL code in a closed-source way, the Slashbots would be up in arms about it. Why then, are we so outraged at the mere idea that SCO might also seek to protect its licenced code?
Frankly, I don't trust most of the standard news stations or papers. Most have alterior motives, if they're not just plain ignorant. btw.. I also have a theory that the entire country is controlled by 2 companies that battle for the top position. See below...
But you don't have to get your news there, you can go right to the source. Read the Reuters Trust Principles. The majority of "retail" news outlets (TV, paper, web, etc) actually buy their news in a raw and objective form from a "wholesale" news service like Reuters (or Dow Jones or AP) then put their own editorial slant on it.
(Disclaimer: I am a Reuters employee, but not on the news side).
Have you ever noticed that when you know a lot about an event or person you are associated with that gets written up in the news paper it is --without exception--grossly wrong? I mean positively without exception its always got factual errors or exaggerations or misstatements. So do you suppose that when you dont know anything about a subject and you read an article, its somehow correct?
The problem is in the definition of "responsible". To a scientist, responsibility is about reporting the results as the experiment precisely and accurately. But a journalist interprets responsibility as being about putting a slant on things "is this good for society? should I let this scientist get away with doing this?". That's a fundamental and intractable difference between two world views.
Another problem is that many journalists - not all but many - were already broadly anti-science before going into the profession. Maybe they just hated science lessons at school, maybe they'd already decided that they were anti-nuclear and could never be persuaded otherwise, maybe they've already decided that corporate science is bad and only university science is good. Not only that, but only other scientists are really interested in good news about science, whereas scandal can sell papers.
Take 3 Mile Island, for example. The local population were exposed to no more radiation than a medical X ray. But to hear the press talk about it, it's as if it was as bad as Chernobyl. And they blame Chernobyl on failings in all nuclear technology, rather than untrained operators running unauthorized experiments. Fortunately, nowadays, you can get your science news direct from the lab rather than a mass-market paper.
Err, these are competing philosophies. You can't have both types of scheduling going on. Think about it: you have an interactive process which wants to use all the CPU all day long, and you have 6 server processes that want to have balanced scheduling for the clients they are handling. No matter what the scheduler chooses, it is being unfaithful to your bit for each process.
Check out the Solaris 9 Resource Manager, which can do both types. It allows you specify at a high level how much of the system's resources each group of processes gets under which conditions. You could say for example, group A (interactive) gets up to 100% unless group B (batch) needs some, in which case allow B up to 30% during the day and up to 70% at night. You could do this sort of thing in VMS over a decade ago. Also, even if the underlying OS doesn't give you the capability, an Oracle server running batch and interactive tasks can do it too.
only claim made about him is that he proposed that the way in which Linux uses it be changed. (It would help to actually read the article.)
/. editor not to me ;-)
I'll assume that was addressed to the
Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently proposed a patch to offer interactive processes a boost, greatly benefiting the X desktop, as well as music and movie players. O(1) scheduler author Ingo Molnar merged Linus' patch into his own interactivity efforts, the end result nothing short of amazing... The upcoming 2.6 kernel is looking to be a desktop user's dream come true
The "feature" of biasing the scheduler either towards interactive proceses or to background processes has been around since NT 3.51, if I remember correctly. It was definitely in NT4, released in 1994 (again, IIRC). So, while this is welcome, it's not an innovation, and saying that Linus "proposed" it is misleading.
I was wondering if anyone has ever though about using their DNS servers to provide mirror information? A specially formated TXT-record could easily provide a DNS-cache-friendly mirror listing.
Akamai already do something like this, and they didn't need to extend the DNS protocol in any way. They even provide the mirrors for you, if you use their service, and take care of ensuring that users get redirected to the nearest mirror. Sure beats having to scroll through a long list like you have to on sites that mirror the old-fashioned way, particularly since a site physically close to you might actually have less bandwidth than a faraway one.
Looks like some random "genius" decided he'd make a quick buck on old technology. I'm so sick of this behavior.
Wait, a Slashbot happy that a patent was upheld?
I'd write more but I want to go look at the pig floating outside my window...
Their Windows based PC broke after a year.
If the PC broke, it would have broken with any OS
Right now everyone uses Sun machines to design, but you can get a cheaper Linux x86 machine that is four times faster. So it is my job to prove that Linux works. The problem is that I'm an analog circuit designer stuck in the role of sysadmin.
Most engineering work, whether it's CFD and FEA or ICE is bound by memory bandwidth, not CPU speed. It requires the construction of very large in-memory data structures, which see a combination of random access and sequential traversal. Before you assert that an x86 machine is 4x faster, benchmark it with the actual applications you use, don't rely on SPECmarks and the like, which can run entirely in cache, because benchmarks aren't representative of real applications. And if you've got UPA in your workstation (like say the old Ultra 1) then no bus-based x86 can match you for I/O. If you want workstation-class hardware, it costs more than a PC.
This is my experience: for benchmarks, my 1Ghz P3 beats my 225Mhz Octane easily, but for work, the Octane runs rings around the PC - one I/O bound task and the PC is almost unusable 'til it completes, but the Octane can max out its disks, run at 100% CPU and still remain responsive. I see similar comparing PC with Sun.
Secondly, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying a piece of hardware, you're buying a service. Support and maintenance you can get are far, far beyond what you can expect from an x86 vendor. If a part goes bad, you can get it replaced in a few hours. All the components in your machine have been certified as working together and working with the OS. And can your Linux vendor do this? (No, they can't even stabilise on one libc!) Running a network of workstations for your company's core business is a completely different game than running a network of PCs for ordinary office workers.
Maybe you've heard of it. Your grades are slipping because you play too much EverCrack? Too bad, quit playing EverCrack. Can't quit playing EverCrack? Seek out addiction counseling, it's availabe, often for free. Your ass is getting fat because you've eaten too many cheeseburgers? Quit eating cheesburgers every day.
Damn right, it's like that old joke:
Cute female student: I would do anything to pass this course.
Old professor: Anything?
Cute female student: Absolutely anything!
Old professor: Would you... study?
You obviously don't understand GPL. Please get a fucking clue before posting again.
Yeah, I've read all that "help your friend" stuff. So, what are you saying, if I can "help my friends" by stealing cars, should I do it? Maybe they really, really need their crack, hmmm? The GNU people can wriggle all they like, but what they advocate is collectivization of property, plain and simple, and that dogma has been discredited time and time again.
It may or may not be fair, but fairness is the last thing the free market is concerned with.
Actually, the free market is all about fairness. It's blind to everything but the best product at the best price. I've found that most people are actually thinking of mercantilism when they attack capitalism.
The simple fact is that intellectual property cannot exist without a government mandate. There may be very good reasons that it exists, but that still does not make it a NATURAL right. Natural rights exist whether or not a government says they do.
On the contrary, IP is the most fundamental natural right. Do you own what's in your own head or not? Just as you do not lose ownership of a piece of land if you let someone walk on it, you do not lose ownership of an idea if you let someone know it.
The problem now is that people are claiming property to the very IDEAS being used to create particular products. Amazon's One-Click Patent is a wonderful example of this.
Well, you aren't supposed to be able to patent an idea, only the implementation of an idea. People who are patenting nebulous ideas are abusing the patent system, and the patent system is lax in letting them get away with it.
Now, Amazon could very easily protect and license their overall software package that is used to support their one-click check out. They could sell as many shrink wrapped licenses as they want and use Copyright to protect their "IP" from misappropriation.
Agreed.
Finally, IBM makes its money on SERVICE, not hardware. Sure it doesn't fully embrace all of the principles of the GPL, but they don't embrace all of the principles of proprietary software either. They embrace the principles of "let's get the customer's job done."
A few people have said that, but they're missing the point: whether it's hardware or services, IBM aren't making their money from software or operating systems.