When I PGP a file, it shrinks to same or smaller than when I standard zip it. Isn't that secure / small? Or am I horribly confused?
Yes, encryption benefits from compression because it makes the data look more random - there are fewer repeating patterns in the plaintext once it's compressed so there are fewer patterns in the ciphertext too(i.e. it's harder to do a dictionary attack).
I get great compression results from creating archives as.tar.pgp, slightly better than.tgz and much better than.zip with "encryption" turned on, and much more secure too.
GROMACS is the main simulation program we use. Its very well programmed, optimized, and GPL to boot. I hope that the software I write will have this sort of functionality and optimization
Indeed, this is one of the cases in which CPU is really useful. I think GROMACS is the core of what Folding@Home do. But you can bet they developed it on much smaller systems and proved it for trivial cases based on deep understanding of the theory and algorithms before making it scale to supercomputers.
I can't think of a reason why we shouldn't be getting hyped about these teraflops. We use a 8 node AppleSeed cluster at work and I've seen that thing hump out 4-6 gigaflops of crunching power. It takes as long as a week to run some of our molecular dynamics simulations. If we had 10 teraflops of power in our hands those simulations could take somewhere on the order of minutes instead of days.
As an aside, I have to wonder whether or not that's a good thing. I have noticed in myself and almost everyone I've worked with that having massive amounts of CPU at your disposal makes you sloppy - people tend to take a "shotgun" approach, rather than thinking through a problem, they just "try something" until it works. Of course in some cases, CPU really is cheaper than developer time, but in just as many cases, it's an excuse for laziness. I see this all the time, people will build an over-complex solution using technologies like J2EE and EJBs when something much simpler and more efficient would suffice. For another example, every Slashbot who has complained about bloat in MS Office knows exactly what I mean.
Roll on the teraflops, but not before developers have the self-discipline to use them well.
Anyways, what I'm trying to point out is that it is actually becoming very convinient to build a super computer with lots of PCs that just lie idle. I am not sure if Saddam has heard about cheap linux systems. But what if he could build a super computer cluster?
Well, it depends. A Linux cluster is a good way to render a movie, because you can easily parallelize that task - send a frame to each node you've got, wait for it to come back, send out the next one, then when you're done composite them into an animation. That's easy, because you can make each task essentially stateless. For example, you don't have to wait for frame 1 to rasterize before you know how to light frame 2.
But in many scientific computations, there is a limit to how you can subdivide a task. Say you are modelling the movement of a gas in 3 dimensional space, you cannot partition your space 3x3x3 and send it to 27 compute nodes, because what happens in each partition both influences and is influenced by what happens in adjacent partitions. If you did try to do something like this on a cluster designed for rendering movies (or brute forcing a cipher, or serving web pages) performance would be terrible because of the overhead of communication between nodes. For that, a Single System Image machine has a vast advantage.
So the question is (and I don't know, I didn't study nuclear physics beyond A-level), are the significant computational problems associated with the development of nuclear weapons easy to parallelize, or do they require a real supercomputer?
If people bought things based on reason, they would pick the products that met their needs for the best price. Instead, we have marketers that convince people to buy things based on "brand" or "image" or something fuzzy like that. That's the reason why Nike sells so many ugly high priced shoes, when for most people a cheaper shoe would do.
Ah, you are misunderstanding need. Consider: do people just want to keep their feet warm and to avoid slipping on the pavement? No, they want to look good and make a statement about themselves. Nike create a brand image, and people who buy their products do so because they want to associate themselves with that image. Look up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People always buy products that represent the lifestyle they aspire to. The fact that they are exclusive is a big part of that - otherwise you might as well wear cardboard boxes on your feet.
Microsoft believes many of its efforts to market its products against Linux and open source are backfiring, according to a memo posted on the Internet.
Particularly ineffective tactics include legal arguments and name-calling, the memo says.
So it's really just Microsoft's version of the advocacy howto.
wouldn't it have made more sense to donate to the #1 country (Africa) dealing with an AIDS epidemic than #2 (India)?
Silly American, don't you even know that Africa is a continent, not a country? What makes you think you are qualified to comment on anything outside of Iowa?
hmm.. marketing and product development are two VERY different things, no?
Marketing is the process by which companies work out what the market wants, and how its products can meet that want. Good marketing - and no-one can deny that Microsoft are excellent marketers - is tightly integrated with development, so that customer demands can influence development priorities and technological developments can be pitched to customers. There should also be a lot of cross pollination, it's not uncommon for developers to do a stint as "pre-sales engineers" and marketers to do a stint as a "product manager".
Really, is the Microsoft memo so different from this and similar documents?
Organizations refine their marketing all the time. And incidentally, Linux and open source in general is the #1 threat to Microsoft... and also to Sun. I don't doubt there is a similar pro-Solaris, pro-SPARC, anti-Linux, anti-Intel memo within Sun's sales organization.
And lastly. Let's assume that some company did develop a voting system that was used. Would you really want a single entity in such a power role. What if it were Microsoft, IBM, or heaven forbid Oracle or SUN? Could you trust the system? I mean really trust, more than 90% trust it? Probably not.
*LOL* Who would you trust then, the CIA, FBI and NSA?
Large companies have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted with the power they wield.
And large, faceless government bureaucracies are to be trusted, I suppose?
I feel for America to progress we must change the voting system. An intermediate step might be to have none of the above on the ballot. The next step would be for none of the above to be the dafault, if you do not show your vote goes to none of the above. Where I would like to see the US system end up is with a lottery.
IIRC, the Thais have a system like this. If "none of the above" wins, the election has to be re-held with completely different candidates.
We would see a reduction in business and military interests and an increase in eduction and healthcare.
No, you would see the acts of government more accurately reflect the will of the people. Could be that the people prefer jobs and security, and to keep health and education out of the hands of the political system altogether. Or maybe not. Either way, you are making the same mistake as the politicians you distrust if you assume that the will of the people just so happens to coincide neatly with your own personal desires.
I can't believe this got moderated as "insightful." Crap like Indys and O2s is what put SGI in a bad place to begin with. SGI always had fantastic graphics technology and a kick-ass operating system. When they tried to sell low-end workstations-- Indys and O2s running IRIX, and all the stupid stuff with Intel machines running NT and Linux-- their net revenues went into the toilet.
Not quite true. After all, in 1994 an Indy had better price/performance than a comparable Pentium system... and a Pentium couldn't touch a fully loaded Indy. With better marketing, SGI could have dominated the high end 2D and low end 3D space, driving out Apple and Intergraph, and continued to hold high-end 3D. I agree that NT was a colossal mistake for them, and they aren't recovered from that mistake next.
It's when SGI de-focuses to talk about stuff like PCs with fancy cases or video servers or data mining software that they start to lose their way.
SGI servers are fantastic for large databases, the features that make them great for rendering and number crunching (high memory bandwidth, very fast disk I/O, single system image) can easily be applied to databases. The Origins should be wiping the floor with Sun's Fire range. It's a marketing failure, not a technology failure.
This isn't SGI finding a new reason to exist. This is SGI going back to what has always been one of its best reasons to exist. Over time, SGI's technical lead in graphics has diminished, fueled primarily by (believe it or not) home computer games. But even now, nobody can touch SGI for high-performance scalable servers like the 3900.
It has diminished true, but it still exists. There isn't a PC that can touch the Fuel workstation, for example.
The Japanese made an order of magnitude increase in processing power and you think this toy from SGI is leading edge? LOL
SGI will happily sell you a 512-processor machine if you want one. The innovation in the 3900 is compute power/m^3, not raw power. It just so happens that the Origin 3000 has got the raw power too.
SGI is rapidly becoming the transmeta of super computer manafacturers. There product fills a very small niche, yet all the stupid kids like you think they're so neat.
Don;t write them off so quickly. There are plenty of things that only an SGI can do. There are circa-1993 Indigo2's still on people's desks (being used for things like Gladiator), because even a 2002 PC can't do some of the things they can do. SGI are a niche vendor, true... but so is Mercedes.
As an aside the open critical component in a supercomputer is memory, fast memory, whith out that it matters not a jot how quickly your processors work. So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?
Put it this way: internal bandwidth in an SGI workstation is 3.2Gb/s. Can your peecee do that?
However, Nazism promotes hate towards other human beings; communism does not. When one promotes Nazism, one automatically promotes "hate speech" because the hatred for Jewish/homosexual/disabled people is an inherent aspect of Nazism. Communism, on the other hand, does not promote hatred; it promotes the change of an economic system. Besides, Soviet Russia wasn't communist anyway; it's "Stalinist".
You cannot directly compare Communism to Nazism. One is an abstract theory, the other a practical implementation. You can compare Nazism (which shoudl really be called Hitlerism) to Stalinism, and Communism to Fascism. Note that both Communism and Fascism can be utopian in theory.
I've said in another thread that altho' the modern-day left would have you believe Hitler and Stalin were ideological foes, it simply isn't true. It would be more accurate to characterize them as rivals. Both ran police states with all political power concentrated in the hands of a single individual, both ran command economies, both oppressed and persecuted ethnic minorities, both had expansionist foreign policies. In any practical sense, there is no difference between Nazism and Stalinism. If the Swastika is banned, then the Hammer & Sickle should be too - and if it isn't, the true agenda of the CoE is revealed.
Just because a group did evil acts in the name of an ideology, doesn't automatically make it "hate speech"; however when hatred is a fundamental part of an ideology, it is hate speech
It's impossible to implement Communism without slavery, just as it is impossible to implement Fascism without feudalism. Hasn't stopped anyone trying, tho'.
Democratic capitalism isn't a perfect way to run a political and economic system, but it's the least-worst practical compromise (at our current level of technology).
Complex systems have more individual breakdowns than simple systems because they have more components to break. But, they are less likely to collapse than simple systems.
I strongly suggest you read this. A quick summary is that complex societies are vulnerable because of the investment they need to make in creating the complexity and the overhead needed to maintain it. Complex societies can "fade away" when the overhead of maintaining the complexity does not generate a return; this happened to the Romans, whose decline took centuries, as a greater and greater proportion of the economy's capacity had to be diverted into maintaining complexity. In more recent times it happened to the Soviet Empire. Note that the collapse of these particular societies wasn't cataclysmic; the people were mostly OK, the political structures weren't.
Or they can collapse abruptly because they have no slack built in... if you are a simple society with lots of people working on vanity projects like monumental architecture (say temples or cities or pyramids or whatever), then you have plenty of capacity that can be reassigned; it would be very easy to turn this mass of people into an army if you needed one, or detach some temporarily for disaster relief, or permanently to become farmers. It's all different sorts of manual labour anyway, so you can re-skill people quickly and easily. Any advanced society that abruptly and mysteriously disappeared probably did so because it faced a cataclysm it couldn't cope with.
But in a complex and efficient society where everyone has a specialized role with hard-to-learn skills, there is no spare capacity and even if there was, you couldn't train those people fast enough to deal with a crisis. These societies collapse abruptly.
Seeing as the climate has been changing rapidly in the last hundred years. Could it also be a result of the declining magnetic field?
Yes, indeed it could. There is some evidence that the Earth is getting warmer (some parts are warmer, some are colder, some are unchanged), and there is definite evidence of increasing amounts of various chemical compounds in the atmosphere, but the relationship is correlation, not causality. It is just as likely that so-called "global warming" is a result of reducing magnetic field strength or increased solar flare activity.
We sure as hell weren't living in industrial countires 1 million years ago. I'm sure we'll notice ths, but I doubt there'll be any mass extinction (of course, I am making assumptions here).
That makes extinction more likely, not less. A modern society cannot revert to a pre-industrial state without 90% or more of its population dying in the process... subsistence farming simply can't support a population that grew on mechanized industrial farming. Not only that but most of the people won't have farming skills or tools, and there will be a sizeable minority who decide to just take by force rather than farm, which has a net result of reducing the chances of survival for everyone. Modern medicine and hygiene also means that our immune systems will have lost some of its capability.
If there is a cataclysm, any human survivors will probably be the natives of the Brazilian rainforests, if there are any left by then. How ironic that they can't survive the encroachment of modern civilization but could survive something that a modern civilization couldn't.
This kind ofstuff is great. Appletakes advantage of open protocols like webDAV to implement their services, and they'll still make lots of money off of.Mac.
It's still counterproductive. Consider the following business model:
Invest time and money in the development of a commercial product that uses an open protocol
Wait for some random hacker to reverse engineer the product from his parent's basement and give it away for free
Profit!!!
Or, not. If the Open Source community wants to encourage the use of open protocols, this isn't the way to do it - unless the intention all along was just to make it easier to wait for a commercial entity to create a product then clone it.
I didn't say he wasn't. I just think he's a pompous self-centered.... that goes out of his way to point out he has a lot of money and power and thinks it gives him some right to 'predict' things unlike a scientist that works his whole life to make 'visionary predictions'.
Actually he seems quite modest. From the NYT article:
Mr. Gates was worth nearly $75 billion in Microsoft holdings alone. Now, he is about $40 billion lighter, on paper, but he shrugs it off. "My value is still so much higher than I ever expected it to be by a factor of about 50," Mr. Gates said. "So the fact that at one point it was say, a factor of 60, well -- that wealth is all going back to society anyway."
I don't know if you ever read the first edition of The Road Ahead, but he did get a lot of things very wrong (the most practical being he didn't see the web coming and thought people would prefer MSN). At least he learnt from his mistakes and moved on.
So, someone who knows... Are these threading systems good for different things? And would it really be that hard to make them both come with the kernel?
They both implement the POSIX threading API (a good thing IMHO). NPTL is more radical; the IBM team made a conscious decision to keep the impact of their changes to the minimum. For that reason, I expect that NGPT will be accepted; it has a shorter path to deployment in production systems, even though NPTL is a more "correct" solution (i.e. it uses purely kernel threads). But it changes userspace, libc and the kernel - it will be much harder to verify.
Are these threading systems good for different things? And would it really be that hard to make them both come with the kernel?
Developers shouldn't care, or more accurately it doesn't matter for them. Both implement POSIX threads, so it simply depends what is installed on the system on which their code ends up running - the same application code will work the same on both, altho' each will have its "quirks". Sysadmins will prefer the NGPT because it is easier to deploy and test. Linux purists will prefer NPTL because a) it's the "right" way to do it, and b) it was written by Red Hat.
They could both come with the kernel source and you could choose one when you compiled it. I don't see how they could coexist on a single system.
But are Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie constantly putting out books about their visionary abilities, or listing themselves as 'philanthropists' in microsoft encarta?
I dunno, are they donating $1.2 billion/year to charity? I think that counts as philanthropy (look it up in the dictionary).
It's impossible to predict what people will do with their bandwith. Saying all we really need is a phone line and electric power is kind of like saying that all we will ever need is 640K of RAM.
And y'know what, the creators of Unix thought that all we would ever need was a command line. Times change, people and technology change with them. Last time I checked Windows could address just as much memory as Linux can. By all means flame Microsoft if you have a legitimate grievance, but dredging up this old and apocryphal quote does not strengthen your argument one whit.
Many non-tech businesses require broadband Internet access. For example, a retailer of outdoor apparel might want to set up a modest e-commerce site. A patent attorney might need to do online patent searches. I know someone that moved from Missouri because he runs a small business and could not get broadband. He is now in Northern, VA.
Broadband in this context is DSL, which is a consumer service - typically upstream speed is much lower than downstream, and contention is between 20:1 and 50:1. This sort of service is designed for people who pull lots of content down, but don't send much back, and who don't require a guaranteed minimum bandwidth availability at any one time.
It might be suitable for connecting an office that downloads content and only sends email back, but it's not suitable for anyone running a business-critical server. Tell your friend he needs a T1 (or a fractional T1). This will give you the upstream capacity you need for serving a web site.
Slashdot Mirror
He must've been looking for the secret blueprints for the prevention of tooth decay...
Just be thankful that the geniuses at MIT invented the elasticated waist and made America safe for Truth, Justice and the Chicken Parm Sub.
When I PGP a file, it shrinks to same or smaller than when I standard zip it. Isn't that secure / small? Or am I horribly confused?
.tar.pgp, slightly better than .tgz and much better than .zip with "encryption" turned on, and much more secure too.
Yes, encryption benefits from compression because it makes the data look more random - there are fewer repeating patterns in the plaintext once it's compressed so there are fewer patterns in the ciphertext too(i.e. it's harder to do a dictionary attack).
I get great compression results from creating archives as
GROMACS is the main simulation program we use. Its very well programmed, optimized, and GPL to boot. I hope that the software I write will have this sort of functionality and optimization
Indeed, this is one of the cases in which CPU is really useful. I think GROMACS is the core of what Folding@Home do. But you can bet they developed it on much smaller systems and proved it for trivial cases based on deep understanding of the theory and algorithms before making it scale to supercomputers.
I can't think of a reason why we shouldn't be getting hyped about these teraflops. We use a 8 node AppleSeed cluster at work and I've seen that thing hump out 4-6 gigaflops of crunching power. It takes as long as a week to run some of our molecular dynamics simulations. If we had 10 teraflops of power in our hands those simulations could take somewhere on the order of minutes instead of days.
As an aside, I have to wonder whether or not that's a good thing. I have noticed in myself and almost everyone I've worked with that having massive amounts of CPU at your disposal makes you sloppy - people tend to take a "shotgun" approach, rather than thinking through a problem, they just "try something" until it works. Of course in some cases, CPU really is cheaper than developer time, but in just as many cases, it's an excuse for laziness. I see this all the time, people will build an over-complex solution using technologies like J2EE and EJBs when something much simpler and more efficient would suffice. For another example, every Slashbot who has complained about bloat in MS Office knows exactly what I mean.
Roll on the teraflops, but not before developers have the self-discipline to use them well.
Anyways, what I'm trying to point out is that it is actually becoming very convinient to build a super computer with lots of PCs that just lie idle. I am not sure if Saddam has heard about cheap linux systems. But what if he could build a super computer cluster?
Well, it depends. A Linux cluster is a good way to render a movie, because you can easily parallelize that task - send a frame to each node you've got, wait for it to come back, send out the next one, then when you're done composite them into an animation. That's easy, because you can make each task essentially stateless. For example, you don't have to wait for frame 1 to rasterize before you know how to light frame 2.
But in many scientific computations, there is a limit to how you can subdivide a task. Say you are modelling the movement of a gas in 3 dimensional space, you cannot partition your space 3x3x3 and send it to 27 compute nodes, because what happens in each partition both influences and is influenced by what happens in adjacent partitions. If you did try to do something like this on a cluster designed for rendering movies (or brute forcing a cipher, or serving web pages) performance would be terrible because of the overhead of communication between nodes. For that, a Single System Image machine has a vast advantage.
So the question is (and I don't know, I didn't study nuclear physics beyond A-level), are the significant computational problems associated with the development of nuclear weapons easy to parallelize, or do they require a real supercomputer?
If people bought things based on reason, they would pick the products that met their needs for the best price. Instead, we have marketers that convince people to buy things based on "brand" or "image" or something fuzzy like that. That's the reason why Nike sells so many ugly high priced shoes, when for most people a cheaper shoe would do.
Ah, you are misunderstanding need. Consider: do people just want to keep their feet warm and to avoid slipping on the pavement? No, they want to look good and make a statement about themselves. Nike create a brand image, and people who buy their products do so because they want to associate themselves with that image. Look up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People always buy products that represent the lifestyle they aspire to. The fact that they are exclusive is a big part of that - otherwise you might as well wear cardboard boxes on your feet.
From the article:
So it's really just Microsoft's version of the advocacy howto.
wouldn't it have made more sense to donate to the #1 country (Africa) dealing with an AIDS epidemic than #2 (India)?
Silly American, don't you even know that Africa is a continent, not a country? What makes you think you are qualified to comment on anything outside of Iowa?
Fortunately, Gates does.
hmm.. marketing and product development are two VERY different things, no?
Marketing is the process by which companies work out what the market wants, and how its products can meet that want. Good marketing - and no-one can deny that Microsoft are excellent marketers - is tightly integrated with development, so that customer demands can influence development priorities and technological developments can be pitched to customers. There should also be a lot of cross pollination, it's not uncommon for developers to do a stint as "pre-sales engineers" and marketers to do a stint as a "product manager".
Really, is the Microsoft memo so different from this and similar documents?
Organizations refine their marketing all the time. And incidentally, Linux and open source in general is the #1 threat to Microsoft... and also to Sun. I don't doubt there is a similar pro-Solaris, pro-SPARC, anti-Linux, anti-Intel memo within Sun's sales organization.
And lastly. Let's assume that some company did develop a voting system that was used. Would you really want a single entity in such a power role. What if it were Microsoft, IBM, or heaven forbid Oracle or SUN? Could you trust the system? I mean really trust, more than 90% trust it? Probably not.
*LOL* Who would you trust then, the CIA, FBI and NSA?
Large companies have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted with the power they wield.
And large, faceless government bureaucracies are to be trusted, I suppose?
Give me Microsoft over these any day!
I feel for America to progress we must change the voting system. An intermediate step might be to have none of the above on the ballot. The next step would be for none of the above to be the dafault, if you do not show your vote goes to none of the above. Where I would like to see the US system end up is with a lottery.
IIRC, the Thais have a system like this. If "none of the above" wins, the election has to be re-held with completely different candidates.
We would see a reduction in business and military interests and an increase in eduction and healthcare.
No, you would see the acts of government more accurately reflect the will of the people. Could be that the people prefer jobs and security, and to keep health and education out of the hands of the political system altogether. Or maybe not. Either way, you are making the same mistake as the politicians you distrust if you assume that the will of the people just so happens to coincide neatly with your own personal desires.
I can't believe this got moderated as "insightful." Crap like Indys and O2s is what put SGI in a bad place to begin with. SGI always had fantastic graphics technology and a kick-ass operating system. When they tried to sell low-end workstations-- Indys and O2s running IRIX, and all the stupid stuff with Intel machines running NT and Linux-- their net revenues went into the toilet.
Not quite true. After all, in 1994 an Indy had better price/performance than a comparable Pentium system... and a Pentium couldn't touch a fully loaded Indy. With better marketing, SGI could have dominated the high end 2D and low end 3D space, driving out Apple and Intergraph, and continued to hold high-end 3D. I agree that NT was a colossal mistake for them, and they aren't recovered from that mistake next.
It's when SGI de-focuses to talk about stuff like PCs with fancy cases or video servers or data mining software that they start to lose their way.
SGI servers are fantastic for large databases, the features that make them great for rendering and number crunching (high memory bandwidth, very fast disk I/O, single system image) can easily be applied to databases. The Origins should be wiping the floor with Sun's Fire range. It's a marketing failure, not a technology failure.
This isn't SGI finding a new reason to exist. This is SGI going back to what has always been one of its best reasons to exist. Over time, SGI's technical lead in graphics has diminished, fueled primarily by (believe it or not) home computer games. But even now, nobody can touch SGI for high-performance scalable servers like the 3900.
It has diminished true, but it still exists. There isn't a PC that can touch the Fuel workstation, for example.
The Japanese made an order of magnitude increase in processing power and you think this toy from SGI is leading edge? LOL
SGI will happily sell you a 512-processor machine if you want one. The innovation in the 3900 is compute power/m^3, not raw power. It just so happens that the Origin 3000 has got the raw power too.
SGI is rapidly becoming the transmeta of super computer manafacturers. There product fills a very small niche, yet all the stupid kids like you think they're so neat.
Don;t write them off so quickly. There are plenty of things that only an SGI can do. There are circa-1993 Indigo2's still on people's desks (being used for things like Gladiator), because even a 2002 PC can't do some of the things they can do. SGI are a niche vendor, true... but so is Mercedes.
As an aside the open critical component in a supercomputer is memory, fast memory, whith out that it matters not a jot how quickly your processors work. So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?
Put it this way: internal bandwidth in an SGI workstation is 3.2Gb/s. Can your peecee do that?
perhaps someday MS would like to try a light install. Give me XP w/o the Fisher Price colors, w/o the various menu display methods
That's pretty much what runs on the X-box, isn't it?
However, Nazism promotes hate towards other human beings; communism does not. When one promotes Nazism, one automatically promotes "hate speech" because the hatred for Jewish/homosexual/disabled people is an inherent aspect of Nazism. Communism, on the other hand, does not promote hatred; it promotes the change of an economic system. Besides, Soviet Russia wasn't communist anyway; it's "Stalinist".
You cannot directly compare Communism to Nazism. One is an abstract theory, the other a practical implementation. You can compare Nazism (which shoudl really be called Hitlerism) to Stalinism, and Communism to Fascism. Note that both Communism and Fascism can be utopian in theory.
I've said in another thread that altho' the modern-day left would have you believe Hitler and Stalin were ideological foes, it simply isn't true. It would be more accurate to characterize them as rivals. Both ran police states with all political power concentrated in the hands of a single individual, both ran command economies, both oppressed and persecuted ethnic minorities, both had expansionist foreign policies. In any practical sense, there is no difference between Nazism and Stalinism. If the Swastika is banned, then the Hammer & Sickle should be too - and if it isn't, the true agenda of the CoE is revealed.
Just because a group did evil acts in the name of an ideology, doesn't automatically make it "hate speech"; however when hatred is a fundamental part of an ideology, it is hate speech
It's impossible to implement Communism without slavery, just as it is impossible to implement Fascism without feudalism. Hasn't stopped anyone trying, tho'.
Democratic capitalism isn't a perfect way to run a political and economic system, but it's the least-worst practical compromise (at our current
level of technology).
Complex systems have more individual breakdowns than simple systems because they have more components to break. But, they are less likely to collapse than simple systems.
I strongly suggest you read this. A quick summary is that complex societies are vulnerable because of the investment they need to make in creating the complexity and the overhead needed to maintain it. Complex societies can "fade away" when the overhead of maintaining the complexity does not generate a return; this happened to the Romans, whose decline took centuries, as a greater and greater proportion of the economy's capacity had to be diverted into maintaining complexity. In more recent times it happened to the Soviet Empire. Note that the collapse of these particular societies wasn't cataclysmic; the people were mostly OK, the political structures weren't.
Or they can collapse abruptly because they have no slack built in... if you are a simple society with lots of people working on vanity projects like monumental architecture (say temples or cities or pyramids or whatever), then you have plenty of capacity that can be reassigned; it would be very easy to turn this mass of people into an army if you needed one, or detach some temporarily for disaster relief, or permanently to become farmers. It's all different sorts of manual labour anyway, so you can re-skill people quickly and easily. Any advanced society that abruptly and mysteriously disappeared probably did so because it faced a cataclysm it couldn't cope with.
But in a complex and efficient society where everyone has a specialized role with hard-to-learn skills, there is no spare capacity and even if there was, you couldn't train those people fast enough to deal with a crisis. These societies collapse abruptly.
Seeing as the climate has been changing rapidly in the last hundred years. Could it also be a result of the declining magnetic field?
Yes, indeed it could. There is some evidence that the Earth is getting warmer (some parts are warmer, some are colder, some are unchanged), and there is definite evidence of increasing amounts of various chemical compounds in the atmosphere, but the relationship is correlation, not causality. It is just as likely that so-called "global warming" is a result of reducing magnetic field strength or increased solar flare activity.
We sure as hell weren't living in industrial countires 1 million years ago. I'm sure we'll notice ths, but I doubt there'll be any mass extinction (of course, I am making assumptions here).
That makes extinction more likely, not less. A modern society cannot revert to a pre-industrial state without 90% or more of its population dying in the process... subsistence farming simply can't support a population that grew on mechanized industrial farming. Not only that but most of the people won't have farming skills or tools, and there will be a sizeable minority who decide to just take by force rather than farm, which has a net result of reducing the chances of survival for everyone. Modern medicine and hygiene also means that our immune systems will have lost some of its capability.
If there is a cataclysm, any human survivors will probably be the natives of the Brazilian rainforests, if there are any left by then. How ironic that they can't survive the encroachment of modern civilization but could survive something that a modern civilization couldn't.
It's still counterproductive. Consider the following business model:
Or, not. If the Open Source community wants to encourage the use of open protocols, this isn't the way to do it - unless the intention all along was just to make it easier to wait for a commercial entity to create a product then clone it.
Actually he seems quite modest. From the NYT article:
I don't know if you ever read the first edition of The Road Ahead, but he did get a lot of things very wrong (the most practical being he didn't see the web coming and thought people would prefer MSN). At least he learnt from his mistakes and moved on.
So, someone who knows... Are these threading systems good for different things? And would it really be that hard to make them both come with the kernel?
They both implement the POSIX threading API (a good thing IMHO). NPTL is more radical; the IBM team made a conscious decision to keep the impact of their changes to the minimum. For that reason, I expect that NGPT will be accepted; it has a shorter path to deployment in production systems, even though NPTL is a more "correct" solution (i.e. it uses purely kernel threads). But it changes userspace, libc and the kernel - it will be much harder to verify.
Are these threading systems good for different things? And would it really be that hard to make them both come with the kernel?
Developers shouldn't care, or more accurately it doesn't matter for them. Both implement POSIX threads, so it simply depends what is installed on the system on which their code ends up running - the same application code will work the same on both, altho' each will have its "quirks". Sysadmins will prefer the NGPT because it is easier to deploy and test. Linux purists will prefer NPTL because a) it's the "right" way to do it, and b) it was written by Red Hat.
They could both come with the kernel source and you could choose one when you compiled it. I don't see how they could coexist on a single system.
But are Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie constantly putting out books about their visionary abilities, or listing themselves as 'philanthropists' in microsoft encarta?
I dunno, are they donating $1.2 billion/year to charity? I think that counts as philanthropy (look it up in the dictionary).
It's impossible to predict what people will do with their bandwith. Saying all we really need is a phone line and electric power is kind of like saying that all we will ever need is 640K of RAM.
And y'know what, the creators of Unix thought that all we would ever need was a command line. Times change, people and technology change with them. Last time I checked Windows could address just as much memory as Linux can. By all means flame Microsoft if you have a legitimate grievance, but dredging up this old and apocryphal quote does not strengthen your argument one whit.
Many non-tech businesses require broadband Internet access. For example, a retailer of outdoor apparel might want to set up a modest e-commerce site. A patent attorney might need to do online patent searches. I know someone that moved from Missouri because he runs a small business and could not get broadband. He is now in Northern, VA.
Broadband in this context is DSL, which is a consumer service - typically upstream speed is much lower than downstream, and contention is between 20:1 and 50:1. This sort of service is designed for people who pull lots of content down, but don't send much back, and who don't require a guaranteed minimum bandwidth availability at any one time.
It might be suitable for connecting an office that downloads content and only sends email back, but it's not suitable for anyone running a business-critical server. Tell your friend he needs a T1 (or a fractional T1). This will give you the upstream capacity you need for serving a web site.