...or XML, or javascript, etc. Look at *BSD. Generally compiled with GCC, a GPL program, but distributed under a different license. Just because the server runs GPL software, doesn't mean that the GPL has to apply to any of the content serves. Heaven forbid the lawsuits if someone decided that they should be able to redistribute copyrighted content served up by Apache.
I don't see where the big dillemma is. We have licenses for server code, and we have plenty of flexibility with copyrighting (or not copyrighting) the content.
I've played around with Pascal a bit, and haven't seen any particular advantages over C++, aside from the traditional academic usage, and I think I'm a bit beyond that now. Still, I'm very interested in Delphi, and a lot of my friends swear by it, but I've been too lazy to try it out. Now I know where to get it. Thanks people!
I'm not a Metallica fan, but I've always appreciated Lars's directness on this matter. I think he's absolutely right that legislation is needed to protect consumer rights. The music industry is pretty cut-throat, and he knows as well as anyone in the business that hell will freeze over before they can come up with their own fair standard licenses. Thankfully he has the guts to admit it.
My watch has two patents engraved in the back of it, and there is surely plenty more patented technology inside. I'm fairly sure that there's nothing particularly revolutionary about this watch, it's just a matter of Timex protecting its engineering efforts. What RAMBUS is doing is not a matter of protecting a specific feat of engineering, but trying to control an entire class of technologies. That's not how patent law is supposed to work. It's supposed to keep someone from taking something apart and make copies and undersell the first maker who sunk so much into R&D. Somehow I suspect that the other memory makers, who are making items that get the same task done (store and retrieve high-speed volatile memory) but in fairly different ways (different chipsets, even) are not making a direct ripoff of RAMBUS technology. While it's true that they may be operating on a principle that RAMBUS is also using, this doesn't mean that general technique should be patentable and enforcable. It just means a specific implementation of it should.
My car probably has a couple hundred, if not thousand patents. Still, my neighbors drive a car made by a different company, and neither of these companies has sued the other any time in recent history.
I share the concerns over privacy matters that this technology brings up, but I don't think it could go as far as Gattaca, at least not any time soon. Sequencing DNA takes a long time. It wouldn't be one of those things where you could instantly identify people, though it might be a useful forensic tool, since you could tell which doorways a person had walked through. Of course, checking them all the time would be a pain, but it would be the kind of thing you'd check if something happened. As far as I can tell, the advantages of security are far greater than the privacy incursions, if any, posed by this technology. That could easily change with time, however.
For starters, an authoritative source would be something about the human eye, rather than a CCD camera. The human brain has more image interpretation hardware and software than SGI and Adobe combined.
Hmmm... 120M cones? I find that very difficult to believe. I suppose I might be off by an order of magnitude, but not 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. I remember some stuff from science class back in 4th grade, and it's amazing how much we can see with what should be terribly inadequate hardware.
The human eye can actually only directly perceive 12 different shades of green. Still, something happens in the software that we can tell the difference between 64k color and 16.7M color.
Can someone find a page that's about the human eye, rather than about CCDs? It's not that yours wasn't informative, but it flies in the face of what I've read elsewhere, and I'd like an authoritative opinion.
This will probably surprise you, but 3,500 receptors is about what the human eye has. I'm not joking. Maybe I'm off by a bit, but that's about the figure. We see with such incredible resolution because our brain puts together lots of information in several different ways, and as long as we see something for more than a half second, the brain can gather enough information to create a high-quality mental image of what we're actually seeing in very poor resolution.
No, I don't know how it works. I just know that it does.
I'm a little curious as to how post number 21, which is chronologically the 4th post visible at +1, could be considered "Redundant".
If the moderator who modded down my previous comment would kindly explain himself/herself in response to this message, I would be very appreciative. It is clear that I have much to learn about the moderation system.
My parents are lawyers, and they frequently get people coming in to their office, asking to help them get their money back from some contract that had a lot of fine details. They didn't always read the contract, and even when they did, they often didn't understand it. In some of these cases it was just sheer stupidity on their part, but when a company tells you that you can get a free computer, and it's not free, that's deceptive advertising. It doesn't matter what you actually pay for, if it's required to get the deal, then it's not really free. Sure, people ought to be more aware of TANSTAAFL, but the average person is goes dumb as a fencepost when you tell them they can get a very expensive and desirable thing for free if they just sign on the dotted line. The government shouldn't protect people from all forms of stupidity, but it should take some reasonable measures when feasible, and this is one of those cases.
This is at least better than what they had before, but it's still a pathetic attempt at truly open source, let alone free (speech) software. Woohoo Sun. Yay. We're all so proud of you.
It's nice to see corporations like IBM heartily embrace open source/free software. It's pathetic to see Sun try to imitate.
Is it possible that this could mark the start of an age in which our desktop chips and our portables are inherently different? I have serious doubts about Intel's ability to scale down Itanium to laptop scale and power consumption. Now it looks like AMD is going the same way, too. Many of the high-performance architectures, PPC joyfully excluded, don't even attempt to be portable. I'd like to think this is just a temporary condition, while manufacturing processes are improved, but I think with the physical limits we're looking at, even PPC may not be too far away on this trend. Hopefully we can see crusoe-like innovation on the portable end to offset the pain, but don't be surprised if portability means a different instruction set in the near future, or at least a different native one, regardless of what may be emulated.
...because I was about to mod down a whole bunch of Natalie Portman posts.
It's only offtopic if you talk about something that won't be in the movie. Considering that this is supposedly when Amidala and Anakin hook up, I fear we may have to give the trolls some leeway this time!
...a few months ago when there was that big hubbub about the North Korean Taepo-Dong II rocket, which has a range that lets it theoretically hit an aleutian island or two. He explained that the quality of the North Korean missile program was such that it was unlikely that they could even guarantee a hit within 100 miles. He also cited Chinese rocket problems (where the North Koreans get a lot of tech) in which dozens of Chinese died on the ground from several launch accidents. As he said "Rocketry is grotesquely difficult. That is why we respectfully refer to it as 'Rocket Science.'" These aren't problems in the second stage, which is above what this guy is messing with, these are at ground level. Frankly, I admire this guy, but I hope he does more than just get his specs checked out. He needs to make sure everything is tweaked perfectly, too. Ideally, even run a test firing to make sure he's got symmetric thrust, so his rocket doesn't shoot him into the ground a mile away. I have a hard time believing he can get that rigged up for only a quarter million dollars.
Good luck, but I won't be within a few hundred yards to watch.
That's quite a shock to me. Last I saw, 64MB was gonna cost me about $70. I was thinking maybe they mean the subchips that go on each DIMM, but aren't there 16 of those on each? Maybe they're referring to PC133.
Well, anyway, I am a bit curious as to whether or not this is completely market-driven. I know that this won't explain all the shortages, but I remember that RAM became fairly pricey after the Taiwan earthquake. Is it possible we're still feeling after-effects of that? (I recall reading somewhere that Taiwan makes 70% of the world's DRAM, correct me if I'm wrong.)
...but with a bunch of bloated features to enable strict control over intellectual property, and to reconcile all of the confusion created by using a windows registry?
Why is it that every time Microsoft makes an "Innovation" it turns out to be a crappy attempt to reproduce something that has been standard in *N*X systems for 2 decades, but wasn't "secure" (read: bloated and proprietary) enough to protect their paranoiac intellectual property interests?
In my experience, an "easy-to-use" programming language has the result of being horribly bloated, since you have to include features you'd never use, since it's so friendly to have everything already done for you. Reusable code should only go but so far. Personally, I like C/C++ even in its more obscure moments. I like not having to link in complex number handling when I code "Hello World".
I live now in mortal fear that GCC will support this.
I do agree that American Pie was a pathetic piece of pre-teen drivel.
Dogma was great, Cider House Rules was great, American Beauty was great, Gladiator was great.
I don't suppose it counts as classic cinema, but Mission: Impossible 2 was a very cool movie, in the same way that The Matrix was. (but not quite THAT cool, come on, we're talking about The Matrix here)
While it's true that many of these algorithms are the fastest possible ways of doing things (aside from minor tweaks on a case-by-case basis), it is wrong to say that this will always be the case. I know this seems oxymoronic, but it makes sense if you consider that our methods of computing may soon undergo fundamental changes. Quantum computing has produced algorithms which are abstractly faster than their conventional counterparts, so much so that even a 1 MHz quantum processor may be several orders of magnitude faster than a 1 GHz conventional processor on these specialized tasks, so far including factoring huge numbers (encryption) and extremely fast data searching. I think that quantum computing will fundamentally change the way we look at high performance algorithms, because it requires much more specialization at the hardware level. Any thoughts on this?
1) Firmly establish that which is already used offline to make forging the source of any internet transmission to be illegal. This would include packets, even to have the nice effect of making it easier to prosecute DoS cases.
2) Set up servers to not accept messages from non-existant hosts. This way, the server will only accept messages from real hosts, and if they're forged, it'll be prosecutable.
Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that, though. I know it could be dangerous if inappropriately applied, but I can see circumstances under which civil suits by a clean ISP against an open transport ISP *cough*AOL*cough* on the grounds of negligence. Heck, if a little kid goes into my shed and steals my radial saw, and ends up cutting his hand off with it, I can be held responsible. Therefore, I keep a lock on it. Of course, if the kid breaks in despite the lock, I'm not responsible, because I made a reasonable effort at securing the hazard.
I am kind of afraid of letting judges and juries determine what is a reasonable computer security expectation, though. Well, this is just food for thought. I'll let the experts hack it out. (in every meaning of the word)
Actually, the original doubling time was 24 months. Of course, not everything follows this. (just look at hard drives). There's exponential growth everywhere in the computer industry, each niche seems to have its own doubling rate. The nifty effect of that is that some technologies overtake other technologies, because what once was slow and low-capacity may outpace development of whatever we're using now.
Slashdot Mirror
...or XML, or javascript, etc. Look at *BSD. Generally compiled with GCC, a GPL program, but distributed under a different license. Just because the server runs GPL software, doesn't mean that the GPL has to apply to any of the content serves. Heaven forbid the lawsuits if someone decided that they should be able to redistribute copyrighted content served up by Apache.
I don't see where the big dillemma is. We have licenses for server code, and we have plenty of flexibility with copyrighting (or not copyrighting) the content.
I wonder how much I'd have to bribe someone to "accidentally" put one of these on my thinkpad? Less than $10k maybe?
I've played around with Pascal a bit, and haven't seen any particular advantages over C++, aside from the traditional academic usage, and I think I'm a bit beyond that now. Still, I'm very interested in Delphi, and a lot of my friends swear by it, but I've been too lazy to try it out. Now I know where to get it. Thanks people!
I'm not a Metallica fan, but I've always appreciated Lars's directness on this matter. I think he's absolutely right that legislation is needed to protect consumer rights. The music industry is pretty cut-throat, and he knows as well as anyone in the business that hell will freeze over before they can come up with their own fair standard licenses. Thankfully he has the guts to admit it.
My watch has two patents engraved in the back of it, and there is surely plenty more patented technology inside. I'm fairly sure that there's nothing particularly revolutionary about this watch, it's just a matter of Timex protecting its engineering efforts. What RAMBUS is doing is not a matter of protecting a specific feat of engineering, but trying to control an entire class of technologies. That's not how patent law is supposed to work. It's supposed to keep someone from taking something apart and make copies and undersell the first maker who sunk so much into R&D. Somehow I suspect that the other memory makers, who are making items that get the same task done (store and retrieve high-speed volatile memory) but in fairly different ways (different chipsets, even) are not making a direct ripoff of RAMBUS technology. While it's true that they may be operating on a principle that RAMBUS is also using, this doesn't mean that general technique should be patentable and enforcable. It just means a specific implementation of it should.
My car probably has a couple hundred, if not thousand patents. Still, my neighbors drive a car made by a different company, and neither of these companies has sued the other any time in recent history.
I share the concerns over privacy matters that this technology brings up, but I don't think it could go as far as Gattaca, at least not any time soon. Sequencing DNA takes a long time. It wouldn't be one of those things where you could instantly identify people, though it might be a useful forensic tool, since you could tell which doorways a person had walked through. Of course, checking them all the time would be a pain, but it would be the kind of thing you'd check if something happened. As far as I can tell, the advantages of security are far greater than the privacy incursions, if any, posed by this technology. That could easily change with time, however.
I'd be much more impressed if it could suck up my red-headed mistress's hair.
I tried using partners.nytimes.com to get in, but it sent me to the login screen anyway. Has NYTimes disabled this access?
If for some reason it was just a fluke on my end, here's the link.
Added Bonus: Obligatory Complaint about downplay of Linux
These people need to get a clue.
For starters, an authoritative source would be something about the human eye, rather than a CCD camera. The human brain has more image interpretation hardware and software than SGI and Adobe combined.
Where's your link, anyway?
Hmmm... 120M cones? I find that very difficult to believe. I suppose I might be off by an order of magnitude, but not 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. I remember some stuff from science class back in 4th grade, and it's amazing how much we can see with what should be terribly inadequate hardware.
The human eye can actually only directly perceive 12 different shades of green. Still, something happens in the software that we can tell the difference between 64k color and 16.7M color.
Can someone find a page that's about the human eye, rather than about CCDs? It's not that yours wasn't informative, but it flies in the face of what I've read elsewhere, and I'd like an authoritative opinion.
This will probably surprise you, but 3,500 receptors is about what the human eye has. I'm not joking. Maybe I'm off by a bit, but that's about the figure. We see with such incredible resolution because our brain puts together lots of information in several different ways, and as long as we see something for more than a half second, the brain can gather enough information to create a high-quality mental image of what we're actually seeing in very poor resolution.
No, I don't know how it works. I just know that it does.
I'm a little curious as to how post number 21, which is chronologically the 4th post visible at +1, could be considered "Redundant".
If the moderator who modded down my previous comment would kindly explain himself/herself in response to this message, I would be very appreciative. It is clear that I have much to learn about the moderation system.
My parents are lawyers, and they frequently get people coming in to their office, asking to help them get their money back from some contract that had a lot of fine details. They didn't always read the contract, and even when they did, they often didn't understand it. In some of these cases it was just sheer stupidity on their part, but when a company tells you that you can get a free computer, and it's not free, that's deceptive advertising. It doesn't matter what you actually pay for, if it's required to get the deal, then it's not really free. Sure, people ought to be more aware of TANSTAAFL, but the average person is goes dumb as a fencepost when you tell them they can get a very expensive and desirable thing for free if they just sign on the dotted line. The government shouldn't protect people from all forms of stupidity, but it should take some reasonable measures when feasible, and this is one of those cases.
This is at least better than what they had before, but it's still a pathetic attempt at truly open source, let alone free (speech) software. Woohoo Sun. Yay. We're all so proud of you.
It's nice to see corporations like IBM heartily embrace open source/free software. It's pathetic to see Sun try to imitate.
Is it possible that this could mark the start of an age in which our desktop chips and our portables are inherently different? I have serious doubts about Intel's ability to scale down Itanium to laptop scale and power consumption. Now it looks like AMD is going the same way, too. Many of the high-performance architectures, PPC joyfully excluded, don't even attempt to be portable. I'd like to think this is just a temporary condition, while manufacturing processes are improved, but I think with the physical limits we're looking at, even PPC may not be too far away on this trend. Hopefully we can see crusoe-like innovation on the portable end to offset the pain, but don't be surprised if portability means a different instruction set in the near future, or at least a different native one, regardless of what may be emulated.
...because I was about to mod down a whole bunch of Natalie Portman posts.
It's only offtopic if you talk about something that won't be in the movie. Considering that this is supposedly when Amidala and Anakin hook up, I fear we may have to give the trolls some leeway this time!
...a few months ago when there was that big hubbub about the North Korean Taepo-Dong II rocket, which has a range that lets it theoretically hit an aleutian island or two. He explained that the quality of the North Korean missile program was such that it was unlikely that they could even guarantee a hit within 100 miles. He also cited Chinese rocket problems (where the North Koreans get a lot of tech) in which dozens of Chinese died on the ground from several launch accidents. As he said "Rocketry is grotesquely difficult. That is why we respectfully refer to it as 'Rocket Science.'" These aren't problems in the second stage, which is above what this guy is messing with, these are at ground level. Frankly, I admire this guy, but I hope he does more than just get his specs checked out. He needs to make sure everything is tweaked perfectly, too. Ideally, even run a test firing to make sure he's got symmetric thrust, so his rocket doesn't shoot him into the ground a mile away. I have a hard time believing he can get that rigged up for only a quarter million dollars.
Good luck, but I won't be within a few hundred yards to watch.
That's quite a shock to me. Last I saw, 64MB was gonna cost me about $70. I was thinking maybe they mean the subchips that go on each DIMM, but aren't there 16 of those on each? Maybe they're referring to PC133.
Well, anyway, I am a bit curious as to whether or not this is completely market-driven. I know that this won't explain all the shortages, but I remember that RAM became fairly pricey after the Taiwan earthquake. Is it possible we're still feeling after-effects of that? (I recall reading somewhere that Taiwan makes 70% of the world's DRAM, correct me if I'm wrong.)
Any thoughts?
...but with a bunch of bloated features to enable strict control over intellectual property, and to reconcile all of the confusion created by using a windows registry?
Why is it that every time Microsoft makes an "Innovation" it turns out to be a crappy attempt to reproduce something that has been standard in *N*X systems for 2 decades, but wasn't "secure" (read: bloated and proprietary) enough to protect their paranoiac intellectual property interests?
In my experience, an "easy-to-use" programming language has the result of being horribly bloated, since you have to include features you'd never use, since it's so friendly to have everything already done for you. Reusable code should only go but so far. Personally, I like C/C++ even in its more obscure moments. I like not having to link in complex number handling when I code "Hello World".
I live now in mortal fear that GCC will support this.
Personally, I thought the singing made the movie.
I do agree that American Pie was a pathetic piece of pre-teen drivel.
Dogma was great, Cider House Rules was great, American Beauty was great, Gladiator was great.
I don't suppose it counts as classic cinema, but Mission: Impossible 2 was a very cool movie, in the same way that The Matrix was. (but not quite THAT cool, come on, we're talking about The Matrix here)
You know you're a celebrity when you get mention in the top paragraph of the story itself. Keep it up!
While it's true that many of these algorithms are the fastest possible ways of doing things (aside from minor tweaks on a case-by-case basis), it is wrong to say that this will always be the case. I know this seems oxymoronic, but it makes sense if you consider that our methods of computing may soon undergo fundamental changes. Quantum computing has produced algorithms which are abstractly faster than their conventional counterparts, so much so that even a 1 MHz quantum processor may be several orders of magnitude faster than a 1 GHz conventional processor on these specialized tasks, so far including factoring huge numbers (encryption) and extremely fast data searching. I think that quantum computing will fundamentally change the way we look at high performance algorithms, because it requires much more specialization at the hardware level. Any thoughts on this?
1) Firmly establish that which is already used offline to make forging the source of any internet transmission to be illegal. This would include packets, even to have the nice effect of making it easier to prosecute DoS cases.
2) Set up servers to not accept messages from non-existant hosts. This way, the server will only accept messages from real hosts, and if they're forged, it'll be prosecutable.
Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that, though. I know it could be dangerous if inappropriately applied, but I can see circumstances under which civil suits by a clean ISP against an open transport ISP *cough*AOL*cough* on the grounds of negligence. Heck, if a little kid goes into my shed and steals my radial saw, and ends up cutting his hand off with it, I can be held responsible. Therefore, I keep a lock on it. Of course, if the kid breaks in despite the lock, I'm not responsible, because I made a reasonable effort at securing the hazard.
I am kind of afraid of letting judges and juries determine what is a reasonable computer security expectation, though. Well, this is just food for thought. I'll let the experts hack it out. (in every meaning of the word)
Actually, the original doubling time was 24 months. Of course, not everything follows this. (just look at hard drives). There's exponential growth everywhere in the computer industry, each niche seems to have its own doubling rate. The nifty effect of that is that some technologies overtake other technologies, because what once was slow and low-capacity may outpace development of whatever we're using now.