IPREDator's website says that it won't store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web.
From TFS, not even the article. I assume they'll keep billing records, but just using an anonymising VPN isn't a crime in most countries. You can turn off logging. It's not recommended, but you can do it. In this case, they're doing it for a reason.
I did try to allow for limited exceptions, I figured there might have been a few people over 40 in really unusual circumstances that managed to get computer time at a young age, but my overall point still stands I think. For one, there's a world of difference between writing your first program at 14 and doing so at 8 or 10. It's just a few years to us, but they are really formative years. For another I think people like me (and the guy I was responding to) are a fairly small subset of our generation (outside the rarefied air of Slashdot, obviously we're more common here), guys like you that managed to get computer time while in high school in the early 70's are probably one in 100,000 or more. Finally, while you did have some access to a computer, you didn't grow up "around" the computer. You occasionally were able to go to where the computer was and spend some time on it. By contrast I OWNED a computer. It was in my room, I played with it all the time. It was a part of my world the way my mother or my brother were, in your case it was more like the Library or the movie theater. You had access to it, it was something you did and enjoyed doing, but it wasn't everyday or whenever you wanted.
I'm of course not denigrating you. You had 3 or 4 years of experience on the day I was born, much less 10 years later when I got my first computer, but due to that same accident of birth years I had mine at a much younger age and had a much more "normal" (by today's standards) relationship with it.
And the rest of his post indicated that people like you (and me for that matter, 36 years old working or playing with computers since I was 10 or so), are starting to buck that trend. We're the youngest possible generation to do so. Before us there were no inexpensive computers were available to get "kids" into computers. No one older than 40 can possibly have started using a computer before their late teens or college (unless maybe their father worked for the university and got them time or something). We are the first generation that can possibly claim to have 'grown up' with computers, and not very many of us can make the claim either. I'd guess that less than 10% of my friends my own age had computers before they were in high school and many didn't have one into 1st or 2nd year of college. I was the only person I knew as a child to have a real computer (as opposed to a Nintendo or other set top device). In 10 years MOST people in their mid-30s will have 'grown up" with computers. Right now some few of us did. 10 years ago no one could have made the claim (or at least a statistically insignificant number of people could have).
Or they try (and fail) to understand the requirements and get you to rewrite your whole freakin resumes for each job.
"You say on your resume that you're an experiences Linux Administrator, do you know Red Hat Linux?" "Yes, I've worked with most of the major distributions. I mention Red hat specifically in point x and y on my resume..." "Oh, great! Can you put the words 'Red Hat' into your resume in at least 5 other places?" "eh..." "Great! Oh, hey, I've this other job looking for a 'SuSE administrator' do you know that? Can you put 'SuSE' on your resume about 6 more times? Oh, and mention your Veritas experience!" (SuSE inevitably pronounced like "Seuss") "I don't know Veritas... I know lots of other SAN systems though I'm sure I can apply...." "You sure? Maybe you worked with Veritas once?" "You know a lot of this experience applies across a lot of similar types of technology..." "Oh, yeah, totally. I understand. So you'll send me two new resumes that mention Red Hat and Seuss 7 times each and Veritas right?"....
I think the editors were considering this newsworthy on the "Look for the big explosions on Discovery soon!" theory of newsworthiness. While this may be a tech website, we have a fair sized representation of the "Likes Big Booms" demographic present.::Wanders off to look up Mythbuster's episode guide::
Anyhow - if the document contains information which should not be classified it is not up to joe schmoe to determine this and release the information. First off joe schmoe may not have all of the facts (and often doesn't) - there may be some legitimate reason why those sites are classified.
In general you are correct, but like anything else it is sometimes necessary to go to extreme lengths to defend one's rights. It's a slippery slope to be sure, when you break the law you are labeled a law breaker, though to outside observers or to history you might later be labeled a hero or a freedom fighter. Think of the Civil Rights movement here in the states. Lots of those people broke the law in various ways, yet they are scene as courageous heroes now, not criminals. Of course other people who broke similar laws in other places are still considered criminals. Either their cause never caught the public imagination (rightly or wrongly), or they were beat down so thoroughly that no one ever heard their stories. Whether this turns out to be a case of heroic civil disobedience or a simple criminal act probably depends a lot on your perspective, and the eventual judgment of history.
Having said all of that, it's not at all clear how posting information the AUSTRALIAN government considers classified could be a crime in GERMANY. It's not like these are NATO secrets, properly considered classified in all signatory countries. It's not like a crime was committed in Australia and then the perpetrator fled to Germany (that would, again properly, be a matter for extradition). This is information that the Australian government wants to keep secret, which a citizen of another country, a country with no apparent applicable law, published in his own personal bit of the web.
Well, first this is relevant to Australia and Germany, so I doubt Bush had anything to do with it (You were making a joke, I know, "Whoosh!", etc. but it was pretty poor). Second, I think the objection here is not that publishing classified documents is a crime, most non-libertarian fringe people on the site would probably agree with that, but rather that this document, which has significant potential for quelling free speach and political dissent, is classified. Here we have a list of sites that an entire nation worth of the "Free World" is not allowed to look at. A list which clearly contains sites not relevant to the original purpose of the list (basically to block kiddie porn). A list, in short, which the Government of Australia could conceivably use to block any speech that they see fit, and NO ONE is allowed to know what is actually on the list to protest.
There has been some screwed up crap going on in the US, but I don't think even Bush would have tried something like this.
My wife an I both have iPhones. I'd guess that somewhere in neighborhood of 30%-40% of the people I know have some version of smart phone, and those numbers are growing. Netbooks are one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry. You're both right and wrong. I don't see a lot of people giving up their powerful home systems for when they are sitting at their base of operations and "working", but lots of advantages can be seen for the rest of the time.
I think what we'll see on the personal side is a hybrid approach, hopefully using open standards. How cool would it be to have a powerful machine at home where you can create and edit content (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, whatever) put them in a open globally recognized format and mirror them to some service on the "cloud", so that when you're at a client's site or a coffee shop, or the library you can pull them up and display or edit them as needed on your phone, your ultra-portable computer, or even the library or Internet Cafe workstation. When you save the "cloud" copy on whatever device you use to edit it, the document mirrors back to your home system. You backup (or not, it's your stuff, not mine) your home system, and you've got "real" copies of the editing/creation software you use there so there's no real risk of losing data in the event that your "cloud" service fails, and since the standards are open you can just get a new cloud service to use your old data. If you have something private that you don't want getting out, you just don't put it in your "mirror" folder. I could totally see something like this taking off.
On the corporate side I see a different approach. Locally hosted clouds. Basically the corporate intranet has it's own local "Google Gears" server, where everyone connects and runs the shared apps. This would save companies a fair amount of money and ensure that anyone who can get to the Intranet (say through a VPN) is able to get to the tools they need to do almost everything from where ever they are. This seems a little chancier than the personal version. Computing power in workstations is getting so cheap that I question how quick companies will be to hop on this kind of bandwagon. Getting a low power workstation to run a Gears instance for $100 vs a more powerful one that can run everything locally for $250 isn't much money in the grand scheme. On the other hand it would allow them to control things more tightly, and it is saving some money on hardware costs (whether the scheme itself has enough overhead to eat that savings is another question), so it might fly. Remember that most companies replace all of their computers every 3-4 years, often on a rotational basis, so as soon as they made a decision to implement something like this it would have an affect.
To prove perjury you have to prove intent. All it takes is for the issuer of the take down notice to say they really thought there was an infringement, and they really apologize for the inconvenience, and your case goes out the window. It's only perjury if you lie, not if you're wrong. It's relatively easy to prove someone lied about facts, much harder to prove they deliberately lied about an interpretation of those facts.
Reality? OK, I'm exaggerating, but the fact is that the most successful F/OSS companies in the world all together probably don't have income of a moderately successful closed source software company. Companies like Sun and IBM make serious money with F/OSS, but in thise cases they make maney by selling solutions that happen to include F/OSS, not from the software in a vacuum. I can't think of any F/OSS company with a software/service based business model (Think Red Hat, Novell, or MySQL here) that can hold a candle to Oracle, Adobe, or Microsoft in income.
I'm trying to rag on F/OSS here, but, like teaching or working for a charity, it's not something you do for the money. It's something you do because you love it, and smile gratefully when or if you get a pay check. Personally I take a middle of the road when it comes to Free Software, I'll use it when it suits a need or not use it when something else works better. I try to make a point to contribute to projects I use, but I can't always do so in a financial sense. Since a lot of people don't even make that much of an effort...
ATS: Amazon.com Tech Support, can I help you? Cust: Yeah. I can't seem to buy books from your website. ATS: I see. Lets' see what we can do to help you....... an hour later... ATS: Well sir, everything seems fine. We've looked at all of you settings, verified your account, even successfully completed a transaction on antother computer, I'm at a loss... Cust: Hang on a sec...::what's that? Huh? Umm.. OK::... Uh, my son says he modified the javascript for your site for our local browser and it might have done something to...::click::... Hello? Hello?
That only works for some kinds of problems. The article mentions that Photoshop and several video packages have already been optimized for multiple cores, seeing substantial performance gains. The reason that video and image software have already been substantially optimized, and other kinds of software have not is not really gone into, but seems twofold to my mind.
1) Signal transformation of various sorts is one of the most highly parallelizable forms of computation around. It seems likely that audio software could be similarly rewritten with a minimum of effort to make better use of multiple cores.
2) Because it's relatively easy to break down signal transformation problems, and because there are lots of viable commercial reasons to do so in markets that could afford multiprocessing systems early, before they became cheap (Movie and video rendering and editing comes to mind right away); it's one of the better researched forms of multiprocessing problems. I'd venture to guess that 80 or 90% of people who have ever done any work at all in parallel systems have done signal transformation work either as part of their education or part of their work.
The problem with applying these techniques to consumer software is figuring out how to break down the problem. What CAN be done in parallel (not everything can, if you try you'll get race conditions interrupt servicing problems, all kinds of stuff.), and how can you do it such that breaking the problem down and coordinating the threads isn't MORE work than just solving the problem in a single thread would have been.
GP's idea is to develop systems (I'd imagine that CPU instructions, kernel modification, and compilers would all be needed) capable of figuring this stuff out for us. Parallelizing the code at run time (or compile time? I wasn't clear) probably requiring a minimum of three threads to do it, the controller and N+1 computational threads you suggest, plus another thread to figure out how to break up the problem in real time and send chunks to the computational threads. I don't think I understand exactly how he wants to handle the real time breakdown, but I think that's the key. The computer figures out how to parallelize the problem for us, rather than forcing us to find the place in the algorithm where we can break the problem up.
I'm with sibling on this one. I can't figure out if you've seen some clever angle I missed or just spouting baseless drivel. As far as I can see this is a pretty smart move by Oracle. They are providing a standard OS that they know their product will run well on, using something that a lot of sys admins are familiar with to do it, and adding only minimally to the cost of their product to do it. Seems like a win all around to me.
I think you've hit one something here. AT&T has massively oversubscribed the major metropolitan areas. My wife gets much better 3G here in Huntsville than she does in larger cities. I'm sure that there are more towers in the larger cities, but the ratio of towers to people trying to use the device is much worse. I often find that my older Edge iPhone works better in places where her 3G is having trouble. I'm connecting to a lower subscription tower than she is (Well, we're probably connecting to the same physical tower, but I'm on the lower subscription channel).
Most of the time I'm jealous of her phone, but every so often when we travel I get to be the one who laughs:-)
Also, at two weddings I was just at, the DJ just brought his laptop. No reason to bring stacks and cases of CDs. Music sounded great, and we had a huge selection of songs that he could instantly look up for requests, etc.
At the higher end than this are DJ setups with professional quality speakers and amps hooked to laptops with large hard drives full of uncompressed or only slightly compressed music. Music quality is the same as CDs, which all but the most rabid audiophiles agree is good enough for clubs and social events, and otherwise the setup is the same as what other DJs use to play CDs.
That makes a certain amount of sense. MP3's are often sold ala carte, which means that a person who has $15 to spend on music this week can buy 15 songs at $1 a piece, rather than one CD for $13 that has 8 or 10 songs. They're spending slightly more money (good for the industry), but perhaps not as much money on any one band or label (possibly still good for the industry but probably less good for the bigger labels and more popular bands).
Every time we talk about computer retail the "custom boxes" argument comes up. Either people pay extra for them or build them, but in both cases laptops (easily the largest growing sector of computer sales) are ignored. You can't build custom laptops and almost no small companies make them. I don't travel as much as I used to when I was a field engineer, but I still travel often enough to prefer a laptop as my primary machine. Road Warriors who drive (and fly) more miles in a week than I currently do in a year need them even more than I do. I could probably switch back to a desktop if I chose, but for a lot of people they aren't even really options. That as much as anything is what is causing the death of custom built computers.
I think you're kind of missing the point of the article though. There are haven's in the military for nerd types. There are jobs that can be great to have, units that can be great to work with, etc. But it's career limiting to take those jobs, or at least to stay in them long term. Especially for commissioned officers (which is where the VAST majority of the advanced degrees in the military ranks are). I experienced this myself on a limited scale. I was the communications officer for a National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. I was branched Signal Corp (the Army's communications branch) and refused to re-branch to FA or Infantry (we were direct support to an Infantry Brigade, so I could had moved to another battalion with and Infantry patch). This meant I was never going to hold command (there were no SC branch units in the state), and there was only one major's slot available for me in the whole brigade. I was going to have to move over to the Reserves to even have a chance to make major, and even then the slots were pretty limited.
Besides the lack of available slots for me to move into, I was always treated as less useful and/or less skilled than my fellow officers. The combat arms guys feel (with some justification, don't misunderstand me) the rest of the Army exists to support them. They are less tolerant of mistakes from combat support officers, and more willing to blame them for problems than they are the guys that are their direct peers. It's always easier to assume that it's the signal officer's fault that LT Smith's platoon can't communicate during critical maneuvers than that LT Smith didn't do Preventative Maintenance, or that his soldiers failed to load the proper time into their radios. After all, that guy has a ton of stuff to worry about and all you need to do is keep his radio working. The fact that you weren't there, or don't have enough soldiers to make sure that every kid's radio has the right load is easy to ignore.
I was respected, don't get me wrong. People thought I was smart, knew I was willing to work hard, and usually wanted to know why such a promising young officer was "wasting his time" in the Signal Corps. The smart thing, it was made clear to me on a number of occasions was to transfer to FA (or Infantry, or Armor if the senior officer in question was from brigade or one of our sister battalions). Get a few OERs under my belt in Combat Arms (which would, by nature of the job be better than my current OERs), get a battery or company command, and make major in something less than a glacial time frame.
Very few Signal Branched officers every make General, and not a lot make COL. To my knowledge the only general officer's berths in the who Army specifically reserved for Signal Qualified officers are the Chief of Signal and his deputies, and those are pretty much ceremonial posts given to officers on their way out. They command Ft. Gordon (The home of Signal School) and run the school house and branch manager guys. In the Army as a whole, of course, things aren't as limiting as they are in one state's National Guard, but the same problems exist to one extent or another. Signal Brigades and Battalions exist, so there is promotion potential into the O4, O5, and even O6 ranks, but there are still fewer slots (because there are fewer units) than there are for combat guys. Lots of specialist and staff jobs exist at the upper echelons, to take up some of the slack in majors and light colonels, but those guys never get command, so they never get colonel or general slots. To use your own example, submarine officers have a notoriously hard time making admiral. Partly because subs are usually commanded by commanders or lt cmdrs, thus leaving a "rank gap" for those guys to get through to find something to do to make commander and captain, and partly because sub commands aren't considered as impressive as surface ship commands by the higher ups (partly because they were all surface ship guys I'm sure).
The Army, with good reason, focuses on it's war fighter
This is true in any military environment to some extent, but really not feasibly so when it comes to weapons and ammo. It's not Vietnam out there, and the dangerous stuff is quite tightly controlled. I spent a year in Baghdad with my National Guard unit, and let me tell you... it's not just a simple of matter of getting someone to fork over some rounds. Much as cops do, we had to account for every round we were issued. If it was fired, you better have reported the contact, and made sure you knew how many rounds you and anyone under your supervision expended. It wasn't insane or anything, you didn't have to call higher every time you pulled the trigger, but you damn well better report the contact immediately, and be ready to report rounds or other munitions expended once the fight was over and people had time to make a count. And God help you if you lost a weapon or other "sensitive item" (basically a "sensitive item" is anything that might help the enemy if they get it. Stuff like weapons, anything with crypto, night vision goggles, gas masks, etc). We did daily inventories of all sensitive items, and weekly "dump 'em out and count 'em" inventories of all soldiers ammunition.
There's no way anyone is going to "lose" enough stuff to equip some poor unloved airman with enough gear to keep him or her alive outside the wire. Now, having said that... What was this poor unloved Airmen supposed to be doing? I spent the vast majority of my hitch inside the wire, and never had to fire my weapon. I HAD a weapon, and ammunition, but I never had to use them. If the Airmen in question was fixing radars on Victory, and never got closer than a mile from the gates, that's one thing. He still should have had a weapon (if only a pistol) just in case, but I can see where it wasn't anyone's priority. If he was going outside the wire, even just to travel between camps, his lack of equipment might literally have been criminal. Outside the wire, US forces have loaded weapons, ballistic vests, and helmets. Period.
The problems being that someone with the kind of money buffet has almost literally can't "cash out". If Buffet's billions were made liquid that would, in itself, put a huge strain on the economy. I just heard on the radio today that between them the world's top 10 billionaires control almost 3 TRILLION dollars. That's down from a high of over 4 TRILLION dollars. There's not that much liquid cash in the world.
The great irony is that the Mac's actual compilation and installation process is actually considerably less elegant, space efficient, and from most developers or other experts point of view generally "worse" than Linux's system. I use a Mac as my primary computer at home, and I really like the system from a usage point of view, but poking around from a command prompt makes you go "hmmm" quite a bit. Hidden directories containing most of the important system stuff (You have to go through major hoops to get/usr and/etc to show up in finder, though of course they're there in the terminal or other command line interface), "application files" that are actually directories full of statically linked libraries that bloat application size (which is why dependencies are much less of a problem, or at least part of why, rigorously backward compatible API stacks help too), "semi-standard" Unix config files that are almost like using Unix, but not always... It's really a pretty ugly system under the hood. But since 99% of users never see any of the ugliness and the UI is designed to make it seamlessly invisible to anyone who doesn't make an effort to find out how everything works, it doesn't really matter. From everything the user sees it's a pretty, easy to use, well thought out system. Even developers rarely need to think about the what's under the overlay, since Xcode takes care of a lot of the complications. I hardly ever think how weird it is that I start apps by double-clicking on a directory with a fancy icon, and a ".app" extension.
In the end, what is more important? An "elegant" system that is hugely configurable, maximizes storage space, and, for the expert, is able to be examined and changed to an almost infinite degree? Or a system that is really easy to use, maintains a consistent "look and feel", and hides its warts so well that even those who realize they exist tend to ignore them the majority of the time? I know which I'd rather have for my servers, for applications that need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the system, for when I have a need to craft the system to the application... but I also know which one I chose when I was looking for the computer I interact with most of the time.
Yeah, cause I'm sure that when the users he supports as part of his job call him about their inability to access to "Z:" share on the network, they want him to whip out his copy of "Damn Small Linux" reboot the machine, and prove that... ummm... he can fit an operating system on a really small jump drive. When most of us talk about using computers that are not our own, we mean supporting users of those machines: usually in a work or other "getting paid" (even if only in beer for helping out the guy next door) type of environment.
What, did you think he went up to random computers he saw on the street, muscled their owners out the way and used them to surf the 'Net for a few minutes? I like Linux as much as the next guy, but comments like this really annoy me. Maybe there are people out there who are lucky enough to have jobs where they never have to dirty themselves with "non-Free" software touching any machine they use, but most of us don't. Granted I don't care all that much (I'm perfectly content to use a mix of FOSS and closed software myself), but even if I did care I couldn't do much about the fact that there are probably 100 jobs in the computer industry that involve at least some contact with closed software for every one job where you can completely avoid it.
Funny story about that... I thought I was having some trouble with the video card on my MacBook (It turned out to actually be a problem with the application, but that's immaterial), and had brought it to the local Apple store to beat up the Genius Bar guy. Sitting next to me at the bar was a guy who was trying to get the iPhone Genius to upgrade the operating system on his phone, because he didn't own a computer. At all. He'd bought the phone at the AT&T store and they'd activated it for him. He'd never plugged it into a computer since. The Store people were a bit flustered, I don't think anyone had ever come to them with such a request.
You're aware of the fact that credit card transaction don't list line items right? Best buy doesn't send a request for approval of (1) HP XYZX Computer: $563.05, (1) HP VSY39 Monitor: $256.04, (10) Lextronic rewriteable CD-ROMs: 14.98, (1) prepaid cellphone: $56.04... They send a request for approval of $890.08. All the CC companies know is that you spent around $900 at Best Buy. Perhaps useful info for some level of profiling (they now know you're willing to spend money on electronics gear), but hardly useful for figuring out who's a terrorist. Now if they already suspect you of building a fertilizer bomb, and they discover your $900 charge to Bob's Tractors and Fertilizer, then they might have something to work with; but I seriously doubt they're trolling the credit card transactions of every person in America looking for the terrorist who was (a) dumb enough to pay for his disposable cell phone with a CC, and (b) did so from company that only sells disposable cell phones rather than just getting it from a Best Buy or corner gas station.
Slashdot Mirror
IPREDator's website says that it won't store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web.
From TFS, not even the article. I assume they'll keep billing records, but just using an anonymising VPN isn't a crime in most countries. You can turn off logging. It's not recommended, but you can do it. In this case, they're doing it for a reason.
I did try to allow for limited exceptions, I figured there might have been a few people over 40 in really unusual circumstances that managed to get computer time at a young age, but my overall point still stands I think. For one, there's a world of difference between writing your first program at 14 and doing so at 8 or 10. It's just a few years to us, but they are really formative years. For another I think people like me (and the guy I was responding to) are a fairly small subset of our generation (outside the rarefied air of Slashdot, obviously we're more common here), guys like you that managed to get computer time while in high school in the early 70's are probably one in 100,000 or more. Finally, while you did have some access to a computer, you didn't grow up "around" the computer. You occasionally were able to go to where the computer was and spend some time on it. By contrast I OWNED a computer. It was in my room, I played with it all the time. It was a part of my world the way my mother or my brother were, in your case it was more like the Library or the movie theater. You had access to it, it was something you did and enjoyed doing, but it wasn't everyday or whenever you wanted.
I'm of course not denigrating you. You had 3 or 4 years of experience on the day I was born, much less 10 years later when I got my first computer, but due to that same accident of birth years I had mine at a much younger age and had a much more "normal" (by today's standards) relationship with it.
And the rest of his post indicated that people like you (and me for that matter, 36 years old working or playing with computers since I was 10 or so), are starting to buck that trend. We're the youngest possible generation to do so. Before us there were no inexpensive computers were available to get "kids" into computers. No one older than 40 can possibly have started using a computer before their late teens or college (unless maybe their father worked for the university and got them time or something). We are the first generation that can possibly claim to have 'grown up' with computers, and not very many of us can make the claim either. I'd guess that less than 10% of my friends my own age had computers before they were in high school and many didn't have one into 1st or 2nd year of college. I was the only person I knew as a child to have a real computer (as opposed to a Nintendo or other set top device). In 10 years MOST people in their mid-30s will have 'grown up" with computers. Right now some few of us did. 10 years ago no one could have made the claim (or at least a statistically insignificant number of people could have).
Or they try (and fail) to understand the requirements and get you to rewrite your whole freakin resumes for each job.
"You say on your resume that you're an experiences Linux Administrator, do you know Red Hat Linux?" ....
"Yes, I've worked with most of the major distributions. I mention Red hat specifically in point x and y on my resume..."
"Oh, great! Can you put the words 'Red Hat' into your resume in at least 5 other places?"
"eh..."
"Great! Oh, hey, I've this other job looking for a 'SuSE administrator' do you know that? Can you put 'SuSE' on your resume about 6 more times? Oh, and mention your Veritas experience!" (SuSE inevitably pronounced like "Seuss")
"I don't know Veritas... I know lots of other SAN systems though I'm sure I can apply...."
"You sure? Maybe you worked with Veritas once?"
"You know a lot of this experience applies across a lot of similar types of technology..."
"Oh, yeah, totally. I understand. So you'll send me two new resumes that mention Red Hat and Seuss 7 times each and Veritas right?"
I think the editors were considering this newsworthy on the "Look for the big explosions on Discovery soon!" theory of newsworthiness. While this may be a tech website, we have a fair sized representation of the "Likes Big Booms" demographic present. ::Wanders off to look up Mythbuster's episode guide::
Anyhow - if the document contains information which should not be classified it is not up to joe schmoe to determine this and release the information. First off joe schmoe may not have all of the facts (and often doesn't) - there may be some legitimate reason why those sites are classified.
In general you are correct, but like anything else it is sometimes necessary to go to extreme lengths to defend one's rights. It's a slippery slope to be sure, when you break the law you are labeled a law breaker, though to outside observers or to history you might later be labeled a hero or a freedom fighter. Think of the Civil Rights movement here in the states. Lots of those people broke the law in various ways, yet they are scene as courageous heroes now, not criminals. Of course other people who broke similar laws in other places are still considered criminals. Either their cause never caught the public imagination (rightly or wrongly), or they were beat down so thoroughly that no one ever heard their stories. Whether this turns out to be a case of heroic civil disobedience or a simple criminal act probably depends a lot on your perspective, and the eventual judgment of history.
Having said all of that, it's not at all clear how posting information the AUSTRALIAN government considers classified could be a crime in GERMANY. It's not like these are NATO secrets, properly considered classified in all signatory countries. It's not like a crime was committed in Australia and then the perpetrator fled to Germany (that would, again properly, be a matter for extradition). This is information that the Australian government wants to keep secret, which a citizen of another country, a country with no apparent applicable law, published in his own personal bit of the web.
Well, first this is relevant to Australia and Germany, so I doubt Bush had anything to do with it (You were making a joke, I know, "Whoosh!", etc. but it was pretty poor). Second, I think the objection here is not that publishing classified documents is a crime, most non-libertarian fringe people on the site would probably agree with that, but rather that this document, which has significant potential for quelling free speach and political dissent, is classified. Here we have a list of sites that an entire nation worth of the "Free World" is not allowed to look at. A list which clearly contains sites not relevant to the original purpose of the list (basically to block kiddie porn). A list, in short, which the Government of Australia could conceivably use to block any speech that they see fit, and NO ONE is allowed to know what is actually on the list to protest.
There has been some screwed up crap going on in the US, but I don't think even Bush would have tried something like this.
My wife an I both have iPhones. I'd guess that somewhere in neighborhood of 30%-40% of the people I know have some version of smart phone, and those numbers are growing. Netbooks are one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry. You're both right and wrong. I don't see a lot of people giving up their powerful home systems for when they are sitting at their base of operations and "working", but lots of advantages can be seen for the rest of the time.
I think what we'll see on the personal side is a hybrid approach, hopefully using open standards. How cool would it be to have a powerful machine at home where you can create and edit content (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, whatever) put them in a open globally recognized format and mirror them to some service on the "cloud", so that when you're at a client's site or a coffee shop, or the library you can pull them up and display or edit them as needed on your phone, your ultra-portable computer, or even the library or Internet Cafe workstation. When you save the "cloud" copy on whatever device you use to edit it, the document mirrors back to your home system. You backup (or not, it's your stuff, not mine) your home system, and you've got "real" copies of the editing/creation software you use there so there's no real risk of losing data in the event that your "cloud" service fails, and since the standards are open you can just get a new cloud service to use your old data. If you have something private that you don't want getting out, you just don't put it in your "mirror" folder. I could totally see something like this taking off.
On the corporate side I see a different approach. Locally hosted clouds. Basically the corporate intranet has it's own local "Google Gears" server, where everyone connects and runs the shared apps. This would save companies a fair amount of money and ensure that anyone who can get to the Intranet (say through a VPN) is able to get to the tools they need to do almost everything from where ever they are. This seems a little chancier than the personal version. Computing power in workstations is getting so cheap that I question how quick companies will be to hop on this kind of bandwagon. Getting a low power workstation to run a Gears instance for $100 vs a more powerful one that can run everything locally for $250 isn't much money in the grand scheme. On the other hand it would allow them to control things more tightly, and it is saving some money on hardware costs (whether the scheme itself has enough overhead to eat that savings is another question), so it might fly. Remember that most companies replace all of their computers every 3-4 years, often on a rotational basis, so as soon as they made a decision to implement something like this it would have an affect.
To prove perjury you have to prove intent. All it takes is for the issuer of the take down notice to say they really thought there was an infringement, and they really apologize for the inconvenience, and your case goes out the window. It's only perjury if you lie, not if you're wrong. It's relatively easy to prove someone lied about facts, much harder to prove they deliberately lied about an interpretation of those facts.
Reality? OK, I'm exaggerating, but the fact is that the most successful F/OSS companies in the world all together probably don't have income of a moderately successful closed source software company. Companies like Sun and IBM make serious money with F/OSS, but in thise cases they make maney by selling solutions that happen to include F/OSS, not from the software in a vacuum. I can't think of any F/OSS company with a software/service based business model (Think Red Hat, Novell, or MySQL here) that can hold a candle to Oracle, Adobe, or Microsoft in income.
I'm trying to rag on F/OSS here, but, like teaching or working for a charity, it's not something you do for the money. It's something you do because you love it, and smile gratefully when or if you get a pay check. Personally I take a middle of the road when it comes to Free Software, I'll use it when it suits a need or not use it when something else works better. I try to make a point to contribute to projects I use, but I can't always do so in a financial sense. Since a lot of people don't even make that much of an effort...
I can see it now:
ATS: Amazon.com Tech Support, can I help you? ... ... ... ::what's that? Huh? Umm.. OK:: ... Uh, my son says he modified the javascript for your site for our local browser and it might have done something to... ::click:: ... Hello? Hello?
Cust: Yeah. I can't seem to buy books from your website.
ATS: I see. Lets' see what we can do to help you....
an hour later
ATS: Well sir, everything seems fine. We've looked at all of you settings, verified your account, even successfully completed a transaction on antother computer, I'm at a loss...
Cust: Hang on a sec
That only works for some kinds of problems. The article mentions that Photoshop and several video packages have already been optimized for multiple cores, seeing substantial performance gains. The reason that video and image software have already been substantially optimized, and other kinds of software have not is not really gone into, but seems twofold to my mind.
1) Signal transformation of various sorts is one of the most highly parallelizable forms of computation around. It seems likely that audio software could be similarly rewritten with a minimum of effort to make better use of multiple cores.
2) Because it's relatively easy to break down signal transformation problems, and because there are lots of viable commercial reasons to do so in markets that could afford multiprocessing systems early, before they became cheap (Movie and video rendering and editing comes to mind right away); it's one of the better researched forms of multiprocessing problems. I'd venture to guess that 80 or 90% of people who have ever done any work at all in parallel systems have done signal transformation work either as part of their education or part of their work.
The problem with applying these techniques to consumer software is figuring out how to break down the problem. What CAN be done in parallel (not everything can, if you try you'll get race conditions interrupt servicing problems, all kinds of stuff.), and how can you do it such that breaking the problem down and coordinating the threads isn't MORE work than just solving the problem in a single thread would have been.
GP's idea is to develop systems (I'd imagine that CPU instructions, kernel modification, and compilers would all be needed) capable of figuring this stuff out for us. Parallelizing the code at run time (or compile time? I wasn't clear) probably requiring a minimum of three threads to do it, the controller and N+1 computational threads you suggest, plus another thread to figure out how to break up the problem in real time and send chunks to the computational threads. I don't think I understand exactly how he wants to handle the real time breakdown, but I think that's the key. The computer figures out how to parallelize the problem for us, rather than forcing us to find the place in the algorithm where we can break the problem up.
I'm with sibling on this one. I can't figure out if you've seen some clever angle I missed or just spouting baseless drivel. As far as I can see this is a pretty smart move by Oracle. They are providing a standard OS that they know their product will run well on, using something that a lot of sys admins are familiar with to do it, and adding only minimally to the cost of their product to do it. Seems like a win all around to me.
I think you've hit one something here. AT&T has massively oversubscribed the major metropolitan areas. My wife gets much better 3G here in Huntsville than she does in larger cities. I'm sure that there are more towers in the larger cities, but the ratio of towers to people trying to use the device is much worse. I often find that my older Edge iPhone works better in places where her 3G is having trouble. I'm connecting to a lower subscription tower than she is (Well, we're probably connecting to the same physical tower, but I'm on the lower subscription channel).
Most of the time I'm jealous of her phone, but every so often when we travel I get to be the one who laughs :-)
Also, at two weddings I was just at, the DJ just brought his laptop. No reason to bring stacks and cases of CDs. Music sounded great, and we had a huge selection of songs that he could instantly look up for requests, etc.
At the higher end than this are DJ setups with professional quality speakers and amps hooked to laptops with large hard drives full of uncompressed or only slightly compressed music. Music quality is the same as CDs, which all but the most rabid audiophiles agree is good enough for clubs and social events, and otherwise the setup is the same as what other DJs use to play CDs.
That makes a certain amount of sense. MP3's are often sold ala carte, which means that a person who has $15 to spend on music this week can buy 15 songs at $1 a piece, rather than one CD for $13 that has 8 or 10 songs. They're spending slightly more money (good for the industry), but perhaps not as much money on any one band or label (possibly still good for the industry but probably less good for the bigger labels and more popular bands).
Every time we talk about computer retail the "custom boxes" argument comes up. Either people pay extra for them or build them, but in both cases laptops (easily the largest growing sector of computer sales) are ignored. You can't build custom laptops and almost no small companies make them. I don't travel as much as I used to when I was a field engineer, but I still travel often enough to prefer a laptop as my primary machine. Road Warriors who drive (and fly) more miles in a week than I currently do in a year need them even more than I do. I could probably switch back to a desktop if I chose, but for a lot of people they aren't even really options. That as much as anything is what is causing the death of custom built computers.
I think you're kind of missing the point of the article though. There are haven's in the military for nerd types. There are jobs that can be great to have, units that can be great to work with, etc. But it's career limiting to take those jobs, or at least to stay in them long term. Especially for commissioned officers (which is where the VAST majority of the advanced degrees in the military ranks are). I experienced this myself on a limited scale. I was the communications officer for a National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. I was branched Signal Corp (the Army's communications branch) and refused to re-branch to FA or Infantry (we were direct support to an Infantry Brigade, so I could had moved to another battalion with and Infantry patch). This meant I was never going to hold command (there were no SC branch units in the state), and there was only one major's slot available for me in the whole brigade. I was going to have to move over to the Reserves to even have a chance to make major, and even then the slots were pretty limited.
Besides the lack of available slots for me to move into, I was always treated as less useful and/or less skilled than my fellow officers. The combat arms guys feel (with some justification, don't misunderstand me) the rest of the Army exists to support them. They are less tolerant of mistakes from combat support officers, and more willing to blame them for problems than they are the guys that are their direct peers. It's always easier to assume that it's the signal officer's fault that LT Smith's platoon can't communicate during critical maneuvers than that LT Smith didn't do Preventative Maintenance, or that his soldiers failed to load the proper time into their radios. After all, that guy has a ton of stuff to worry about and all you need to do is keep his radio working. The fact that you weren't there, or don't have enough soldiers to make sure that every kid's radio has the right load is easy to ignore.
I was respected, don't get me wrong. People thought I was smart, knew I was willing to work hard, and usually wanted to know why such a promising young officer was "wasting his time" in the Signal Corps. The smart thing, it was made clear to me on a number of occasions was to transfer to FA (or Infantry, or Armor if the senior officer in question was from brigade or one of our sister battalions). Get a few OERs under my belt in Combat Arms (which would, by nature of the job be better than my current OERs), get a battery or company command, and make major in something less than a glacial time frame.
Very few Signal Branched officers every make General, and not a lot make COL. To my knowledge the only general officer's berths in the who Army specifically reserved for Signal Qualified officers are the Chief of Signal and his deputies, and those are pretty much ceremonial posts given to officers on their way out. They command Ft. Gordon (The home of Signal School) and run the school house and branch manager guys. In the Army as a whole, of course, things aren't as limiting as they are in one state's National Guard, but the same problems exist to one extent or another. Signal Brigades and Battalions exist, so there is promotion potential into the O4, O5, and even O6 ranks, but there are still fewer slots (because there are fewer units) than there are for combat guys. Lots of specialist and staff jobs exist at the upper echelons, to take up some of the slack in majors and light colonels, but those guys never get command, so they never get colonel or general slots. To use your own example, submarine officers have a notoriously hard time making admiral. Partly because subs are usually commanded by commanders or lt cmdrs, thus leaving a "rank gap" for those guys to get through to find something to do to make commander and captain, and partly because sub commands aren't considered as impressive as surface ship commands by the higher ups (partly because they were all surface ship guys I'm sure).
The Army, with good reason, focuses on it's war fighter
This is true in any military environment to some extent, but really not feasibly so when it comes to weapons and ammo. It's not Vietnam out there, and the dangerous stuff is quite tightly controlled. I spent a year in Baghdad with my National Guard unit, and let me tell you... it's not just a simple of matter of getting someone to fork over some rounds. Much as cops do, we had to account for every round we were issued. If it was fired, you better have reported the contact, and made sure you knew how many rounds you and anyone under your supervision expended. It wasn't insane or anything, you didn't have to call higher every time you pulled the trigger, but you damn well better report the contact immediately, and be ready to report rounds or other munitions expended once the fight was over and people had time to make a count. And God help you if you lost a weapon or other "sensitive item" (basically a "sensitive item" is anything that might help the enemy if they get it. Stuff like weapons, anything with crypto, night vision goggles, gas masks, etc). We did daily inventories of all sensitive items, and weekly "dump 'em out and count 'em" inventories of all soldiers ammunition.
There's no way anyone is going to "lose" enough stuff to equip some poor unloved airman with enough gear to keep him or her alive outside the wire. Now, having said that... What was this poor unloved Airmen supposed to be doing? I spent the vast majority of my hitch inside the wire, and never had to fire my weapon. I HAD a weapon, and ammunition, but I never had to use them. If the Airmen in question was fixing radars on Victory, and never got closer than a mile from the gates, that's one thing. He still should have had a weapon (if only a pistol) just in case, but I can see where it wasn't anyone's priority. If he was going outside the wire, even just to travel between camps, his lack of equipment might literally have been criminal. Outside the wire, US forces have loaded weapons, ballistic vests, and helmets. Period.
The problems being that someone with the kind of money buffet has almost literally can't "cash out". If Buffet's billions were made liquid that would, in itself, put a huge strain on the economy. I just heard on the radio today that between them the world's top 10 billionaires control almost 3 TRILLION dollars. That's down from a high of over 4 TRILLION dollars. There's not that much liquid cash in the world.
I'm not manly enough to build laptops, nor to lug desktop systems around on my back with a monitor attached to a helmet.
The great irony is that the Mac's actual compilation and installation process is actually considerably less elegant, space efficient, and from most developers or other experts point of view generally "worse" than Linux's system. I use a Mac as my primary computer at home, and I really like the system from a usage point of view, but poking around from a command prompt makes you go "hmmm" quite a bit. Hidden directories containing most of the important system stuff (You have to go through major hoops to get /usr and /etc to show up in finder, though of course they're there in the terminal or other command line interface), "application files" that are actually directories full of statically linked libraries that bloat application size (which is why dependencies are much less of a problem, or at least part of why, rigorously backward compatible API stacks help too), "semi-standard" Unix config files that are almost like using Unix, but not always... It's really a pretty ugly system under the hood. But since 99% of users never see any of the ugliness and the UI is designed to make it seamlessly invisible to anyone who doesn't make an effort to find out how everything works, it doesn't really matter. From everything the user sees it's a pretty, easy to use, well thought out system. Even developers rarely need to think about the what's under the overlay, since Xcode takes care of a lot of the complications. I hardly ever think how weird it is that I start apps by double-clicking on a directory with a fancy icon, and a ".app" extension.
In the end, what is more important? An "elegant" system that is hugely configurable, maximizes storage space, and, for the expert, is able to be examined and changed to an almost infinite degree? Or a system that is really easy to use, maintains a consistent "look and feel", and hides its warts so well that even those who realize they exist tend to ignore them the majority of the time? I know which I'd rather have for my servers, for applications that need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the system, for when I have a need to craft the system to the application... but I also know which one I chose when I was looking for the computer I interact with most of the time.
Yeah, cause I'm sure that when the users he supports as part of his job call him about their inability to access to "Z:" share on the network, they want him to whip out his copy of "Damn Small Linux" reboot the machine, and prove that... ummm... he can fit an operating system on a really small jump drive. When most of us talk about using computers that are not our own, we mean supporting users of those machines: usually in a work or other "getting paid" (even if only in beer for helping out the guy next door) type of environment.
What, did you think he went up to random computers he saw on the street, muscled their owners out the way and used them to surf the 'Net for a few minutes? I like Linux as much as the next guy, but comments like this really annoy me. Maybe there are people out there who are lucky enough to have jobs where they never have to dirty themselves with "non-Free" software touching any machine they use, but most of us don't. Granted I don't care all that much (I'm perfectly content to use a mix of FOSS and closed software myself), but even if I did care I couldn't do much about the fact that there are probably 100 jobs in the computer industry that involve at least some contact with closed software for every one job where you can completely avoid it.
Funny story about that... I thought I was having some trouble with the video card on my MacBook (It turned out to actually be a problem with the application, but that's immaterial), and had brought it to the local Apple store to beat up the Genius Bar guy. Sitting next to me at the bar was a guy who was trying to get the iPhone Genius to upgrade the operating system on his phone, because he didn't own a computer. At all. He'd bought the phone at the AT&T store and they'd activated it for him. He'd never plugged it into a computer since. The Store people were a bit flustered, I don't think anyone had ever come to them with such a request.
You're aware of the fact that credit card transaction don't list line items right? Best buy doesn't send a request for approval of (1) HP XYZX Computer: $563.05, (1) HP VSY39 Monitor: $256.04, (10) Lextronic rewriteable CD-ROMs: 14.98, (1) prepaid cellphone: $56.04... They send a request for approval of $890.08. All the CC companies know is that you spent around $900 at Best Buy. Perhaps useful info for some level of profiling (they now know you're willing to spend money on electronics gear), but hardly useful for figuring out who's a terrorist. Now if they already suspect you of building a fertilizer bomb, and they discover your $900 charge to Bob's Tractors and Fertilizer, then they might have something to work with; but I seriously doubt they're trolling the credit card transactions of every person in America looking for the terrorist who was (a) dumb enough to pay for his disposable cell phone with a CC, and (b) did so from company that only sells disposable cell phones rather than just getting it from a Best Buy or corner gas station.