I've seen the code most of y'all programmer types turn out!
Seriously, though, a few years ago I took my "senior design" course in college. I'd never used java before, but the other two competent people on my team had, and what the heck, it's just a programming language, right? So we decided to do it in Java, using Swing for our GUI.
Java, to me, feels more like scripting than programming-- it felt like everything anyone would ever want to do was in a library, and all I had to do was write some glue, just as if I was writing some ksh to glue together sed or awk. I really began to wonder whether there was truly any difference between "programming" and "scripting" anymore.
Of course, I then went home and put in some work on the game I was writing for the Intellivision, and that's completely different-- but there aren't many bits-and-registers programmers anymore. Modern programming, for the vast majority of us, is really not so different from scripting.
who enjoys a good stock car race (or, more accurately, I like watching darned near anything race...) I'd like to add in a few notes:
1) Stock car racing isn't always like this; this is the norm at Daytona or Talladega, but smaller tracks have different dynamics. Also, simply saying this is "NASCAR" is also misleading; the "NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series" is just as much NASCAR as the "NASCAR Winston Cup Series" they're talking about here, and the trucks run differently, even at Daytona. (The trucks have unrestricted motors, and instead rely on the fact that they have to punch a bigger hole in the air to keep them at "safe" speeds. This leaves sufficient power to bring back one-on-one moves like a slingshot)
2) NASCAR drivers aren't all "he". Shawna Robinson, Deborah Renshaw, and Tina Gordon would probably argue that point.
3) The comment that racers get more aggressive when they're worried about losing more so than winning is questionable-- it seems more to me that the agressiveness level is a function of how many laps are left, and not position on the track. The reason backmarkers tend to wreck more often is their car isn't handling as well, which is why they're back there in the first place...
On the other hand, the game theory aspect is pretty spot-on, and it gets even better than what the article noted: Many race teams field more than one car. So there are some cars out there that a driver can trust more so than the others, since they're teammates. Finishing second to your teammate isn't nearly as painful as finishing second to somebody else-- pays the same, but if you didn't win, it's much better to have not won by helping your teammate do so. The game mechanics are notably more complex than the article notes, and may even be as complex as the auto mechanics...
If I'd've told my twelve-year-old self my 29-year-old self's mantra for dealing with other people, be they cow-orkers, other students, instructors, authority figures:
"There's an easy way to do things and a hard way to do things. Someone else usually gets to choose which way, my job is to make it more so for him than it is for me."
Technically, the Bells really should be able to lay down the law when it comes to who access their cables. I mean, it's their cables.
The problem is that it's only sort of their cables. Yes, they ran them, but as tax payers, we all effectively paid for them via subsidies and tax relief and all sorts of mechanisms by which the government has helped out utility companies over the years.
Since a) we like to consider ourselves a mostly free-market economy, and b) those lines belong to you and me as much as they do Bell, I kinda like the idea of deregulation.
Unfortunately, what we wound up with is broken. For example, a CLEC can't force the ILEC to recondition a loop to carry DSL-- if it's got good enough quality for voice, that's all the CLEC can demand. CLECs can't use remote SLAMs. The competition is unfair.
Of course, to the Bells, being forced to compete in the DSL market is unreasonable since they're already competing with cable and (theoretically) satellite in the broadband market already. So they're not even interested in complying with the spirit of the law; to them, they're being forced to hand some of their profits in a perfectly reasonabl y competitive environment over to some other company.
Given that the ILEC/CLEC structure needs fixed, I like the idea of trying to do so. On the one hand, I kind of feel like this recent ruling is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater-- but on the other hand, I wonder if the baby isn't dead anyhow.
As a number of folks have mentioned, the article notes nothing about requesting pork. To enlighten our slashdot editors such that they might device not to embellish future stories, let me explain why.
Yes, muslims do not eat pork. And yes, anyone who is sufficiently religious to consider it a good idea to die in a suicide bombing for one's faith is very likely to be sufficiently religious not to eat pork.
That said, nobody cares about pork. There's two reasons. The first is false positives. While it takes a pretty screwed up fanatic to be a suicide bomber, there are many people who actually do follow the peaceful teachings of Islam who aren't screwed up but don't eat pork. [0] Couple that with the fact that Jews also eat no pork, and there's a haystack of people who don't eat pork. A religious extremist mad suicide bomber type would be one hell of a hard needle to find.
The other reason is that religious extremist mad suicide bombers are misguided, not stupid. If somebody knows that porkless meals are a red flag, he's not going to order a porkless meal. When the stewardess shows up, he's simply going to say, "no, thank you. I'm not really hungry today" or he'll hand it to the fifteen year old kid in the next row. If you're planning on going to meet Allah tomorrow, well, he's not going to mind if you're a little hungry when you get there. Besides, I'd bet a guy like Allah's got a heavenly catering service.
Since it doesn't take a hell of a lot of thought to realize that pork's irrelevant, it really makes one's position look weak when one has to make stuff up to bolster it. While journalists have been slanted since journalism began, please do realize that your point is driven home much better when you simply present the facts, and don't feel a need to make them up.
[0] Yes, I know. "Aren't screwed up but don't eat pork." Yes. Even bacon. It sounds insane, doesn't it? But I assure....
What you don't get is your local TV station's programming. So you miss your local news, and things like local information on the Weather Channel, as well as independent stations in your area. That's a long way from saying you don't get the Simpsons.
This is also not necessarily true. I not only get my local channels, I get them as the same numbers that they'd be on from broadcast.
If you're in a sufficiently large market, you'll get your own local channels. Atlanta is a sufficiently major market for this, dunno how large an area has to be to be a "major market" but it's not just New York and LA. If you do get your own channels, you don't get the east-and-west-coast feeds.
If you don't get the local channels, you'll get a feed for each network, probably both an east coast and west coast version.
Either way, you get the Simpsons.
To bring this sort of back on topic: My take on the SBC or News Corp buyout is better SBC than News Corp. While SBC may suck in many ways, the idea of having the satellite company owned by the folks who generate some of the content sounds anti-competitive to me. In two years, I see myself saying, "Gee, I wonder why all the non-Fox channels went away..."
When DirectvDSL died, I tried switching to Speakeasy. In this area, DirectvDSL was on Bell South's hardware, but Speakeasy was on Covad's stuff. Either way, the loop belongs to BellSouth, but it meant switching my DSL line to a different CO.
I had line problems on the Covad end-- the distance meant I should have easily been able to get 768k, maybe even a megabit, but I couldn't guarantee even 256k, sometimes I couldn't get a signal at all.
Since the loop's owned by Bellsouth, Covad can't fix it, nor can they require Bellsouth to do so as long as it carries voice traffic "acceptibly".
Now, it's easy to say, "Damn Bellsouth for giving Covad crappy lines and then not fixing them!" But then, given that Bellsouth's being forced by deregulation (now how's that for a misnomer?) to sell that line to Covad at below what it actually costs them to operate phone lines, it's no wonder they have no desire to make Covad's life easier, especially when it's quite likely that if it sucks I'll switch back to some ISP that's using BellSouth hardware....which is exactly what I did. Hard to fault the player when the real problem is the game...
Five years ago we would've all said, "Screw 'em! There's billions of jobs out there, and you can get one that doesn't require a credit check and will build you a Lego desk as a perk in your employment contract!
Now we're sitting here thinking, "Oooh, that sucks... but what else is there?"
Damn the venture capitalists for catching clue! Damn them!
Columbia used to have about 6,000 lbs more data collection and sensor equipment than she had at the time of the STS-107 launch, since she was the first Space Shuttle in operation. NASA found they just weren't using a lot of that data anymore so in the 1999-2001 refit of the orbiter, they removed that equipment so they could have 6,000 lbs more launch capacity instead. This part of the refit brought her flight data collection equipment in-line with the other operating orbiters.
She may well have had the sort of data collection package you expected, but it was decided they'd rather have three tons more lift capacity than data they never use.
People who get themselves put on opt-out lists don't like telemarketers. They don't buy from telemarketers. Some of them won't buy from a company that they know engages in telemarketing.
An opt-out list is a list of people who won't buy your product, so you don't have to waste your time selling to them. What's more, it keeps you from reminding people who are sufficiently averse that you telemarket.
And they think an opt-out list would hurt their business?! It can only improve their business!
When I first got to college, I failed out with a 1.1 GPA overall.
When I went back to school a short few years later, my GPA was 3.8. I'm sure grades are now inflated!
Or, well, maybe it's because the second time around I actually went to class once in a while...
And this is why...
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We will probably always be stuck with spam.
I keep looking at it and saying, "Who buys this stuff? Who's so stupid to buy stuff from a spammer?" I look at it and wonder how spamming could possibly be profitable....and then we find people who believe they can buy a drivers' license that'll reinstate their revoked one and make them immume to speeding tickets.
As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute, and I get the feeling if he were around today, he'd find lots of money in spam...
* PCI is kind of like "kleenex"; It's a common-place word that is used to describe something, usually not a company or organization. If I recall correctly, there was a legal ruling about pretty much this same situation, the plantif being Kleenex. The court did not rule in Kleenex's favor.
Not quite. At present, Kleenex is still a trademark held by Kimberly-Clark Corporation, and they do their best to try to keep it that way, having branded other stuff with the Kleenex name, by making sure never to refer to their stuff as 'Kleenex', but instead, 'Kleenex brand snotwipes', and such.
They're paranoid because Bayer did lose the trademark on 'Aspirin', and K-C isn't interested in going down that road.
I would _guess_ that the PCI-SIG folks are worried about this in that if PCI does become a "household term", I can design whatever board I want, not pay those guys, and call it PCI-- whether or not it actually is. They probably don't so much care about the latter, but the not paying them bit makes most corporations, consortiums, and conglomerations get a bit lawyer-happy.
or because people get annoyed at mashing the 6 button three times for each 'o' that they give up typing in the message half-way through 7.5% of the time?
So would it be fair for Ford to require you to purchase Ford-brand tires and the only thing that distiguishes Ford-brand tires from regular tires is a chip that "authenticates" the tires as being Ford.
The difference here is that when Ford sells you a Mustang, they sell it to you for, oh, a little more than what it cost to build that Mustang.
Where the problem comes from is that printer manufacturers (along with game console manufacturers, since someone noted the Xbox) have followed the Gilette model of marketing, which is "give away the razor, sell the blades." Printers are now a market where you can't actually sell your printer for what it costs to build a printer because nobody does that. They all assume they're going to make their money back on consumables, so of course they want to force you to buy their consumables. I don't believe I'd go so far as to call it "fair"-- after all, when you buy the printer you're not signing a contract that says you're going to make up the difference by buying their consumables-- but that's the logic behind their position.
It's too bad there doesn't seem to be a way to get that djinni back into the bottle-- it'd be quite nice if instead of paying $100 for a printer and $30 for a proprietary ink cartridge that we could pay $150 for the printer and $5 for ink cartridges that are standardized and work in anybody's inkjet printer.
In the Other Model of program development, one person comes up with the idea for a feature, and someone else implements it. There's a mechanism in place that puts both sorts of people on a project.
In the Open Source model, there's no mechanism for people with great ideas but no hack-fu to get their ideas to the programmers.
So for truly innovative things to come from Open Source development, you have to find someone who's a competent programmer _and_ who has good ideas. This is certainly bound to be much rarer than someone who just has one or the other.
If we want to see more true innovation come out of Open Source, then we either need a mechanism to put idea people together with the hackers (and since folks aren't getting paid for this, there's very little incentive to listen to someone else's desires when you're coding...) or find more Renaissance Men. Or we need to find an idea guy with a better answer who's got sufficient charisma we're all willing to listen to him.:)
Welcome to the difference between torque and horsepower.
The small cylinder, high-reving V8 should indeed have higher bhp. This can translate directly into higher top speeds, and will allow better use of gears (more time in lower gears). It will also be smoother (more, smaller sparks), which is why luxury cars almost always come with V8s or even V12s.
The V6, while not reving as high, will have a stronger torque curve (each pulse provides more raw power) and, as was originally posted, can rev faster (but to a lower maximum rpm).
This helps to explain why Ferraris run V12s while Semis run V8s. The Ferrari is faster, but a nice diesel semi will be substantially more powerful
...which gets us to the difference between theory and practice.:)
As designed, four-cylinders tend to rev higher, and V8s less so, because the reason to design an engine as a four cylinder is to reduce displacement and use less fuel. Since horsepower is directly related to engine RPM, the four cylinder from, say, that new hopped up Integra model makes a ridiculous number of horsepower up at some obscene RPM figure, but not so much down low. On the other hand, the V8 from a 'Vette may make a similar number of horsepower, but it does so at a much lower RPM figure. They're designed this way because the greater rotating mass of the V8 (more pistons and piston rods, more valves, etc...) would lead you to reliability problems if you were spinning all that metal at 9,000 RPM, and since you can make the power you need with fewer RPM, you do so.
The original statement is, of course, true, that a hopped-up V6 can beat a hopped up V8, because frankly, the number of cylinders is pretty much irrelevant, but there's no replacement for displacement. If you had a four cylinder engine with the same displacement as a V8, you'd wind up with fairly close to the same amount of power.
In reality, with commonly found engines found in vehicles here in America, the reason V6es can beat V8s is because the V6 get more souping up and get more horsepower per displacement-unit, which sounds exactly like what's described here; a 2.9 GHz P4 getting the souping up of some ridiculous cooling and overclocking to make it beat top of the line P4 with a cheapass fan slapped on it.
is not that this is the second time that ATI has been faster than nVidia, it's that this is only the second time that this has been the case.
Back in The Day, it seemed that 3dfx would come out with their card, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then someone else would release theirs, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then 3dfx would release their next generation of cards, and the cycle would continue that way.
It's been all ATI and nVidia now for a number of years, and ATI has only just now figured out that if they want to sell graphics cards to gamers, they have to be faster every once in a while?
I hope it reverts to the old model. Competition can only yield better graphics cards at lower prices.
Microsoft doesn't give good deals to colleges so they can raise the price on them two years later.
Microsoft gives good deals to colleges (as do Sun Microsystems, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM...) because they want their stuff in front of the people who will be making the decisions in ten years. Microsoft doesn't give software to colleges (or discount the heck out of it) because they want to leverage a monopoly-- they do it because they fear not being a monopoly in 10 years.
Microsoft often goes one step further: They'll foot the bill for some percentage of PC hardware if the college in question will promise to run Microsoft OSes on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen the code most of y'all programmer types turn out!
Seriously, though, a few years ago I took my "senior design" course in college. I'd never used java before, but the other two competent people on my team had, and what the heck, it's just a programming language, right? So we decided to do it in Java, using Swing for our GUI.
Java, to me, feels more like scripting than programming-- it felt like everything anyone would ever want to do was in a library, and all I had to do was write some glue, just as if I was writing some ksh to glue together sed or awk. I really began to wonder whether there was truly any difference between "programming" and "scripting" anymore.
Of course, I then went home and put in some work on the game I was writing for the Intellivision, and that's completely different-- but there aren't many bits-and-registers programmers anymore. Modern programming, for the vast majority of us, is really not so different from scripting.
-JDF
who enjoys a good stock car race (or, more accurately, I like watching darned near anything race...) I'd like to add in a few notes:
1) Stock car racing isn't always like this; this is the norm at Daytona or Talladega, but smaller tracks have different dynamics. Also, simply saying this is "NASCAR" is also misleading; the "NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series" is just as much NASCAR as the "NASCAR Winston Cup Series" they're talking about here, and the trucks run differently, even at Daytona. (The trucks have unrestricted motors, and instead rely on the fact that they have to punch a bigger hole in the air to keep them at "safe" speeds. This leaves sufficient power to bring back one-on-one moves like a slingshot)
2) NASCAR drivers aren't all "he". Shawna Robinson, Deborah Renshaw, and Tina Gordon would probably argue that point.
3) The comment that racers get more aggressive when they're worried about losing more so than winning is questionable-- it seems more to me that the agressiveness level is a function of how many laps are left, and not position on the track. The reason backmarkers tend to wreck more often is their car isn't handling as well, which is why they're back there in the first place...
On the other hand, the game theory aspect is pretty spot-on, and it gets even better than what the article noted: Many race teams field more than one car. So there are some cars out there that a driver can trust more so than the others, since they're teammates. Finishing second to your teammate isn't nearly as painful as finishing second to somebody else-- pays the same, but if you didn't win, it's much better to have not won by helping your teammate do so. The game mechanics are notably more complex than the article notes, and may even be as complex as the auto mechanics...
If I'd've told my twelve-year-old self my 29-year-old self's mantra for dealing with other people, be they cow-orkers, other students, instructors, authority figures:
"There's an easy way to do things and a hard way to do things. Someone else usually gets to choose which way, my job is to make it more so for him than it is for me."
-JDF
And I thought Slammer was going to be the way MS's SQL swerver was going to cost this company the most money this month....
Technically, the Bells really should be able to lay down the law when it comes to who access their cables. I mean, it's their cables.
The problem is that it's only sort of their cables. Yes, they ran them, but as tax payers, we all effectively paid for them via subsidies and tax relief and all sorts of mechanisms by which the government has helped out utility companies over the years.
Since a) we like to consider ourselves a mostly free-market economy, and b) those lines belong to you and me as much as they do Bell, I kinda like the idea of deregulation.
Unfortunately, what we wound up with is broken. For example, a CLEC can't force the ILEC to recondition a loop to carry DSL-- if it's got good enough quality for voice, that's all the CLEC can demand. CLECs can't use remote SLAMs. The competition is unfair.
Of course, to the Bells, being forced to compete in the DSL market is unreasonable since they're already competing with cable and (theoretically) satellite in the broadband market already. So they're not even interested in complying with the spirit of the law; to them, they're being forced to hand some of their profits in a perfectly reasonabl y competitive environment over to some other company.
Given that the ILEC/CLEC structure needs fixed, I like the idea of trying to do so. On the one hand, I kind of feel like this recent ruling is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater-- but on the other hand, I wonder if the baby isn't dead anyhow.
...does not necessarily imply "journalism".
As a number of folks have mentioned, the article notes nothing about requesting pork. To enlighten our slashdot editors such that they might device not to embellish future stories, let me explain why.
Yes, muslims do not eat pork. And yes, anyone who is sufficiently religious to consider it a good idea to die in a suicide bombing for one's faith is very likely to be sufficiently religious not to eat pork.
That said, nobody cares about pork. There's two reasons. The first is false positives. While it takes a pretty screwed up fanatic to be a suicide bomber, there are many people who actually do follow the peaceful teachings of Islam who aren't screwed up but don't eat pork. [0] Couple that with the fact that Jews also eat no pork, and there's a haystack of people who don't eat pork. A religious extremist mad suicide bomber type would be one hell of a hard needle to find.
The other reason is that religious extremist mad suicide bombers are misguided, not stupid. If somebody knows that porkless meals are a red flag, he's not going to order a porkless meal. When the stewardess shows up, he's simply going to say, "no, thank you. I'm not really hungry today" or he'll hand it to the fifteen year old kid in the next row. If you're planning on going to meet Allah tomorrow, well, he's not going to mind if you're a little hungry when you get there. Besides, I'd bet a guy like Allah's got a heavenly catering service.
Since it doesn't take a hell of a lot of thought to realize that pork's irrelevant, it really makes one's position look weak when one has to make stuff up to bolster it. While journalists have been slanted since journalism began, please do realize that your point is driven home much better when you simply present the facts, and don't feel a need to make them up.
[0] Yes, I know. "Aren't screwed up but don't eat pork." Yes. Even bacon. It sounds insane, doesn't it? But I assure....
mmmmmm.... bacon....
I'm going to have my name legally changed to something 27 letters long with no vowels, just to watch people try to pronounce it.
Make it all vowels. With no vowels, people will just assume you're Polish.
Besides, AaaaaaaaaiiiIiiiIIEeeeeeEEE is a great name.
-JDF
What you don't get is your local TV station's programming. So you miss your local news, and things like local information on the Weather Channel, as well as independent stations in your area. That's a long way from saying you don't get the Simpsons.
This is also not necessarily true. I not only get my local channels, I get them as the same numbers that they'd be on from broadcast.
If you're in a sufficiently large market, you'll get your own local channels. Atlanta is a sufficiently major market for this, dunno how large an area has to be to be a "major market" but it's not just New York and LA. If you do get your own channels, you don't get the east-and-west-coast feeds.
If you don't get the local channels, you'll get a feed for each network, probably both an east coast and west coast version.
Either way, you get the Simpsons.
To bring this sort of back on topic: My take on the SBC or News Corp buyout is better SBC than News Corp. While SBC may suck in many ways, the idea of having the satellite company owned by the folks who generate some of the content sounds anti-competitive to me. In two years, I see myself saying, "Gee, I wonder why all the non-Fox channels went away..."
When DirectvDSL died, I tried switching to Speakeasy. In this area, DirectvDSL was on Bell South's hardware, but Speakeasy was on Covad's stuff. Either way, the loop belongs to BellSouth, but it meant switching my DSL line to a different CO.
...which is exactly what I did. Hard to fault the player when the real problem is the game...
I had line problems on the Covad end-- the distance meant I should have easily been able to get 768k, maybe even a megabit, but I couldn't guarantee even 256k, sometimes I couldn't get a signal at all.
Since the loop's owned by Bellsouth, Covad can't fix it, nor can they require Bellsouth to do so as long as it carries voice traffic "acceptibly".
Now, it's easy to say, "Damn Bellsouth for giving Covad crappy lines and then not fixing them!" But then, given that Bellsouth's being forced by deregulation (now how's that for a misnomer?) to sell that line to Covad at below what it actually costs them to operate phone lines, it's no wonder they have no desire to make Covad's life easier, especially when it's quite likely that if it sucks I'll switch back to some ISP that's using BellSouth hardware.
Five years ago we would've all said, "Screw 'em! There's billions of jobs out there, and you can get one that doesn't require a credit check and will build you a Lego desk as a perk in your employment contract!
Now we're sitting here thinking, "Oooh, that sucks... but what else is there?"
Damn the venture capitalists for catching clue! Damn them!
Columbia used to have about 6,000 lbs more data collection and sensor equipment than she had at the time of the STS-107 launch, since she was the first Space Shuttle in operation. NASA found they just weren't using a lot of that data anymore so in the 1999-2001 refit of the orbiter, they removed that equipment so they could have 6,000 lbs more launch capacity instead. This part of the refit brought her flight data collection equipment in-line with the other operating orbiters.
She may well have had the sort of data collection package you expected, but it was decided they'd rather have three tons more lift capacity than data they never use.
-JDF
Crackers've been getting shells via poorly written CGI for years, but now it's news?
People who get themselves put on opt-out lists don't like telemarketers. They don't buy from telemarketers. Some of them won't buy from a company that they know engages in telemarketing.
An opt-out list is a list of people who won't buy your product, so you don't have to waste your time selling to them. What's more, it keeps you from reminding people who are sufficiently averse that you telemarket.
And they think an opt-out list would hurt their business?! It can only improve their business!
How mind-boggling.
When I first got to college, I failed out with a 1.1 GPA overall.
When I went back to school a short few years later, my GPA was 3.8. I'm sure grades are now inflated!
Or, well, maybe it's because the second time around I actually went to class once in a while...
We will probably always be stuck with spam.
...and then we find people who believe they can buy a drivers' license that'll reinstate their revoked one and make them immume to speeding tickets.
I keep looking at it and saying, "Who buys this stuff? Who's so stupid to buy stuff from a spammer?" I look at it and wonder how spamming could possibly be profitable.
As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute, and I get the feeling if he were around today, he'd find lots of money in spam...
* PCI is kind of like "kleenex"; It's a common-place word that is used to describe something, usually not a company or organization. If I recall correctly, there was a legal ruling about pretty much this same situation, the plantif being Kleenex. The court did not rule in Kleenex's favor.
Not quite. At present, Kleenex is still a trademark held by Kimberly-Clark Corporation, and they do their best to try to keep it that way, having branded other stuff with the Kleenex name, by making sure never to refer to their stuff as 'Kleenex', but instead, 'Kleenex brand snotwipes', and such.
They're paranoid because Bayer did lose the trademark on 'Aspirin', and K-C isn't interested in going down that road.
I would _guess_ that the PCI-SIG folks are worried about this in that if PCI does become a "household term", I can design whatever board I want, not pay those guys, and call it PCI-- whether or not it actually is. They probably don't so much care about the latter, but the not paying them bit makes most corporations, consortiums, and conglomerations get a bit lawyer-happy.
-JDF
or because people get annoyed at mashing the 6 button three times for each 'o' that they give up typing in the message half-way through 7.5% of the time?
SCO was the stuff so bad they had to buy the name Unix to be able to call their software Unix with a clear conscience.
Linux claims it's like Unix.
SCO owns the name Unix.
Therefore, to SCO, Linux is using SCO's intellectual property.
Which is an impressive feat, given that the previous statement shows SCO has no intellect to have property in the first place...
So would it be fair for Ford to require you to purchase Ford-brand tires and the only thing that distiguishes Ford-brand tires from regular tires is a chip that "authenticates" the tires as being Ford.
The difference here is that when Ford sells you a Mustang, they sell it to you for, oh, a little more than what it cost to build that Mustang.
Where the problem comes from is that printer manufacturers (along with game console manufacturers, since someone noted the Xbox) have followed the Gilette model of marketing, which is "give away the razor, sell the blades." Printers are now a market where you can't actually sell your printer for what it costs to build a printer because nobody does that. They all assume they're going to make their money back on consumables, so of course they want to force you to buy their consumables. I don't believe I'd go so far as to call it "fair"-- after all, when you buy the printer you're not signing a contract that says you're going to make up the difference by buying their consumables-- but that's the logic behind their position.
It's too bad there doesn't seem to be a way to get that djinni back into the bottle-- it'd be quite nice if instead of paying $100 for a printer and $30 for a proprietary ink cartridge that we could pay $150 for the printer and $5 for ink cartridges that are standardized and work in anybody's inkjet printer.
Why do you think so much effort been invested in areas such as advanced modelling tools but so little in improving debugging tools?
Easy. As anyone who's ever tried to use software knows, nobody uses debugging tools anyway.
-JDF
In the Other Model of program development, one person comes up with the idea for a feature, and someone else implements it. There's a mechanism in place that puts both sorts of people on a project.
:)
In the Open Source model, there's no mechanism for people with great ideas but no hack-fu to get their ideas to the programmers.
So for truly innovative things to come from Open Source development, you have to find someone who's a competent programmer _and_ who has good ideas. This is certainly bound to be much rarer than someone who just has one or the other.
If we want to see more true innovation come out of Open Source, then we either need a mechanism to put idea people together with the hackers (and since folks aren't getting paid for this, there's very little incentive to listen to someone else's desires when you're coding...) or find more Renaissance Men. Or we need to find an idea guy with a better answer who's got sufficient charisma we're all willing to listen to him.
The Radeon 9700 pushes 147 frames per second.
The GeForce pushes over 200 frames per second.
My monitor refreshes 75 times a second.
Tell me again why I want a top-of-the-line graphics card?
-JDF
Welcome to the difference between torque and horsepower.
:)
The small cylinder, high-reving V8 should indeed have higher bhp. This can translate directly into higher top speeds, and will allow better use of gears (more time in lower gears). It will also be smoother (more, smaller sparks), which is why luxury cars almost always come with V8s or even V12s.
The V6, while not reving as high, will have a stronger torque curve (each pulse provides more raw power) and, as was originally posted, can rev faster (but to a lower maximum rpm).
This helps to explain why Ferraris run V12s while Semis run V8s. The Ferrari is faster, but a nice diesel semi will be substantially more powerful
...which gets us to the difference between theory and practice.
As designed, four-cylinders tend to rev higher, and V8s less so, because the reason to design an engine as a four cylinder is to reduce displacement and use less fuel. Since horsepower is directly related to engine RPM, the four cylinder from, say, that new hopped up Integra model makes a ridiculous number of horsepower up at some obscene RPM figure, but not so much down low. On the other hand, the V8 from a 'Vette may make a similar number of horsepower, but it does so at a much lower RPM figure. They're designed this way because the greater rotating mass of the V8 (more pistons and piston rods, more valves, etc...) would lead you to reliability problems if you were spinning all that metal at 9,000 RPM, and since you can make the power you need with fewer RPM, you do so.
The original statement is, of course, true, that a hopped-up V6 can beat a hopped up V8, because frankly, the number of cylinders is pretty much irrelevant, but there's no replacement for displacement. If you had a four cylinder engine with the same displacement as a V8, you'd wind up with fairly close to the same amount of power.
In reality, with commonly found engines found in vehicles here in America, the reason V6es can beat V8s is because the V6 get more souping up and get more horsepower per displacement-unit, which sounds exactly like what's described here; a 2.9 GHz P4 getting the souping up of some ridiculous cooling and overclocking to make it beat top of the line P4 with a cheapass fan slapped on it.
is not that this is the second time that ATI has been faster than nVidia, it's that this is only the second time that this has been the case.
Back in The Day, it seemed that 3dfx would come out with their card, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then someone else would release theirs, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then 3dfx would release their next generation of cards, and the cycle would continue that way.
It's been all ATI and nVidia now for a number of years, and ATI has only just now figured out that if they want to sell graphics cards to gamers, they have to be faster every once in a while?
I hope it reverts to the old model. Competition can only yield better graphics cards at lower prices.
commenting on the Microsoft monopoly.
Microsoft doesn't give good deals to colleges so they can raise the price on them two years later.
Microsoft gives good deals to colleges (as do Sun Microsystems, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM...) because they want their stuff in front of the people who will be making the decisions in ten years. Microsoft doesn't give software to colleges (or discount the heck out of it) because they want to leverage a monopoly-- they do it because they fear not being a monopoly in 10 years.
Microsoft often goes one step further: They'll foot the bill for some percentage of PC hardware if the college in question will promise to run Microsoft OSes on it.
-JDF