it would make sense to me for Microsoft and Open Source in general to find a way of co-existing.
Microsoft has decided they have found that way: patent royalties. A Linux programmer paid by someone else writes the code, and Microsoft receives revenue from someone else's work (while simultaneously creating a deterrent for others in the same industry).
All the software industry needs, is roll over and accept that programmers (and their customers) can never be free.
Conservatives favor tax cuts for the rich, liberals favor health care spending.
Yes, but in addition to those two points of view, Republicans favor tax cuts for job creators, and Democrats favor increased death panel spending. You left both job creators and death panels out, so I'd hardly say your bizarre comment about con.. convertiv.. cons... whatever that word is, and librar.. lies.. lib... whatever that word is, is balanced.
You don't know what URL shorteners are really for?
They're for tracking/counting, particularly for outbound links when your own httpd isn't where the link leads. (But also for whenever someone simply doesn't want to ask IT for the apache logs or wants to use a trendy new reporting tool rather than rely on the last couple decades worth of accreted tools (what can I say, people are funny).)
And the best thing about counting is that you don't have to
count the cost.
What does it offer over Linux? The only fundamental technical difference of note I see is that it's got a microkernel, and arguing about monolithic kernels vs. microkernels is like arguing about vi vs. Emacs
Not quite. In theory, microkernels ought to offer some concrete advantages and disadvantages. They should be a little bit slower due to context switching (waaaah! my computer acts like it's 3 months older! waaaaahh!), but it should be easier to develop and advance, due to certain traditionally-hard-to-debug parts running in user space. (You shouldn't have to be a "kernel hacker" to implement a filesystem API.)
Thus, Hurd ought to have more and better device drivers and filesystems.
But then there's reality.
Drivers: Linux may not be quite on top, but currently beats the crap out of Hurd.
Filesystems: Linux is just plain king of the world, bar none. (Yeah, so I just started a flamewar with the Solaris / ZFS guys... Look, I'm not putting your project down, but no way one-size-fits-all will ever be best at everything. Linux lets you use the right tool at the right mountpoint, and what a diverse set of tools!)
Religiously (if you look at it like vi-vs-emacs) I prefer microkernels, but you just can't ignore Linux's very real achievements.
If someone wants to give $10,000 to some quack who claims that some bottle of snake oil is going to cure his cancer, why should that be deductible?
Two answers:
The GP poster was pretty clear that the quack was offering a mainstream technical procedure which had nothing to do with the usually homeopathic goofiness. I think it's best to think of homeopaths as witch doctors rather than snake oil salesmen: they are wrong about a lot of stuff but they really believe that shit (it's not maliciously fraudulent) and they are also incapable of preventing themselves from learning things too. And sometimes a knife is just a knife (or a targeted-freezing-thingie is just a targeted-freezing-thingie), and you're just paying someone to not be squeamish and to keep things hygienic.
Secondly, if we ask why quackery should be deductible, we should ask really why a wart removal procedure by a real doctor should be deductible. I think whatever answer you come up with, is going to apply to non-doctors too. That is, unless, your answer is "I'm a doctor and I want the government to encourage people to do business with me, but as few of my competitors as possible."
That's especially true with elective procedures. I don't know the details of this case but I don't think this wart was going to kill someone. The IRS just has no fucking business here and shouldn't be interfering with the market. It's not their job to teach people the difference between science and witchcraft.
So what do we do about it? How do you incentivize someone in my position..
I don't know the details, but it's going to involve a situation where there isn't an INSURANCE CLAIM for wart removal. Unless this life-threatening catastrophic wart-from-the-blue suddenly crept up on you and was going to require you to sell your house for treatment, that's not an insurance scenario. It's not a type of risk that needs to be spread. (Imagine a world where people filed auto insurance claims for the cost of their oil changes.)
Make that sort of procedure self-pay so that it is always out of the customer's pocket, and then you can have market forces. We want a situation to develop such that when a doc gives a $550 estimate for that type of job, people say, "I think I'll go to Wal-Doc supercenter instead."
Then there's the whole homeopathic tax-deductible thing. I have no confidence in homeopathy but that's totally my personal opinion and it is intolerable that government has a position on it and discriminates one way or the other (i.e. subsidizes one of the industries and not the other). Expenses should either always or never be tax deductible, regardless of who you do business with.
OTOH, if Google is doing what a government is forcing them to do, the word "censorship" surely applies...;-) Get angry, but get angry at the right people.
No, it implies other travelers they're presumed unknown (i.e. there's no presumption at all).
*IF* passenger screening is a good idea, subsidized by the government to inhibit a secondary ticket marke-- oops I mean -- funded by the government in the interests of public safety, then whitelisting is a good idea for making it faster and less expensive.
Imagine you're a TSA administrator and word comes down from above that you have to screen passengers. You would do this. You'd have to be crazy or incompetent not to want to.
If we don't like it, then we need to have a different word come down from above onto TSA's head (or just disband TSA altogether). The elected official the TSA ultimately accounts to is the president, and there happens to be a presidential election next year. Just sayin'. Maybe we should get some statements/promises from candidates...
if you compare eight real cores to four cores that look like eight, and you improve performance so those eight real cores are competitive per-clock with Intel cores, there's a big advantage.
Competitive per-dollar. That's why HyperThreading wasn't necessarily a bad idea: of course it wasn't as fast as multicore but it was a lot easier/cheaper. (Cheaper for Intel; I'm not talking about their chips' prices, especially at the time they introduced P4.)
There's a tradeoff, and what makes Bulldozer exciting is that they're saying multi-core (as we know it in mid 2011) and Intel's HyperThreading both get it wrong, optimizing die size at the expense of performance or vice-versa. AMD is taking this tradeoff's optimization to a new level of granularity and I think that's very cool, whether or not this iteration is a winner.
There was far too much information marked top secret for no true reason
I think this is the most important part of the whole story.
A lot of the leaked data should have been in press releases or sitting on a public-accessible website or something. If the stuff that should be public is public and the secrets are limited to what needs to be secret, then the government won't be constantly putting their people into terrible no-win situations. Release the information that should be public (and break the law, risking punishment), or be safe by keeping the secret (but betraying your country's rape by looking the other way at what the government is doing).
Get that right, and then only the truly-bad-guys will be a threat. There won't be public sympathy for them and there won't be an overwhelming crowd of well-meaning leakers to conceal them within.
Manning's leaks should have been met with a yawn and "we already read all that stuff years ago on the government's website." With that kind of "reward," he wouldn't have acted out in the first place. Instead, his life is ruined, yes because of his own actions but also because of overzealous use of a Classified rubber stamp.
That totally depends on who buys NVIDIA after Intel and AMD squeeze them to death. At that point, the answer could be anywhen between "immediately after that" and "never."
Do people really believe that it'll be on-par with Sandy Bridge?
We don't know! It might. It might not. Everyone hopes it will.
Whether it wins or loses against Sandy Bridge, one thing's for sure: it's interesting. It sounds like you're still running MSDOS so you don't ever need any parallelism but for the rest of us, AMD has shown the future of hyperthreading and multi-core. It looks like the question of "should we split this piece up so that it can do n things at once?" may be on the table for every part of the CPU.
If you're a Turingist, an entity is intelligent if it seems to be intelligent.
Perhaps a person is religious if they say they are religious.
Fuck the internal state. You'll never know how fully well someone believes any particular dogma. Sure, there are edge cases where it's blindingly obvious: I can say with absolute confidence that a rock is not intelligent, Richard Feynman was intelligent, Richard Dawkins is not religious, and Mohamed Atta almost certainly was religious.
Go beyond the edge cases though, and you're going to find it impossible to say how sincerely religious someone is. I actually had to struggle to think of the name of a person who I'm sure was religious. Anytime someone says they are, there's always the nagging suspicion "do they really believe this shit?" I can't even say for sure that The Pope is religious.
If you start having the state make judgments about who is sincere in their religion and who isn't, then that immediately opens up a bunch of exploits for denying people their religious freedom or establishing state churches. "Oh, you're a Catholic? Surely if you were serious about believing in the One True God, you would denounce the festering corruption of the Vatican, therefore I know you're not serious. I'm an not depriving you of any 'rights' when I say you may not practice Catholicism."
Why should a single parent of one child pay more in taxes than a childless married couple who earn the same amount of income? Marriage itself is a religious rite
You answered the question immediate after asking it. If politicians can't do a special favor for religious people at the rest of society's expense, then why should religious people vote for that politician?
Or to tun it around, if a politician votes to repeal a subsidy, shouldn't they expect the beneficiaries of that subsidy to be angry about it?
It seems pretty obvious to most of us that we are currently playing musical chairs based on IQ and each year there are simply less chairs.
No, not yet. Ideally that would be the case but we're really not anywhere close to that yet. It's just hard to see/find the chairs. Very hard. I assure you they exist, though.
There's always something that needs to get done. Every time I moan "I'm bored," there's some entrepreneurial genius out there somewhere, cursing how few hours there are in the day.
I don't say this as an article of faith in business, but rather as a corollary to the simple fact that we don't have infinite resources yet. If there were really "less chairs" then we would all be a lot wealthier than we are now. You'd say, "Computer, Earl Grey, hot," and get what you want. Until then, it's up to us to find the chairs to sit in, to bring that scenario to reality.
As a reference librarian, my main goal is to be Bablyon 5. I'd love it if we succeeded in creating a powerful enough search and retrieval tool with an intuitive interface that negated the need for library user instruction.
That sounds cool but I'll take 2011 tech searching over 2260 tech any day. (Watch the episode.)
;-) Just picking nits. I loved B5 but boy did it mispredict text searching.
This is a situation where one synonym for "hype" is "curiosity." There isn't any way to understand WTF Google+ really is (from a user's point of view (*)) unless you check it out.
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised about all the signups. The large signups doesn't mean people lik-- um I mean-- +1 the service. It just means they're taking look. Google is significant on the web, no matter what else you think of them.
(*) And yes, of course it's worth thinking about what it might be, from Google's point of view, before you start leaking new information.
Existence of professions isn't necessarily a good thing. Not to knock your profession (it applies equally to mine or anyone else's) but if anything could come along and provide the same value while eliminating the profession of librarian (or computer programmer) (or hand wheat thresher) (or stableboy or street-dung shoveler) that would be a net gain to the economy.
This is one of the terrible problems with dealing with government-minded people and their "jobs, jobs, jobs" slogans. They think of economic value as happening (and only happening) when taxable transactions take place. If cheap cold fusion or teleporters come along, that's economic damage, in their eyes. If a hurricane comes along and creates construction jobs, that's an economic boon to them.
They pretty much say this crap all the time now in the United States, and they say it in public and don't even get ridiculed for it. People nod their heads and cheer. It's crazy.
They want to get paid for their content... If you have any evidence to the contrary, please present it.
They use DRM.
That is, they have decided to create a situation where pirated content (the stuff they don't get paid for) is worth a lot more: easier to use, more reliable, more functional, and interoperable with more devices than their own for-sale content. And they are entirely in control of this; it's a decision, not a accident of fate or luck.
If you offer them money in exchange for hassle-free content, they say NO.
If they wanted to get paid, they would offer what pirates offer, except in exchange for money. Pirates have already done the research and proved that people want it. Moving to a for-profit model would be a move completely free of risk and R&D.
If someone says No to money, and continues to voluntarily create conditions which punish people who stubbornly pay them, and benefit those who give up on the hassles of doing business with someone who doesn't want to do business, I think that is pretty strong evidence that they want to not be paid.
Interestingly, they are owned by companies that also produce hardware (e.g. Sony). I'm not saying they're not in business, just that they're not in the business of selling content.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has decided they have found that way: patent royalties. A Linux programmer paid by someone else writes the code, and Microsoft receives revenue from someone else's work (while simultaneously creating a deterrent for others in the same industry).
All the software industry needs, is roll over and accept that programmers (and their customers) can never be free.
Problem solved.
Damn, I don't even get funny mods? This stuff isn't funny anymore?
Tell me something, mods. Is it because it's old and tired? (please oh please oh please)
Or are we still at the "How Dare You Mock Fox?!" stage? (seriously?)
Yes, but in addition to those two points of view, Republicans favor tax cuts for job creators, and Democrats favor increased death panel spending. You left both job creators and death panels out, so I'd hardly say your bizarre comment about con.. convertiv.. cons... whatever that word is, and librar .. lies .. lib ... whatever that word is, is balanced.
PS: quit making up strange words.
You don't know what URL shorteners are really for?
They're for tracking/counting, particularly for outbound links when your own httpd isn't where the link leads. (But also for whenever someone simply doesn't want to ask IT for the apache logs or wants to use a trendy new reporting tool rather than rely on the last couple decades worth of accreted tools (what can I say, people are funny).)
And the best thing about counting is that you don't have to count the cost.
Not quite. In theory, microkernels ought to offer some concrete advantages and disadvantages. They should be a little bit slower due to context switching (waaaah! my computer acts like it's 3 months older! waaaaahh!), but it should be easier to develop and advance, due to certain traditionally-hard-to-debug parts running in user space. (You shouldn't have to be a "kernel hacker" to implement a filesystem API.)
Thus, Hurd ought to have more and better device drivers and filesystems.
But then there's reality.
Drivers: Linux may not be quite on top, but currently beats the crap out of Hurd.
Filesystems: Linux is just plain king of the world, bar none. (Yeah, so I just started a flamewar with the Solaris / ZFS guys... Look, I'm not putting your project down, but no way one-size-fits-all will ever be best at everything. Linux lets you use the right tool at the right mountpoint, and what a diverse set of tools!)
Religiously (if you look at it like vi-vs-emacs) I prefer microkernels, but you just can't ignore Linux's very real achievements.
Two answers:
The GP poster was pretty clear that the quack was offering a mainstream technical procedure which had nothing to do with the usually homeopathic goofiness. I think it's best to think of homeopaths as witch doctors rather than snake oil salesmen: they are wrong about a lot of stuff but they really believe that shit (it's not maliciously fraudulent) and they are also incapable of preventing themselves from learning things too. And sometimes a knife is just a knife (or a targeted-freezing-thingie is just a targeted-freezing-thingie), and you're just paying someone to not be squeamish and to keep things hygienic.
Secondly, if we ask why quackery should be deductible, we should ask really why a wart removal procedure by a real doctor should be deductible. I think whatever answer you come up with, is going to apply to non-doctors too. That is, unless, your answer is "I'm a doctor and I want the government to encourage people to do business with me, but as few of my competitors as possible."
That's especially true with elective procedures. I don't know the details of this case but I don't think this wart was going to kill someone. The IRS just has no fucking business here and shouldn't be interfering with the market. It's not their job to teach people the difference between science and witchcraft.
Court orders are government action, and government should be held responsible for them, regardless of who petitioned the court.
Keep in my that my GP post did have a smiley, though... I realize this is an ironic case.
I don't know the details, but it's going to involve a situation where there isn't an INSURANCE CLAIM for wart removal. Unless this life-threatening catastrophic wart-from-the-blue suddenly crept up on you and was going to require you to sell your house for treatment, that's not an insurance scenario. It's not a type of risk that needs to be spread. (Imagine a world where people filed auto insurance claims for the cost of their oil changes.)
Make that sort of procedure self-pay so that it is always out of the customer's pocket, and then you can have market forces. We want a situation to develop such that when a doc gives a $550 estimate for that type of job, people say, "I think I'll go to Wal-Doc supercenter instead."
Then there's the whole homeopathic tax-deductible thing. I have no confidence in homeopathy but that's totally my personal opinion and it is intolerable that government has a position on it and discriminates one way or the other (i.e. subsidizes one of the industries and not the other). Expenses should either always or never be tax deductible, regardless of who you do business with.
OTOH, if Google is doing what a government is forcing them to do, the word "censorship" surely applies... ;-) Get angry, but get angry at the right people.
On one hand, that would be truly fucking awesome and probably the second best possible thing to happen for the advancement of phone tech.
On the other hand, the market does not want that, and the company that does it will not sell many phones. It's a death sentence.
No, it implies other travelers they're presumed unknown (i.e. there's no presumption at all).
*IF* passenger screening is a good idea, subsidized by the government to inhibit a secondary ticket marke-- oops I mean -- funded by the government in the interests of public safety, then whitelisting is a good idea for making it faster and less expensive.
Imagine you're a TSA administrator and word comes down from above that you have to screen passengers. You would do this. You'd have to be crazy or incompetent not to want to.
If we don't like it, then we need to have a different word come down from above onto TSA's head (or just disband TSA altogether). The elected official the TSA ultimately accounts to is the president, and there happens to be a presidential election next year. Just sayin'. Maybe we should get some statements/promises from candidates...
I stand corrected on the Intel trademark abuse.
Competitive per-dollar. That's why HyperThreading wasn't necessarily a bad idea: of course it wasn't as fast as multicore but it was a lot easier/cheaper. (Cheaper for Intel; I'm not talking about their chips' prices, especially at the time they introduced P4.)
There's a tradeoff, and what makes Bulldozer exciting is that they're saying multi-core (as we know it in mid 2011) and Intel's HyperThreading both get it wrong, optimizing die size at the expense of performance or vice-versa. AMD is taking this tradeoff's optimization to a new level of granularity and I think that's very cool, whether or not this iteration is a winner.
No, AMD (and much later, Intel) proved they had more potential: the $1k workstation.
It's mostly all about bang-for-buck, not just bang. The bang-at-any-price market is small, which is why DEC got bought rather than doing the buying.
I think this is the most important part of the whole story.
A lot of the leaked data should have been in press releases or sitting on a public-accessible website or something. If the stuff that should be public is public and the secrets are limited to what needs to be secret, then the government won't be constantly putting their people into terrible no-win situations. Release the information that should be public (and break the law, risking punishment), or be safe by keeping the secret (but betraying your country's rape by looking the other way at what the government is doing).
Get that right, and then only the truly-bad-guys will be a threat. There won't be public sympathy for them and there won't be an overwhelming crowd of well-meaning leakers to conceal them within.
Manning's leaks should have been met with a yawn and "we already read all that stuff years ago on the government's website." With that kind of "reward," he wouldn't have acted out in the first place. Instead, his life is ruined, yes because of his own actions but also because of overzealous use of a Classified rubber stamp.
That totally depends on who buys NVIDIA after Intel and AMD squeeze them to death. At that point, the answer could be anywhen between "immediately after that" and "never."
We don't know! It might. It might not. Everyone hopes it will.
Whether it wins or loses against Sandy Bridge, one thing's for sure: it's interesting. It sounds like you're still running MSDOS so you don't ever need any parallelism but for the rest of us, AMD has shown the future of hyperthreading and multi-core. It looks like the question of "should we split this piece up so that it can do n things at once?" may be on the table for every part of the CPU.
If you're a Turingist, an entity is intelligent if it seems to be intelligent.
Perhaps a person is religious if they say they are religious.
Fuck the internal state. You'll never know how fully well someone believes any particular dogma. Sure, there are edge cases where it's blindingly obvious: I can say with absolute confidence that a rock is not intelligent, Richard Feynman was intelligent, Richard Dawkins is not religious, and Mohamed Atta almost certainly was religious.
Go beyond the edge cases though, and you're going to find it impossible to say how sincerely religious someone is. I actually had to struggle to think of the name of a person who I'm sure was religious. Anytime someone says they are, there's always the nagging suspicion "do they really believe this shit?" I can't even say for sure that The Pope is religious.
If you start having the state make judgments about who is sincere in their religion and who isn't, then that immediately opens up a bunch of exploits for denying people their religious freedom or establishing state churches. "Oh, you're a Catholic? Surely if you were serious about believing in the One True God, you would denounce the festering corruption of the Vatican, therefore I know you're not serious. I'm an not depriving you of any 'rights' when I say you may not practice Catholicism."
You answered the question immediate after asking it. If politicians can't do a special favor for religious people at the rest of society's expense, then why should religious people vote for that politician?
Or to tun it around, if a politician votes to repeal a subsidy, shouldn't they expect the beneficiaries of that subsidy to be angry about it?
No, not yet. Ideally that would be the case but we're really not anywhere close to that yet. It's just hard to see/find the chairs. Very hard. I assure you they exist, though.
There's always something that needs to get done. Every time I moan "I'm bored," there's some entrepreneurial genius out there somewhere, cursing how few hours there are in the day.
I don't say this as an article of faith in business, but rather as a corollary to the simple fact that we don't have infinite resources yet. If there were really "less chairs" then we would all be a lot wealthier than we are now. You'd say, "Computer, Earl Grey, hot," and get what you want. Until then, it's up to us to find the chairs to sit in, to bring that scenario to reality.
That sounds cool but I'll take 2011 tech searching over 2260 tech any day. (Watch the episode.)
This is a situation where one synonym for "hype" is "curiosity." There isn't any way to understand WTF Google+ really is (from a user's point of view (*)) unless you check it out.
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised about all the signups. The large signups doesn't mean people lik-- um I mean-- +1 the service. It just means they're taking look. Google is significant on the web, no matter what else you think of them.
(*) And yes, of course it's worth thinking about what it might be, from Google's point of view, before you start leaking new information.
Existence of professions isn't necessarily a good thing. Not to knock your profession (it applies equally to mine or anyone else's) but if anything could come along and provide the same value while eliminating the profession of librarian (or computer programmer) (or hand wheat thresher) (or stableboy or street-dung shoveler) that would be a net gain to the economy.
This is one of the terrible problems with dealing with government-minded people and their "jobs, jobs, jobs" slogans. They think of economic value as happening (and only happening) when taxable transactions take place. If cheap cold fusion or teleporters come along, that's economic damage, in their eyes. If a hurricane comes along and creates construction jobs, that's an economic boon to them.
They pretty much say this crap all the time now in the United States, and they say it in public and don't even get ridiculed for it. People nod their heads and cheer. It's crazy.
They use DRM.
That is, they have decided to create a situation where pirated content (the stuff they don't get paid for) is worth a lot more: easier to use, more reliable, more functional, and interoperable with more devices than their own for-sale content. And they are entirely in control of this; it's a decision, not a accident of fate or luck.
If you offer them money in exchange for hassle-free content, they say NO.
If they wanted to get paid, they would offer what pirates offer, except in exchange for money. Pirates have already done the research and proved that people want it. Moving to a for-profit model would be a move completely free of risk and R&D.
If someone says No to money, and continues to voluntarily create conditions which punish people who stubbornly pay them, and benefit those who give up on the hassles of doing business with someone who doesn't want to do business, I think that is pretty strong evidence that they want to not be paid.
Interestingly, they are owned by companies that also produce hardware (e.g. Sony). I'm not saying they're not in business, just that they're not in the business of selling content.
Create whatever "evidence" you'd like there to be, XOR that against the cipertext, and then provide the result to law enforcement as the OTP.
Breaker one nine. Breaker one nine. Over.