There he is. Everytime theres a story about a developing nation spending on something scientific, atleast one guy has to come up with this sameoldsameold bullshit.
There are problems in the developed world too - problems that could use money that the developed world wants to spend on the ISS or the LHC, to name a few "big science" examples. US doesn't even have universal health care for cryin out loud! Why don't they stop all their space funding and use that to provide universal health care first instead?
The idiots who whip out this argument think that powerty alleviation or slum improvements or food assistance programs somehow have to happen in a vacuum - "you must only do this, not that". You try and do many things - there is no "serialization" requirement.
The logic that every last cent of money must somehow be spent first on powerty alleviation before anything else is done is facetious - the same way you can't make a baby gestate fully in 1 months instead of 9 by "throwing" 9 women at the problem, you cannot "fix" the slums by just throwing money at it. Its a complex problem and it takes coherance in funding, social improvements, labor environment changes, etc to slowly feed on one another before the problem is resolved. The USians know that - they tried to fix their problem by throwing money at it in the form of "the projects" - all that was achieved was just a change of geography of the slums.
I hope you don't "tyrannize" (is that a word? it should be:-) your own life by this false dichotomy. It would be a pity.
Oh, and a few nitpicks:
-- No, Half the population DOES NOT live in slums - Half the population does not live in cities even, theres no question of half the population living in slums. You KNOW how much their population IS, don't you? You are possibly thinking of Mumbai - surveys say half the population of Mumbai lives in slums, and it could quite possibly be true given what I have seen of that city, but Mumbai holds only about 1% of Indias population.
-- Majority of the population is functionally illiterate? Where did you get this? You must be thinking of the US;-)
It is said that a major milestone in the development of a human young adults' brain is when he becomes capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in his head without going all "Angsty" about it.
I counter suggest that its high time you crossed that threshold "Smart Fellow".
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 3, Informative
huh...i guess amazon would not be moving to this any time soon;-)
btw, not that great: i typed in lord of the rings, and it came back with this load of books by mary higgins clark..another one of my fav authors...
but get this: number 50 on the list was.........The hobbit!!
hehe...someone messed with the unsuggesters head..../me thinks the frost posters got to it...another one bites the dust!! long live the slashdot troll coalition!
Way to go Mate!! Hear hear for the misinformation.
In India, a few categories of business expense reimbursements (called "fringe benefits" under the India Tax law) paid by employer to employee are tax exempt. These include things like business related travel expenses, costs associated with having a telephone at home, conveyance, and over-the-counter medicine, house rent etc. Each category has an amount limit, but more importantly, they employee is supposed to submit receipts of these expenses to the employer. The employer is supposed to ensure no foul play and then reimburse the employee the specified amount. This is reported as income for the employee, but, come tax time, it can be excluded from tax calculations as long as the employer certifies in the F16 (the Indian equivalent of the W2) that the expense was truly incurred.
These "benefits" are usually considered part of the pay package of an employee. So if I have an entitlement to Rs 10000 per year as "over the counter medicine" allowance, I can submit bills for the same and get the amount paid to me as Tax free. The kicker is this: Even if I dont submit the bills, the amount of Rs 10000 will still be paid to me at the end of the year! The difference would be that this amount would now be taxed as regular salary.
So essentially, either way, the employer pays out the same amount, and the employee recieves the same amount from the employer; fake receipts or not. The fake receipts are essentially a "tax fraud". And thats why Intel fired these employees. The Tax authorities in India depend on the employer to do due diligence as far as these benefit claims are concerned. So by submiting fake bills to Intel, the employees are essentially creating a legal liability for Intel. Its a different matter that such fake bills are a very common practice in India. Hopefully this will change with the stance taken by Intel and other MNCs recently.
This is a very good move by Intel (though maybe a bit extreme: an initial warning/fine and then firing may have been better). But this has nothing to do with capabilities of the people fired, or their work ethics. They DID NOT try to defraud Intel: they tried to commit a Tax fraud. I am not even sure where the "simulating work" part came from.
-G2
Re:It's harder than you might at first think
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Diebold Flops in Alaska
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is practically the same as what I proposed on my blog a while back:
A proposal for a Trustable Electronic Voting System
Seeing how the failure of electronic voting to earn our trust is a hot topic today, heres my shot at a proposal for a secure electonic voting system.
1. The voting process starts with a voter walking into a polling station and presenting his/her ID. This is verified by the officials, and possibly representatives of the candidates, and once verified, the Voter is issued a Physical Token. This Token is NOT generated on demand, and can be something like the tokens used at game arcades. Each token needs to have a globally unique serial ID, which would need be changeable. Each polling booth is issued a fixed number of voter tokens, enough for the total number of voters expected to show up at a booth. Any unused tokens need to be returned to the Election Authority.
2. The voter takes the token (remmeber that this token is not associated with his identity in any way) and walks up to the voting machine. This machine consists of a touch screen with the poll options on it. The machine activates when the voter drops the token into its slot. The user makes his/her selection, confirms it, and is issued a printed reciept of his/her choice. The machine keeps a running tally of the votes polled, but does NOT communicate the vote to any central server. This information is kept secure inside the machine itself, and the machine needs to be made physcially temper proof and temper-evident. At the end of the polling process, all the voting mashines can be collected together and an authorized elction officer can instruct the machine to reveal the poll results. All results from all machines can be tallied to get the final election result.
4. The receipt format would be a standardized one, established by the febderal election officals, including the fonts, sizes and the information content. It will have on it, printed, the day/date and identifier of the particular election and the id of the machine which issued the reciept, and in large fonts, the selection made by the voter.
5. The voter checks on the reciept to make sure the information on the reciept matches what he had punched in. If not, the vote is invalid, and he/she gets to vote again.
6. If the reciept information is valid, the voter proceeds to another machine, where he/she inserts the reciept into a slot. This second machine reads the receipt using Optical Character Recognition, and maintains its own independent tally of votes polled. It also securely holds all the receipts in a safe vault inside it. The first machine and this second machine are not linked in any way.
7. The first machine and the second machine must not be made by the same manufacturer, or by companies with substantial holding by common entities.
8. Ideally, the token and the receipt would be federal standards, and the machines themselves can be made by any number of companies. They would need to get certified by a testing body. The certification test would focus on standards compliance (including such standards as physical size, accessibility, etc).
9. A single company may make both the machines, but in any specific poll booth, machines from two indepepdent manufacturers need to be used.
At the end of the election, the polling officials return to a central location with all the unused tokens, and the sealed machines. The total number of votes polled by both the machines, and the number of tokens issued is first matched. Then both the machines are activated and the total tallies of votes taken and matched against each other. In case of mismatch, the paper reciepts are retrieved from the second machine, and counted by hand.
The crucial points are:
1. Two independent tallies of the same votes, with a trail between corresponding votes (the receipt carries the token ID, so from the machines databases, one can matc
Exhibit A. 1 peta flops is 10 to the 15th power floating point operations per second. Exhibit B. This computer has ~5000 chips.
This means each chip should be able to capable of 200 giga floating point ops per second. I know of no technology which can allow any floating point unit to be clocked at 200 GHz. Even if it were possible, the kind of power it will consume would make P4s look like mere tiny fuzzy little animals.
This means that each of these chips has to have multiple fpus running in parallel. For low power apps, generally going over 1GHz clock (at todays chip process technologies) is not viable. Assuming that to be the case, this would need 200 FPUs in each chip, amounting to the equivalent of 1 million nodes (just distributed over 5000 chips): why does this matter? The larger the nodes, the larger the complexity of splitting the application into so many threads of execution, and the larger the communication bottleneck. Yes, integrating 200 FPUs on a single chip would certainly ease the design of the communication system, but that also means that going off chip will in general have to carry withitself a large large large "communication penalty".
Also, in that case, I would consider the article deliberately misleading, as they make it a point to mention the lower number of chips being used in this design as evidence of it being better than the other super comps.
As to having so many FPUs on a chip, there are dozens of companies out there making massively parallel chips...1024 and 2048 fpus per chip has already been done...
theres more to this than meets the eye... if anyone here has more info, care to share?
Well, I had the Motorola C100 for a couple yrs around( 1999-2000), before I moved out of the US. I got it from T-mobile as was really pleased with the compact size, long battery life and generally quality of the phone. T-mobile also gave me the unlock code for it when I called them.
In fact, I paid $100 initially for the phone (bought it from Amazon) with a 1yr contract from T-mobile, and T-mobile sent me $250 in rebate checks. So I actually got a free phone, and the equivalent of 4 months of service free for signing a 1 yr contract.
apologies in advance for the shameless plug, but I was just wondering about this problem and I think I may have a solution. I came up with a brief proposal to the trustable electronic voting problem, and posted it on my personal blog. Read it here:
Well, given that he spent more money, added more RAM, as is still hosed when the SAME situation comes up, dont you think his gains would be more worth the dollar if he still kept the swap? This way, certain situations in which he would have been hosed in Case A, he wont have any major problems (beyond the slow slow swap) under Case B
A polygraph literally creates multiple graphs, of various physiological measurements from the diffrent (six?) probes attached to the subjects body. These graphs taken together can then be visually analysed by an expert to (at least in theory) determine when the subject seemed to be under a higher physiological stress (theory saying that when we lie, we are under a higher stress).
But yes, the dictionary meaning is correct.
Re:lets see if we cant do this in a more civil man
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Stallman Goes to India
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· Score: 1
hi again...
ok, firstly, i really really wish you hadnt brought MS into the argument. This is slashdot, and involving MS in a thread not directly about MS i think should be cause enough for invoking godwins law. (ESR, maybe its time to update the entry for godwins law in the hackers dictionary:P)
secondly, its you who now can be accused of a straw man defense by bringing in the issue of reverse engineering and dissassembly, none of which was being argued about. I hope if u do reply further you will refrain from such fascile arguments, cause i am starting to get an uncomfortable feeling that i have been trolled:P
now to respond:
I have absolutely no issues with you liking the 'MS-way' better. to each his own. It just doesnt square with what you have been saying in this thread. If u are talking about freedom to incorporate someones code into yours, the MS way is certainly NOT less restrictive than the GPL. (and no, COM linking is not the same as incorporating code. Such runtime component invocation is all pervasive in the GPL world as well, in other forms). Hell, the "MS-Way" doesnt even let you LOOK at the code!! So i do have to take issues with you if u are implying that MS EULAs are in *any* way less restrictive than GPL.
About only licensing code to people who agree with you: Well, THAT is TRUE for EVERY LICENSE. A LICENSE is a statement of agreement of views on how to use the code. How can i/why should i license you ANYTHING if u dont agree with me on how its to be distributed? Again, MS even imposes restrictions on not only how u distribute code (compiled code, not even source code, which is unavailable) , but also how you USE it on your own!! No one that i have come across has issues with that. The problem is with keeping secret core interoperabilty data which strengthens MS (declared illegal) monopoly: File formats, protocols etc. And that problem arises from the fact that many people dont want a death grip on them where their whole business can be held to ransom because MS wants more money, and there are no options. AGAIN, this is an issue BECAUSE MS is a monopoly. There is no choice for most ppl but to use the.doc format. If a small company with no death grip on the market had a proprietory protocol, no one would care two hoots. That small company cant do much harm. (and if we continue this discussion, please keep MS out of it)
Now about dissassmebly/reverse enginnering: Dissassmebly/reverse engineering is perfectly respectable and legal. Even under the infamous DMCA. And Disassembly is always done for interoperatability reasons. Another big thing which u forgot: dissassembly involves a LOT more effort than just developing an equivalent product yourself from scratch. AGAIN, The only reason ppl do it is for interoperatabilty, when there is NO other choice. Dissassemblers are NOT freeloaders. SAMBA/WINE have worked **much harder** than the original windows team to develop products talking the same protocols as MS products. You should know, given u are no stranger to dissassemblers yourself. The great thing with GPLed code is, one doesnt NEED to reverse engineer anything. Even if the GPL doesnt work for u, u can always go through the code, learn the techniques used, details of all protocols and file formats, and proceed to write a compatible piece of code from scratch. as long as u dont incorporate gpled code verbatim, u are all set!
About leechers: I dont care about a person downloading my code and using it for his own purposes. Thats why i released my code under the GPL, not under a EULA. If that person(your leecher) is not a developer, i DONT *WANT* ANYTHING BACK from him anyways!!! But if he IS a developer, my cost to him is that he contributes back any modifications to my code (failling that, i want a good amount of money from him, maybe a share of the profits he will make from that prop. package of his). And this is true for you too! as a developer of a propreitory product, u benefit more fr
lets see if we cant do this in a more civil manner
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Stallman Goes to India
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· Score: 1
Ok...Hi Andrew:)
me from the other side of the world so i am joining this discussion really late...something to do with the sun not being around earlier...
anyways...
to not be accused of a "straw man defense" let me try and summarise what u r trying to say here:
* GPL is more restrictive than other OPEN SOURCE licenses (u r obviously not comparing it to proprietary licenses and EULAs...err...i hope?)
* The reason for ur thinking this is GPL makes it impossible, or atleast *clunky* to incorporate into a proprietory package. Clunky because a parallel licensing deal may need to be worked out with the author(S) and with the usual number of authors on most serious projects, this process could get complicated.
* You also find the deal the GPL offers "unfair" because it either makes u GPL ur entire code (which may be quite valuable) even if all u want to do is use a small function/lib from a GPL project.
* In the case where u try to work out alternative license arrangements u think/find (u give a specific example of QT somewhere up there) that the price asked for an alternative license is again "unfair" and inconsistent with market prices.
* additionally u think this is bad cause it makes u re-invent the wheel when u could have just used some GPLed code (if it were under a license which worked for you)...thus making the GPL a cause of wasted effort.
If this *isnt* what u have been saying, my apologies, and u can skip to the next comment now.
If this *is* infact what u have been saying, here are my two cents:
* well, yes, from a perspective the GPL *is* more restrictive. Its aim is to create an openly available suite of code and keep it open indefinately. Remember GPL roots are from a project which tried/tries to make a not-UNIX(TM) unix -- a monstrous reinvention of the wheel...the waste was already there because of the proprietory license. GPL/GNU tried to make it so that there wont be more such waste going forward. It also tries to appeal to a lot of peoples sense of "fairness" in which they dont want entities which dont share their views on "free as in speech" to benefit from the code. This also encourages these entities to go for the GPL if they think using GPL code provides them value enough to make it a fair deal to open their own code.
In your case, u dont find it a fair deal to have to openup your whole code just because u used a few hundred lines of GPLed code. fair enough, as u said urself, thats why u dont use it. In my case i think it wont be a fair deal if u were able to use some code that i wrote, incorporate that in some proprietory package of yours, and gave nothing back. My reasons for GPLing my code are for it to aid in the snowballing effect of more GPL code out there. If u do contact me with a special case where u just cant open up your code for whatever reasons, but would still like to use my code in it, its only fair for me to ask any amount for it (my experience though, is that GPLed code is usually available for very reasonable terms under alternative licenses). After i name an amount, u are completely free to choose some other provider, if u think i am overcharging (maybe i am stupid to charge so much, and will thus never make a cent from my code, or maybe i really dont want my code in prop. software, and i did actually pull out a number from thin air).
The only license i can think of which is less restrictive (from your perspective) is the BSD (and its bretheren). No prop. license even comes close, so again, i assume your comparision was only with the BSD licenses. The BSD license is usually applied to code which was developed using public money, and thus is only fair that individuals and corporations, FOSS ppl and prop. folks be able to use it equally freely (actually, using BSD with GPL is kind of "clunky" to use ur word). Most code that GPL is applied to was developed by private individuals in their spare time, or by ppl who were being paid to do so by companies which make mone
offtopic, responding to your sig: why not just use associative arrays if u want named parameters? and i have been waiting for true OO in PHP...i like it:)
I have been looking all over for an automated (wget style) way to download *ALL* patches available on windowsupdate, for say, windows XP SP1, for offline use, so i can download them all, slipstream them onto my installation media, like i do with the service packs, and voila! have a completely secure installation (as much as a windows install can be completely secure) from its first boot....havent found one yet....anyone managed to do this?
cant a small number of even "small-fish" shareholders get together and sue vivendi for destroying share holder value by failing to capitalize on a fully-paid-for acquisition?
i am sure a company if not allowed to just gut property like that...
Linux makes quite a bit of practical sense in India. No indian can really afford to pay retail for software. Even the $40 that is the (rumored) cost of windows to PC OEMS is something most people just cannot pay in addition to the huge price of a computer. The OS and the office suite are thus mostly pirated, and usually include a plethora of free viruses...Ditto for the development environments. Everyone who is serious about learning comp/programming realizes sooner o\r later that instead of trying to pirate each and every tool one needs for a dev environment, its just better to move to linux.
In addition to that, there are magazine like PC Quest which have distributed free linux distro CDs (and include loads of good linux articles) with the magazine since around 1994. These CDs are how i got hooked on linux. That helps...
In my college, the IITs linux has long been the OS of choice in comp labs. They would rather buy a few more PCs than spend the huge ammount on WIN+DEV STUDIO, (even after the educational discount), and even when i was there, 5 years back, students, even non power users clearly preferred the linux systems over the NT systems...to the end where they migrated the NT ones to linux too.
blah...i thought i had a point here...DAMN ADD:P
Ghoul2
I have found that in such situations, the best that one can do is look for news sources which you expect to be biased towards both sides of the issue. I mean, read BBC and, say, DAWN, a pakistani newspaper (a rather respectable newspaper, very balanced, relative to most others that i have found from islamic countries).
So both of these are mostly very unbiased, but on such a issue, probably leaning to opposite sides. one can expect them to report pretty much all relevant points to the issue between them, and then, once u have all the information, build your own opinion...no, not as easy as getting your opinion ready made for you by a single source, but i think the only way one has any chance at knowing even a part of the truth. I know this is what i am going to do.
One thing i am not going to do is read CNN, though. CNN has recently been a major dissapointment in its over all coverage of ALL issues, from the ENRON and co. scams, to the IRAQ issue. I think they are guilty of fraud, the way they omit an anti-goverment viewpoint, eg in the case of the hugely edited UN weapons inspector transscript posted on CNN (read about it on that other site )...thats just one example. Their coverage of the worldwide anti-war protests could have made one feel that it was just a dozen hippies who made a bit of noise, not the 10 million plus who marched all over the world. What good is the guarentee of freedom of press when the press is unwilling to use that freedom? Its weird that a govt. owned news channel (BBC) manages a much more balanced reporting that a completely independent and very powerfull entity like CNN. The irony get worse when you consider that CNN gained most of its worldwide popularity during operation desert storm, when it was the only international news network allowed to operate from inside iraq by saddam, because, as the iraqi govt put it: "they are the only ones we trust to objectively report the truth".
try Fotopic. No ads, 250MB storage, FTP access, can be used with your own domain...the interface leaves a bit to be desired, but still is better than all others i have used. Very geek oriented. I don't understand why so few people know about it, although i think i just took care of that problem;)
am not paid anything by them for this "promotion", just a very satisfied user.
Well, there is a monthly "features" mail that i get on my hotmail account from "staff@hotmail.com" that
cannot be blocked cannot be marked as "junk mail" cannot be forwarded ( say to "abuse" at hotmail.com) does not specify how i can stop recieving it
i think its the worst kind of spam possible. no other spam msg has made me feel so helpless and so angry. The fact is only hotmail itself could spam its users in this manner...they have a system where the "this is junk mail", "block sender" buttons etc, do not even appear when u view the msg. The first time i rcvd it was when i finally decided to get my own domain and buy some decent email hosting. I have still not completed the switching over, but am getting there...i definitely wont miss hotmail. its weird when one of the largest companies in the world finds it useful to spam its users.
yeah, true. But my calculations assumed that the "electrical signals" on the chip travel at the speed of light. So my point still stands. Doesnt this give rise to complex race conditions ON the chip?
With 3GHz CPUs on the horizon, i am kinda confused as to how these cpus can function. I mean, assuming electricity travels in copper/semiconductor (or whatever they use in ICs these days) as fast as light in vaccum (in fact it travels at a fraction of 'c'):
in one 3GHz cycle, a signal in the the CPU can only travel less than 10cm (~4 inches for those still stuck with the imperial units). With CPU dies sizes of a similar magnitude (~4cm), and with all the routing inside the CPU, why dont we get some very serious race conditions? are the intel engineers actually going in and laying out the chip keeping this speed in mind? as the speed will vary with the CPU temperature, its even more difficult.
And doesnt that impose a HARD LIMIT on how many MHz can be squeezed out? I mean, a comment below mentions intel demoing 5GHz CPU (this is the first time i'v heard about this, so i dunno how true this is), and that means the signal only travels 6cm, which means it cant even traverse the whole die in one cycle.
Is there something i am forgetting here? Can someone in the know please shed some light?
Well, i am talking about my desktop machine(s) here. Win2k is not bad at all, one of the few MS products i actually like, but as i end up downloading and playing around with a lot of software, i just find it a good idea to start afresh every once in a while. As far as reinstalling redhat is concerned, that is done to keep up with the latest releases. I know, not required, just something i have always done in my 8 years of linux use.
My point about the tcp/ip stack in bios and the firewall had to do with the fact that i don't even let my OS tcpip stack onto the net unprotected.
Add to that the fact that there would be no way to run a firewall over a BIOS tcp/ip stack (yes, they may include a firewall there as well but which then needs to be configured for my specific use) and the fact that the only point of having a tcpip stack is to get online, you will eventually have to hook ur comp with that (BIOS based) tcpip stack upto the net, and u see the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There he is. Everytime theres a story about a developing nation spending on something scientific, atleast one guy has to come up with this sameoldsameold bullshit.
There are problems in the developed world too - problems that could use money that the developed world wants to spend on the ISS or the LHC, to name a few "big science" examples. US doesn't even have universal health care for cryin out loud! Why don't they stop all their space funding and use that to provide universal health care first instead?
The idiots who whip out this argument think that powerty alleviation or slum improvements or food assistance programs somehow have to happen in a vacuum - "you must only do this, not that". You try and do many things - there is no "serialization" requirement.
The logic that every last cent of money must somehow be spent first on powerty alleviation before anything else is done is facetious - the same way you can't make a baby gestate fully in 1 months instead of 9 by "throwing" 9 women at the problem, you cannot "fix" the slums by just throwing money at it. Its a complex problem and it takes coherance in funding, social improvements, labor environment changes, etc to slowly feed on one another before the problem is resolved. The USians know that - they tried to fix their problem by throwing money at it in the form of "the projects" - all that was achieved was just a change of geography of the slums.
You really should go google for "tyranny of the O" - heres something to start you off: http://www.well.com/~bbear/collins.html#RTFToC10
I hope you don't "tyrannize" (is that a word? it should be :-) your own life by this false dichotomy. It would be a pity.
Oh, and a few nitpicks:
-- No, Half the population DOES NOT live in slums - Half the population does not live in cities even, theres no question of half the population living in slums. You KNOW how much their population IS, don't you? You are possibly thinking of Mumbai - surveys say half the population of Mumbai lives in slums, and it could quite possibly be true given what I have seen of that city, but Mumbai holds only about 1% of Indias population.
-- Majority of the population is functionally illiterate? Where did you get this? You must be thinking of the US ;-)
It is said that a major milestone in the development of a human young adults' brain is when he becomes capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in his head without going all "Angsty" about it.
I counter suggest that its high time you crossed that threshold "Smart Fellow".
you want LyX (www.lyx.org).
huh...i guess amazon would not be moving to this any time soon ;-)
btw, not that great: i typed in lord of the rings, and it came back with this load of books by mary higgins clark..another one of my fav authors...
but get this: number 50 on the list was.........The hobbit!!
hehe...someone messed with the unsuggesters head..../me thinks the frost posters got to it...another one bites the dust!! long live the slashdot troll coalition!
i will go now...
Way to go Mate!! Hear hear for the misinformation.
In India, a few categories of business expense reimbursements (called "fringe benefits" under the India Tax law) paid by employer to employee are tax exempt. These include things like business related travel expenses, costs associated with having a telephone at home, conveyance, and over-the-counter medicine, house rent etc. Each category has an amount limit, but more importantly, they employee is supposed to submit receipts of these expenses to the employer. The employer is supposed to ensure no foul play and then reimburse the employee the specified amount. This is reported as income for the employee, but, come tax time, it can be excluded from tax calculations as long as the employer certifies in the F16 (the Indian equivalent of the W2) that the expense was truly incurred.
These "benefits" are usually considered part of the pay package of an employee. So if I have an entitlement to Rs 10000 per year as "over the counter medicine" allowance, I can submit bills for the same and get the amount paid to me as Tax free. The kicker is this: Even if I dont submit the bills, the amount of Rs 10000 will still be paid to me at the end of the year! The difference would be that this amount would now be taxed as regular salary.
So essentially, either way, the employer pays out the same amount, and the employee recieves the same amount from the employer; fake receipts or not. The fake receipts are essentially a "tax fraud". And thats why Intel fired these employees. The Tax authorities in India depend on the employer to do due diligence as far as these benefit claims are concerned. So by submiting fake bills to Intel, the employees are essentially creating a legal liability for Intel. Its a different matter that such fake bills are a very common practice in India. Hopefully this will change with the stance taken by Intel and other MNCs recently.
This is a very good move by Intel (though maybe a bit extreme: an initial warning/fine and then firing may have been better). But this has nothing to do with capabilities of the people fired, or their work ethics. They DID NOT try to defraud Intel: they tried to commit a Tax fraud. I am not even sure where the "simulating work" part came from.
-G2
This is practically the same as what I proposed on my blog a while back:
A proposal for a Trustable Electronic Voting System
Seeing how the failure of electronic voting to earn our trust is a hot topic today, heres my shot at a proposal for a secure electonic voting system.
1. The voting process starts with a voter walking into a polling station and presenting his/her ID. This is verified by the officials, and possibly representatives of the candidates, and once verified, the Voter is issued a Physical Token. This Token is NOT generated on demand, and can be something like the tokens used at game arcades. Each token needs to have a globally unique serial ID, which would need be changeable. Each polling booth is issued a fixed number of voter tokens, enough for the total number of voters expected to show up at a booth. Any unused tokens need to be returned to the Election Authority.
2. The voter takes the token (remmeber that this token is not associated with his identity in any way) and walks up to the voting machine. This machine consists of a touch screen with the poll options on it. The machine activates when the voter drops the token into its slot. The user makes his/her selection, confirms it, and is issued a printed reciept of his/her choice. The machine keeps a running tally of the votes polled, but does NOT communicate the vote to any central server. This information is kept secure inside the machine itself, and the machine needs to be made physcially temper proof and temper-evident. At the end of the polling process, all the voting mashines can be collected together and an authorized elction officer can instruct the machine to reveal the poll results. All results from all machines can be tallied to get the final election result.
4. The receipt format would be a standardized one, established by the febderal election officals, including the fonts, sizes and the information content. It will have on it, printed, the day/date and identifier of the particular election and the id of the machine which issued the reciept, and in large fonts, the selection made by the voter.
5. The voter checks on the reciept to make sure the information on the reciept matches what he had punched in. If not, the vote is invalid, and he/she gets to vote again.
6. If the reciept information is valid, the voter proceeds to another machine, where he/she inserts the reciept into a slot. This second machine reads the receipt using Optical Character Recognition, and maintains its own independent tally of votes polled. It also securely holds all the receipts in a safe vault inside it. The first machine and this second machine are not linked in any way.
7. The first machine and the second machine must not be made by the same manufacturer, or by companies with substantial holding by common entities.
8. Ideally, the token and the receipt would be federal standards, and the machines themselves can be made by any number of companies. They would need to get certified by a testing body. The certification test would focus on standards compliance (including such standards as physical size, accessibility, etc).
9. A single company may make both the machines, but in any specific poll booth, machines from two indepepdent manufacturers need to be used.
At the end of the election, the polling officials return to a central location with all the unused tokens, and the sealed machines. The total number of votes polled by both the machines, and the number of tokens issued is first matched. Then both the machines are activated and the total tallies of votes taken and matched against each other. In case of mismatch, the paper reciepts are retrieved from the second machine, and counted by hand.
The crucial points are:
1. Two independent tallies of the same votes, with a trail between corresponding votes (the receipt carries the token ID, so from the machines databases, one can matc
Exhibit A. 1 peta flops is 10 to the 15th power floating point operations per second.
Exhibit B. This computer has ~5000 chips.
This means each chip should be able to capable of 200 giga floating point ops per second.
I know of no technology which can allow any floating point unit to be clocked at 200 GHz.
Even if it were possible, the kind of power it will consume would make P4s look like mere tiny fuzzy little animals.
This means that each of these chips has to have multiple fpus running in parallel. For low power apps, generally going over 1GHz clock (at todays chip process technologies) is not viable. Assuming that to be the case, this would need 200 FPUs in each chip, amounting to the equivalent of 1 million nodes (just distributed over 5000 chips): why does this matter? The larger the nodes, the larger the complexity of splitting the application into so many threads of execution, and the larger the communication bottleneck. Yes, integrating 200 FPUs on a single chip would certainly ease the design of the communication system, but that also means that going off chip will in general have to carry withitself a large large large "communication penalty".
Also, in that case, I would consider the article deliberately misleading, as they make it a point to mention the lower number of chips being used in this design as evidence of it being better than the other super comps.
As to having so many FPUs on a chip, there are dozens of companies out there making massively parallel chips...1024 and 2048 fpus per chip has already been done...
theres more to this than meets the eye...
if anyone here has more info, care to share?
-ghoul2
Well, I had the Motorola C100 for a couple yrs around( 1999-2000), before I moved out of the US. I got it from T-mobile as was really pleased with the compact size, long battery life and generally quality of the phone. T-mobile also gave me the unlock code for it when I called them.
In fact, I paid $100 initially for the phone (bought it from Amazon) with a 1yr contract from T-mobile, and T-mobile sent me $250 in rebate checks. So I actually got a free phone, and the equivalent of 4 months of service free for signing a 1 yr contract.
apologies in advance for the shameless plug, but I was just wondering about this problem and I think I may have a solution. I came up with a brief proposal to the trustable electronic voting problem, and posted it on my personal blog. Read it here:
A proposal for Trustable Electronic Voting
Am sure there are issues I missed in there, would appreciate comments.
Well, given that he spent more money, added more RAM, as is still hosed when the SAME situation comes up, dont you think his gains would be more worth the dollar if he still kept the swap? This way, certain situations in which he would have been hosed in Case A, he wont have any major problems (beyond the slow slow swap) under Case B
A polygraph literally creates multiple graphs, of various physiological measurements from the diffrent (six?) probes attached to the subjects body. These graphs taken together can then be visually analysed by an expert to (at least in theory) determine when the subject seemed to be under a higher physiological stress (theory saying that when we lie, we are under a higher stress).
But yes, the dictionary meaning is correct.
hi again...
:P)
:P
.doc format. If a small company with no death grip on the market had a proprietory protocol, no one would care two hoots. That small company cant do much harm. (and if we continue this discussion, please keep MS out of it)
ok, firstly, i really really wish you hadnt brought MS into the argument. This is slashdot, and involving MS in a thread not directly about MS i think should be cause enough for invoking godwins law. (ESR, maybe its time to update the entry for godwins law in the hackers dictionary
secondly, its you who now can be accused of a straw man defense by bringing in the issue of reverse engineering and dissassembly, none of which was being argued about. I hope if u do reply further you will refrain from such fascile arguments, cause i am starting to get an uncomfortable feeling that i have been trolled
now to respond:
I have absolutely no issues with you liking the 'MS-way' better. to each his own. It just doesnt square with what you have been saying in this thread. If u are talking about freedom to incorporate someones code into yours, the MS way is certainly NOT less restrictive than the GPL. (and no, COM linking is not the same as incorporating code. Such runtime component invocation is all pervasive in the GPL world as well, in other forms). Hell, the "MS-Way" doesnt even let you LOOK at the code!! So i do have to take issues with you if u are implying that MS EULAs are in *any* way less restrictive than GPL.
About only licensing code to people who agree with you: Well, THAT is TRUE for EVERY LICENSE. A LICENSE is a statement of agreement of views on how to use the code. How can i/why should i license you ANYTHING if u dont agree with me on how its to be distributed? Again, MS even imposes restrictions on not only how u distribute code (compiled code, not even source code, which is unavailable) , but also how you USE it on your own!! No one that i have come across has issues with that. The problem is with keeping secret
core interoperabilty data which strengthens MS (declared illegal) monopoly: File formats, protocols etc. And that problem arises from the fact that many people dont want a death grip on them where their whole business can be held to ransom because MS wants more money, and there are no options. AGAIN, this is an issue BECAUSE MS is a monopoly. There is no choice for most ppl but to use the
Now about dissassmebly/reverse enginnering: Dissassmebly/reverse engineering is perfectly respectable and legal. Even under the infamous DMCA. And Disassembly is always done for interoperatability reasons. Another big thing which u forgot: dissassembly involves a LOT more effort than just developing an equivalent product yourself from scratch. AGAIN, The only reason ppl do it is for interoperatabilty, when there is NO other choice. Dissassemblers are NOT freeloaders. SAMBA/WINE have worked **much harder** than the original windows team to develop products talking the same protocols as MS products. You should know, given u are no stranger to dissassemblers yourself. The great thing with GPLed code is, one doesnt NEED to reverse engineer anything. Even if the GPL doesnt work for u, u can always go through the code, learn the techniques used, details of all protocols and file formats, and proceed to write a compatible piece of code from scratch. as long as u dont incorporate gpled code verbatim, u are all set!
About leechers: I dont care about a person downloading my code and using it for his own purposes. Thats why i released my code under the GPL, not under a EULA. If that person(your leecher) is not a developer, i DONT *WANT* ANYTHING BACK from him anyways!!! But if he IS a developer, my cost to him is that he contributes
back any modifications to my code (failling that, i want a good amount of money from him, maybe a share of the profits he will make from that prop. package of his). And this is true for you too! as a developer of a propreitory product, u benefit more fr
Ok...Hi Andrew :)
me from the other side of the world so i am joining this discussion really late...something to do with the sun not being around earlier...
anyways...
to not be accused of a "straw man defense" let me try and summarise what u r trying to say here:
* GPL is more restrictive than other OPEN SOURCE licenses (u r obviously not comparing it to proprietary licenses and EULAs...err...i hope?)
* The reason for ur thinking this is GPL makes it impossible, or atleast *clunky* to incorporate into a proprietory package. Clunky because a parallel licensing deal may need to be worked out with the author(S) and with the usual number of authors on most serious projects, this process could get complicated.
* You also find the deal the GPL offers "unfair" because it either makes u GPL ur entire code (which may be quite valuable) even if all u want to do is use a small function/lib from a GPL project.
* In the case where u try to work out alternative license arrangements u think/find (u give a specific example of QT somewhere up there) that the price asked for an alternative license is again "unfair" and inconsistent with market prices.
* additionally u think this is bad cause it makes u re-invent the wheel when u could have just used some GPLed code (if it were under a license which worked for you)...thus making the GPL a cause of wasted effort.
If this *isnt* what u have been saying, my apologies, and u can skip to the next comment now.
If this *is* infact what u have been saying, here are my two cents:
* well, yes, from a perspective the GPL *is* more restrictive. Its aim is to create an openly available suite of code and keep it open indefinately. Remember GPL roots are from a project which tried/tries to make a not-UNIX(TM) unix -- a monstrous reinvention of the wheel...the waste was already there because of the proprietory license. GPL/GNU tried to make it so that there wont be more such waste going forward. It also tries to appeal to a lot of peoples sense of "fairness" in which they dont want entities which dont share their views on "free as in speech" to benefit from the code. This also encourages these entities to go for the GPL if they think using GPL code provides them value enough to make it a fair deal to open their own code.
In your case, u dont find it a fair deal to have to openup your whole code just because u used a few hundred lines of GPLed code. fair enough, as u said urself, thats why u dont use it. In my case i think it wont be a fair deal if u were able to use some code that i wrote, incorporate that in some proprietory package of yours, and gave nothing back. My reasons for GPLing my code are for it to aid in the snowballing effect of more GPL code out there. If u do contact me with a special case where u just cant open up your code for whatever reasons, but would still like to use my code in it, its only fair for me to ask any amount for it (my experience though, is that GPLed code is usually available for very reasonable terms under alternative licenses). After i name an amount, u are completely free to choose some other provider, if u think i am overcharging (maybe i am stupid to charge so much, and will thus never make a cent from my code, or maybe i really dont want my code in prop. software, and i did actually pull out a number from thin air).
The only license i can think of which is less restrictive (from your perspective) is the BSD (and its bretheren). No prop. license even comes close, so again, i assume your comparision was only with the BSD licenses. The BSD license is usually applied to code which was developed using public money, and thus is only fair that individuals and corporations, FOSS ppl and prop. folks be able to use it equally freely (actually, using BSD with GPL is kind of "clunky" to use ur word). Most code that GPL is applied to was developed by private individuals in their spare time, or by ppl who were being paid to do so by companies which make mone
offtopic, responding to your sig: why not just use associative arrays if u want named parameters? and i have been waiting for true OO in PHP...i like it :)
hth,
Ghoul
(tongue firmly in cheek)
:P
the poster was obviously kidding (you werewerent you?) cause then BASH is the best programming langague of them ALL:
bash$ mozilla
there: the worlds most advanced browser in 8 letters...beat that, python!!!
Muahahahahahaha
Ghoul
I have been looking all over for an automated (wget style) way to download *ALL* patches available on windowsupdate, for say, windows XP SP1, for offline use, so i can download them all, slipstream them onto my installation media, like i do with the service packs, and voila! have a completely secure installation (as much as a windows install can be completely secure) from its first boot....havent found one yet....anyone managed to do this?
any help appreciated!
thx,
Ghoul
cant a small number of even "small-fish" shareholders get together and sue vivendi for destroying share holder value by failing to capitalize on a fully-paid-for acquisition?
i am sure a company if not allowed to just gut property like that...
just a thought...
Ghoul2
Linux makes quite a bit of practical sense in India. No indian can really afford to pay retail for software. Even the $40 that is the (rumored) cost of windows to PC OEMS is something most people just cannot pay in addition to the huge price of a computer. The OS and the office suite are thus mostly pirated, and usually include a plethora of free viruses...Ditto for the development environments. Everyone who is serious about learning comp/programming realizes sooner o\r later that instead of trying to pirate each and every tool one needs for a dev environment, its just better to move to linux. :P
Ghoul2
In addition to that, there are magazine like PC Quest which have distributed free linux distro CDs (and include loads of good linux articles) with the magazine since around 1994. These CDs are how i got hooked on linux. That helps...
In my college, the IITs linux has long been the OS of choice in comp labs. They would rather buy a few more PCs than spend the huge ammount on WIN+DEV STUDIO, (even after the educational discount), and even when i was there, 5 years back, students, even non power users clearly preferred the linux systems over the NT systems...to the end where they migrated the NT ones to linux too.
blah...i thought i had a point here...DAMN ADD
ah...ZX Spectrum...i learnt assembly/machine code on that one...
:)
stupid stupid nostalgia
I have found that in such situations, the best that one can do is look for news sources which you expect to be biased towards both sides of the issue. I mean, read BBC and, say, DAWN, a pakistani newspaper (a rather respectable newspaper, very balanced, relative to most others that i have found from islamic countries).
So both of these are mostly very unbiased, but on such a issue, probably leaning to opposite sides. one can expect them to report pretty much all relevant points to the issue between them, and then, once u have all the information, build your own opinion...no, not as easy as getting your opinion ready made for you by a single source, but i think the only way one has any chance at knowing even a part of the truth. I know this is what i am going to do.
One thing i am not going to do is read CNN, though. CNN has recently been a major dissapointment in its over all coverage of ALL issues, from the ENRON and co. scams, to the IRAQ issue. I think they are guilty of fraud, the way they omit an anti-goverment viewpoint, eg in the case of the hugely edited UN weapons inspector transscript posted on CNN (read about it on that other site )...thats just one example. Their coverage of the worldwide anti-war protests could have made one feel that it was just a dozen hippies who made a bit of noise, not the 10 million plus who marched all over the world. What good is the guarentee of freedom of press when the press is unwilling to use that freedom? Its weird that a govt. owned news channel (BBC) manages a much more balanced reporting that a completely independent and very powerfull entity like CNN. The irony get worse when you consider that CNN gained most of its worldwide popularity during operation desert storm, when it was the only international news network allowed to operate from inside iraq by saddam, because, as the iraqi govt put it: "they are the only ones we trust to objectively report the truth".
Its a weird world.
Ghoul2
try Fotopic. No ads, 250MB storage, FTP access, can be used with your own domain...the interface leaves a bit to be desired, but still is better than all others i have used. Very geek oriented. I don't understand why so few people know about it, although i think i just took care of that problem ;)
am not paid anything by them for this "promotion", just a very satisfied user.
Ghoul2
Well, there is a monthly "features" mail that i get on my hotmail account from "staff@hotmail.com" that
cannot be blocked
cannot be marked as "junk mail"
cannot be forwarded ( say to "abuse" at hotmail.com)
does not specify how i can stop recieving it
i think its the worst kind of spam possible. no other spam msg has made me feel so helpless and so angry. The fact is only hotmail itself could spam its users in this manner...they have a system where the "this is junk mail", "block sender" buttons etc, do not even appear when u view the msg. The first time i rcvd it was when i finally decided to get my own domain and buy some decent email hosting. I have still not completed the switching over, but am getting there...i definitely wont miss hotmail. its weird when one of the largest companies in the world finds it useful to spam its users.
Ghoul2
is this what you want? Then go, HELP OUT!!
Ghoul2
yeah, true. But my calculations assumed that the "electrical signals" on the chip travel at the speed of light. So my point still stands. Doesnt this give rise to complex race conditions ON the chip?
Ghoul2
With 3GHz CPUs on the horizon, i am kinda confused as to how these cpus can function. I mean, assuming electricity travels in copper/semiconductor (or whatever they use in ICs these days) as fast as light in vaccum (in fact it travels at a fraction of 'c'):
in one 3GHz cycle, a signal in the the CPU can only travel less than 10cm (~4 inches for those still stuck with the imperial units). With CPU dies sizes of a similar magnitude (~4cm), and with all the routing inside the CPU, why dont we get some very serious race conditions? are the intel engineers actually going in and laying out the chip keeping this speed in mind? as the speed will vary with the CPU temperature, its even more difficult.
And doesnt that impose a HARD LIMIT on how many MHz can be squeezed out? I mean, a comment below mentions intel demoing 5GHz CPU (this is the first time i'v heard about this, so i dunno how true this is), and that means the signal only travels 6cm, which means it cant even traverse the whole die in one cycle.
Is there something i am forgetting here? Can someone in the know please shed some light?
Ghoul2
Well, i am talking about my desktop machine(s) here. Win2k is not bad at all, one of the few MS products i actually like, but as i end up downloading and playing around with a lot of software, i just find it a good idea to start afresh every once in a while. As far as reinstalling redhat is concerned, that is done to keep up with the latest releases. I know, not required, just something i have always done in my 8 years of linux use.
My point about the tcp/ip stack in bios and the firewall had to do with the fact that i don't even let my OS tcpip stack onto the net unprotected.
Add to that the fact that there would be no way to run a firewall over a BIOS tcp/ip stack (yes, they may include a firewall there as well but which then needs to be configured for my specific use) and the fact that the only point of having a tcpip stack is to get online, you will eventually have to hook ur comp with that (BIOS based) tcpip stack upto the net, and u see the problem.