And I just caught the full latrine-like stench of baseless accusation.
Yes, MS does do underhanded things. But to accuse somebody of taking a bribe based solely on their making a decision you disagreed with is stupid and irresponsible.
I installed Open Office on my sister's home machine. (She uses MS Office at work.) She tried for a while to get the hang of it, but relearning how to do everything was not worth it to her, and she eventually installed Word. Did she get bribed too?
Nonsense. A single-threaded program doesn't magically become multi-threaded just because you're running it on a multi-core system. The programmer still needs to do "tricks" (or, hopefully, use a solid concurrency library) in order to create threads. A multithreaded program will run faster if there's more than once core, but even then it tops out if there are more cores than threads.
Oh yeah, and if there are lots of wait states in your program so that most of your threads are idle most of the time, it doesn't matter how many cores you have.
You're right. Did a little reading, and it turns out that "can't prove a negative" is one of those little bits of folklore that's not true. I stand by the rest of my argument, but I should have left the "can't prove a negative, period" out.
Yes, it would certainly take you less time to visit every star in the universe than it would for you to view every porn movie ever made. But the fact that you're willing to make the comparison just shows you need to get out more.
You can't prove a negative, period. You can only raise doubts. And the fact that most people have a belief system based on our noble selves being the center and purpose of all creation indicates how ignorant they are of how big (and how old) the universe is.
Such a project only makes sense if there are a lot of galaxies. And indeed there are: thousands are visible, and estimates of the grand total vary between 100 billion and half a trillion.
Big numbers. But don't forget that each galaxy contains hundreds of millions of stars. Of which ours is just one.
Which should give us all a little humility. But it won't.
Speaking as a Internet user, it seems to me that any kind of telecom open-access is desirable. But telcos like AT&T have always opposed sharing their "last-mile" links. They've resisted being forced to share their telephone lines with independent DSL providers; they've resisted sharing their CATV cables with independent ISPs, and now they're resisting sharing their wireless spectrum. Business as usual.
Their argument is that the government will get more money if we give them a monopoly. Which is certainly true: if they a monopoly, they make more money; if they make more money, they can afford to bid more for the spectrum.
Very sound logic! We should apply it to other aspects of commerce. I propose that we legalize armed robbery, in exchange for bandits being required to pay hefty license fees. Imagine the revenue that would generate!
It's sort of like a monarch sending off one of his daughters to marry another monarch who's a potential adversary or ally. It cements relationships between the two companies. After all, both EMC and VMware need Intel's good will.
The articles a ZDNET newflash, probably prepared in a hurry. When journalists are doing a breaking story, they don't have time to get all the details. Presumably we'll see more in-depth stuff later in the day.
I fault the editor (let's see who is it? uh huh, Zonk, what a suprise) for not taking the time to dig up the actual security bulletin, or at least waiting for a submission that contains a link to an article that actually describes the exploit.
Dude, evaluate words in context. "Everything" implicitly means "everything that we're talking about." If I go into a football huddle and say "everything's at stake in this next play" everybody knows I mean the game and nobody infers that dropping the ball means the end of the universe.
Your alternative headline ("everything virtual") implies that only Java software is affected. Which I hope is not what you meant. I haven't seen a proper description of this exploit, but if it allows the attacker to inject native code into the target, then everything on that computer is affected. And to an IT director, computers are everything.
I'm not faulting you for nitpicking. That's what I do for a living. But not all nits are worth picking.
Dude, don't get all defensive because somebody points out a flaw in your logic. We all say stupid shit. The difference between that and being stupid is refusing to admit our mistakes.
Itanium's big issue was backward compatibility with Intel's own legacy x86 chips. That's a lot different from not being compatible with a competitor's chips — especially one that has maybe 10% of the market.
Whose facility? VMware's? Nonsense. They're hardware vendor-agnostic. They have to be. They were probably just qualifying IBM blades the day you were there.
I work for a company that sells AMD-based servers, both blade and rack-mount. And ESX is darned important product for us.
The news reports I've seen say that Intel's stake in VMware is in addition to the 10% stake that had already been announced. So EMC is indeed selling off 13% of VMware, or close to it.
My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind.
Perhaps that's precisely what Intel has in mind. For many years now, Intel's ability to set prices has been limited mainly by the fear of losing market share to AMD. Surely Intel would love to have a technology that AMD can't copy.
On a more serious note, even if you think that global warming is a pile of horse manure, why would anyone object to the measures that are being suggested? Unless they owned a coal mine of course...
Or worked in a coal mine. Or in an auto factory.
Or at UPS or FedEx. Their business model relies it being cheap to operate huge fleets of carbon-spewing airplanes and trucks.
Or at Amazon.com. Which would go out of business without UPS or FedEx.
Or at any big company whose business model depends on shipping a lot of stuff back and forth. Which nowadays is all of them.
Or you. Yes, you, the guy who drives to work alone because it's a pain to carpool or ride transit. And don't tell me you own a hybrid — 70% of a huge carbon footprint is still a huge carbon footprint.
But you're right. There's been a good case for cutting back on fossil fuels long before anybody heard about global warming. There's only so much of it, and nobody's making any more. This has been known for over a century.
So why isn't anything being done about it? Because our economy and our lifestyle is built around cheap energy, and nobody is willing to make the sacrifices involved in a major change. Or if they do, that makes them irrelevant — those crazy hippies down the block who don't own a car.
Instead we do marginal stuff like switching to florescent bulbs and driving hybrids. We spend a little extra on "green power" and tell Congress to spend a little extra on new sources of energy. But not too much—taxes are already too high.
Face facts. Maybe you're not one of the moral Neanderthals who doesn't want to hear about climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. But you're still part of the problem. Because even though you admit the problem exists, you tell yourself you don't have to make any big sacrifices to turn things around. And that means that you're fooling yourself, just as much as the guy who won't thinks the problem is just a scam to take away his SUV.
You're right, there's a lot more to games development than graphics. I can tolerate weak graphics (up to a point) but I want to scream when NPCs can't find their way around simple obstacles. Also, human factors is a lot more important than eye candy, as the success of the Wii has demonstrated.
But a lot of people associate game design with graphics. Which is why this thread drifted from Java graphics to game design. And why all those art school grads spent a lot of time acquiring game design skills few of them will ever use.
Anybody thinking about a future in game development should ask themselves whether they're just doing because it sounds like a fun way to make a living, or because they know that they have the makings of a world-class ubergenius game developer. So many people are studying game design (I was at an art school graduation ceremony; half the class had studied game design) that you have no hope of making a living at it unless you're the best of the best.
It's not unlikely that Dell started adjusting its Linux systemp rices in response to the Slashdot story.
I think this whole tempest is a side effect of the way computer pricing works. A system always has a "list price", defined by the manufacturer, that nobody ever actually pays. Then the retailer applies various discounts, based on market conditions, the need to move out old stock, some sales manager's desire to make quotas, how grouchy everybody feels that day, and possibly the phase of the moon. I think this applies even to manufacturers that are their own retailers, like Dell. Which is why prices on the Dell web site keep changing.
Now then, these Ubuntu systems that Dell sells are not big sellers, and are not going to be, because only a few hackers buy them. (By "few" I mean compared to the billions of dollars worth of systems they sell every year.) They just sell them in response to complaints about the "Microsoft tax". So nobody's job is on the line if they don't move these systems out the door. So they end up selling at pretty close to the list price. Until, that is, people realize that instead of "Microsoft tax" they're paying an "Ubuntu tax".
If you mean the typical user running Linux on their PC: probably no effect at all. But a better scheduler would make a lot of difference to a server. And that's the growth market for Linux these days.
You're reading "old and therefore irrelevant" out of context. Yes, Gilgamesh remain relevant 4,000 years after it was written. But technical trivia is not great literature. It's just a collection of factoids and hacks that ceases to be relevant as soon as people stop using the technology.
Hey, maybe I'll post my collection of Wordstar hacks...
As for Fox, people will still be studying its pronouncements centuries from now. Pathology is always relevant.
If a manager puts on one face with his employees and another face with his own bosses, how do we know when he's bullshitting and when he's not? Indeed, it's not unlikely that's he's being dishonest with everybody — including himself.
Slashdot Mirror
And, ironically, it was canceled because Sci Fi decided it cost too much. Muppets don't work cheap!
And I just caught the full latrine-like stench of baseless accusation.
Yes, MS does do underhanded things. But to accuse somebody of taking a bribe based solely on their making a decision you disagreed with is stupid and irresponsible.
I installed Open Office on my sister's home machine. (She uses MS Office at work.) She tried for a while to get the hang of it, but relearning how to do everything was not worth it to her, and she eventually installed Word. Did she get bribed too?
Nonsense. A single-threaded program doesn't magically become multi-threaded just because you're running it on a multi-core system. The programmer still needs to do "tricks" (or, hopefully, use a solid concurrency library) in order to create threads. A multithreaded program will run faster if there's more than once core, but even then it tops out if there are more cores than threads.
Oh yeah, and if there are lots of wait states in your program so that most of your threads are idle most of the time, it doesn't matter how many cores you have.
You're right. Did a little reading, and it turns out that "can't prove a negative" is one of those little bits of folklore that's not true. I stand by the rest of my argument, but I should have left the "can't prove a negative, period" out.
Yes, it would certainly take you less time to visit every star in the universe than it would for you to view every porn movie ever made. But the fact that you're willing to make the comparison just shows you need to get out more.
You can't prove a negative, period. You can only raise doubts. And the fact that most people have a belief system based on our noble selves being the center and purpose of all creation indicates how ignorant they are of how big (and how old) the universe is.
Such a project only makes sense if there are a lot of galaxies. And indeed there are: thousands are visible, and estimates of the grand total vary between 100 billion and half a trillion.
Big numbers. But don't forget that each galaxy contains hundreds of millions of stars. Of which ours is just one.
Which should give us all a little humility. But it won't.
Speaking as a Internet user, it seems to me that any kind of telecom open-access is desirable. But telcos like AT&T have always opposed sharing their "last-mile" links. They've resisted being forced to share their telephone lines with independent DSL providers; they've resisted sharing their CATV cables with independent ISPs, and now they're resisting sharing their wireless spectrum. Business as usual.
Their argument is that the government will get more money if we give them a monopoly. Which is certainly true: if they a monopoly, they make more money; if they make more money, they can afford to bid more for the spectrum.
Very sound logic! We should apply it to other aspects of commerce. I propose that we legalize armed robbery, in exchange for bandits being required to pay hefty license fees. Imagine the revenue that would generate!
It's sort of like a monarch sending off one of his daughters to marry another monarch who's a potential adversary or ally. It cements relationships between the two companies. After all, both EMC and VMware need Intel's good will.
The articles a ZDNET newflash, probably prepared in a hurry. When journalists are doing a breaking story, they don't have time to get all the details. Presumably we'll see more in-depth stuff later in the day.
I fault the editor (let's see who is it? uh huh, Zonk, what a suprise) for not taking the time to dig up the actual security bulletin, or at least waiting for a submission that contains a link to an article that actually describes the exploit.
Dude, evaluate words in context. "Everything" implicitly means "everything that we're talking about." If I go into a football huddle and say "everything's at stake in this next play" everybody knows I mean the game and nobody infers that dropping the ball means the end of the universe.
Your alternative headline ("everything virtual") implies that only Java software is affected. Which I hope is not what you meant. I haven't seen a proper description of this exploit, but if it allows the attacker to inject native code into the target, then everything on that computer is affected. And to an IT director, computers are everything.
I'm not faulting you for nitpicking. That's what I do for a living. But not all nits are worth picking.
Dude, don't get all defensive because somebody points out a flaw in your logic. We all say stupid shit. The difference between that and being stupid is refusing to admit our mistakes.
Itanium's big issue was backward compatibility with Intel's own legacy x86 chips. That's a lot different from not being compatible with a competitor's chips — especially one that has maybe 10% of the market.
Whose facility? VMware's? Nonsense. They're hardware vendor-agnostic. They have to be. They were probably just qualifying IBM blades the day you were there.
I work for a company that sells AMD-based servers, both blade and rack-mount. And ESX is darned important product for us.
The news reports I've seen say that Intel's stake in VMware is in addition to the 10% stake that had already been announced. So EMC is indeed selling off 13% of VMware, or close to it.
Or at UPS or FedEx. Their business model relies it being cheap to operate huge fleets of carbon-spewing airplanes and trucks.
Or at Amazon.com. Which would go out of business without UPS or FedEx.
Or at any big company whose business model depends on shipping a lot of stuff back and forth. Which nowadays is all of them.
Or you. Yes, you, the guy who drives to work alone because it's a pain to carpool or ride transit. And don't tell me you own a hybrid — 70% of a huge carbon footprint is still a huge carbon footprint.
But you're right. There's been a good case for cutting back on fossil fuels long before anybody heard about global warming. There's only so much of it, and nobody's making any more. This has been known for over a century.
So why isn't anything being done about it? Because our economy and our lifestyle is built around cheap energy, and nobody is willing to make the sacrifices involved in a major change. Or if they do, that makes them irrelevant — those crazy hippies down the block who don't own a car.
Instead we do marginal stuff like switching to florescent bulbs and driving hybrids. We spend a little extra on "green power" and tell Congress to spend a little extra on new sources of energy. But not too much—taxes are already too high.
Face facts. Maybe you're not one of the moral Neanderthals who doesn't want to hear about climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. But you're still part of the problem. Because even though you admit the problem exists, you tell yourself you don't have to make any big sacrifices to turn things around. And that means that you're fooling yourself, just as much as the guy who won't thinks the problem is just a scam to take away his SUV.
What's CI? Never mind, I get this gist.
You're right, there's a lot more to games development than graphics. I can tolerate weak graphics (up to a point) but I want to scream when NPCs can't find their way around simple obstacles. Also, human factors is a lot more important than eye candy, as the success of the Wii has demonstrated.
But a lot of people associate game design with graphics. Which is why this thread drifted from Java graphics to game design. And why all those art school grads spent a lot of time acquiring game design skills few of them will ever use.
Anybody thinking about a future in game development should ask themselves whether they're just doing because it sounds like a fun way to make a living, or because they know that they have the makings of a world-class ubergenius game developer. So many people are studying game design (I was at an art school graduation ceremony; half the class had studied game design) that you have no hope of making a living at it unless you're the best of the best.
It's not unlikely that Dell started adjusting its Linux systemp rices in response to the Slashdot story.
I think this whole tempest is a side effect of the way computer pricing works. A system always has a "list price", defined by the manufacturer, that nobody ever actually pays. Then the retailer applies various discounts, based on market conditions, the need to move out old stock, some sales manager's desire to make quotas, how grouchy everybody feels that day, and possibly the phase of the moon. I think this applies even to manufacturers that are their own retailers, like Dell. Which is why prices on the Dell web site keep changing.
Now then, these Ubuntu systems that Dell sells are not big sellers, and are not going to be, because only a few hackers buy them. (By "few" I mean compared to the billions of dollars worth of systems they sell every year.) They just sell them in response to complaints about the "Microsoft tax". So nobody's job is on the line if they don't move these systems out the door. So they end up selling at pretty close to the list price. Until, that is, people realize that instead of "Microsoft tax" they're paying an "Ubuntu tax".
If you mean the typical user running Linux on their PC: probably no effect at all. But a better scheduler would make a lot of difference to a server. And that's the growth market for Linux these days.
If you're going to make a lame joke, at least get the context right. Geller is not sham psychic. He's a sham psychokinetic.
You're reading "old and therefore irrelevant" out of context. Yes, Gilgamesh remain relevant 4,000 years after it was written. But technical trivia is not great literature. It's just a collection of factoids and hacks that ceases to be relevant as soon as people stop using the technology.
Hey, maybe I'll post my collection of Wordstar hacks...
As for Fox, people will still be studying its pronouncements centuries from now. Pathology is always relevant.
If a manager puts on one face with his employees and another face with his own bosses, how do we know when he's bullshitting and when he's not? Indeed, it's not unlikely that's he's being dishonest with everybody — including himself.