Basically, you can tell a huge amount from the routing address. You should be able to tell from the start of the address as to what type of communication it is. You then have two byte pairs, identifying the upstream gateway and the downstream gateway. Backbone routers must have a short prefix, followed by zeros or::, followed by a suffix identifying the machine. The longer the prefix, the further from the top tier it is. There will therefore be a very well-defined set of prefixes that identify each country - one prefix for every upstream connection. Most nations will probably run top-tier routers, so the national prefix will necessarily be very short.
Mobile nodes will have the last 48 bits in their address equal to their MAC address, but ISPs that support mobility cannot pre-allocate anything in the valid range of MAC addresses. So, any IPv6 address whose ISP is known and whose suffix is arguably in the range for MAC addresses but is not a valid MAC address is connected to an ISP that does not support mobility. Likewise, if the ISP is know to support mobility, you can examine the last 48 bits to determine the nature and type of network device being used. Converseley, if multiple machines on that segment have resolvable MAC address style addresses, it's certainly autoconfiguring and probably suppoting mobility. Where routers fall into this category, the routers are autoconfigured and network mobility (NEMO) is probably supported. Network mobility is not useful except for failover (explained later) for fixed systems, so you're likely looking at a router that has a wireless connection upstream and must cross between two providers, so is most likely on a vehicle with moderate range and multiple on-board networked devices. An aircraft or a train is realistic, as is a military vehicle acting as the group's servive provider, but a car is unlikely (not enough machines inside), as are mass transit buses (they don't have the budget) and roller coasters (nobody's stupid enough to use wifi on one, and the entire circuit would probably be in range of a single router with a bunch of wireless access points to extend the range, if they were).
As one of the first IPv6 system admins, I can say that the biggest change is that you will need to learn the new syntax for using numerical addresses in a URL. It changes, because of a rather careless piece of symbol overloading. Actually, only an idiot would use the number if a name is present. Names work the same way. Adding in static IP addresses into BIND becomes a pain, so don't. Use a dynamic system, which means either DHCPv6 or IPv6' own automatic configuration and discovery. Then, you will never have to concern yourself with manually entering in IPv6 addresses backwards, one byte at a time, for no obvious reason besides someone having a sadistic moment.
For routing, the differences between RIPv2 and RIPng, or OSPFv3 and OSPF6, are very small. Most routes can be discovered, as they always have been. The routing protocols were developed before IPv6 had a default route - for a long time, it was believed you should have paths discovered as far as possible, so that you don't end up hard-coding single points of failure that don't exist in the network topology itself. (If some upstream router A fails, then traffic moves to upstream router B, as if the router was mobile. The NEMO protocol allows all upstream routers to re-adjust the paths to get to the router concerned efficiently without dropping too many packets.) Otherwise, current IPv6 routing is nearly identical to IPv4 routing.
For multicasting, service discovery is done via multicast, so it'd better be available over more than a local network, otherwise everyone is going to have to provide everything. Either that, or users will need to configure things for different networks. Which they aren't going to like. A VoIP cellphone should be capable of working over any wireless tower and get a service identical to the one they receive on their local service, though not necessarily at the same cost. IPv6 would not eliminate roaming, but it would eliminate the need to lose provider-specific capabilities when doing so.
No, there was no question in the researchers' minds as to what had killed them. I'm willing to accept the researcher's statements on their observations, whether or not I agree with the conclusions from those observations. We already know about the mutating properties of the virus from elsewhere, from repeat examples in just about every research lab, so far from my theory being convoluted, I would argue that it is inevitable and inescapable that some strains will be undetectable by the immune system until after the virus has destroyed the bulk of it, by which time it is far too late.
The researchers' seemed very certain of their conclusions on what had killed the individuals. Not because of expectation, but in defiance of what they had expected. I don't know the specific details, but if you eliminate looking directly for the immune response, you have several options. You can examine the white cell count, you can look at the T-cell count, you can see if there is any immunity to any other known condition the person has, you can try making a serum and then injecting that into laboratory animals, you can look for late-stage symptoms which are not also attributable to any other probable cause, you could place cells on an agar dish, multiply up the virus, then use a microscope of sufficient power. This list should not be considered exhaustive, or remotely close to it.
If their research was valid in the first place, we must assume their research was valid in the second, as it is very easy to see that they could use alternative, more time-laborious, methods. It may be simpler to assume something convenient, to save the hastle of considering that the "good news" maybe wasn't, but I somehow suspect microbiology doesn't give a damn about the whims of humans eager to return to the free love of the 60s. Conclusion? The researchers' gave conclusions that would have been easily verifiable for the first round and for the second round. Provided the experiments performed were valid (and we'd know by know if they'd been ripped to pieces) and the conclusions matched the data (we'd know if that wasn't true, as well), we're left with the fact that at least one strain of the virus is not guaranteed detectable at an early stage using current methods.
Or, if you prefer, if you slam the researchers at the end, you have no reason to believe their claims at the start, which means you'd have to believe that the women were infected all along. Either way, Gibson's fantasy from the start of Neuromancer remains fantasy.
HIV mutates fast and confusingly. De-activated HIV, for the purpose of creating a vaccine, can - and has - reactivated itself. HIV is not always immediately detectable - many methods use detection of antibodies, so those with a damaged immune system may carry the virus and be considered negative with such tests. This may have happened with a group of women in Africa who appeared to be immune to the virus (they remained negative, despite repeated exposure to the virus) but then some of them started dying from the full-blown form suddenly. None of the usual intermediate stages. My guess is that they still test negative, though, using the test they've been using so far.
So, even if they are 100% absolutely right for the samples they have, at the time the experiment was conducted, that confidence must fall as you increase the range of HIV viruses and the range of time they have to mutate.
You must also consider that we're on some Nth generation of anti-virals because AIDS has mutated to develop resistance to all of the others. The second that happens with the current generation is the second the risk goes from near-zero to infinity, and nobody knows for sure when that moment will be. Hence the use of all kinds of toxic substances and anti-virals mixed together, so that immunity from one won't help, so minimizing the risk of mutant strains surviving. But you know that they will, sooner or later, and that when they do, they will spread. It might be tomorrow, but I'm guessing it's actually not too likely this side of 2020.
Of course, if everyone considers it safe, and takes no precautions, I imagine the probability of such a mutation surviving and spreading will go up. As such, even if it is "safe" for the moment, it can't be safe forever and when it does develop resistance, it may take years - or decades - for the resistant strain to even get detected.
Hope you don't mind me saying, but that was brilliantly said. If we could get schools, colleges and workplaces to understand that, core competencies would go through the roof, because people would be applying their skills to work effectively rather than to just look impressive.
PostgreSQL 8.3 is nicely timed. I've been looking forward to trying it in a setting which wouldn't allow the use of betas. Now I've got the on-topic stuff out the way, onto my main point.
There are so many Open Source databases (MySQL, MaxDB the last GPL version, Firebird, Postgresql, Ingres Community Edition, hsqldb and H2) that it is hard to know which ones implement what, which ones are useful for what, or which ones are optimal for what. Simple benchmarks (a) rarely are, and (b) usually want to promote one specific product over another. There are standardized tests, for a small fortune and by a relatively closed group who probably don't have a fraction of the range of experiences of databases in the real world, so cannot possibly be trusted to authenticate a standard or measure that could be used to compare databases.
We could really do with some serious side-by-side evaluations of these database engines, or at least decide what such evaluations would need to be to be actually useful. (Hey, maybe CmdrTaco can add a comparison section, get it sponsored by Which? or some other consumer guide, and have some of us run evaluations. It'd have to be done well to not be flamebait, which I think might rule me out, but if it could be done, it would be hellishly useful.)
The new memory is described as being as fast in reads as DRAM, which is an order or two of magnitude slower than register memory, which is what you need in a processor. Intel's adding of so much memory into the CPU interests me far more. Add enough, and the main memory is IN the processor (a-la the Transputer). From there, a little reorganizing reverses the arrangement - from memory in a CPU to a process in memory (PIM) architecture. Special-purpose PIM has been done before - Cray embedded a communications library in RAM before - but a full processor would be much more interesting.
...leads itself into somewhat of a trap. I need only prove one spontaneous invention to disprove the rule, and since inventions now include methods, all I need is one spontaneous method. Since invention and innovation take place throughout the animal kingdom, I need not limit myself to humans, either. Hey, either the argument holds and is a "universal" principle, or it is an accidental property of the cases that have been observed.
So, when we look at the monkeys that wash potatos in sea water, we see a methodology that has no obvious predecessor and was most likely the result of a pure accident (dropping a potato in sea water). Spontaneous invention of condiments.
I only need one example to show it can't be a truly universal principle. "Invention in a flash" may be a myth in specific cases, maybe even many specific cases, but it is NOT, and never has been, universally so. True "eureka" moments are clearly rare, but they are provably non-zero, as I've found one. Even just a value of one is greater than a value of zero. And I doubt it's unique. My guess would be that there's a genuine, unassailable "eureka moment" at least once a century, and that during times of Classical or Classical-derived thinking, I would expect this number to maybe even get into the realms of four or five "eureka moments" a century.
We may be talking at cross-purposes here, I'm not sure. To me, ad-hoc speaks of randomness, of improvisation, of Brownian motion and Gaussian distributions, of unevenness and arbitrariness through lack of design. Uniform, on the other hand, speaks of an artificial, engineered, construction that is flawless and applies equally to all well-defined points and all points that can be interpolated in between, without exception. The two, by this understanding, cannot ever hope to be reconciled. They are polar opposites.
Now, let's examine patent law. This is applied to inventions, non-obvious innovations (and certain classes of obvious innovation, as there is case law upholding patents that are mind-blowingly obvious), business methods, software algorithms (but not mathematical algorithms, even though these are functionally the same) and decoded genes, but not all classes are recognized in all countries, classes that are recognized aren't necessarily recognized the same way, and even when they are, patent authorities have a degree of flexibility in what they recognize. All countries have been guilty of tolerating - even encouraging - the patenting of an idea lifted off a patent in another country. No exceptions, except maybe the Pitcairns and Antarctica.
That's not exactly uniform. Way too many different categories, for a start. This could be split into five or six distinct laws that had virtually not a single common element beyond being restrictions on use and compensation.
What about trademarks? There is a world of difference in meaning, intent and quality between a trademark used to represent a common source (eg: the stamps used to mark goods for trade as being authentic), a trademark used to represent a specific product (Unix is a trademarked name), a trademark used to describe something (it's amazing how many technical books and software packages have trademarks for something descriptive) and a trademark in the form of some expression (you can't play an electric guitar with a bow, without violating trademark law).
Again, these are entirely distinct things. If you were a programmer, you'd write these as different modules, libraries, functions or at the very least different code blocks. Again, if you split these into three or four laws, they'd again have nothing in common.
Ok, so if they are all so different, could they be unified? Electricity and magnetism are entirely different, when looked at one way, but can be unified into an overarching electromagnetic principle when looked at another. Nobody as unified electromagnetism with gravity - yet - and again they appear totally different from one perspective, but nobody seriously questions the idea that a perspective exists that allows you to see the two as merely different forms of a grand unified theory.
Yes, but the law is very different from physics. Can a policy be unified? One might argue that any implementation of Mandatory Access Controls in an Operating System that supports multiple inheritance and polymorphism (and therefore also implements Discretionary Access Controls) would be a wholly unified access control system in which all forms of policy control can be implemented. Maybe not efficiently, but they could be implemented and would be correct per specification and design. So, yes, you can have grand unified theories in policies, which means you can have them in law.
Would it be worth doing, though? Depends. If you can find truly universal principles that underlie all patent, copyright and trademark law, such that you could compose a specification that was both necessary and sufficient (in the strict mathematical sense), such that the specification was simpler and more fundamental than the sum total of each and every single law you'd need if you were to break everything down to the key components. The first part I can accept - at least in theory. Current unification methods have nothing to do with universal principles or fundamental components, so I seriously doubt the competence of any politician to pr
The problem is that the work is still performed publicly (it is present in the receiver and the decoded emissions are then broadcast as radio waves locally - all electronic equipment, unless properly screened, is a low-power transmitter) whether the TV is on or not, and whether there is anyone in the church or not. A good enough radio dish can quite easily pick up such signals and put them on a display in an entirely usable form.
Short of there being a requirement that every building in the US be equipped with a Faraday Cage attached to an extremely effective ground, the law either prohibits anyone from ever watching anything or using any electronic device in any real-world scenario whatsoever, or it is intended to be rather more specific and focussed than that.
Private clubs, for example, are usually considered exempt, which is why student societies are generally not prosecuted for playing movies or videos. Hell, the BBC even came round to one society I belonged to and ran a short feature on it. They're hard-hitting when it comes to copyright and unlicensed viewing of material, their dragnets make the RIAA look like a bunch of wimps, but actively supported what we were doing. For that matter, most fan clubs and appreciation societies routinely use copyrighted material without explicit permission.
So, the question comes down to this: are churches a private, closed group, in much the same sense that a student society or an appreciation society is, or are they a public forum in the way that a movie theater or a street theater is? And, because of the way technology works, if it is public, how public must it be to be included in the intended meaning of "public" in the law? In Scotland, playing a radio too loud becomes "public" and therefore a violation of copyright. Is that reasonable? Have you (or anyone close to you) ever played music in your car, or at home, loud enough to qualify as a public performance? Would you be willing to be fined if you have?
Can the Lack Of Redundancy Department be guilty of a dupe? In order to be a genuine lack of redundancy, it would need to be The Redundancy, Lack thereof, As Pertains To The Lack Of Redundancy Department.
Huh. Aardvark is actually very good, as it's aa, which is the convention the Linux kernel used after producing 0.99z. We'd still need an 'aa' word at the start, though, if we did that. Would Aambivalent Aardvark be considered cheating, though?
POSIX simply doesn't support all the facilities required for a trusted (as in "Trusted IRIX") Operating System and, let's face it, security has for a long time been moving more towards MAC and not just for Linux. POSIX got into updating security surprisingly late in the game, and although there are patches for POSIX ACLs for Linux, I can't think of a single distro or mega-patch that includes POSIX security. I seem to recall Linux is deprecating some POSIX functionality, like POSIX ttys, and the kernel has always included unPOSIX-ish code where it is clear that the official POSIX syntax or semantics are carp (sic) or where support for other standards has been useful or expedient.
D-Bus may not be the answer to everything, individual technologies rarely are, and it's not as if D-Bus was even the only user-level software bus commonly used in Linux, but it has interesting potential. Not sure how well it currently plays with clustering technology like MOSIX, or grid technology, but given the effort being poured into developing user-space software buses precisely for those, I imagine that's just a matter of time.
Personally, I'd rather have more localized limited-purpose buses in any case where a general-purpose solution is slower and/or heavier. The code can't be that maintenance-intensive and too much abstraction must eventually pessimize the resulting code. Moore's Law is worthless if code gets slower at the same rate systems get faster. Nonetheless, any general-purpose abstract IPC that is easier to implement against than traditional mechanisms (RPC, CORBA, Unix sockets, System V messages, etc) must surely be beneficial - even if those end up being the mechanisms used under the hood. In fact, the more of those implemented and the better you could switch data between them, the more portable such a software bus becomes as well as the more optimal - to a point. The whole trend in programming is towards such pluggable solutions, it's surprising IPC is so far behind almost every other mechanism out there, and unless there are specific technological reasons to not use a given generic mechanisms (such as performance costs), you're already using so many that are not following some standard or other that it's absurd to discriminate against one just because it's not specifically POSIX.
Technically, a truly live, unrecorded broadcast could be considered transitory and therefore not copyrightable. However, the five second delay means that it is indeed being recorded and therefore is an after-the-fact replay. I'm not sure copyright is the correct instrument to use, though. Copyright is intended for a work, an assembly that is well-defined prior to the copying of whatever is copyright, whereas this is essentially an improvised collection of improvisations, where the assemblage is taking place essentially simultaneously to the copying. Copyright was also never intended for a broadcast medium, where the copy technically exists whether the TV is displaying it or not. (It exists as a radio signal or a cable signal and it exists in the receiver up to the point of discrimination, even if the TV is switched off.)
IP law is, frankly, a mess. Either unify all the concepts into one single notion, OR sub-divide the existing categories into wholly uniform concepts. Force-fitting one idea into a mechanism never designed or intended to be used in such an abstract manner creates a great deal of confusion over what actually is permissible and makes rational discourse on what should be permissible difficult to impossible. I would argue for unification, partly because you are dealing with underlying principles but also because if the unification is valid and correct, it will remain valid and correct for any future technologies within the bounds for which it is defined. Splitting the categories up into much finer-grain notions would make each rule much easier to understand, much easier to follow and much easier to enforce rationally and fairly, but makes IP as a whole harder to conceptualize and doesn't scale well as new methods of delivering information emerge.
This church fiasco might - possibly - turn out quite useful if the level of resentment generated is sufficient to persuade the politicians that genuine reform (ie: not in the pockets of corporations) is in the interest of voters and therefore their own jobs. Narking a few churches off, though, probably isn't going to generate enough sustained ill-will to do anything beyond getting a few more people seriously drunk and lower that week's collection takings by a few dollars. Anyone who feels wronged on Sunday will have forgotten by Tuesday at the latest. No, the NFL would need to do something far more serious to do any good for the country.
Correction noted. Thanks for that. I shall remain skeptical of anything associating Intel with a notion of "turbo", but your comments on the direction of solid state disks is extremely interesting.
I know. I maintain the Freshmeat record for it and had to change the description and links after the changeover. I happen to think Coreboot is a crappy name and there's a risk that any positive associations people have with LinuxBIOS will get lost. Mind you, it's probably much more acceptable to suits and marketroids, who always disliked both the Linux association and the idea of an unwarrantied BIOS (not that any BIOS is actually under warranty, or that anyone has ever successfully sued a software company for a defective product). I guess it's also true that the name is more representative, as LinuxBIOS/Coreboot is more of a bootstrap than a BIOS. I still don't like it, though. Regardless of what you call it, though, it's a damn good program and, along with OpenBIOS, offers some really nice possibilities. Intel's Tiano shows no news activity since April 23rd of last year and most of the code repository looks largely untouched. A log entry of "initial import" for virtually all files is not terribly promising. Intel requires that it be used, though, which is amusing. Either they're holding back (well, it IS Intel, after all). or the Not Invented Here culture still overwhelms common sense (which, again, would be perfectly normal for Intel).
As another poster pointed out, the flash memory discussed is not in fact used for BIOSes, so my point there was flawed, but I think that this mini-thread was nonetheless worthwhile having.
LinuxBIOS was already down to 3 seconds, and I'll guess that slow flash access times contributed some to that. We could also see the revival of cartridge hard disks, only solid-state. A variant on that would be to have a RAID array where one or more of the disks were replaced with flash devices. In either case, you'd probably improve longevity and definitely improve resilience to things like shock. It wouldn't be cheap, sure, but the people mainly concerned with ruggedized technology (aircraft vendors, the military, war correspondents) are less likely to be concerned by price than by whether it'll survive the environment.
It could significantly increase the usefulness of suspend/resume at the OS level. The limits on writes is a headache, but it would be possible to treat flash devices as additional swap space, making it theoretically possible to have hot-swappable swap devices as per some rather ancient mainframes. (Virtual swap space can be larger than the physical space directly available to a machine.)
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Well, he took care to not be caught by SCO shareholders before now, and as for custodianship, maybe the ship he was custodian of was the Titanic.
Mobile nodes will have the last 48 bits in their address equal to their MAC address, but ISPs that support mobility cannot pre-allocate anything in the valid range of MAC addresses. So, any IPv6 address whose ISP is known and whose suffix is arguably in the range for MAC addresses but is not a valid MAC address is connected to an ISP that does not support mobility. Likewise, if the ISP is know to support mobility, you can examine the last 48 bits to determine the nature and type of network device being used. Converseley, if multiple machines on that segment have resolvable MAC address style addresses, it's certainly autoconfiguring and probably suppoting mobility. Where routers fall into this category, the routers are autoconfigured and network mobility (NEMO) is probably supported. Network mobility is not useful except for failover (explained later) for fixed systems, so you're likely looking at a router that has a wireless connection upstream and must cross between two providers, so is most likely on a vehicle with moderate range and multiple on-board networked devices. An aircraft or a train is realistic, as is a military vehicle acting as the group's servive provider, but a car is unlikely (not enough machines inside), as are mass transit buses (they don't have the budget) and roller coasters (nobody's stupid enough to use wifi on one, and the entire circuit would probably be in range of a single router with a bunch of wireless access points to extend the range, if they were).
As one of the first IPv6 system admins, I can say that the biggest change is that you will need to learn the new syntax for using numerical addresses in a URL. It changes, because of a rather careless piece of symbol overloading. Actually, only an idiot would use the number if a name is present. Names work the same way. Adding in static IP addresses into BIND becomes a pain, so don't. Use a dynamic system, which means either DHCPv6 or IPv6' own automatic configuration and discovery. Then, you will never have to concern yourself with manually entering in IPv6 addresses backwards, one byte at a time, for no obvious reason besides someone having a sadistic moment.
For routing, the differences between RIPv2 and RIPng, or OSPFv3 and OSPF6, are very small. Most routes can be discovered, as they always have been. The routing protocols were developed before IPv6 had a default route - for a long time, it was believed you should have paths discovered as far as possible, so that you don't end up hard-coding single points of failure that don't exist in the network topology itself. (If some upstream router A fails, then traffic moves to upstream router B, as if the router was mobile. The NEMO protocol allows all upstream routers to re-adjust the paths to get to the router concerned efficiently without dropping too many packets.) Otherwise, current IPv6 routing is nearly identical to IPv4 routing.
For multicasting, service discovery is done via multicast, so it'd better be available over more than a local network, otherwise everyone is going to have to provide everything. Either that, or users will need to configure things for different networks. Which they aren't going to like. A VoIP cellphone should be capable of working over any wireless tower and get a service identical to the one they receive on their local service, though not necessarily at the same cost. IPv6 would not eliminate roaming, but it would eliminate the need to lose provider-specific capabilities when doing so.
Well, the GUI is so cumbersome, it's no wonder that even the viruses are slowed.
The researchers' seemed very certain of their conclusions on what had killed the individuals. Not because of expectation, but in defiance of what they had expected. I don't know the specific details, but if you eliminate looking directly for the immune response, you have several options. You can examine the white cell count, you can look at the T-cell count, you can see if there is any immunity to any other known condition the person has, you can try making a serum and then injecting that into laboratory animals, you can look for late-stage symptoms which are not also attributable to any other probable cause, you could place cells on an agar dish, multiply up the virus, then use a microscope of sufficient power. This list should not be considered exhaustive, or remotely close to it.
If their research was valid in the first place, we must assume their research was valid in the second, as it is very easy to see that they could use alternative, more time-laborious, methods. It may be simpler to assume something convenient, to save the hastle of considering that the "good news" maybe wasn't, but I somehow suspect microbiology doesn't give a damn about the whims of humans eager to return to the free love of the 60s. Conclusion? The researchers' gave conclusions that would have been easily verifiable for the first round and for the second round. Provided the experiments performed were valid (and we'd know by know if they'd been ripped to pieces) and the conclusions matched the data (we'd know if that wasn't true, as well), we're left with the fact that at least one strain of the virus is not guaranteed detectable at an early stage using current methods.
Or, if you prefer, if you slam the researchers at the end, you have no reason to believe their claims at the start, which means you'd have to believe that the women were infected all along. Either way, Gibson's fantasy from the start of Neuromancer remains fantasy.
So, even if they are 100% absolutely right for the samples they have, at the time the experiment was conducted, that confidence must fall as you increase the range of HIV viruses and the range of time they have to mutate.
You must also consider that we're on some Nth generation of anti-virals because AIDS has mutated to develop resistance to all of the others. The second that happens with the current generation is the second the risk goes from near-zero to infinity, and nobody knows for sure when that moment will be. Hence the use of all kinds of toxic substances and anti-virals mixed together, so that immunity from one won't help, so minimizing the risk of mutant strains surviving. But you know that they will, sooner or later, and that when they do, they will spread. It might be tomorrow, but I'm guessing it's actually not too likely this side of 2020.
Of course, if everyone considers it safe, and takes no precautions, I imagine the probability of such a mutation surviving and spreading will go up. As such, even if it is "safe" for the moment, it can't be safe forever and when it does develop resistance, it may take years - or decades - for the resistant strain to even get detected.
Hope you don't mind me saying, but that was brilliantly said. If we could get schools, colleges and workplaces to understand that, core competencies would go through the roof, because people would be applying their skills to work effectively rather than to just look impressive.
There are so many Open Source databases (MySQL, MaxDB the last GPL version, Firebird, Postgresql, Ingres Community Edition, hsqldb and H2) that it is hard to know which ones implement what, which ones are useful for what, or which ones are optimal for what. Simple benchmarks (a) rarely are, and (b) usually want to promote one specific product over another. There are standardized tests, for a small fortune and by a relatively closed group who probably don't have a fraction of the range of experiences of databases in the real world, so cannot possibly be trusted to authenticate a standard or measure that could be used to compare databases.
We could really do with some serious side-by-side evaluations of these database engines, or at least decide what such evaluations would need to be to be actually useful. (Hey, maybe CmdrTaco can add a comparison section, get it sponsored by Which? or some other consumer guide, and have some of us run evaluations. It'd have to be done well to not be flamebait, which I think might rule me out, but if it could be done, it would be hellishly useful.)
The new memory is described as being as fast in reads as DRAM, which is an order or two of magnitude slower than register memory, which is what you need in a processor. Intel's adding of so much memory into the CPU interests me far more. Add enough, and the main memory is IN the processor (a-la the Transputer). From there, a little reorganizing reverses the arrangement - from memory in a CPU to a process in memory (PIM) architecture. Special-purpose PIM has been done before - Cray embedded a communications library in RAM before - but a full processor would be much more interesting.
So, when we look at the monkeys that wash potatos in sea water, we see a methodology that has no obvious predecessor and was most likely the result of a pure accident (dropping a potato in sea water). Spontaneous invention of condiments.
I only need one example to show it can't be a truly universal principle. "Invention in a flash" may be a myth in specific cases, maybe even many specific cases, but it is NOT, and never has been, universally so. True "eureka" moments are clearly rare, but they are provably non-zero, as I've found one. Even just a value of one is greater than a value of zero. And I doubt it's unique. My guess would be that there's a genuine, unassailable "eureka moment" at least once a century, and that during times of Classical or Classical-derived thinking, I would expect this number to maybe even get into the realms of four or five "eureka moments" a century.
Although "Ice Worms" are a product of a mutation, it was a single mutation and therefore may well be a throwback to an earlier form.
Into sectors or quadrants?
Now, let's examine patent law. This is applied to inventions, non-obvious innovations (and certain classes of obvious innovation, as there is case law upholding patents that are mind-blowingly obvious), business methods, software algorithms (but not mathematical algorithms, even though these are functionally the same) and decoded genes, but not all classes are recognized in all countries, classes that are recognized aren't necessarily recognized the same way, and even when they are, patent authorities have a degree of flexibility in what they recognize. All countries have been guilty of tolerating - even encouraging - the patenting of an idea lifted off a patent in another country. No exceptions, except maybe the Pitcairns and Antarctica.
That's not exactly uniform. Way too many different categories, for a start. This could be split into five or six distinct laws that had virtually not a single common element beyond being restrictions on use and compensation.
What about trademarks? There is a world of difference in meaning, intent and quality between a trademark used to represent a common source (eg: the stamps used to mark goods for trade as being authentic), a trademark used to represent a specific product (Unix is a trademarked name), a trademark used to describe something (it's amazing how many technical books and software packages have trademarks for something descriptive) and a trademark in the form of some expression (you can't play an electric guitar with a bow, without violating trademark law).
Again, these are entirely distinct things. If you were a programmer, you'd write these as different modules, libraries, functions or at the very least different code blocks. Again, if you split these into three or four laws, they'd again have nothing in common.
Ok, so if they are all so different, could they be unified? Electricity and magnetism are entirely different, when looked at one way, but can be unified into an overarching electromagnetic principle when looked at another. Nobody as unified electromagnetism with gravity - yet - and again they appear totally different from one perspective, but nobody seriously questions the idea that a perspective exists that allows you to see the two as merely different forms of a grand unified theory.
Yes, but the law is very different from physics. Can a policy be unified? One might argue that any implementation of Mandatory Access Controls in an Operating System that supports multiple inheritance and polymorphism (and therefore also implements Discretionary Access Controls) would be a wholly unified access control system in which all forms of policy control can be implemented. Maybe not efficiently, but they could be implemented and would be correct per specification and design. So, yes, you can have grand unified theories in policies, which means you can have them in law.
Would it be worth doing, though? Depends. If you can find truly universal principles that underlie all patent, copyright and trademark law, such that you could compose a specification that was both necessary and sufficient (in the strict mathematical sense), such that the specification was simpler and more fundamental than the sum total of each and every single law you'd need if you were to break everything down to the key components. The first part I can accept - at least in theory. Current unification methods have nothing to do with universal principles or fundamental components, so I seriously doubt the competence of any politician to pr
Short of there being a requirement that every building in the US be equipped with a Faraday Cage attached to an extremely effective ground, the law either prohibits anyone from ever watching anything or using any electronic device in any real-world scenario whatsoever, or it is intended to be rather more specific and focussed than that.
Private clubs, for example, are usually considered exempt, which is why student societies are generally not prosecuted for playing movies or videos. Hell, the BBC even came round to one society I belonged to and ran a short feature on it. They're hard-hitting when it comes to copyright and unlicensed viewing of material, their dragnets make the RIAA look like a bunch of wimps, but actively supported what we were doing. For that matter, most fan clubs and appreciation societies routinely use copyrighted material without explicit permission.
So, the question comes down to this: are churches a private, closed group, in much the same sense that a student society or an appreciation society is, or are they a public forum in the way that a movie theater or a street theater is? And, because of the way technology works, if it is public, how public must it be to be included in the intended meaning of "public" in the law? In Scotland, playing a radio too loud becomes "public" and therefore a violation of copyright. Is that reasonable? Have you (or anyone close to you) ever played music in your car, or at home, loud enough to qualify as a public performance? Would you be willing to be fined if you have?
Can the Lack Of Redundancy Department be guilty of a dupe? In order to be a genuine lack of redundancy, it would need to be The Redundancy, Lack thereof, As Pertains To The Lack Of Redundancy Department.
Huh. Aardvark is actually very good, as it's aa, which is the convention the Linux kernel used after producing 0.99z. We'd still need an 'aa' word at the start, though, if we did that. Would Aambivalent Aardvark be considered cheating, though?
D-Bus may not be the answer to everything, individual technologies rarely are, and it's not as if D-Bus was even the only user-level software bus commonly used in Linux, but it has interesting potential. Not sure how well it currently plays with clustering technology like MOSIX, or grid technology, but given the effort being poured into developing user-space software buses precisely for those, I imagine that's just a matter of time.
Personally, I'd rather have more localized limited-purpose buses in any case where a general-purpose solution is slower and/or heavier. The code can't be that maintenance-intensive and too much abstraction must eventually pessimize the resulting code. Moore's Law is worthless if code gets slower at the same rate systems get faster. Nonetheless, any general-purpose abstract IPC that is easier to implement against than traditional mechanisms (RPC, CORBA, Unix sockets, System V messages, etc) must surely be beneficial - even if those end up being the mechanisms used under the hood. In fact, the more of those implemented and the better you could switch data between them, the more portable such a software bus becomes as well as the more optimal - to a point. The whole trend in programming is towards such pluggable solutions, it's surprising IPC is so far behind almost every other mechanism out there, and unless there are specific technological reasons to not use a given generic mechanisms (such as performance costs), you're already using so many that are not following some standard or other that it's absurd to discriminate against one just because it's not specifically POSIX.
Yes, but what do they do after Zoroastrian Zebra?
IP law is, frankly, a mess. Either unify all the concepts into one single notion, OR sub-divide the existing categories into wholly uniform concepts. Force-fitting one idea into a mechanism never designed or intended to be used in such an abstract manner creates a great deal of confusion over what actually is permissible and makes rational discourse on what should be permissible difficult to impossible. I would argue for unification, partly because you are dealing with underlying principles but also because if the unification is valid and correct, it will remain valid and correct for any future technologies within the bounds for which it is defined. Splitting the categories up into much finer-grain notions would make each rule much easier to understand, much easier to follow and much easier to enforce rationally and fairly, but makes IP as a whole harder to conceptualize and doesn't scale well as new methods of delivering information emerge.
This church fiasco might - possibly - turn out quite useful if the level of resentment generated is sufficient to persuade the politicians that genuine reform (ie: not in the pockets of corporations) is in the interest of voters and therefore their own jobs. Narking a few churches off, though, probably isn't going to generate enough sustained ill-will to do anything beyond getting a few more people seriously drunk and lower that week's collection takings by a few dollars. Anyone who feels wronged on Sunday will have forgotten by Tuesday at the latest. No, the NFL would need to do something far more serious to do any good for the country.
Correction noted. Thanks for that. I shall remain skeptical of anything associating Intel with a notion of "turbo", but your comments on the direction of solid state disks is extremely interesting.
As another poster pointed out, the flash memory discussed is not in fact used for BIOSes, so my point there was flawed, but I think that this mini-thread was nonetheless worthwhile having.
It could significantly increase the usefulness of suspend/resume at the OS level. The limits on writes is a headache, but it would be possible to treat flash devices as additional swap space, making it theoretically possible to have hot-swappable swap devices as per some rather ancient mainframes. (Virtual swap space can be larger than the physical space directly available to a machine.)
I have NewScientist in my slashboxes and went to the original. I imagine that others have done the same - at least those who RTFA.
Come off it, it's not as if it's rocket science! Oh....
No, you picked Bush because 98% of the planet wishes it was him, and the other 2% handed him cable cutters.
Well, yes, in The Goodies episode they did.