Even with some fairly powerful explosives, a packed crowd, and no forewarning of the authorities they only killed three people. Yes they wounded many more and sadly a lot of people lost limbs, but again that is not the goal of terrorism, they want death.
I would beg to differ, maiming people is in many ways far more effective as terror than killing people. The dead will have a funeral, maybe the odd memorial but the crippled will go around the rest of their lives as living reminders of the Boston Marathon bombings, make for tons of heart breaking scenes and be a huge drain on medical and other resources. There is a reason even the Geneva Convention banned weapons that are "excessively injurious" as an inhumane way to fight a war even when outright killing enemy combatants is generally permitted. Yes perhaps terrorists would favor a kill over a maiming but bomb makers generally want as many, as gravely and as permanently wounded as possible, not wanting clean kills but rather making it as messy as possible. Without the wounded three kills wouldn't even be half a pistol clip and not a fraction as terrifying.
Probably in setting this whole thing up, they actually had developers write code and put it in a PPA and have it merged upstream, they apparently include a year of support with their own support staff that at least knows some Linux, they're trying for a few more value-adds but overall I think you're underestimating the overhead in doing a small run compared to selling millions of Windows machines. Also all the crapware they bundle with Windows puts the OS cost at ~$0, here you really get a no-crap standard mainstream distribution. And yet people are still not happy, why am I not surprised... I think the Ars reviewer was spot on with this observation:
The Ugly
That in spite of the excellent precedent Dell is setting, some people will still scream and rage because this product says "Dell" on it and/or because it costs more than $0
Well it's not surprising as the GCC maintainers are becoming completely impossible to work with. Each new version of GCC becomes less compatible with 3rd-party linkers and less popular runtime libraries (e.g. Solaris). It also becomes harder to build a working compiler for anything other than Linux. Often you need to hack stuff up to get it to build at all on SPARC, and even then it won't necessarily produce working executables. Red Hat GCC usually has fewer issues than FSF GCC, but by the time Red Hat fixes make it upstream, even more bugs will have been introduced. I think it comes down to lack of competition.
Or maybe it's just another sign of Sparc/Solaris' slide into... well, not irrelevancy but a hardware/software niche that neither developers or maintainers actually have. OpenSolaris is gone, Oracle is probably not doing much if anything to support GCC so how much of it is added hubris and how much of it is increasing obscurity? I just tried a search for SPARC on eBay and ignoring parts there's maybe 150 servers for sale. That's somewhat more than Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, but it's still rare/vintage. Yes, I know it's not dead yet and some huge enterprises use it but 99.9% of people have never seen one and never will.
The reason software should be free is so that you can stop wasting your labor trying to sell ice to eskimos. Instead, do as any other labor industry does, from mechanics to home-builders to FLOSS devs: Get assurances that you will be paid for your work before you do the work.
Except in the cases where you commission a work, that's not how the world works. When I go to the grocery store I haven't made any agreements to buy anything yet obviously a lot of work has been sunk into the products for sale, the same way a developer sinks his work into his product. They have taken all the risk of producing deliverables and that they are of a quality and price that'll sell, which is how consumers generally like it. Your hours may be scarce but they're not valuable to me, this is not like a taxi driver where I have immediate value of your time. I only have value of it if the end result is something that I can use, I don't want to be responsible for managing a time & material project with risks of overruns and non-delivery or a fixed bid project with change management, sign-offs and all that. I want you to offer something so I can say yay or nay.
Running a marathon is torture? Hmm...that thing in Boston they were doing must have been a group torture event then.
Having started ill-prepared and barely finished a half-marathon, I can inform you that thoughts like "Why the hell am I torturing myself like this?" and "I'm even paying for this!" are not unheard of. Then again, people pay to be locked up in S&M dungeons and every Easter there's some religious guys whipping themselves bloodied too... insanity loves company.
They just seem unimportant until she can't do that 10% that she needs to do.
But if you just need some laptop for the occasional, not so intense use (or at least rarely enough you don't care) then any cheap laptop will do. Not to mention if they win the first 90%, they'll start making software and docking hardware for all the people who don't want to buy a whole laptop to use 10% of the time. I mean if you have this one application that you need to dual boot for or run in a VM or WINE or whatever - wouldn't you rather have a native or web solution? It will be the same for tablets, the fewer things you need the PC for the harder you'll look for replacements.
If they should sell out to China I don't know, but IBM should have gotten out of commodity hardware sometime around the PS/2 flop in the late 80s. They got out of the desktop business after their ass was handed to them by cheap clones. They ditched the storage unit after the infamous IBM "Deathstars". So they created the original IBM PC, the Model M keyboard and I guess the PS/2 port is the lone survivor of that line but who is really going to miss their IBM hardware? Yeah ThinkPad was built like a tank and made to last twice as long at thrice the price but their performance/$ has been more than questionable for a very long time. IBM just isn't the right kind of company to be in that business.
Indeed, the only reasonable coherent argument I've heard is that those that don't believe in any god by implication don't believe in any omniscient power that'll bring justice, whether it's heaven/hell, karma or whatnot. That essentially if you don't get caught you've gotten away with it. It's actually not such a bad argument but it's rather hard to believe in an adult version of Santa who knows if you've been naughty or nice. In fact it would strongly suggest a view where humans have no inherent ethics or morality at all, we just fear divine punishment.
Indeed, and the weighting of the coalition is mostly based on the relative number of votes. For example here in Norway there's currently a coalition of 35,4% + 6,2% + 6,2% (in representatives actually a small majority due to a 4% cutoff for proportional representation), and undoubtedly the big party sets most of the policy while the smaller get a few core issues and some compromises where they're directly opposite. That balance may change though as people change their vote within the coalition, how can you do that when the ballot is Republican, Republican or Republican and Democrat, Democrat or Democrat? The only way the voter can signal a change is to not vote or switch side, which is too big a jump for most.
Tablets are a fad in the consumer space which will fizzle out in 2 years. Microsoft won't be able to break into this market, just like their other consumer-oriented efforts (Zune, Kin, Windows Phone... everything except XBox) failed. However E-readers will continue to sell. Tablet equals fancy electronic clipboard... if you don't havea sue for a clipboard, you have little use for a tablet. In certain vertical business markets, tablets can make sense. In the end, tablets are for consumtion, not production, and touch UIs are a step backward. The PC isn't going to die any time soon.
I don't think you realize how big tablets have gotten, here in Norway tablets now far outsell PCs - yes most people have a PC but they're not replacing it they're buying a tablet instead. Our biggest newspaper reports that in the last month they have had 1.1 million unique tablet users in a country of 5 million - that's at least 22% of the population, probably more since some share tablets and some don't visit their site. Any part of the traditional "PC" experience that people prefer to do on a tablet, will move to a tablet. And while I barely use mine and have considered selling it, I've realized I'm in a tiny minority here. Friends, family, coworkers, pretty much everyone now prefers the tablet for couch surfing and whatnot. The laptop is that old thing in the corner for writing term papers and long letters and such. And no, the normal person doesn't have a desktop.
Equality of results (not equality of opportunity) which is their version of "Utopia", and impossible, and tyranny of a sort. It punishes success, rewards failure, by definition.
Depends on your understanding of equal opportunity, let's take college education as an example. Is it "equal opportunity" if the B-grade son of a minimum wage worker goes to college and the C-grade son of a millionaire doesn't get in? Or is it that they both had the "equal opportunity" to pay Harvard $40,000/year in tuition? If a teenage kid develops a serious condition before he's had any chance to pay for his own medical insurance does he deserve the same quality of life if he's the son of a minimum wage work or a millionaire? Or is it equal opportunity that their parents both had "equal opportunity" to pay for an insurance with good coverage? The words are the same but the meaning is very different.
The plan economy died with the Soviet Union decades ago and despite the rumors of socialism in Europe doctors are paid very different than burger flippers, there is competition to provide many if not most goods and services. The difference is the cost is often shifted from the user to the tax payer, particularly at the lowest end to provide universal services to those who can't afford them. But I wouldn't call giving someone who's fallen down help getting up rewarding failure, whether they tripped on their own shoelaces or got pushed to the gutter. Then again offers to bring a mattress, food and water so they can stay down more comfortable might. Unless they have broken legs, in which case they don't need tough love to pull them back on their feet but real help to recover. And some can't recover, but we can give them a decent life.
It's easy to become a capitalist when you're on the winning side of the equation. I'm not so selfish to believe that I "deserve" a better life than an Indian or Chinese or worse a third world country but if you lay out of a plan to average the standard of living across the world then hell yeah expect opposition. The rich want to stay rich, whether it was earned fair... meh, like anyone chose to be born a son of a poor, non-literate sheep herder in Africa or not. I've run into many people with various physical and mental disabilities and the only thing I can say is that I'm happy to be relatively healthy. You're right, I'm quite probably going to be a net tax contributor unless I happen to live to 100+ or have some hyper-expensive medical issues down the road. I still think I got the better end of that deal.
Anyone who is a user and does this with hardware or software has a fool for an engineer. If they are not a fool, they are a developer and then the developer freedoms espoused by permissive licenses become more important.
No, they aren't. How is a developer going to change the BSD code in OS X? The BSD freedom is the freedom to find all the little bits and pieces that are BSD code, recreate all the other parts and ship it on their own hardware. It doesn't do anything to enable a developer to modify any closed source project made with open source. The BSD fans just like to flip-flop on this subject, yeah either tons of people are using BSD but they have none of the open source freedoms or they have the BSD freedoms but almost nobody uses any of the *BSD distros. Maybe you can argue that the BSD code helps improve the quality of closed source software, but to the developer the BSD in the closed source software is just as closed as the rest.
They couldn't agree on a global form of censorship, but if you count all the countries who'd like some form of censorship I don't think there'd be any problem to find a majority to open the door. Then you start building international treaties like the Berne convention saying we'll help you with your censorship if you'll help us with ours. Cue the obvious poster children that nobody* can object to in order to get the ball running then start poisoning the well. Or to put it another way, no matter what other constellation they make up I sincerely doubt more would be permitted on the Internet than today. All the other options range from somewhat less to a lot less.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all packets are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Propagation, Transit and the pursuit of their Destination. --That to secure these rights, net neutrality is instituted among ISPs, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Regulation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Regulation, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Sure it's regulation, the Bill of Rights is regulation... but there's good kinds.
I often get the feeling that the engineering side of the carriers understands this, but the business side doesn't quite grasp the idea of call volume not being a normal distribution.
No, they just want to know who's paying and if nobody is then they're going to let it fail. For many years on New Year's Eve the cell phone system choked, everybody knew it would happen but were people willing to pay for that one night in the year? Were people going to switch providers based on that day's performance? Hell no, nobody cared that their "Happy New Year" text arrived at 6AM instead of midnight. Same for every other place that is full, sold out or whatever - they're passing up business because it doesn't pay to serve the biggest peaks and have so much idle capacity so often.
Impressive and touching as this demonstration is, it is also deceptive. Googleâ(TM)s cars follow a route that has already been driven at least once by a human, and a driver always sits behind the wheel, or in the passenger seat, in case of mishap. This isnâ(TM)t purely to reassure pedestrians and other motorists. No system can yet match a human driverâ(TM)s ability to respond to the unexpected, and sudden failure could be catastrophic at high speed.
Google has cars driving around almost everywhere for their map feature, I'd have no problems with a first edition limited to what they already know. And they're legally obligated to have a driver ready to take over, even if they wanted to go solo. Miiiiiiiiinor detail.
It's still an Atom processor, not a true x86. If you don't understand the difference you may want to do some serious reading before you make yourself look even more foolish.
Sweet little troll, x86 is an instruction set and Atoms are as true as they come. In fact it supports x86-64 as well, not the oldest Atoms but even this little smart phone is a full 64 bit processor. It's not very fast but if you think that's anything to do with it you're the foolish one.
Uh...if sufficient you mean a PC from 2001, then I guess so.
My ultra-portable laptop from 2002 had a single-core 750 MHz Pentium III-M processor, 128MB RAM and 20GB HDD so you're off by at least a couple years if you want it to be as apples-to-apples as the comparison goes. The latest Samsung Galaxy S4 that launches in 10 days has a 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait 300 (GT-I9505 version), 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 64 GB of flash - it'd run a million circles around my old laptop.
Or just a sufficient PC... A modern smartphone has a gigahertz processor, a gigabyte of RAM and for plain 2D it can do a full desktop no problem. The question is do you really have a horsepower problem or do you have an interface problem? Yes, if you're doing 300 DPI poster layouts you'll need more but a lot of people today do "media creation" that'll be a part of a 2MP web page, they just need to be able to see it up close and manipulate it. Also note that a docked cell phone can run at whatever speed the cooling solution can handle, it's no longer limited to energy saving modes to keep it working all day. If most smart phones were x86 I think it'd already have happened, but the only two who can produce x86 chips don't want to kill the PC market.
Which is why you often find them doing black market work or other illegal activity, if it isn't official income just money in your pocket it's very hard for a judge to reach. Say you get hit with a Jammie Thomas verdict of 1.5 million dollars, even at a moderate 2% interest that's $30k before you even start making down payments and it'd take you 30 years to pay down at $50k/year and you're not going to have $80k in free post-tax income. People just give up permanently and make whatever they can on the side, even crap pay is better than good pay that's going straight down an endless hole. If you wanted more people to pay them back you need to give them some kind of incentive or a kickback for at least paying something back.
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate. There is no reason that this has to be true. Environmental effects on organisms increases selective pressure and causes evolution to progress at a faster rate. Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms. Seems pretty uneven to me...
All that aside, is there even a good logical reason to think the bootstrapping has much to do with the later processes? In the beginning a single mutation to a primitive life form is a much bigger deal than to a large, complex organism. Many bacteria have a life span of 20 minutes, that's 25000+ generations in a year so big positive or negative mutations would spread like wildfire. Meanwhile us humans have a regeneration cycle of 20-30 years and being large, complex organisms most of us carry a ton of positive and negative genes, just not good enough to achieve dominance or bad enough to eliminate us from the gene pool. Since they brought Moore's law up, why not extrapolate it to say how many transistors a computer had in 1900...
On the other hand, like laptops can finish faster a faster Internet connection also goes faster back to idle given the same load. My 2 Mbit line was pegged at 100% almost 24x7, my 25 Mbit line some of the time, my 60 Mbit line not that often. I'd not use double the bandwidth if I got double the speed and across all subscribers those peaks would even out. Of course you'll use some more because you can but not in a straight linear fashion. On the other side too, if Steam releases a gigabyte patch they're not served in any way by sharing it out as a trickle, they'll use the same bandwidth anyway as if they just blast it off and make room for the next customer.
You must not recognize the name of Dave Airlie - among other things, he's an active Mesa developer, one of the main X.Org developers, and the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager in the Linux kernel; i.e., he is the person who submits the pull requests to Linus for the graphics drivers in the kernel. Not exactly the kind of person who would get confused over the difference between OpenGL and OpenCL, or who has "no clue" what he's talking about.
Par for the course around here, you hear the same crap about Wayland despite it being made by ex-X and current-X devlopers who have spent 10+ years staring at the innards of X. That might make a good case for insanity, but not ignorance. It's hardly limited to IT, it seems many here feel qualified to be Supreme Court justices and a host of other things. Yet we laugh hard at others who think software development are about throwing up a few dialogs in Visual Basic, the Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well even among the intelligent. We just like to think that because we're smart we're not armchair quarterbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with some fairly powerful explosives, a packed crowd, and no forewarning of the authorities they only killed three people. Yes they wounded many more and sadly a lot of people lost limbs, but again that is not the goal of terrorism, they want death.
I would beg to differ, maiming people is in many ways far more effective as terror than killing people. The dead will have a funeral, maybe the odd memorial but the crippled will go around the rest of their lives as living reminders of the Boston Marathon bombings, make for tons of heart breaking scenes and be a huge drain on medical and other resources. There is a reason even the Geneva Convention banned weapons that are "excessively injurious" as an inhumane way to fight a war even when outright killing enemy combatants is generally permitted. Yes perhaps terrorists would favor a kill over a maiming but bomb makers generally want as many, as gravely and as permanently wounded as possible, not wanting clean kills but rather making it as messy as possible. Without the wounded three kills wouldn't even be half a pistol clip and not a fraction as terrifying.
Probably in setting this whole thing up, they actually had developers write code and put it in a PPA and have it merged upstream, they apparently include a year of support with their own support staff that at least knows some Linux, they're trying for a few more value-adds but overall I think you're underestimating the overhead in doing a small run compared to selling millions of Windows machines. Also all the crapware they bundle with Windows puts the OS cost at ~$0, here you really get a no-crap standard mainstream distribution. And yet people are still not happy, why am I not surprised... I think the Ars reviewer was spot on with this observation:
The Ugly
That in spite of the excellent precedent Dell is setting, some people will still scream and rage because this product says "Dell" on it and/or because it costs more than $0
Well it's not surprising as the GCC maintainers are becoming completely impossible to work with. Each new version of GCC becomes less compatible with 3rd-party linkers and less popular runtime libraries (e.g. Solaris). It also becomes harder to build a working compiler for anything other than Linux. Often you need to hack stuff up to get it to build at all on SPARC, and even then it won't necessarily produce working executables. Red Hat GCC usually has fewer issues than FSF GCC, but by the time Red Hat fixes make it upstream, even more bugs will have been introduced. I think it comes down to lack of competition.
Or maybe it's just another sign of Sparc/Solaris' slide into... well, not irrelevancy but a hardware/software niche that neither developers or maintainers actually have. OpenSolaris is gone, Oracle is probably not doing much if anything to support GCC so how much of it is added hubris and how much of it is increasing obscurity? I just tried a search for SPARC on eBay and ignoring parts there's maybe 150 servers for sale. That's somewhat more than Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, but it's still rare/vintage. Yes, I know it's not dead yet and some huge enterprises use it but 99.9% of people have never seen one and never will.
The reason software should be free is so that you can stop wasting your labor trying to sell ice to eskimos. Instead, do as any other labor industry does, from mechanics to home-builders to FLOSS devs: Get assurances that you will be paid for your work before you do the work.
Except in the cases where you commission a work, that's not how the world works. When I go to the grocery store I haven't made any agreements to buy anything yet obviously a lot of work has been sunk into the products for sale, the same way a developer sinks his work into his product. They have taken all the risk of producing deliverables and that they are of a quality and price that'll sell, which is how consumers generally like it. Your hours may be scarce but they're not valuable to me, this is not like a taxi driver where I have immediate value of your time. I only have value of it if the end result is something that I can use, I don't want to be responsible for managing a time & material project with risks of overruns and non-delivery or a fixed bid project with change management, sign-offs and all that. I want you to offer something so I can say yay or nay.
Running a marathon is torture? Hmm...that thing in Boston they were doing must have been a group torture event then.
Having started ill-prepared and barely finished a half-marathon, I can inform you that thoughts like "Why the hell am I torturing myself like this?" and "I'm even paying for this!" are not unheard of. Then again, people pay to be locked up in S&M dungeons and every Easter there's some religious guys whipping themselves bloodied too... insanity loves company.
They just seem unimportant until she can't do that 10% that she needs to do.
But if you just need some laptop for the occasional, not so intense use (or at least rarely enough you don't care) then any cheap laptop will do. Not to mention if they win the first 90%, they'll start making software and docking hardware for all the people who don't want to buy a whole laptop to use 10% of the time. I mean if you have this one application that you need to dual boot for or run in a VM or WINE or whatever - wouldn't you rather have a native or web solution? It will be the same for tablets, the fewer things you need the PC for the harder you'll look for replacements.
If they should sell out to China I don't know, but IBM should have gotten out of commodity hardware sometime around the PS/2 flop in the late 80s. They got out of the desktop business after their ass was handed to them by cheap clones. They ditched the storage unit after the infamous IBM "Deathstars". So they created the original IBM PC, the Model M keyboard and I guess the PS/2 port is the lone survivor of that line but who is really going to miss their IBM hardware? Yeah ThinkPad was built like a tank and made to last twice as long at thrice the price but their performance/$ has been more than questionable for a very long time. IBM just isn't the right kind of company to be in that business.
people still use yahoo?
I do... it's older than my Slashdot account :p
Indeed, the only reasonable coherent argument I've heard is that those that don't believe in any god by implication don't believe in any omniscient power that'll bring justice, whether it's heaven/hell, karma or whatnot. That essentially if you don't get caught you've gotten away with it. It's actually not such a bad argument but it's rather hard to believe in an adult version of Santa who knows if you've been naughty or nice. In fact it would strongly suggest a view where humans have no inherent ethics or morality at all, we just fear divine punishment.
Indeed, and the weighting of the coalition is mostly based on the relative number of votes. For example here in Norway there's currently a coalition of 35,4% + 6,2% + 6,2% (in representatives actually a small majority due to a 4% cutoff for proportional representation), and undoubtedly the big party sets most of the policy while the smaller get a few core issues and some compromises where they're directly opposite. That balance may change though as people change their vote within the coalition, how can you do that when the ballot is Republican, Republican or Republican and Democrat, Democrat or Democrat? The only way the voter can signal a change is to not vote or switch side, which is too big a jump for most.
Tablets are a fad in the consumer space which will fizzle out in 2 years. Microsoft won't be able to break into this market, just like their other consumer-oriented efforts (Zune, Kin, Windows Phone... everything except XBox) failed. However E-readers will continue to sell. Tablet equals fancy electronic clipboard... if you don't havea sue for a clipboard, you have little use for a tablet. In certain vertical business markets, tablets can make sense. In the end, tablets are for consumtion, not production, and touch UIs are a step backward. The PC isn't going to die any time soon.
I don't think you realize how big tablets have gotten, here in Norway tablets now far outsell PCs - yes most people have a PC but they're not replacing it they're buying a tablet instead. Our biggest newspaper reports that in the last month they have had 1.1 million unique tablet users in a country of 5 million - that's at least 22% of the population, probably more since some share tablets and some don't visit their site. Any part of the traditional "PC" experience that people prefer to do on a tablet, will move to a tablet. And while I barely use mine and have considered selling it, I've realized I'm in a tiny minority here. Friends, family, coworkers, pretty much everyone now prefers the tablet for couch surfing and whatnot. The laptop is that old thing in the corner for writing term papers and long letters and such. And no, the normal person doesn't have a desktop.
Equality of results (not equality of opportunity) which is their version of "Utopia", and impossible, and tyranny of a sort. It punishes success, rewards failure, by definition.
Depends on your understanding of equal opportunity, let's take college education as an example. Is it "equal opportunity" if the B-grade son of a minimum wage worker goes to college and the C-grade son of a millionaire doesn't get in? Or is it that they both had the "equal opportunity" to pay Harvard $40,000/year in tuition? If a teenage kid develops a serious condition before he's had any chance to pay for his own medical insurance does he deserve the same quality of life if he's the son of a minimum wage work or a millionaire? Or is it equal opportunity that their parents both had "equal opportunity" to pay for an insurance with good coverage? The words are the same but the meaning is very different.
The plan economy died with the Soviet Union decades ago and despite the rumors of socialism in Europe doctors are paid very different than burger flippers, there is competition to provide many if not most goods and services. The difference is the cost is often shifted from the user to the tax payer, particularly at the lowest end to provide universal services to those who can't afford them. But I wouldn't call giving someone who's fallen down help getting up rewarding failure, whether they tripped on their own shoelaces or got pushed to the gutter. Then again offers to bring a mattress, food and water so they can stay down more comfortable might. Unless they have broken legs, in which case they don't need tough love to pull them back on their feet but real help to recover. And some can't recover, but we can give them a decent life.
It's easy to become a capitalist when you're on the winning side of the equation. I'm not so selfish to believe that I "deserve" a better life than an Indian or Chinese or worse a third world country but if you lay out of a plan to average the standard of living across the world then hell yeah expect opposition. The rich want to stay rich, whether it was earned fair... meh, like anyone chose to be born a son of a poor, non-literate sheep herder in Africa or not. I've run into many people with various physical and mental disabilities and the only thing I can say is that I'm happy to be relatively healthy. You're right, I'm quite probably going to be a net tax contributor unless I happen to live to 100+ or have some hyper-expensive medical issues down the road. I still think I got the better end of that deal.
Anyone who is a user and does this with hardware or software has a fool for an engineer. If they are not a fool, they are a developer and then the developer freedoms espoused by permissive licenses become more important.
No, they aren't. How is a developer going to change the BSD code in OS X? The BSD freedom is the freedom to find all the little bits and pieces that are BSD code, recreate all the other parts and ship it on their own hardware. It doesn't do anything to enable a developer to modify any closed source project made with open source. The BSD fans just like to flip-flop on this subject, yeah either tons of people are using BSD but they have none of the open source freedoms or they have the BSD freedoms but almost nobody uses any of the *BSD distros. Maybe you can argue that the BSD code helps improve the quality of closed source software, but to the developer the BSD in the closed source software is just as closed as the rest.
They couldn't agree on a global form of censorship, but if you count all the countries who'd like some form of censorship I don't think there'd be any problem to find a majority to open the door. Then you start building international treaties like the Berne convention saying we'll help you with your censorship if you'll help us with ours. Cue the obvious poster children that nobody* can object to in order to get the ball running then start poisoning the well. Or to put it another way, no matter what other constellation they make up I sincerely doubt more would be permitted on the Internet than today. All the other options range from somewhat less to a lot less.
* that'd like a political career.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all packets are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Propagation, Transit and the pursuit of their Destination. --That to secure these rights, net neutrality is instituted among ISPs, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Regulation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Regulation, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Sure it's regulation, the Bill of Rights is regulation... but there's good kinds.
I often get the feeling that the engineering side of the carriers understands this, but the business side doesn't quite grasp the idea of call volume not being a normal distribution.
No, they just want to know who's paying and if nobody is then they're going to let it fail. For many years on New Year's Eve the cell phone system choked, everybody knew it would happen but were people willing to pay for that one night in the year? Were people going to switch providers based on that day's performance? Hell no, nobody cared that their "Happy New Year" text arrived at 6AM instead of midnight. Same for every other place that is full, sold out or whatever - they're passing up business because it doesn't pay to serve the biggest peaks and have so much idle capacity so often.
Impressive and touching as this demonstration is, it is also deceptive. Googleâ(TM)s cars follow a route that has already been driven at least once by a human, and a driver always sits behind the wheel, or in the passenger seat, in case of mishap. This isnâ(TM)t purely to reassure pedestrians and other motorists. No system can yet match a human driverâ(TM)s ability to respond to the unexpected, and sudden failure could be catastrophic at high speed.
Google has cars driving around almost everywhere for their map feature, I'd have no problems with a first edition limited to what they already know. And they're legally obligated to have a driver ready to take over, even if they wanted to go solo. Miiiiiiiiinor detail.
It's still an Atom processor, not a true x86. If you don't understand the difference you may want to do some serious reading before you make yourself look even more foolish.
Sweet little troll, x86 is an instruction set and Atoms are as true as they come. In fact it supports x86-64 as well, not the oldest Atoms but even this little smart phone is a full 64 bit processor. It's not very fast but if you think that's anything to do with it you're the foolish one.
Uh...if sufficient you mean a PC from 2001, then I guess so.
My ultra-portable laptop from 2002 had a single-core 750 MHz Pentium III-M processor, 128MB RAM and 20GB HDD so you're off by at least a couple years if you want it to be as apples-to-apples as the comparison goes. The latest Samsung Galaxy S4 that launches in 10 days has a 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait 300 (GT-I9505 version), 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 64 GB of flash - it'd run a million circles around my old laptop.
If smart phones were built on x86 they would be the size of a football
Actually it would look like this...
Or just a sufficient PC... A modern smartphone has a gigahertz processor, a gigabyte of RAM and for plain 2D it can do a full desktop no problem. The question is do you really have a horsepower problem or do you have an interface problem? Yes, if you're doing 300 DPI poster layouts you'll need more but a lot of people today do "media creation" that'll be a part of a 2MP web page, they just need to be able to see it up close and manipulate it. Also note that a docked cell phone can run at whatever speed the cooling solution can handle, it's no longer limited to energy saving modes to keep it working all day. If most smart phones were x86 I think it'd already have happened, but the only two who can produce x86 chips don't want to kill the PC market.
Which is why you often find them doing black market work or other illegal activity, if it isn't official income just money in your pocket it's very hard for a judge to reach. Say you get hit with a Jammie Thomas verdict of 1.5 million dollars, even at a moderate 2% interest that's $30k before you even start making down payments and it'd take you 30 years to pay down at $50k/year and you're not going to have $80k in free post-tax income. People just give up permanently and make whatever they can on the side, even crap pay is better than good pay that's going straight down an endless hole. If you wanted more people to pay them back you need to give them some kind of incentive or a kickback for at least paying something back.
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate. There is no reason that this has to be true. Environmental effects on organisms increases selective pressure and causes evolution to progress at a faster rate. Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms. Seems pretty uneven to me...
All that aside, is there even a good logical reason to think the bootstrapping has much to do with the later processes? In the beginning a single mutation to a primitive life form is a much bigger deal than to a large, complex organism. Many bacteria have a life span of 20 minutes, that's 25000+ generations in a year so big positive or negative mutations would spread like wildfire. Meanwhile us humans have a regeneration cycle of 20-30 years and being large, complex organisms most of us carry a ton of positive and negative genes, just not good enough to achieve dominance or bad enough to eliminate us from the gene pool. Since they brought Moore's law up, why not extrapolate it to say how many transistors a computer had in 1900...
On the other hand, like laptops can finish faster a faster Internet connection also goes faster back to idle given the same load. My 2 Mbit line was pegged at 100% almost 24x7, my 25 Mbit line some of the time, my 60 Mbit line not that often. I'd not use double the bandwidth if I got double the speed and across all subscribers those peaks would even out. Of course you'll use some more because you can but not in a straight linear fashion. On the other side too, if Steam releases a gigabyte patch they're not served in any way by sharing it out as a trickle, they'll use the same bandwidth anyway as if they just blast it off and make room for the next customer.
You must not recognize the name of Dave Airlie - among other things, he's an active Mesa developer, one of the main X.Org developers, and the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager in the Linux kernel; i.e., he is the person who submits the pull requests to Linus for the graphics drivers in the kernel. Not exactly the kind of person who would get confused over the difference between OpenGL and OpenCL, or who has "no clue" what he's talking about.
Par for the course around here, you hear the same crap about Wayland despite it being made by ex-X and current-X devlopers who have spent 10+ years staring at the innards of X. That might make a good case for insanity, but not ignorance. It's hardly limited to IT, it seems many here feel qualified to be Supreme Court justices and a host of other things. Yet we laugh hard at others who think software development are about throwing up a few dialogs in Visual Basic, the Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well even among the intelligent. We just like to think that because we're smart we're not armchair quarterbacks.