The major benefit of RISC was that it reduced the number of transistors needed in the CPU. Fewer components = faster speed and greater reliability. Then along came a change: RAM clocks were decoupled from CPU clocks with an intermediary SRAM cache making up the difference. Since RISC takes more instructions per useful set of work, it consumes more ram. This means it needs more cache ram to keep moving at the same pace as a CISC processors. Cache SRAMs use something like 3 transistors per bit. That leads to the counterintuitive result that a RISC processor now requires more transistors than an comperable CISC processor running RISC + microcode under the hood.
At this point, very few people take SORBS seriously. They're inaccurately over-aggressive. If you use it for more than your personal email, you're begging for a lot of user complaints.
My own fun story is that they went on to my web site and subscribed their spamtraps to my opt-in email list. I didn't double-confirm, so I guess its my fault that they scammed me. SORBS then used the emails emitted from that single IP address to justify blocking 8,192 of my ISP's email addresses.
Every other RBL maintainer has found my list to be clean. The only non-SORBS problem I've had with an RBL was with Spamcop. That was immediately resolved when the only folks who responded to further inquiry apologized for reporting the list mail by mistake.
These days there is a limited amount difference under the hood between a CISC processor like the x86 series and a RISC processor. They're mostly RISC under the hood but a CPU like the x86 has a layer of microcode embedded in the processor which implements the complex instructions.
Now if extortionist SORBS would die, the anti-spam communinity could refocus on dealing with actual spammers. SORBS never was a pillar of responsibility but the current practice of "dontate to a SORBS-approved charity to get off the list" is just plain wrong.
Besides, what's to stop anyone from back-patching the kernel so that it does accept binary module loads? Freedom to change it; that's the GPL. Or did you think Red Hat and Novell wouldn't remove that particular feature?
Until September the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had their main Internet servers hosted at Verizon Business' Ashburn Virginia data center. This past January, Verizon Business (VB) was asked to provide a quote on a major upgrade: More space, more electrical power, more bandwidth, bigger "tubes." They failed. Badly: it took them two months to provide a quote and when they did it was outrageous. And oh yeah: they couldn't guarantee that they'd be able to meet the very modest space and power requirements: 200 amps @ 120 volts + a cage with 5 cabinets. How outrageous was the quote? Well, with Cogent selling bandwidth for $10/meg and most providers in the $50-$100 per meg range, VB was asked for a rate in the $100 per meg neighborhood. They had been charging $250. The new rate? $290.
But that wasn't the end of it. Oh no. A set of vendors was chosen to replace Verizon Business. The contracts were signed in the summer with completion on each scheduled for the end of August. VB was asked to provide one simple component in the replacement: some Internet bandwidth at a different data center where they confirmed existing connectivity. In particular, the DNC wanted them to do what any reasonable ISP is capable of: move the DNC's IP addresses to the new location. Not only did they miss the August 30 installation deadline by the better part of a month, they never were able to transfer the IP addresses. Working around that with the help of the other vendors was one hell of a scramble.
This mess all happened in August and September, by the way, threatening to spill over into the main part of the election cycle... And the DNC was under contract to host the Internet servers for the DCCC and DSCC this cycle. So it impacted and very nearly impaired election operations for three of the top Democratic Party committees responsible for helping take back the Congress.
So, the next time you wonder how Verizon treats folks whose good will they actually need, now you know.
As for Verizon's lobbying efforts in the 110th Congress? Yeah.
Actually, if it was just AOL it'd probably be OK. The fact is, AOL relies on a wide variety of third parties (such as Level 3) for their connection services. If the equipment at both AOL and the third parties don't have their clocks perfectly in sync then the logs can become seriously skewed.
Back when I worked for an ISP, I usually required two reports seperated in time (and preferably IP address) before taking action against a user. The radius logs gave us the IP address, logoff time and duration. We ran NTP so 95% of the time the logs were right but once in a while they didn't match up -- one of the boxes would be out of sync or misconfigured or we'd make a math error converting local time to UTC. That was with just one party involved where we had full control over all of the equipment.
Requiring two seperate incidents to line up to the same user helped weed out those mistakes.
Spiffy, but I believe the challenge was: offer one example of a governmental entitity above the municipal level granting a right-of-way for undergroud cabling through private property, especially one which would not result in a record of the right-of-way at the municipal level.
At any rate, condemnation for the purpose of creating a right of way involves a process which includes compensating the property owner and (surprise!) filing the change to the property where the property records are kept. In other words, it shows up in the survey in the form of an easement (which is the word I should have been using instead of right-of-way.)
Perhaps you could offer an example of an underground cabling right-of-way granted above the municipal level? Something that, how do I put this, actually exists?
Most people don't have a survey done before they buy a house.
You're on crack! Its very hard to get a mortgage or title insurance without having a survey done. The lender wants to know exactly what he's buying. That survey includes a visit to the courthouse so that they can locate any properly filed right-of-ways that the structures on the property might encroach.
If there are utility cables running across your yard, they almost certainly have a right-of-way.
Not necessarily. Phone and cable companies are notoriously sloppy about acquiring the proper rights-of-way and its exceedingly rare to find an underground cabling right-of-way in someone's back yard -- they're usually beside or under the street: in the front yard.
Unless you have a right-of-way on your property, he doesn't have a legal right to be there unless you invite him, miss-utility or not. Any right-of-way on your property will show up in the survey that was done when you bought the house.
Service providers who want to offer services on an open network are welcome to apply to UTOPIA. While the network is being constructed and the number of users is limited, practical necessity dictates that the number of service providers will be increased gradually. For service providers to be added to the UTOPIA Community MetroNet fiber-optic network, they must meet the following criteria
Fact: Once the phone company has installed conduit on someone's property that conduit becomes a "fixture of the property." Like a shed or a building, it belongs to the owner of the property. The only exception is if the phone company requests and receives a right-of-way from the property owner, something which they almost never do when the conduit terminates on the property instead of passing through it.
I carefully researched this a couple years ago when I worked for an ISP and wanted Cox to install fiber for us. Doing it cheaply required using conduit that Bell Atlantic (Verizon) had installed eight years earlier. Cos installed brought the fiber off the poles they both rented from Dominion Power and straight into the conduit system Bell had installed.
The Baby Bells' can complain all they want but its their own shoddy business practices which have left them open to this. Besides, in our case (as in most cases) the Bells' installation cost had long since been paid off by our purchase of Bell services. The conduit was ours. Fair is fair.
Different people respond to cubicles and open-plan offices differently.
Management tends to consist of extroverts. They're in meetings or on the phone with lots of different people all day. This energizes them. Spending an entire day in a closed office typing code on a keyboard is the worst torture they could think of. They understand that you like it, but they have no idea why. At least with cubicles you're able to chat with your neighbors while you work so that your experience with the company isn't so awful.
Engineers, especially the good ones, tend to consist of introverts. Spend an entire week with nothing but a problem to be solved and your tools and you're in heaven. Meetings and chatter with your neighbors are not good things: they're interruptions. Worse, they're draining. The definition of torture is that you accomplish nothing all day due to constant meetings and chatter. Its exhausting and not in a good way. If you're lucky your music headphones at least let you pretend that your alone so you can occasionally get some work done.
Its a personality trait thing. Any good psychologist could explain it.
Wow, that blows the door wide open. The major three DRM ripping scenarios are: DVDs, computer games and ebooks. For each one, there is now a legal ability to create and distribute the software in the US. You still can't legally use the software in most cases but the software can be legally created and once it exists it'll get used.
Better yet, the use of MAME in commercial settings where a non-working obsolete copy of the game board has been purchased is now totally vindicated: 100% legal.
What, this wasn't obvious? Entire rows of teeth have shown up inside of tumors and nobody thought to say, "Gee, maybe there are some rogue stem cells at work here." What blindingly obvious connection will they fail to see next? The possibility that stem cells may turn out not to be useful because when properly stimulated to grow a replacement body part, they behave precisely like cancer?
No, I don't think he sees the point. He doesn't reject the possibility of God -- that would be closed-minded, an unforgiveable sin among the humanists. Nevertheless, he can't accept a pejorative identity as an agnostic: agnostics lack the courage of their convictions, an ailment from which he does not suffer. The only answer which resolves this dissonance is that the terms must be misdefined, an error he aims to correct: He's a weak atheist, see, not an agnostic. He doesn't believe in God but he's willing to be open-minded about it.
Its pure spin, just like the whole hackers/crackers thing. Back in the 80's, a hacker broke in to computers via the phone while a cracker removed copy protection from software. Now lots of folks identify themselves as hackers, but its important that you understand that they're the good kind, not the bad kind, so they seek to push the "bad" kind of hacking into the term cracker. Sillyness. Next we'll redefine geek and nerd. Oh wait...
ASCII text has been going strong for 40 years with no signs of becoming inaccessible in the foreseeable future. If you want your text to be retrievable 40 years hence, just make sure that one of the forms you save it in is ASCII.
As to the rest, its worth noting that none of the major proprietary formats has become unrecoverable in 20 years. Even the old DOS Word Perfect files are still readable in modern office programs. Lots of minor formats have gone by the wayside, but that should have been obvious up front. It should be similarly obvious that the major compression formats (pkzip, gzip) will be around for the rest of your life while minor formats (zoo, arj) and newcomers (rar, bzip2) may or may not survive the next decade.
What it boils down to is this: If you use common sense when choosing how to archive your documents, you should have every expectation of being able to retrieve your documents with the software then available for the rest of your life. If you succumb to the urge to use the latest greatest format then you'll probably lose the data.
There's one form of Agnostic, the non-proof: I don't deny that God could exist but I don't see enough evidence which supports the claim that he does.
There are three forms of Atheism. First, the non-proof: No credible evidence supports the existance of God therefore there is no God.
Second, the omnipotent force version of Atheism: Everything unexplainable is the result of some physics or non-sentient universal forces we don't yet have the science to describe, not because of some omniscient god. The term "atheist" here is generally reserved for folks who have individually reasoned their way to this conclusion . If multiple people share the specific tenets of the belief it becomes a cult instead. If a lot of people share the belief then its a full-blown religion like Buddism.
And finally the Atheist emotional appeal: No omniscient diety could be as mean as God is described therefore there is no God.
Theoretically there is also a fourth non-theist atheist, that is to say an intelligent adult who doesn't consider religion to be a topic worth thinking about. If I ever meet such a person, I'll drop the "theoretically" from this statement.
If you know of any atheists/agnostics which don't fit this mold, feel free to describe them. If not, I respectfully submit that the topic is simple enough in nature that the common definitions of atheist and agnostic are more than adequate.
As for the word "theory," the scientific and common definitions remain very close despite the creationists' best efforts. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that the scientific definition of "theory" is at most a slightly more rigorous version of the common definition, not a redefinition. Let me put that another way: If a scientist said, "This is a theory," someone relying on the common definition would just about always agree. Conversely, a scientist might say of a common man's theory: "No, that's just a supposition." He may narrow the boundaries of the definition but he doesn't move them somewhere else entirely.
The common definition IS the definition. That a few people lobby for some other definition is part of a common political phenomenon known as "spin doctoring."
I did a Google search for the material claiming that Gates is an athiest and it mostly came back to the following:
Gates was interviewed November 1995 on PBS by David Frost. Below is the transcript with minor edits.
Frost: Do you believe in the Sermon on the Mount?
Gates: I don't. I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. There's a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact.
Frost: I sometimes say to people, do you believe there is a god, or do you know there is a god? And, you'd say you don't know?
Gates: In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
Now, last I heard an athiest was someone who denies the existance of any god while an agnostic questions God's existance. Unless we plan to redefine these words or there is some more significant quote floating around out there, Gates is an agnostic, not an atheist.
I beg to differ. The onus is on A to sign a letter claiming that they do not infringe. That's it. A needs prove nothing. Having signed that letter, the onus returns to B to either put up or shut up: they have to bring suit and prove that the material infringes in court.
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The major benefit of RISC was that it reduced the number of transistors needed in the CPU. Fewer components = faster speed and greater reliability. Then along came a change: RAM clocks were decoupled from CPU clocks with an intermediary SRAM cache making up the difference. Since RISC takes more instructions per useful set of work, it consumes more ram. This means it needs more cache ram to keep moving at the same pace as a CISC processors. Cache SRAMs use something like 3 transistors per bit. That leads to the counterintuitive result that a RISC processor now requires more transistors than an comperable CISC processor running RISC + microcode under the hood.
At this point, very few people take SORBS seriously. They're inaccurately over-aggressive. If you use it for more than your personal email, you're begging for a lot of user complaints.
My own fun story is that they went on to my web site and subscribed their spamtraps to my opt-in email list. I didn't double-confirm, so I guess its my fault that they scammed me. SORBS then used the emails emitted from that single IP address to justify blocking 8,192 of my ISP's email addresses.
Every other RBL maintainer has found my list to be clean. The only non-SORBS problem I've had with an RBL was with Spamcop. That was immediately resolved when the only folks who responded to further inquiry apologized for reporting the list mail by mistake.
These days there is a limited amount difference under the hood between a CISC processor like the x86 series and a RISC processor. They're mostly RISC under the hood but a CPU like the x86 has a layer of microcode embedded in the processor which implements the complex instructions.
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/riscvcisc.html
Now if extortionist SORBS would die, the anti-spam communinity could refocus on dealing with actual spammers. SORBS never was a pillar of responsibility but the current practice of "dontate to a SORBS-approved charity to get off the list" is just plain wrong.
Besides, what's to stop anyone from back-patching the kernel so that it does accept binary module loads? Freedom to change it; that's the GPL. Or did you think Red Hat and Novell wouldn't remove that particular feature?
they have enough business sense to become the most popular site in their market
It takes no particular talent to sell a dollar for 50 cents.
Interesting bit of Trivia:
Until September the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had their main Internet servers hosted at Verizon Business' Ashburn Virginia data center. This past January, Verizon Business (VB) was asked to provide a quote on a major upgrade: More space, more electrical power, more bandwidth, bigger "tubes." They failed. Badly: it took them two months to provide a quote and when they did it was outrageous. And oh yeah: they couldn't guarantee that they'd be able to meet the very modest space and power requirements: 200 amps @ 120 volts + a cage with 5 cabinets. How outrageous was the quote? Well, with Cogent selling bandwidth for $10/meg and most providers in the $50-$100 per meg range, VB was asked for a rate in the $100 per meg neighborhood. They had been charging $250. The new rate? $290.
But that wasn't the end of it. Oh no. A set of vendors was chosen to replace Verizon Business. The contracts were signed in the summer with completion on each scheduled for the end of August. VB was asked to provide one simple component in the replacement: some Internet bandwidth at a different data center where they confirmed existing connectivity. In particular, the DNC wanted them to do what any reasonable ISP is capable of: move the DNC's IP addresses to the new location. Not only did they miss the August 30 installation deadline by the better part of a month, they never were able to transfer the IP addresses. Working around that with the help of the other vendors was one hell of a scramble.
This mess all happened in August and September, by the way, threatening to spill over into the main part of the election cycle... And the DNC was under contract to host the Internet servers for the DCCC and DSCC this cycle. So it impacted and very nearly impaired election operations for three of the top Democratic Party committees responsible for helping take back the Congress.
So, the next time you wonder how Verizon treats folks whose good will they actually need, now you know.
As for Verizon's lobbying efforts in the 110th Congress? Yeah.
Actually, if it was just AOL it'd probably be OK. The fact is, AOL relies on a wide variety of third parties (such as Level 3) for their connection services. If the equipment at both AOL and the third parties don't have their clocks perfectly in sync then the logs can become seriously skewed.
Back when I worked for an ISP, I usually required two reports seperated in time (and preferably IP address) before taking action against a user. The radius logs gave us the IP address, logoff time and duration. We ran NTP so 95% of the time the logs were right but once in a while they didn't match up -- one of the boxes would be out of sync or misconfigured or we'd make a math error converting local time to UTC. That was with just one party involved where we had full control over all of the equipment.
Requiring two seperate incidents to line up to the same user helped weed out those mistakes.
Spiffy, but I believe the challenge was: offer one example of a governmental entitity above the municipal level granting a right-of-way for undergroud cabling through private property, especially one which would not result in a record of the right-of-way at the municipal level.
At any rate, condemnation for the purpose of creating a right of way involves a process which includes compensating the property owner and (surprise!) filing the change to the property where the property records are kept. In other words, it shows up in the survey in the form of an easement (which is the word I should have been using instead of right-of-way.)
Perhaps you could offer an example of an underground cabling right-of-way granted above the municipal level? Something that, how do I put this, actually exists?
Most people don't have a survey done before they buy a house.
You're on crack! Its very hard to get a mortgage or title insurance without having a survey done. The lender wants to know exactly what he's buying. That survey includes a visit to the courthouse so that they can locate any properly filed right-of-ways that the structures on the property might encroach.
If there are utility cables running across your yard, they almost certainly have a right-of-way.
Not necessarily. Phone and cable companies are notoriously sloppy about acquiring the proper rights-of-way and its exceedingly rare to find an underground cabling right-of-way in someone's back yard -- they're usually beside or under the street: in the front yard.
Unless you have a right-of-way on your property, he doesn't have a legal right to be there unless you invite him, miss-utility or not. Any right-of-way on your property will show up in the survey that was done when you bought the house.
Equal access from anyone to anyone.
Be nice if that was true. From their web site, emphasis mine:
Service providers who want to offer services on an open network are welcome to apply to UTOPIA. While the network is being constructed and the number of users is limited, practical necessity dictates that the number of service providers will be increased gradually. For service providers to be added to the UTOPIA Community MetroNet fiber-optic network, they must meet the following criteria
Fact: Once the phone company has installed conduit on someone's property that conduit becomes a "fixture of the property." Like a shed or a building, it belongs to the owner of the property. The only exception is if the phone company requests and receives a right-of-way from the property owner, something which they almost never do when the conduit terminates on the property instead of passing through it.
I carefully researched this a couple years ago when I worked for an ISP and wanted Cox to install fiber for us. Doing it cheaply required using conduit that Bell Atlantic (Verizon) had installed eight years earlier. Cos installed brought the fiber off the poles they both rented from Dominion Power and straight into the conduit system Bell had installed.
The Baby Bells' can complain all they want but its their own shoddy business practices which have left them open to this. Besides, in our case (as in most cases) the Bells' installation cost had long since been paid off by our purchase of Bell services. The conduit was ours. Fair is fair.
Different people respond to cubicles and open-plan offices differently.
Management tends to consist of extroverts. They're in meetings or on the phone with lots of different people all day. This energizes them. Spending an entire day in a closed office typing code on a keyboard is the worst torture they could think of. They understand that you like it, but they have no idea why. At least with cubicles you're able to chat with your neighbors while you work so that your experience with the company isn't so awful.
Engineers, especially the good ones, tend to consist of introverts. Spend an entire week with nothing but a problem to be solved and your tools and you're in heaven. Meetings and chatter with your neighbors are not good things: they're interruptions. Worse, they're draining. The definition of torture is that you accomplish nothing all day due to constant meetings and chatter. Its exhausting and not in a good way. If you're lucky your music headphones at least let you pretend that your alone so you can occasionally get some work done.
Its a personality trait thing. Any good psychologist could explain it.
Wow, that blows the door wide open. The major three DRM ripping scenarios are: DVDs, computer games and ebooks. For each one, there is now a legal ability to create and distribute the software in the US. You still can't legally use the software in most cases but the software can be legally created and once it exists it'll get used.
Better yet, the use of MAME in commercial settings where a non-working obsolete copy of the game board has been purchased is now totally vindicated: 100% legal.
What, this wasn't obvious? Entire rows of teeth have shown up inside of tumors and nobody thought to say, "Gee, maybe there are some rogue stem cells at work here." What blindingly obvious connection will they fail to see next? The possibility that stem cells may turn out not to be useful because when properly stimulated to grow a replacement body part, they behave precisely like cancer?
No, I don't think he sees the point. He doesn't reject the possibility of God -- that would be closed-minded, an unforgiveable sin among the humanists. Nevertheless, he can't accept a pejorative identity as an agnostic: agnostics lack the courage of their convictions, an ailment from which he does not suffer. The only answer which resolves this dissonance is that the terms must be misdefined, an error he aims to correct: He's a weak atheist, see, not an agnostic. He doesn't believe in God but he's willing to be open-minded about it.
Its pure spin, just like the whole hackers/crackers thing. Back in the 80's, a hacker broke in to computers via the phone while a cracker removed copy protection from software. Now lots of folks identify themselves as hackers, but its important that you understand that they're the good kind, not the bad kind, so they seek to push the "bad" kind of hacking into the term cracker. Sillyness. Next we'll redefine geek and nerd. Oh wait...
ASCII text has been going strong for 40 years with no signs of becoming inaccessible in the foreseeable future. If you want your text to be retrievable 40 years hence, just make sure that one of the forms you save it in is ASCII.
As to the rest, its worth noting that none of the major proprietary formats has become unrecoverable in 20 years. Even the old DOS Word Perfect files are still readable in modern office programs. Lots of minor formats have gone by the wayside, but that should have been obvious up front. It should be similarly obvious that the major compression formats (pkzip, gzip) will be around for the rest of your life while minor formats (zoo, arj) and newcomers (rar, bzip2) may or may not survive the next decade.
What it boils down to is this: If you use common sense when choosing how to archive your documents, you should have every expectation of being able to retrieve your documents with the software then available for the rest of your life. If you succumb to the urge to use the latest greatest format then you'll probably lose the data.
Hmm. Here's how I see it:
There's one form of Agnostic, the non-proof: I don't deny that God could exist but I don't see enough evidence which supports the claim that he does.
There are three forms of Atheism. First, the non-proof: No credible evidence supports the existance of God therefore there is no God.
Second, the omnipotent force version of Atheism: Everything unexplainable is the result of some physics or non-sentient universal forces we don't yet have the science to describe, not because of some omniscient god. The term "atheist" here is generally reserved for folks who have individually reasoned their way to this conclusion . If multiple people share the specific tenets of the belief it becomes a cult instead. If a lot of people share the belief then its a full-blown religion like Buddism.
And finally the Atheist emotional appeal: No omniscient diety could be as mean as God is described therefore there is no God.
Theoretically there is also a fourth non-theist atheist, that is to say an intelligent adult who doesn't consider religion to be a topic worth thinking about. If I ever meet such a person, I'll drop the "theoretically" from this statement.
If you know of any atheists/agnostics which don't fit this mold, feel free to describe them. If not, I respectfully submit that the topic is simple enough in nature that the common definitions of atheist and agnostic are more than adequate.
As for the word "theory," the scientific and common definitions remain very close despite the creationists' best efforts. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that the scientific definition of "theory" is at most a slightly more rigorous version of the common definition, not a redefinition. Let me put that another way: If a scientist said, "This is a theory," someone relying on the common definition would just about always agree. Conversely, a scientist might say of a common man's theory: "No, that's just a supposition." He may narrow the boundaries of the definition but he doesn't move them somewhere else entirely.
The common definition IS the definition. That a few people lobby for some other definition is part of a common political phenomenon known as "spin doctoring."
I did a Google search for the material claiming that Gates is an athiest and it mostly came back to the following:
Gates was interviewed November 1995 on PBS by David Frost. Below is the transcript with minor edits.
Frost: Do you believe in the Sermon on the Mount?
Gates: I don't. I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. There's a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact.
Frost: I sometimes say to people, do you believe there is a god, or do you know there is a god? And, you'd say you don't know?
Gates: In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
Now, last I heard an athiest was someone who denies the existance of any god while an agnostic questions God's existance. Unless we plan to redefine these words or there is some more significant quote floating around out there, Gates is an agnostic, not an atheist.
TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1. If this isn't on your bookshelf you're not an Internet guru.
the onus is on A to prove it is not infringing
I beg to differ. The onus is on A to sign a letter claiming that they do not infringe. That's it. A needs prove nothing. Having signed that letter, the onus returns to B to either put up or shut up: they have to bring suit and prove that the material infringes in court.
There's always damage if you have a clever enough lawyer.