I can't see how chipping for a legitimate use (ie, to use it as a media centre etc) can possibly be illegal.
Because it is. The law is not about justice or morals or ethics, it's ultimately about what interest group can bribe the government to imprison or shoot their opponents.
Yes, it's just that the news last night said "about 5 kilotonnes", so does that mean that the 4GJ figure is wrong or was the news...Actually why don't we just calculate it:
If we're being so picky here Strom, I didn't think you could use 'and' after a comma.
Yes you can. In fact there are many places where it has to be so used for clarity. The Compact OED has a secion outlining the use of the comma as well as being a generally great dictionary.
There were always animals who could outpace us running. We never met anything else that could beat us at chess.
Firstly, there are in fact no animals that can outrun the best humans over long distances. Secondly, we've had calculators that can work out logs faster than we can for a long time; chess is no different.
They should already be feeling the inadaquecy of this old style setup,
Nope.
many mail servers automatically filter any message that appears to originate from a residential IP number.
I've not seen any sign of that.
oh no, upgrading to properly transmitted email is too difficult, too expensive, too hard".
Sending from home is a properly transmitted email. Point to the RFC that says otherwise.
Anyone who sees this is a long term viable email stragegy is foolish.
Anyone that thinks that redefining email is a better solution than ISPs kicking off spammers (which they are uniquely able to do) is obviously an idiot.
Sorry but relying on known broken mechanisms for your business isn't my problem.
It should be the ISP's problem, but they won't get of their collective arses and fix it. Sender-ID (and the rest) is simply a case of everyone else having to waste their time because some dickhead won't do their work properly.
I would far rather see spam-friendly ISP's punished instead of rewarded, which is the current system.
Tell me what your favorite MTA can do that mine can't.
Dunno. My problem with Sendmail was that I only had to install it every couple of years, so I'd forget how to configure it and have to go through the Bat book again. The fourth time I lost it and decided that it would be faster to write my own email server. So I took a week off and did:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cmg/
It certainly doesn't do everything Sendmail does, but it does everything I and my companies need it to, and I never have to wade through hundreds of configuration options for things I don't even understand, let alone need from a mail server.
So, how does this work for companies with large numbers of home-workers who are happily sending main aout throught their home ISP's with "spoofed" headers claiming, quite correctly, that their email comes from the company?
Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.
This is just another, on a thirty-year-long run, example of the fact that when it comes to IT, MS is clueless. Business methods and the law are their fortes.
Now, you can put them in software, just like that. And all of a sudden, you are not allowed to obtain a patent for such a filter anymore? rather strange.
You do not understand the issue. Software is written in programming languages. If a software patent only covered the original program in the original programming language, it would be much more like a hardware patent but also almost identical to copyright. Such a patent could be circumvented simply by writing the code in a different language. Again, this is like hardware effects being duplicated by a different hardware implimentation (which is fine, that's why there were multiple types of steam engines competing for the market - no one was allowed to prevent the invention of other types).
Software patent supporters know all this and so software patents are drafted to give the patentee much greater power than hardware patents: they CAN suppress alternative methods of doing the same thing. That is where the danger lies.
When you patent a complex circuit with transistors you are patening THAT circuit (and some obvious knock-offs) but the software version would grant a patent on doing whatever its the circuit does no matter what the method used. This is inevitable given that there is no way for a patent-office grunt to judge whether the source code was different because it was a genuinely new approach or because it was a mechanically translated copy of the original code.
And that's without even looking at the whole issue that someone could simply patent the idea without even having made their own program!
His point was that keeping an obsolete plant running is probably not profitable.
A plant fulfilling orders from your largest customer is never obsolete as long as said customer is paying for the product (which has long since paid off its development costs, so profits are higher), no matter how obsolete its output is.
That's by Intel's choice. Intel hate having to keep a fab churning out 733MHz Celerons 24/7 just for the Xbox.
Yeah, that'd be a chore. Imagine having to keep a plant running to produce obsolete chips that have a standing order. Who wants profits like that, anyway? They just clutter up your bank account.
Yes, the x86 has a yucky ABI, but so fucking what? The real-world performance you can get out of it is what's important,
Yes. Intel's real-world performance is shit. The programming model on the x86 family is slow and wasteful, which is why they have to put so much effort (and heat) into making it run like a decent processor.
AMD are at least making some progress on this, but Intel are way behind at the moment, havig spent almost 30 years living off the back of the same rancid, ancient, crap chip.
Hey, IBM not keeping up with x86 was the driving factor for the switch.
Actually, it looks more and more like having to deal with Jobs is why IBM told Apple to find someone else to annoy. The PPC and Cell are both much better chips than Intel produce, as are all the recent AMDs. Not many Intel chips in the next generation consoles, are there?
I for one am more interested than ever in getting a Mac as my next computer.
Maybe you'll get the one I was going to buy before Jobs decided that the 70's was the high point in computing. Lucky you.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it is. The law is not about justice or morals or ethics, it's ultimately about what interest group can bribe the government to imprison or shoot their opponents.
TWW
Yes, it's just that the news last night said "about 5 kilotonnes", so does that mean that the 4GJ figure is wrong or was the news...Actually why don't we just calculate it:
.5*372Kg*(37000Km/hr=10000m/s)^2 -> 18.6GJ.
So, the news was wrong. Fair enough.
TWW
Er.. that's it.
Yes, I'd think myself fortunate to have a helicopter too!
TWW
Nope, sorry. HTTP was Europe.
Yes you can. In fact there are many places where it has to be so used for clarity. The Compact OED has a secion outlining the use of the comma as well as being a generally great dictionary.
TWW
Not at all. Chess hardware and software is now so specialised that it tells us absolutely nothing about intelligence.
TWW
Correct.
And, indeed, a search box, although I always just use the URL search prefix instead.
TWW
Firstly, there are in fact no animals that can outrun the best humans over long distances. Secondly, we've had calculators that can work out logs faster than we can for a long time; chess is no different.
TWW
TWW
Me: You buy it and install it and configure it, I'm off to work for someone with a clue.
TWW
Thanks, man.
Nope. many mail servers automatically filter any message that appears to originate from a residential IP number.
I've not seen any sign of that.
oh no, upgrading to properly transmitted email is too difficult, too expensive, too hard".
Sending from home is a properly transmitted email. Point to the RFC that says otherwise.
Anyone who sees this is a long term viable email stragegy is foolish.
Anyone that thinks that redefining email is a better solution than ISPs kicking off spammers (which they are uniquely able to do) is obviously an idiot.
TWW
It should be the ISP's problem, but they won't get of their collective arses and fix it. Sender-ID (and the rest) is simply a case of everyone else having to waste their time because some dickhead won't do their work properly.
I would far rather see spam-friendly ISP's punished instead of rewarded, which is the current system.
TWW
Dunno. My problem with Sendmail was that I only had to install it every couple of years, so I'd forget how to configure it and have to go through the Bat book again. The fourth time I lost it and decided that it would be faster to write my own email server. So I took a week off and did:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cmg/
It certainly doesn't do everything Sendmail does, but it does everything I and my companies need it to, and I never have to wade through hundreds of configuration options for things I don't even understand, let alone need from a mail server.
TWW
Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.
This is just another, on a thirty-year-long run, example of the fact that when it comes to IT, MS is clueless. Business methods and the law are their fortes.
TWW
You do not understand the issue. Software is written in programming languages. If a software patent only covered the original program in the original programming language, it would be much more like a hardware patent but also almost identical to copyright. Such a patent could be circumvented simply by writing the code in a different language. Again, this is like hardware effects being duplicated by a different hardware implimentation (which is fine, that's why there were multiple types of steam engines competing for the market - no one was allowed to prevent the invention of other types).
Software patent supporters know all this and so software patents are drafted to give the patentee much greater power than hardware patents: they CAN suppress alternative methods of doing the same thing. That is where the danger lies.
When you patent a complex circuit with transistors you are patening THAT circuit (and some obvious knock-offs) but the software version would grant a patent on doing whatever its the circuit does no matter what the method used. This is inevitable given that there is no way for a patent-office grunt to judge whether the source code was different because it was a genuinely new approach or because it was a mechanically translated copy of the original code.
And that's without even looking at the whole issue that someone could simply patent the idea without even having made their own program!
TWW
Not without retooling, which is a large fraction of the cost of a new plant.
TWW
That was the point: if you are worried about formatting your source to make the compiler work properly you might as well be using punched cards.
TWW
A plant fulfilling orders from your largest customer is never obsolete as long as said customer is paying for the product (which has long since paid off its development costs, so profits are higher), no matter how obsolete its output is.
TWW
Yeah, that'd be a chore. Imagine having to keep a plant running to produce obsolete chips that have a standing order. Who wants profits like that, anyway? They just clutter up your bank account.
TWW
Yes. Intel's real-world performance is shit. The programming model on the x86 family is slow and wasteful, which is why they have to put so much effort (and heat) into making it run like a decent processor.
AMD are at least making some progress on this, but Intel are way behind at the moment, havig spent almost 30 years living off the back of the same rancid, ancient, crap chip.
Hey, IBM not keeping up with x86 was the driving factor for the switch.
Actually, it looks more and more like having to deal with Jobs is why IBM told Apple to find someone else to annoy. The PPC and Cell are both much better chips than Intel produce, as are all the recent AMDs. Not many Intel chips in the next generation consoles, are there?
I for one am more interested than ever in getting a Mac as my next computer.
Maybe you'll get the one I was going to buy before Jobs decided that the 70's was the high point in computing. Lucky you.
TWW
Does Python do that? Holy Fortran, Batman; pass the punched cards!
I don't think I'll be learning Python any day soon. Geez.
TWW
Maybe, but he's also not retarded enough to think the DOJ would go after them again.
TWW