I understand that for "compatibility" they squeezed a little 386-compatible core in the corner of the chip. It was also my understanding that some people benchmarked the chip by feeding it x86 code, and saw a 10-year-old core struggle with the load. This was not good publicity for their enterprise flagship.
Might all be urban legend, or misremembered, or I might be on drugs.
Not necessarily true - assuming they anonymised *correctly*. I believe Helger Lipmaa (University of Tartu, he of the world's fastest software AES implementation) has at least one paper on anonymising large data sets. Basically, you randomise the data - perturb every datum by a delta from a symmetric, and not too wild, distribution. On average, the law of large numbers tells you that the mean perturbation taken over the whole set will be 0, and the standard deviation caused by your noise will decrease proportional to the square root of the sample set size (and the 2nd and higher moments will be modelable as a normal distribution). So if you're averaging over 10000 gay democrat-voting degree-educated males, the anonymised data you pass on will be rarely much more than 1% (i.e. sqrt(1/10000) ) from the real value. Average just over "humans", and the error could be so small it's below the noise floor. The process is, if you do it correctly, irreversible, as the true data isn't even in the system, so can't be extracted no matter how many different queries you perform.
The problem is that Apple release squadrons of apparently effete attack lawyers at least as often as they release products. They therefore bring this bad publicity on themselves, they invite it.
And to be honest, who cares about another product? Just go to a review site - or a web shop - if you want info on products. Products really are dime a dozen.
Oddly the word 'apology' until less than a century ago could also be used in common English to mean a defence, for example of your thesis. Effectively unchanged straight from the from the greek/apologia/.
There was no snivelling and grovelling in an apology, but pride, and even arrogance could be appropriate.
It's nice to see Apple keeping the old meaning alive through their attitude!
If the age limit is already 14 (which it is according to the signs I've seen), and the trouble cases are 12-year-olds, then the age limit is being ignored. Therefore setting it to 18 will make little difference.
The warning signs already make it clear that these products have some level of danger.
There's no reason for any action by anyone, this is the government interfering with honest trade.
They let themselves be put in captivity as playthings for humans - that's not a life of respect.:-( Respect to the ones who actually use their teeth as a way of voicing their complaints.
That is a question that applies at least as much to BSD/NCSA-licensed software such as Clang/LLVM as to GPL-licensed software such as GCC.
And one that has been answered many times by the businesses that do release their software under the GPL, BSD, and other licenses that permit redistribution.
his tone on the previous paper (sophail, April 2011, IIRC) is much more a reflection of that. Except it's not a feud there, it's a DM-wearing kick-fest, and Sophos is the intoxicated tramp. You can almost hear/Singing in the Rain/ playing whilst reading it.
He's toned things down in the last year - have you read the original sophail from spring last year? He rips sophos' head off and pisses down their gullet. It's arrogant showboating, but absolutely perfect given the shambles he's covering. There's nothing wrong in making stupid companies which pretend that they are not stupid appear stupid.
But on the flipside, more people have trashed Graham Clueless than have ever complained about Tavis.
For example, I like the way that Clueless calls something which was made public 5 days after MS was notified of it a "zeroday". Those with enough brains to count up to five would be more inclined to call that a "fiveday" exploit, assuming they like the "N-day" moniker at all, which not all do.
>>How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand? >What high costs? You volunteer to do it.
In the US election, it seems from the news reports there was 7 *billion* dollars of *partisan* expenditure this election. Only a minuscule fraction of that amount would be needed to actually ensure that an election were run smoothly, including adequately subsidising the volunteers for their time.
And since when has democracy been the thing that you attempt to get the cheapest version of? You'll end up with cheap knock-off democracy from China some time soon if you take care.
>>The ease in which paper votes can be "lost" in transit to the counting facility? >They are to be counted on location, not transported anywhere.
There's no problem with mysterious lost paper votes - as they are trivially detectable. If the number of votes counted does not match the number of votes cast, then something's tampered with the vote.
The tired old "ballot stuffing" link that wassizface upthread keeps posting over and over again simply doesn't work if you take the absolute simplest common sense precautions, ones that anyone from any walk of life can perform and oversee. It is a complete straw man. We can now defend against 19th century attacks, and we don't need 21st century technology to do that. Sure, historically ballot boxes have also ended up in rivers - but that was entirely detectable by counting every box out and counting every box in. Any country which is unable to tally ballot boxes is not advanced enough to be attempting to run any supposedly democratic election using any technology.
In some ways it's almost a cargo-cultism. "Use technology" and things will be, as you said "more advanced", and therefore, better. Mechanical machines not good enough - throw more technology at the problem - PCs runnning windows! touch screens!...
I'm curious what I'm missing, as I use dcraw rather than anything else, as Wine isn't available on my powerpc workstation. I looked at the source, and it's totally shit code - I've made it about twice as fast just by removing some of the idiocy - but what else is horrible about it?
> Just because it isn't very much isn't really a good reason to barf on them.
Indeed. The fact they killed the Alpha architecture is the reason to barf on them. That, and about a dozen other reasons (which from my perspective, as an alpha owner, are less important).
I couldn't have hoped for a more direct answer to my question! It was insinuated in the question, but in case it wasn't picked up, that's my view too.
"And it appears to me that it's driven by Black Duck and it really is time that someone called them upon it."
I like to think that there are many posters on slashdot who do call them on it when the dead horse gets trundled out again, and I presume people on other fairly-technically-sophisticated and mostly-unbiased fora (if there are any) do too. However, just that kind of ground-level (or even underground) grumbling doesn't achieve much. One problem is that by arguing against them, you bring them more publicity, so it might not even be useful for higher-profile individuals to tackle their claims; so it's not obvious even if one should react to their fairytales at all.
Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, and for the recent interviews, and of course for your long history of contributions to the community that I benefit so greatly from.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that for "compatibility" they squeezed a little 386-compatible core in the corner of the chip. It was also my understanding that some people benchmarked the chip by feeding it x86 code, and saw a 10-year-old core struggle with the load. This was not good publicity for their enterprise flagship.
Might all be urban legend, or misremembered, or I might be on drugs.
Not necessarily true - assuming they anonymised *correctly*. I believe Helger Lipmaa (University of Tartu, he of the world's fastest software AES implementation) has at least one paper on anonymising large data sets. Basically, you randomise the data - perturb every datum by a delta from a symmetric, and not too wild, distribution. On average, the law of large numbers tells you that the mean perturbation taken over the whole set will be 0, and the standard deviation caused by your noise will decrease proportional to the square root of the sample set size (and the 2nd and higher moments will be modelable as a normal distribution). So if you're averaging over 10000 gay democrat-voting degree-educated males, the anonymised data you pass on will be rarely much more than 1% (i.e. sqrt(1/10000) ) from the real value. Average just over "humans", and the error could be so small it's below the noise floor. The process is, if you do it correctly, irreversible, as the true data isn't even in the system, so can't be extracted no matter how many different queries you perform.
The problem is that Apple release squadrons of apparently effete attack lawyers at least as often as they release products. They therefore bring this bad publicity on themselves, they invite it.
And to be honest, who cares about another product? Just go to a review site - or a web shop - if you want info on products. Products really are dime a dozen.
Only 4?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTeYncx1xmI
(/Breakfast Club/ - the "I'm cracking skulls" scene)
Oddly the word 'apology' until less than a century ago could also be used in common English to mean a defence, for example of your thesis. Effectively unchanged straight from the from the greek /apologia/.
There was no snivelling and grovelling in an apology, but pride, and even arrogance could be appropriate.
It's nice to see Apple keeping the old meaning alive through their attitude!
They've released the output of a raytracer, and little more by the looks of it.
Things that don't exist are not "capable" of anything. (Well, unless you're of a religious persuasion...)
If the age limit is already 14 (which it is according to the signs I've seen), and the trouble cases are 12-year-olds, then the age limit is being ignored. Therefore setting it to 18 will make little difference.
The warning signs already make it clear that these products have some level of danger.
There's no reason for any action by anyone, this is the government interfering with honest trade.
They let themselves be put in captivity as playthings for humans - that's not a life of respect. :-( Respect to the ones who actually use their teeth as a way of voicing their complaints.
No self-respecting whales have teeth - baleen plates for the whine.
But you're missing the point of the story! We're all going to need a 404.exe app to run locally on our machines now!
That is a question that applies at least as much to BSD/NCSA-licensed software such as Clang/LLVM as to GPL-licensed software such as GCC.
And one that has been answered many times by the businesses that do release their software under the GPL, BSD, and other licenses that permit redistribution.
> I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.
Bollocks.
RMS, and the GPL, do not force you to give your software away, they're perfectly compatible with selling your software for real money.
I hope you enjoyed burning your straw man.
his tone on the previous paper (sophail, April 2011, IIRC) is much more a reflection of that. Except it's not a feud there, it's a DM-wearing kick-fest, and Sophos is the intoxicated tramp. You can almost hear /Singing in the Rain/ playing whilst reading it.
"it wasn't really gloating either."
He's toned things down in the last year - have you read the original sophail from spring last year? He rips sophos' head off and pisses down their gullet. It's arrogant showboating, but absolutely perfect given the shambles he's covering. There's nothing wrong in making stupid companies which pretend that they are not stupid appear stupid.
But on the flipside, more people have trashed Graham Clueless than have ever complained about Tavis.
For example, I like the way that Clueless calls something which was made public 5 days after MS was notified of it a "zeroday". Those with enough brains to count up to five would be more inclined to call that a "fiveday" exploit, assuming they like the "N-day" moniker at all, which not all do.
+don't
>>How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
>What high costs? You volunteer to do it.
In the US election, it seems from the news reports there was 7 *billion* dollars of *partisan* expenditure this election. Only a minuscule fraction of that amount would be needed to actually ensure that an election were run smoothly, including adequately subsidising the volunteers for their time.
And since when has democracy been the thing that you attempt to get the cheapest version of? You'll end up with cheap knock-off democracy from China some time soon if you take care.
Hanging chads? That's not a paper ballot - that's mechanical. That's unnecessary use of technology!
Real paper ballots are where you put a mark on paper, and put the paper in a ballot box.
>>The ease in which paper votes can be "lost" in transit to the counting facility?
>They are to be counted on location, not transported anywhere.
There's no problem with mysterious lost paper votes - as they are trivially detectable. If the number of votes counted does not match the number of votes cast, then something's tampered with the vote.
The tired old "ballot stuffing" link that wassizface upthread keeps posting over and over again simply doesn't work if you take the absolute simplest common sense precautions, ones that anyone from any walk of life can perform and oversee. It is a complete straw man. We can now defend against 19th century attacks, and we don't need 21st century technology to do that. Sure, historically ballot boxes have also ended up in rivers - but that was entirely detectable by counting every box out and counting every box in. Any country which is unable to tally ballot boxes is not advanced enough to be attempting to run any supposedly democratic election using any technology.
In some ways it's almost a cargo-cultism. "Use technology" and things will be, as you said "more advanced", and therefore, better. Mechanical machines not good enough - throw more technology at the problem - PCs runnning windows! touch screens! ...
"DCRAW is horrible"
I'm curious what I'm missing, as I use dcraw rather than anything else, as Wine isn't available on my powerpc workstation. I looked at the source, and it's totally shit code - I've made it about twice as fast just by removing some of the idiocy - but what else is horrible about it?
> Just because it isn't very much isn't really a good reason to barf on them.
Indeed. The fact they killed the Alpha architecture is the reason to barf on them. That, and about a dozen other reasons (which from my perspective, as an alpha owner, are less important).
This was from my 4th computer:
http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg
Next!
I couldn't have hoped for a more direct answer to my question! It was insinuated in the question, but in case it wasn't picked up, that's my view too.
"And it appears to me that it's driven by Black Duck and it really is time that someone called them upon it."
I like to think that there are many posters on slashdot who do call them on it when the dead horse gets trundled out again, and I presume people on other fairly-technically-sophisticated and mostly-unbiased fora (if there are any) do too. However, just that kind of ground-level (or even underground) grumbling doesn't achieve much. One problem is that by arguing against them, you bring them more publicity, so it might not even be useful for higher-profile individuals to tackle their claims; so it's not obvious even if one should react to their fairytales at all.
Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, and for the recent interviews, and of course for your long history of contributions to the community that I benefit so greatly from.
Stop asking for facts! We need headlines, goddammit!