Re:Mutual exclusivity != mutual exhaustivity
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Rebooting The World?
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· Score: 2
ii) people who don't own a computer but would notice if all the computers stopped working
(ii) makes up the remaining 24% of the world. This would consist of people who don't own a computer, but use one at work, or at the public library, or maybe a kid who plays video games on his friend's computer even though he doens't have one of his own.
You're right about where the missing 24% come from , but that group (ii) would be a lot larger than 24%. You're only counting people who use a computer but don't own one. In fact there are plenty of people who don't even know what a computer is but would be massively affected if all computers suddenly disappeared. If your government and the companies in your country use computers you'll be affected whether you have direct contact with computers or not. India and China are both in that situation and total 30-40% of the worlds population alone.
Sting doesn't hold a trademark on his "name". Diablo is a trademark owned by Blizzard or one of it's parents (see this list). It's exactly the same as making a movie called "Windows XP" or "Coke", right?
Actually no. Blizzard also owns the movie title "Diablo" and (in the U.S.) movie titles are registered and duplicates are generally not allowed. New Line don't have much hope, I'd say (IANAL, etc).
Take a look at claim 4:
4. A computer system comprising:
a processor for performing control functions and processing data;
a display for outputting data received from said processor and for receiving input from a user of said computer system via a graphical user interface; and
a plurality of theme engines each capable of rendering a theme by drawing an object on said graphical user interface, wherein a selected one of said theme engines is commanded to draw said object based upon a theme selection coordinated by said processor.
That sounds extremely broad to me. Looks like they're making a claim against any system which includes data processing capability and has UI themes. Note that they don't specify changing behaviour in this claim. And they talk in terms of themeing a particular object so an argument could be made that this would apply to themes within a single app (e.g. WinAMP skins). Of course the prior art on this one would be voluminous.
What RMS doesn't understand is that this battle won't be won all at once.
Obviously he understands exactly that. He's been fighting the battle more years than anyone else.
The free software comunity needs to coexist with the proprietary world, and wean users gradually off proprietary software by offering superior alternatives. If RMS insists on stubbornly making it an all-or-nothing deal, he's most likely going to end up with nothing.
RMS doesn't agree. He sees no place for "the proprietary world", and his fanaticism has paid off. It is exactly because the GPL doesn't make concessions with our rights that, for example, Linux has been more widely adopted than other "free" OSes like BSD etc.
By the way, the correct name of the operating system is "Linux," not "GNU/Linux." It was named "Linux" by Linus Torvalds.
No, the correct term for the kernel is Linux. That's what Linus named. He has never named or distributed an operating system. See the LKML FAQ. Whether a Linux based operating system should be called GNU/Linux or just Linux is open to interpretation. Given that the user has very little interaction with the kernel there is certainly a strong argument for RMS' point of view.
all of the improvements and changes that I would make are things that HURD project pretty much has covered
This is exactly why your focus on architecture is wrong and Linus' focus on practicality is right. The HURD sounds fantastic in theory, but it's taken something like 12 years of development and they're up to 0.3 (or something). Linus OTOH was able to get Linux to the point where it was usable in a fairly short time.
Unfortunately the Linux kernel still does not comply with the principles of good kernel design highlighted in Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems Design And Implentation": the clean (and I do emphasize that that is important) implementation of a scheduler, memory managment aspects, IPC, device drivers etc.
Linus and Tanenbaum have had "discussions" over this before. See this archive. Some choice bits: Tanenbaum state Linux should have had a microkernel arcitecture. Linus replies with: "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project". He wrote that in 1992. We still don't have a 1.0 Hurd release 9 years later. Another piece has Tanenbaum arguing that Linux is too closely tied to the x86 architecture, a valid point back then but amusingly shortsighted to us now.
You and Tanenbaum seem to share the belief that the architecture of the OS is the highest priority. Linus seems to focus instead on practicality and performance, although he does value architectural simplicity and elegance very highly too.
perhaps a CVS system instead of randomly throwing out tarballs....and a proper built-in kernel debugger. (Linus himself apparently dissaproves of things like this)
Linus has good reasons for the decisions he's made. You can read about them at Kernel Traffic. And in the end Linus appears to have been proven correct, after all Linux has far higher market share than the other OSes you mentioned: BeOS, QNX, and Plan 9.
but in matters such as this perhaps it's time he was overruled, in order to take the kernel onto the next level
There are people who agree with you (see the Buy Linus a Spine page), but no one has stepped up to the plate and tried to take over which I think indicates that most reasonable people are willing to live with Linus' "quirks" because his usually his ideas have turned out to be right.
This agreement seems fair. Clearly, a company needs to own all of the source code behind their product. They can't worry about a disgruntled ex-employee suddenly demanding that they pay royalties for 'his code' or any other things that might pop up.
If the company expects you to bring previously developed code to the job (as they seem to in this case) then they should be paying licence fees, or purchasing the rights to the code from you. Salaray or wages are not compensation for work you've done previously.
Just sit down and write the code from scratch. Even if you're doing basically exactly the same thing you've done before. If you get a job at another company doing the exact same thing, rewrite it from scratch
again.
It not only protects the company, it protects you from any ex-employers.
Doing it that way is a breach of "clean room" practices, and won't save you from any ex-employers, because you've seen the old code. Employers just have to stop trying to grab rights to this sort of generic code which has nothing to do with their business logic. They want to take something from you for nothing, which is clearly not fair.
Really the only way to avoid getting into trouble with these sorts of employment contracts these days is to only ever work for one company.
You'd get a big textbook or two and carry it around in your burlap sack, go to classes and get orally quizzed on your ability to recall facts, and go home and get the snot beaten out of you if you didn't show any progress.
You forgot the bit about walking three hours to and from school, barefoot in the snow each day. And all of it up hill, too.
most modern Japanese cars are limited to about 110mph
Huh? Not that I have noticed - not here in Japan, nor in the US & Canada in the last 20 years or so.
Specifically I'm talking about used Japanese imports into New Zealand and Australia. Speedos go up to 180kph (110mph), once you reach about that you lose all acceleration even at mid range revs. Since these are second hand cars I would have assumed this was common in Japan.
Oh, and I supposed it is just a coincedence that this will allow people to track where everyone drives in the UK?
Car manufacturers have been putting artificial limits on their vehicles top speed for years, for example most modern Japanese cars are limited to about 110mph. It would be relatively easy to at least enforce the open road speed limit that way, but it hasn't been done. Now they're hot for this technology which has the advantage of being apply a variable speed limit at the cost of requiring a GPS receiver. Why the change of heart? Smacks of ulterior motive to me.
In that case you should be testing a UP motherboard against the SMP motherboard, not just switch the kernels.
Normally when you benchmark you try to change only one factor. If you change the code you're running and the number of CPUs then how do you know how much each factor is affecting the result?
For comparison this is an article on Tom's Hardware where he tests a few dual PentiumIII 1GHz machines. He doesn't say what kernel he compiles, probably the kernel of the SuSE 6.4 distribution he's using. Anyway the faster of the two boards managed 141 seconds with two CPUs and 221 seconds with one.
The only totally fair way to compare is to boot a non-SMP kernel, run the benchmark, then boot an SMP kernel and run exactly the same benchmark.
Tom simply replaces one of the CPUs with a dummy, presumably using a SMP kernel for both benchmarks. That probably penalises the non-SMP case which is less realistic but arguably fairer since it means you really are measuring just the difference between 1 and 2 cpus with the same code.
Re:This technology doesn't work and can't work
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 2
Your example about that tank detector just sounds like they messed up the training, so that failure is not a problem of neural nets in general. I think proper training and design could lead to good results
But that's the problem - it's very difficult to tell if a neural network is correctly trained because there is always the possibility that every input you've trained it on (and tested it with) coincidentally had some feature in common other than the one you're actually looking for.
The tank story is quite possibly an urban legend but it does illustrate the problem.
Slashdot is not a portal. It's a news and discussion site. It doesn't try to be everything for everyone which is what a portal is. It's pointless to try and debate Slashdot's open- or closed-ness, it's not relevant, but IMO Slashdot is quite open. The editors exercise fairly loose control over stories and anyone can join and post. How can that be a closed community?
Yahoo links to everything on the web.
Yahoo contains a directory and a web search run by Google. If I want to find something on the web I go directly to Google. I certainly don't expect my news site (Slashdot) to also be my search engine.
Right now there aren't many processor manufacturers in the whole computer industry (PC, Apple, pda's, web appliances, etc). You have Intel, AMD, Transmeta, Motorola, IBM, Sun, Alpha. I know there are more, but those are the major players atm. If I missed any, feel free to add them to this list.:)
I'll add MIPS, Hitachi, and VIA (Cyrix), plus Samsung (used to?) make Alpha processors. Some of these companies aren't doing too well, of course.
So what happens when one of them dissapears? Less choice, less competition.
Sure, but when you look at that list and compare it to other industries it look pretty healthy. For example, the oil industry: even aside from the whole OPEC cartel thing, there are only about 4-6 major companies, at least where I live, and they obviously price-fix. Many regions have telecommunications monopolies, either real or partial. Lots of utilities are like that, too.
The processor industry, on the other hand, is one of the most competitive that exist. That's why Moore's Law continues to apply. Now I agree that the loss of choice is a bad thing, but you got to keep perspective. Transmeta is insignificantly small in the processor marketplace, despite the hype and their market cap. Frankly I think the loss of 3dfx is more concerning.
so if AMD buys transmeta, the highers-up hardly-shockingly decide to "unofficially" threaten Linus's livelihood--should he not demand support be officially cut for IA-64 in the kernel, and early support for AMD's new 64-bit architecture get added.
(Forgive me for feeding the troll)
Oh, come on. Can you imagine the public outcry if they tried something like that? Not that it would make any difference - Linus has little to do with IA64 support in the kernel. Besides can you see Linus accepting that? Personally I credit him with a bit more integrity than that. It's not like he'd have difficulty finding another job.
C'mon now ppl, how many times have you heard this kind of thing before..??
Yeah, last time the rumor was Nvidia buying 3dfx.
All of you people talking about how the DOJ would get involved must be on crack. AMD has less than 25% of the processor market. Transmeta is barely even a blip. The DOJ won't give a rat's arse about them merging.
Closing the NetBios port will probably save many windows users from burning themselves.
Note that I never said I had a problem with them closing the port. I agree with that decision. I do have a problem with the way the Acceptable Use Policy is worded. Your contract binds you to the terms of the AUP, but the AUP is quite vague. The only reason I can see them counting NetBIOS as a server is so that they can catch people out. No one is seriously going to use NetBIOS to serve files over the Net. But the ISP could, AFAICS, claim that anyone running Windows with NetBIOS installed is in breach due to the hidden shares NetBIOS sets up by default.
Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules.
Yeah but they don't tell you the rules. They say "oh, by the way, you can't run a server off this collection", and you think "fine, I wasn't planning on running a Web server or a Quake server or anything". Then you get an email stating that they've decided to shut down the NetBios port due to virus problems. I quote from the email:
Closing Port 139 (also known as the NetBios port) will mean that all customers
will no longer be able to use certain functions that this port would normally facilitate.
In particular, some network sharing services (file and print sharing) through our network
will cease operating. Volume based plan customers only use this feature as hosting servers is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy
It's not too coherent, I know, but that says to me that they consider a NetBios share to be a server. I'm probably breaching their Acceptable Use Policy right now - I think I forgot to disable the echo service. Am I the only one who finds that overly broad?
AFAIK Ceres has never been seen clearly enough to determine whether it is a spheroidal shape or not. In fact it transitted a star a while ago and the results indicated that it was surprisingly irregular. But I wouldn't exactly cry if Ceres counted as a planet anyway.
Ceres was discovered well before Pluto, and was consider to be a planet for about a year. A (very low quality) image of Ceres is available here.
I'm not aware of any spheroidal asteroid that is smaller than Ceres either. If you have proof to the contrary, I would like to see it.
Searching for "spherical asteroid" on Google lead me to this article which states that Vesta is "nearly spherical". Pallas is believed to be spherical (see here). This article says there that "at least a half-dozen main-belt asteroids are large, spherical objects that would also satisfy definitions of "major planethood" if sphericity is the criterion." That last article is a pretty good coverage of the debate over Pluto's status.
As for all your other points about pluto- so what. Every single body in the solar system appears to be completely different to every other.
None of the other major planets have anywhere near the "weirdness" of Pluto. About the only thing Pluto has in common with the other major planets is that it orbits the sun. The others are relativly similar. So why do you think Pluto should be considered a major planet?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no. Blizzard also owns the movie title "Diablo" and (in the U.S.) movie titles are registered and duplicates are generally not allowed. New Line don't have much hope, I'd say (IANAL, etc).
- a processor for performing control functions and processing data;
- a display for outputting data received from said processor and for receiving input from a user of said computer system via a graphical user interface; and
- a plurality of theme engines each capable of rendering a theme by drawing an object on said graphical user interface, wherein a selected one of said theme engines is commanded to draw said object based upon a theme selection coordinated by said processor.
That sounds extremely broad to me. Looks like they're making a claim against any system which includes data processing capability and has UI themes. Note that they don't specify changing behaviour in this claim. And they talk in terms of themeing a particular object so an argument could be made that this would apply to themes within a single app (e.g. WinAMP skins). Of course the prior art on this one would be voluminous.You and Tanenbaum seem to share the belief that the architecture of the OS is the highest priority. Linus seems to focus instead on practicality and performance, although he does value architectural simplicity and elegance very highly too.
Linus has good reasons for the decisions he's made. You can read about them at Kernel Traffic. And in the end Linus appears to have been proven correct, after all Linux has far higher market share than the other OSes you mentioned: BeOS, QNX, and Plan 9. There are people who agree with you (see the Buy Linus a Spine page), but no one has stepped up to the plate and tried to take over which I think indicates that most reasonable people are willing to live with Linus' "quirks" because his usually his ideas have turned out to be right.Really the only way to avoid getting into trouble with these sorts of employment contracts these days is to only ever work for one company.
Normally when you benchmark you try to change only one factor. If you change the code you're running and the number of CPUs then how do you know how much each factor is affecting the result?
The tank story is quite possibly an urban legend but it does illustrate the problem.
I wonder if the Solaris or HP-UX editions of IE4 had something similar in their EULAs?
The processor industry, on the other hand, is one of the most competitive that exist. That's why Moore's Law continues to apply. Now I agree that the loss of choice is a bad thing, but you got to keep perspective. Transmeta is insignificantly small in the processor marketplace, despite the hype and their market cap. Frankly I think the loss of 3dfx is more concerning.
Oh, come on. Can you imagine the public outcry if they tried something like that? Not that it would make any difference - Linus has little to do with IA64 support in the kernel. Besides can you see Linus accepting that? Personally I credit him with a bit more integrity than that. It's not like he'd have difficulty finding another job.
All of you people talking about how the DOJ would get involved must be on crack. AMD has less than 25% of the processor market. Transmeta is barely even a blip. The DOJ won't give a rat's arse about them merging.
Pluto has all the characteristics of a Kupier belt object. Why not call it a Kupier belt object?