> I was working with a Japanese system programmer, and he was telling me that US-style programming (individualistic) just don't fit the mindset of Japanese people (consensus). Even when Japanese programmers are given the freedom to do it, they can't (Exceptions occurs for sure).
US-style programming tends to result in a lot of exceptions too.
> Does anyone have any numbers/statistics on Linux use in Japan?
No hard numbers, but the new Netcraft survey (which, oddly enough,/. hasn't picked up on yet) says:
Countries in which Unix-like operating systems maintain the strongest lead are Poland, Hungary, Japan, Russia and Germany, with Linux strong in Poland and Hungary, and BSD in Russia and Japan.
> The MMPI is quite comprehensive. It is designed so that it is effectively impossible to hide anything.
Interesting. I've heard a several times over the years, from completely independent sources, that a number of states had banned the MMPI because it was prone to giving false diagnoses. (Never bothered to investigate the claims, though. Can I "Ask Slashdot"?)
An associated claim is that it was standardized by benching it on institutionalized people, so that it essentially assumes that everyone has problems; it only decides which category you fit best.
I got up this morning and discovered that my tire is flat, the coke I opened last night is already flat, my G/F is still flat,... and now I hear that the whole d*mn*d universe is flat.
I think I'll spend the day compiling kernels, just to take my mind off my troubles.
> It's a sad, sad, day when libertarian actually whole-heartedly supports the DOJ is a case against a corporation.
It's a sad, sad day when people decide which cases to support based on whether they are libertarian (or liberal, or conservative), rather than on the merits of the case.
> There are companies like Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com/) for example who are developing a proprietary product, and have made the following statement: if our company ever goes belly up - the whole software will be released open source.
Think of it as an insurance policy. The kings of Roman "client kingdoms" used to will their kingdoms to Rome in the event of untimely death, in order to prevent usurpers from offing them. (The usurper would be disappointed in his aspirations when a couple of legions showed up on his doorstep to collect the imperial inheritance.)
Maybe Trolltech has something similar in mind? "Cut off my air supply and your problem gets even worse."
> Too bad only Mundie is there to defend the closed-source model
The thing is... the closed-source model doesn't need defending. Lots of people think open-source is "better" for one reason or another, but I'm not aware of anyone saying that "closed source is evil; no one should be allowed to keep closed-source software".
The issue is, why can't CM take a similar live-and-let-live attitude toward open-source software?
And we don't need a forum to answer that question.
> Ancient Chinese soldiers worn a big Chinese word 'BRAVE' on their chest. Their emperor hoped that they'd charge(to death) regardless of all the difficulities.
And when you turn your back to run the enemy can't see the tatoo anymore, so the world still makes ordinary sense.
A Zen general would have tattooed 'BRAVE' on his soldier's backs.
> Open Source fanatics will never come to terms with the corporate software environment and the corporat software people will never come to terms with giving away there "property" for free.
Any particular reason for the choice of "fanatics" for one group and "people" for the other? I.e., could we swap them around without changing the meaning of your post?
> There "bread and butter" is closed source software.
We need to make a distinction here between software producers and software consumers. Not all companies are software producers. Most are not. For them, the "bread and butter" lies in using the software, and sometimes in getting the darn stuff to work. For them, the "bread and butter" may ultimately lie in open source software.
> I would think it would be a lot of money to buy a product that would not be that useful to either company except to maybe get some ideas on improving there own chips.
Actually, most of the ideas are readily accessible in published papers. There may be some patents locked up in the Alpha, but I doubt that there are any secrets.
> I dont think there would be a large market for the Alpha being that Compaq and DEC could do nothing with the chip.
DEC was renowned for nothing so much as their inability to market good products. Dunno about Compaq, but without an NT for it I can't imagine that they would know what to do with it (which probably explains this article).
Your VIA suggestion sounds good. However, I think it would be a shrewd move for AMD too, if they're in a position to market it at a more competitive price than it traditionally has been.
Also, parts of AMD's architecture has been converging with parts of the Alpha's (even on Athlons), so AMD might be able to integrate it into the high end of a "family" of processors.
However, another question also arises. The Alpha has been around for, what, a decade or so now? Possibly the architecture is nearing the end of its life cycle, and if so no one is going to want to spend much to acquire it.
Anyone know how many more years they can squeeze hot stuff out of the Alpha? And is there any margin for cutting the price a bit?
> everyone I know are put in my white list and automatically get sorted in a "Safe Inbox".
The problem I have is that I'm still on a dialup connection, and I get tired of spending several minutes downloading huge HTML-saturated messages with.doc attachments, just to delete them afterwards.
I guess I need to find/write a front end that will identify spam on the server and delete it there without ever downloading it.
> I have the impression that in the past year, US politicians and US political advisors looked at the spam issue and started to think of unsolicited email as their future tool in election campaigns.
Surely an element of that; surely an element of sucking up to business interests.
I was going to suggest that what we need to do is sit back until some other country is foolish enough to provide a legal mandate for spam and then watch their portion of the internet collapse under the exponential growth in message rates.
Then I remembered that lots of US politicians don't like the internet, so now I have another suspicion about what might motivate their pro-spam stance.
> I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam; that is, 99% of it has false origin information and has an opt-out scheme that doesn't work or only results in more spam.
Yes, clearly these guys don't read their own mail, or else they'd know that you would have to "opt out" in a 1:1 ratio with the number of spam messages you get.
> Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash.
I was thinking about a program that would compute my (mutable) e-dress from the current time and a secret key. I would change my e-dress on my end every day or so (more often, if necessary), and give the program and my personal key to my family and friends so that they could calculate the proper address at the time they launched the message.
If I built the program into a mailer, they could just enter the key into their database once, and then the mailer would automatically convert my nominal e-dress into my current actual e-dress for them.
This scheme does have a few problems. The biggest one is that it would make it impossible for people without your key to contact you, even for legitimate purposes. Another is that a down server might delay your friends' mail long enough for the destination name to change. Yet another is that it would make things hard for mailing lists, though in principle there's no reason they couldn't use the translation program; you would just include a key in your opt-in subscription message.
At any rate, it's the core of an idea. Maybe someone can work out a solution to the problems it poses.
> and (in my hometown) charging taxpayers the money to build an arena they don't want.
"Want" is a side issue. It really chapped me to see how many cities' middle-and-upper classes voted themselves new stadiums at taxpayer expense at the height of the big-government-is-bad revolution.
The message I got was, "We don't really mind taxes, so long you don't spend it on poor folk."
Slashdot Mirror
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You know, these benchmarks are completely worthless unless he can prove that he wrote the optimal code possible for each language.
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> I dont know.. I could never get around the Ponderosa angle.
LMAO. That was my take on it as well.
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> I was working with a Japanese system programmer, and he was telling me that US-style programming (individualistic) just don't fit the mindset of Japanese people (consensus). Even when Japanese programmers are given the freedom to do it, they can't (Exceptions occurs for sure).
US-style programming tends to result in a lot of exceptions too.
--
No hard numbers, but the new Netcraft survey (which, oddly enough,
--
When you walk up and down the aisles at CompUSA, are you struck by the impression that the US software industry encourages creative thinking?
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> and I was wondering how many times they were going to ask me if I hear voices and do I love my mother in diffrent formats.
They're just a bunch of voyeurs, eager to find out which "formats" you love your mother in.
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> The MMPI is quite comprehensive. It is designed so that it is effectively impossible to hide anything.
Interesting. I've heard a several times over the years, from completely independent sources, that a number of states had banned the MMPI because it was prone to giving false diagnoses. (Never bothered to investigate the claims, though. Can I "Ask Slashdot"?)
An associated claim is that it was standardized by benching it on institutionalized people, so that it essentially assumes that everyone has problems; it only decides which category you fit best.
--
I got up this morning and discovered that my tire is flat, the coke I opened last night is already flat, my G/F is still flat,
I think I'll spend the day compiling kernels, just to take my mind off my troubles.
--
> It's a sad, sad, day when libertarian actually whole-heartedly supports the DOJ is a case against a corporation.
It's a sad, sad day when people decide which cases to support based on whether they are libertarian (or liberal, or conservative), rather than on the merits of the case.
--
> There are companies like Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com/) for example who are developing a proprietary product, and have made the following statement: if our company ever goes belly up - the whole software will be released open source.
Think of it as an insurance policy. The kings of Roman "client kingdoms" used to will their kingdoms to Rome in the event of untimely death, in order to prevent usurpers from offing them. (The usurper would be disappointed in his aspirations when a couple of legions showed up on his doorstep to collect the imperial inheritance.)
Maybe Trolltech has something similar in mind? "Cut off my air supply and your problem gets even worse."
--
> Too bad only Mundie is there to defend the closed-source model
The thing is... the closed-source model doesn't need defending. Lots of people think open-source is "better" for one reason or another, but I'm not aware of anyone saying that "closed source is evil; no one should be allowed to keep closed-source software".
The issue is, why can't CM take a similar live-and-let-live attitude toward open-source software?
And we don't need a forum to answer that question.
--
> Ancient Chinese soldiers worn a big Chinese word 'BRAVE' on their chest. Their emperor hoped that they'd charge(to death) regardless of all the difficulities.
And when you turn your back to run the enemy can't see the tatoo anymore, so the world still makes ordinary sense.
A Zen general would have tattooed 'BRAVE' on his soldier's backs.
--
> Open Source fanatics will never come to terms with the corporate software environment and the corporat software people will never come to terms with giving away there "property" for free.
Any particular reason for the choice of "fanatics" for one group and "people" for the other? I.e., could we swap them around without changing the meaning of your post?
> There "bread and butter" is closed source software.
We need to make a distinction here between software producers and software consumers. Not all companies are software producers. Most are not. For them, the "bread and butter" lies in using the software, and sometimes in getting the darn stuff to work. For them, the "bread and butter" may ultimately lie in open source software.
--
> I would think it would be a lot of money to buy a product that would not be that useful to either company except to maybe get some ideas on improving there own chips.
Actually, most of the ideas are readily accessible in published papers. There may be some patents locked up in the Alpha, but I doubt that there are any secrets.
> I dont think there would be a large market for the Alpha being that Compaq and DEC could do nothing with the chip.
DEC was renowned for nothing so much as their inability to market good products. Dunno about Compaq, but without an NT for it I can't imagine that they would know what to do with it (which probably explains this article).
Your VIA suggestion sounds good. However, I think it would be a shrewd move for AMD too, if they're in a position to market it at a more competitive price than it traditionally has been.
Also, parts of AMD's architecture has been converging with parts of the Alpha's (even on Athlons), so AMD might be able to integrate it into the high end of a "family" of processors.
However, another question also arises. The Alpha has been around for, what, a decade or so now? Possibly the architecture is nearing the end of its life cycle, and if so no one is going to want to spend much to acquire it.
Anyone know how many more years they can squeeze hot stuff out of the Alpha? And is there any margin for cutting the price a bit?
--
> Hell, most of the content on those groups is pr0n site advertising anyway. ... Or so I've been told.
After many hours of careful research I can say that, yes, most of the posts to alt.binaries.* are pr0n-spam.
It was nasty work, but someone had to do it. I'm about to launch my newsreader now, to see whether the situation has changed since last night.
--
> everyone I know are put in my white list and automatically get sorted in a "Safe Inbox".
.doc attachments, just to delete them afterwards.
The problem I have is that I'm still on a dialup connection, and I get tired of spending several minutes downloading huge HTML-saturated messages with
I guess I need to find/write a front end that will identify spam on the server and delete it there without ever downloading it.
--
> I have the impression that in the past year, US politicians and US political advisors looked at the spam issue and started to think of unsolicited email as their future tool in election campaigns.
Surely an element of that; surely an element of sucking up to business interests.
I was going to suggest that what we need to do is sit back until some other country is foolish enough to provide a legal mandate for spam and then watch their portion of the internet collapse under the exponential growth in message rates.
Then I remembered that lots of US politicians don't like the internet, so now I have another suspicion about what might motivate their pro-spam stance.
--
I thought the New Economy worked this way:
--
> Jesus! Anyone know an easier way to get through to these folks via email?!
They're pro spam, but they don't want e-mail from concerned citizens?
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> I'd like to get rid of the "I'm HOT and WAITING for YOU" spam.
Maybe what we need is a law saying that you are entiled to a free sample of anything you receive an UCE ad about?
On second thought, since most of those messages are sent by guys pretending to be girls, I think I would want to "opt out" of that kind of offer too.
--
> I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam; that is, 99% of it has false origin information and has an opt-out scheme that doesn't work or only results in more spam.
Yes, clearly these guys don't read their own mail, or else they'd know that you would have to "opt out" in a 1:1 ratio with the number of spam messages you get.
> Adam Back has an interesting proposal called Hash Cash.
I was thinking about a program that would compute my (mutable) e-dress from the current time and a secret key. I would change my e-dress on my end every day or so (more often, if necessary), and give the program and my personal key to my family and friends so that they could calculate the proper address at the time they launched the message.
If I built the program into a mailer, they could just enter the key into their database once, and then the mailer would automatically convert my nominal e-dress into my current actual e-dress for them.
This scheme does have a few problems. The biggest one is that it would make it impossible for people without your key to contact you, even for legitimate purposes. Another is that a down server might delay your friends' mail long enough for the destination name to change. Yet another is that it would make things hard for mailing lists, though in principle there's no reason they couldn't use the translation program; you would just include a key in your opt-in subscription message.
At any rate, it's the core of an idea. Maybe someone can work out a solution to the problems it poses.
--
> You're sig screams out, ``I am a moron.''
Your post screams out, "I read what I expected it to say, not what it actually says".
Which is exactly why I haven't taken it down yet. The people who need to hear it are hearing something else entirely.
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> and (in my hometown) charging taxpayers the money to build an arena they don't want.
"Want" is a side issue. It really chapped me to see how many cities' middle-and-upper classes voted themselves new stadiums at taxpayer expense at the height of the big-government-is-bad revolution.
The message I got was, "We don't really mind taxes, so long you don't spend it on poor folk."
--
I thought the original quote was:
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