And here's another mystery monolith that appeared in England a few decades ago, but apparently didn't get a proper stream of respect from its discoverers.
> If companies take open source software and incorporate it into their products in violation of the license, that's quite difficult to detect.... On the other hand, any claim of copyright or patent infringement can be easily supported by examining the source code of open source systems.
Worse, suppose they steal your GPL'd code, leave it in their application for a year or two, and then send you a Cease & Desist letter about the code you "stole".
> God doesn't condemn you; you do that to yourself. God's there to save you from yourself.
Him being omnipotent and all, why does he need my collusion? Why can't he just do like Batman and snatch me from the flaming wreck?
Even lifeguards lean to pop you in the jaw if you struggle too much while they're trying to save you.
If you look at Christian theology even casually, you discover a lot of logical contradictions. The relevant one here is that Bog is supposedly omnipotent, and yet there is some Law of Nature (or whatever) that even he can't bend, so that he sadly has to condemn you to eternal punishment, however much he would like to save you.
If he isn't the Ultimate Power (tm) in the universe, you should cut out the middle man and worship someone higher up the ladder, who can cut through all the red tape if he really loves you.
> If you believe that you can prove without a doubt that there is no God, I (and the rest of the world) are all ears my friend.
No, but two fundamental lemmata were proven long ago:
Lemma 1. If He is God then he is not Good.
Lemma 2. If He is Good, then he is not God.
Both are easily established by observation. With that much in hand, the higher theorem becomes irrelevant. And yet you (and much of the rest of the world) are still holding out, for some unfathomable reason.
> 2. Small L1 cache. The author seems to believe that a larger L1 cache is always good. What he fails to address is that larger caches are inherently slower, and going from a 3 cycle 16KB cache to a 2 cycle 8KB cache improves performance, given a fast L2 cache.
You can't really make blanket statements like that, any more than what you are accusing the author of doing.
Which is better depends on the miss rate and miss penalty, as well as the speed of the L1 cache. And of course the miss rate depends on what software you're running, as well as the size and organization of the cache.
If you know all the variables then you can run up the numbers, but without them you can't really make too many blanket statements.
Or you can look at benchmarks, or (best of all) you can try the systems side by side and see which really works for you, and whether the faster one is worth the extra cost, if any.
> 4. Instruction decode. Hello? Anyone home? At most 1% of instructions will have to be decoded.
I didn't read the article (don't do registrations, free or otherwise), but if you and the author are using standard terminology, then every instruction has to be decoded. "Decode" just means looking at the bits in the instruction and deciding what to do. Every processor has to do this on every instruction, and the fact that it's a decision process means that bits have to ripple through gates, which in turn means that time is consumed. Its complexity can indeed be a factor in a processor's speed.
> This year we had a draught that lasted 8 months, followed by 4 months of continuous rain.
It looks like La Niña tripped a switch when she died: there was a sharp change of weather in lots of places in the USA that date almost to the day they annonced she was gone.
The question is, is it possible to pin the powerful El/La Niñ* events of the last couple of decades directly on global warming?
> Actually, William Morris... probably invented epic high fantasy as we know it today, with The Well at the World's End.
FYI, you can read it on the Web via Project Gutenberg (use a search engine).
A couple of other influential pre-Tolkien books (though not so early as Morris's 1896) are -
Lord Dunsany's[*], The King of Elfland's Daughter, 1924, didn't like it.
E.R.Edison's The Worm Ouroboros, 1926, one of my all-time favorites, though somewhat twisted for common tastes.
And then there's Tolkien's direct influences, the Norse myths and sagas, some of which come across as very simarillionesque. I just finished Hrolf's Saga Kraki, and though parts of it bordered on the lame, parts were quite charming, and not unlike modern fantasy (a sword that could only be drawn thrice, etc.). The Lay of Volund in the Poetic Edda is well worth looking up, abeit somewhat grim (somehow reminiscent of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales -- a very good book itself, BTW).
Beyond that there's always the Illiad and Odyssey, the latter being more accessible to the modern reader, and very much like a modern fantasy in some regards.
But if you want to sup with the gods, you have to read something rather newer, Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy (The Green Pearl, volume II, being my all-time favorite book). You can wash the trilogy down with some rip-roaring tales from his two books about Cugel, which have just been re-released in a thick paperback with the early & influential The Dying Earth and the rather erratic Rhialto the Marvellous. It's worth picking up just for the two Cugel books included in it. I believe the volume is called Tales of the Dying Earth, and is in the stores now.
[*] His actual name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett.
> Lucas had to do the Han shot like that because they couldn't figure out any other way from him to go around Jabba.
Jabba was conceived as a human(oid) when E1 was shot, but then evolved (degenerated?) into a wormy-lookin-thing later. No problem, 'cause the scene had been cut from E1.
But when they remastered E1, they decided to put the scene back in, and for consistency's sake they had to use the wormy Jabba. But Han had walked around close behind the human Jabba, much closer than he could have walked behind the evolved/wormy Jabba. So the step-on-his-tail routine was a kludge to make everything consistent.
Of course, a real director would have just left the scene out of the remastered version, too.
Just don't link to them. Then we'll have a de facto partition of the net into a commercial net and a non-commercial net (you know, like the one we had a couple of years ago).
Slashdot Mirror
And here's another mystery monolith that appeared in England a few decades ago, but apparently didn't get a proper stream of respect from its discoverers.
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> 1)... 2)...
Or (USA): show that the existing system does not do what The Constitution says the US patent system is supposed to do.
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> If companies take open source software and incorporate it into their products in violation of the license, that's quite difficult to detect. ... On the other hand, any claim of copyright or patent infringement can be easily supported by examining the source code of open source systems.
Worse, suppose they steal your GPL'd code, leave it in their application for a year or two, and then send you a Cease & Desist letter about the code you "stole".
--
> Once you have a registered copyright, you can sue the bastards for treble actual damages PLUS statutory damages.
One wonders how the courts would calculate triple damages for the bootlegging of something you're already giving away for free.
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That's because the system isn't based on rational premises; it's based on what the powerful want to enforce on the powerless.
BTW, did you know that voting age was 21 back during the Vietnam War, until people expressed outrage over the fact that
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> More resurrections than you can shake a stick at...
So if your favorite character gets killed, crack the system, create a mess, and hope he gets restored.
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> Yes, people can create huge electro-magnetic pulses which will do a good job of annhiliating the watch you are wearing, likely your TV as well.
Knocking out the enemy's televisions would probably make their society more productive, and cost you the war in the long run.
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> Yes, you can choose another ISP
Choose another International Salvation Provider?
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> God doesn't condemn you; you do that to yourself. God's there to save you from yourself.
Him being omnipotent and all, why does he need my collusion? Why can't he just do like Batman and snatch me from the flaming wreck?
Even lifeguards lean to pop you in the jaw if you struggle too much while they're trying to save you.
If you look at Christian theology even casually, you discover a lot of logical contradictions. The relevant one here is that Bog is supposedly omnipotent, and yet there is some Law of Nature (or whatever) that even he can't bend, so that he sadly has to condemn you to eternal punishment, however much he would like to save you.
If he isn't the Ultimate Power (tm) in the universe, you should cut out the middle man and worship someone higher up the ladder, who can cut through all the red tape if he really loves you.
--
> they could prove you wrong by having the Pope himself do the filtering. The Pope is infallible
But alas, probably prone to heart failure if suddenly exposed to masses of pÔrn at his current age.
Infallible, but not indestructable.
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> Blocks around 85% of all porn sites. Pretty cool!
And by running the inverse algorithm, I have successfully blocked out 85% of all non-prn sites on my computer.
Pretty hot!
--
No, but two fundamental lemmata were proven long ago:Both are easily established by observation. With that much in hand, the higher theorem becomes irrelevant. And yet you (and much of the rest of the world) are still holding out, for some unfathomable reason.
--
> Once Gutenburg's printing press was perfected, it was the Church that was the biggest patron.
I thought he built it to press counterfeit Bills of Indulgence.
--
> 2. Small L1 cache. The author seems to believe that a larger L1 cache is always good. What he fails to address is that larger caches are inherently slower, and going from a 3 cycle 16KB cache to a 2 cycle 8KB cache improves performance, given a fast L2 cache.
You can't really make blanket statements like that, any more than what you are accusing the author of doing.
Which is better depends on the miss rate and miss penalty, as well as the speed of the L1 cache. And of course the miss rate depends on what software you're running, as well as the size and organization of the cache.
If you know all the variables then you can run up the numbers, but without them you can't really make too many blanket statements.
Or you can look at benchmarks, or (best of all) you can try the systems side by side and see which really works for you, and whether the faster one is worth the extra cost, if any.
> 4. Instruction decode. Hello? Anyone home? At most 1% of instructions will have to be decoded.
I didn't read the article (don't do registrations, free or otherwise), but if you and the author are using standard terminology, then every instruction has to be decoded. "Decode" just means looking at the bits in the instruction and deciding what to do. Every processor has to do this on every instruction, and the fact that it's a decision process means that bits have to ripple through gates, which in turn means that time is consumed. Its complexity can indeed be a factor in a processor's speed.
--
> This year we had a draught that lasted 8 months, followed by 4 months of continuous rain.
It looks like La Niña tripped a switch when she died: there was a sharp change of weather in lots of places in the USA that date almost to the day they annonced she was gone.
The question is, is it possible to pin the powerful El/La Niñ* events of the last couple of decades directly on global warming?
--
> The article here is a bit fuzzy
That's the way it goes with quantum mechanics.
--
> Also, there is a popular theory that he never really existed, and the plays attributed to "Shakespeare" were written...
...by another playwright with the same name?
--
FYI, you can read it on the Web via Project Gutenberg (use a search engine).
A couple of other influential pre-Tolkien books (though not so early as Morris's 1896) are -
- Lord Dunsany's[*], The King of Elfland's Daughter, 1924, didn't like it.
- E.R.Edison's The Worm Ouroboros, 1926, one of my all-time favorites, though somewhat twisted for common tastes.
And then there's Tolkien's direct influences, the Norse myths and sagas, some of which come across as very simarillionesque. I just finished Hrolf's Saga Kraki, and though parts of it bordered on the lame, parts were quite charming, and not unlike modern fantasy (a sword that could only be drawn thrice, etc.). The Lay of Volund in the Poetic Edda is well worth looking up, abeit somewhat grim (somehow reminiscent of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales -- a very good book itself, BTW).Beyond that there's always the Illiad and Odyssey, the latter being more accessible to the modern reader, and very much like a modern fantasy in some regards.
But if you want to sup with the gods, you have to read something rather newer, Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy (The Green Pearl, volume II, being my all-time favorite book). You can wash the trilogy down with some rip-roaring tales from his two books about Cugel, which have just been re-released in a thick paperback with the early & influential The Dying Earth and the rather erratic Rhialto the Marvellous. It's worth picking up just for the two Cugel books included in it. I believe the volume is called Tales of the Dying Earth, and is in the stores now.
[*] His actual name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett.
--
For the true geek, writing programs is the best and most enduring entertainment that a PC has to offer.
--
Are you saying you didn't like the AOL Keyword STARWARS tattoo on Jar Jar's buttocks in the shower scene?
--
> Has anyone else heard rumors to the effect that Jar Jar may have actually been someone else in disguise?
He's the real Darth Vader. The ears get burned off when he throws the ring ^w^w^w falls into the volcano.
All that bonk about being Luke's Daddy was just Lucas trying to throw us off the scent.
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> Lucas had to do the Han shot like that because they couldn't figure out any other way from him to go around Jabba.
Jabba was conceived as a human(oid) when E1 was shot, but then evolved (degenerated?) into a wormy-lookin-thing later. No problem, 'cause the scene had been cut from E1.
But when they remastered E1, they decided to put the scene back in, and for consistency's sake they had to use the wormy Jabba. But Han had walked around close behind the human Jabba, much closer than he could have walked behind the evolved/wormy Jabba. So the step-on-his-tail routine was a kludge to make everything consistent.
Of course, a real director would have just left the scene out of the remastered version, too.
--
Let them charge to their heart's content.
Just don't link to them. Then we'll have a de facto partition of the net into a commercial net and a non-commercial net (you know, like the one we had a couple of years ago).
--
> at least if he considers reworking parts of it, we will have a better movie for it. there have been far to many movies that sucked lately..
Yeah, maybe we can get him to re-work E1, too.
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> I wouldn't be surprised to see them calling actors & actresses back down to Sydney soon to shoot new scenes.
Just so long they don't call JJ...
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