The BBC article linked from the editorial doesn't.
And besides, I took that as meaning that after he was diagnosed as HIV+, he had unprotected sex with his infected partner. That doesn't say anything about what he was doing before being diagnosed.
Obviously he had unprotected sex with someone somewhere
So has most of the non/. adult population of the world
Besides, it's not even necessarily true. I'll agree that it is the most likely, but it doesn't take much of a hole viral particles to slip through a condom.
...or, for that matter, not to think of taking some known-to-be-clean needles with you on holiday to an area with prolific AIDS/HIV, in case you need medical treatment.
Fact is, we know nothing about how this person contracted HIV, and it's an unsafe assumption that he picked it up by shagging around.
They invested too heavily on the Mhz-myth of the Netburst. To turn around and say "whoops, we're wrong" is hard. That and they have partners that ALSO invested in it.
Saying 'MHz-myth of the Netburst' is a bit harsh. There was a time when it made sense - if it allows Intel to sell processors that perform faster than AMD's and retail for similar prices, who cares about the clock speed required to do this? Heck, this was pretty much DEC's strategy for the Alpha - design an architecture that's easily scalable to ever-faster clock speeds, and ramp up the performance by aggressively increasing the clock speed.
But it was short-sighted of Intel to over-invest in such a strategy without any guarantees about power consumption, consequent heat output, or the growing importance of those issues to its customers.
In the long run, though, this won't kill Intel, and they'll be back. I'd also expect them to learn from the experience, the same way that after the infamous Pentium FP bug, every processor has had field-upgradeable microcode to (hopefully) eliminate the chance that they'll need to perform a recall of that size - and expense - ever again.
Take Africa and Asia for example where AIDs runs rampent. If this trend continues, only the religiously faithfull and monogamous will survive to carry on their genes and culture.
...and many times, not even those! Scenario: a "religiously faithfull [sic] and monogamous" woman, raped by her <promiscuous|drug-using|haemophiliac-who's-had-bad -clotting-agent|...> husband, and their consequent offspring.
Far more likely is that the choice of languages reflects the regions in which we have an interest in recruiting HUMINT assets:
Spanish - mainly South America, perhaps for feeding to the US in exchange for intelligence of interest to the UK
French - the UK and the French have a long tradition of spying on each other, particularly with regards to economic interests. HUMINT would also be useful in Francophone areas of Africa, such as Algiers. French is also widely spoken in the middle east, I gather.
Russian - the cold war may be over, but we still like to keep an eye on what the Russia and the former Soviet states are upto, particularly regarding energy issues.
Chinese - already an economic superpower, and expected to be a formal superpower soon. China also has economic relationships with states in Africa as well as Iran and Israel.
Again, non-rhetorically, how is FOSS driver support for nVidia chipsets these days?
After they screwed up their VGA drivers so they wouldn't work on my geForce2go Toshiba laptop with Linux kernels >=2.6.10 or so, I don't feel inclined to send any more money their way.
Modern VIA chipsets are fine, just like modern AMD processors are fine - early generation stuff often has subtle (ro not-so-subtle) bugs. Does F00F ring a bell?
The actual bugginess is less of an issue than the poor documentation of the bugs. If the bugs are known by the driver authors, they can usually be worked around.
Hmmm... The speedtouch problem was related to USB 1.1 bug in VIA chipsets. I'm not claiming that that kind of problems don't exist anymore, but considering it is 1.1, we're talking a pretty much old motherboard.
Given. But OTOH, I have an old VIA-based mobo that Linux's ide drivers still have problems with (about 1/90 times, it hangs on boot), probably some five years after it went out of production.
The second one is about a VIA Epia system, that doesn't even use an AMD chip! Those use VIA C3 CPU's, which are an entirely other kind of processors. Also, the mailing list is from 2003. As said: VIA might still have problems. I don't know.
The question I was answering was 'Who builds a PC himself with an Intel CPU anyway?'
Besides, there are non-VIA AMD motherboards, and plenty of VIA Pentium motherboards (I have a P-III 800MHz OpenBSD machine, with a VIA chipset, running 24/7 without *any* trouble). Your main problem seems to reside with VIA, and not with AMD.
You bet it is. I'm very happy that AMD's CPUs are fine, and significantly better than Intel's CPUs in a number of usage scenarios. But it's the whole system that I'm concerned with, not just the CPU. Hence, all the systems I've built have been Intel CPUs on reputable (Asus, Gigabyte) Intel-chipset motherboards (my first PC was pre-built and used an awful UMC/CMD board because I knew no better). I'm open to my next PC (if I ever build one again) being an Opteron-on-AMD-chipset.
VIA is not the only player in town.
The AMD fans I speak to reckon VIA are the best of the bunch, though (and this is backed up by my experiences with an AMD K6 and an awful SiS board that went back for a refund). Non-rhetorically, who would you recommend as a viable alternative to VIA?
Who builds a PC himself with an Intel CPU anyway?;-)
thos of us that are forced to becuase all current video editing apps (prosumer not the cheeze crap that coesm with cameras and firewire cards) require Intel P4.
As well as those of us who don't want to deal with poorly-documented motherboard chipsets and consequent FOSS driver flakiness (sometimes combined with unavoidablebugs). Now that AMD is following Intel in building their own chipsets, this should become less of an issue.
yes, both accounts should be free of censorship. which does not mean you can just surf to any old page you want on company or school time without punishment.
There are a couple of problems with that approach. In the first case, the worst punishment an employer can mete out to a transgressing employee is to fire them. And yet in many jurisdictions, other employees can sue the employer for damages for creating a hostile environment. Why shouldn't employers be able to attempt to mitigate the risk of that happening by blocking some of the most obviously transgressing sites (if only by default)?
In the second case, punishment may well not be appropriate; for instance if a kid reads a site that claims that psychoactive drug X is utterly harmless or a site promoting the views of some cult or other. Further, punishing them can't undo the harm that might have been done if the child wasn't mature enough to be able to critically question or fully understand the material they were reading. OTOH, if such sites are filtered by default according to the school's policy, then the child can always ask for an exception to be made (possibly with the backing of parents, teachers or peers).
there is no legitimate use for censoring software.
So you're saying that if I'm your employee, I should be entitled to browse any old site I like whilst at work, even if doing so brings penalties to your company for 'creating a hostile environment' under anti-discrimination laws?
Or maybe that minors should be able to browse any old site they like at school, regardless of whether it's educationally useful?
I won't defend every deployment of filtering software used in those two scenarios, but your statement was so unequivocal, it deserved to be challenged.
For your purposes the Nexstar 2 will suck. I have one. It uses a Prolific chipset which is considered inferior to the standard Oxford one
I wondered how many posts I'd need to read before someone ranted about Prolific's USB/1394-ATA bridge chips. Not many!
I submitted an entry for Linux's unusual_devs.h to say that the PL-3507 USB/1394 bridge misreports the number of blocks by 1 (a common bug, based on a misinterpretation of the SCSI spec, IIRC). That's fair enough - everyone gets stuff wrong from time to time, but a later firmware revision fixes the problem without making it distinguishable from the version with the bug (e.g. by incrementing the USB ProductID or something). To make matters worse, some devices that use the PL-3507 store the firmware on flash chips that aren't programmable in-circuit, so they're stuck at the firmware level they ship with.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Yes, because a) I pay for web ads (and spam) with a fraction of my bandwidth b) they're easily blocked
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
I generally skip over magazine ads, but I don't mind 'pure factual' ads that much (e.g. "We're selling widget W that does X, Y, and Z and costs you P GBP" as used by boxshifters). I have no desire to buy so-called 'lifestyle' magazines (e.g. GQ, Arena, Loaded, whatever) which are heavy on 'non-factual' ads.
I'm specifically talking about the ads in a webpage, but even popup blockers can cause problems with me using a site.
Privoxy doesn't cause me significant problems (indeed, it can help out some pages that otherwise have problems in non-IE browsers!), and for the few sites that it does break, you can selectively disable certain aspects of its blocking functionality.
If the software comes with source code, the user can assess the risk of using it (or hire someone to do so on their behalf) and make an informed choice as to whether it's worth using or not (possibly after reinforcing some of the weakest parts of the code).
If the software doesn't come without source, the user has to take its reliability on trust, and the vendor should be prepared to indemnify the user if and when it fails.
Whether or not the software is sold or given away is irrelevant.
Re:Well, this has been coming for some time...
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've been pretty disgusted by the way competitors have abused Renaud's generosity
But the code was released under the GPL. The 'competitors' merely manufactured a device that (legitimately) included a copy of code made available under the GPL.
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, under the terms of the present GPL, hence I didn't say that competitors had "abused the license" or whatever. However, Nessus has been one of the most shamelessly exploited GPLed projects, and it that respect, it abuses Renaud's generosity.
By 'shamelessly exploited' I refer to the hordes of so-called "penetration testers" whose business model consists of little more than a) downloading a copy of Nessus b) whining on the mailing lists when they can't get it built c) eventually getting it built and working e) charging their customers large sums to run scans f) sending their customers virtually unaltered Nessus reports, often unchecked g) neglecting to give anything at all (be it money, or code, or even su) to the Nessus project. The present GPL doesn't require them to do anything more than that, but you'd kind of hope that ethics would dictate that they would. And if not ethics, then maybe a rather less short-sighted view of the necessity of certain bits of software to their business model.
Re:Well, this has been coming for some time...
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 1
So you've made a contribution to the Nessus code base? I assume you retain the copyright.
No. It either belongs to a former employer (since it was developed on their equipment and time) or to Nessus (if by contributing it, it was assumed to be a "donation" to Nessus' copyright owners). Whichever, I'm in no place to do anything to contest it, unless my former employer kicks up a fuss.
That said...
They cannot take your GPL-contributed code and make it proprietary.
Correct, but they can rip it out and write something functionally equivalent. As all my code did was extend Nessus to scan ranges of IP addresses (e.g. 10.1.2.20-10.1.2.254) this is distinctly achievable.
Well, this has been coming for some time...
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As someone who encouraged a former employer to pay for a Nessus support contract when it voluntary, someone who personally contributed a minor enhancement to the engine, and as someone who actually used Nessus professionally (i.e. manually verifying the results it gave, rather than selling the reports as-is to customers), I've been pretty disgusted by the way competitors have abused Renaud's generosity.
Hopefully, the time will come when Renaud and crew feel that they can re-open the code, possibly under GPLv3.
eMusic does NOT require you to download their "music manager" (At least it didn't 2 weeks ago), though it is necessary if you want to download an album at a time instead of track by track
I tried the Linux version of their Download Manager and it was useless. The perl script here patched with the patch here worked perfectly for me.
If people are really going to choose 1 distro over the other, because Linus uses it, then they are pretty dumb users.
OTOH, it is a useful 'certification of fitness'; if SuSE or Red Hat or whatever are usable enough for Linus, or Alan, or whoever, they'll probably be good enough for the likes of you and I. Too many people think that the work they're doing is unique and boundary-extending when really most of it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
And besides, I took that as meaning that after he was diagnosed as HIV+, he had unprotected sex with his infected partner. That doesn't say anything about what he was doing before being diagnosed.
So has most of the non /. adult population of the world
Besides, it's not even necessarily true. I'll agree that it is the most likely, but it doesn't take much of a hole viral particles to slip through a condom.
Fact is, we know nothing about how this person contracted HIV, and it's an unsafe assumption that he picked it up by shagging around.
Martin Salter (Reading West) did the very same thing. Useless pillock.
Saying 'MHz-myth of the Netburst' is a bit harsh. There was a time when it made sense - if it allows Intel to sell processors that perform faster than AMD's and retail for similar prices, who cares about the clock speed required to do this? Heck, this was pretty much DEC's strategy for the Alpha - design an architecture that's easily scalable to ever-faster clock speeds, and ramp up the performance by aggressively increasing the clock speed.
But it was short-sighted of Intel to over-invest in such a strategy without any guarantees about power consumption, consequent heat output, or the growing importance of those issues to its customers.
In the long run, though, this won't kill Intel, and they'll be back. I'd also expect them to learn from the experience, the same way that after the infamous Pentium FP bug, every processor has had field-upgradeable microcode to (hopefully) eliminate the chance that they'll need to perform a recall of that size - and expense - ever again.
Sounds like what Dvorak is after is something like Adobe PhotoDeluxe which Adobe discontinued in favour of Elements.
The issue is rather more complicated than that in developing countries like Brazil. I suggest you do some reading.
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
After they screwed up their VGA drivers so they wouldn't work on my geForce2go Toshiba laptop with Linux kernels >=2.6.10 or so, I don't feel inclined to send any more money their way.
The actual bugginess is less of an issue than the poor documentation of the bugs. If the bugs are known by the driver authors, they can usually be worked around.
Given. But OTOH, I have an old VIA-based mobo that Linux's ide drivers still have problems with (about 1/90 times, it hangs on boot), probably some five years after it went out of production.
The second one is about a VIA Epia system, that doesn't even use an AMD chip! Those use VIA C3 CPU's, which are an entirely other kind of processors. Also, the mailing list is from 2003. As said: VIA might still have problems. I don't know.
The question I was answering was 'Who builds a PC himself with an Intel CPU anyway?'
Besides, there are non-VIA AMD motherboards, and plenty of VIA Pentium motherboards (I have a P-III 800MHz OpenBSD machine, with a VIA chipset, running 24/7 without *any* trouble). Your main problem seems to reside with VIA, and not with AMD.
You bet it is. I'm very happy that AMD's CPUs are fine, and significantly better than Intel's CPUs in a number of usage scenarios. But it's the whole system that I'm concerned with, not just the CPU. Hence, all the systems I've built have been Intel CPUs on reputable (Asus, Gigabyte) Intel-chipset motherboards (my first PC was pre-built and used an awful UMC/CMD board because I knew no better). I'm open to my next PC (if I ever build one again) being an Opteron-on-AMD-chipset.
VIA is not the only player in town.
The AMD fans I speak to reckon VIA are the best of the bunch, though (and this is backed up by my experiences with an AMD K6 and an awful SiS board that went back for a refund). Non-rhetorically, who would you recommend as a viable alternative to VIA?
thos of us that are forced to becuase all current video editing apps (prosumer not the cheeze crap that coesm with cameras and firewire cards) require Intel P4.
As well as those of us who don't want to deal with poorly-documented motherboard chipsets and consequent FOSS driver flakiness (sometimes combined with unavoidable bugs). Now that AMD is following Intel in building their own chipsets, this should become less of an issue.
There are a couple of problems with that approach. In the first case, the worst punishment an employer can mete out to a transgressing employee is to fire them. And yet in many jurisdictions, other employees can sue the employer for damages for creating a hostile environment. Why shouldn't employers be able to attempt to mitigate the risk of that happening by blocking some of the most obviously transgressing sites (if only by default)?
In the second case, punishment may well not be appropriate; for instance if a kid reads a site that claims that psychoactive drug X is utterly harmless or a site promoting the views of some cult or other. Further, punishing them can't undo the harm that might have been done if the child wasn't mature enough to be able to critically question or fully understand the material they were reading. OTOH, if such sites are filtered by default according to the school's policy, then the child can always ask for an exception to be made (possibly with the backing of parents, teachers or peers).
So you're saying that if I'm your employee, I should be entitled to browse any old site I like whilst at work, even if doing so brings penalties to your company for 'creating a hostile environment' under anti-discrimination laws?
Or maybe that minors should be able to browse any old site they like at school, regardless of whether it's educationally useful?
I won't defend every deployment of filtering software used in those two scenarios, but your statement was so unequivocal, it deserved to be challenged.
I wondered how many posts I'd need to read before someone ranted about Prolific's USB/1394-ATA bridge chips. Not many!
I submitted an entry for Linux's unusual_devs.h to say that the PL-3507 USB/1394 bridge misreports the number of blocks by 1 (a common bug, based on a misinterpretation of the SCSI spec, IIRC). That's fair enough - everyone gets stuff wrong from time to time, but a later firmware revision fixes the problem without making it distinguishable from the version with the bug (e.g. by incrementing the USB ProductID or something). To make matters worse, some devices that use the PL-3507 store the firmware on flash chips that aren't programmable in-circuit, so they're stuck at the firmware level they ship with.
Further, many firmware revisions have serious problems with their 1394 implementation. There are various hacks to work around them, but is it really worth the trouble?
A number of reasons:
And with what?
Privoxy
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Yes, because a) I pay for web ads (and spam) with a fraction of my bandwidth b) they're easily blocked
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
I generally skip over magazine ads, but I don't mind 'pure factual' ads that much (e.g. "We're selling widget W that does X, Y, and Z and costs you P GBP" as used by boxshifters). I have no desire to buy so-called 'lifestyle' magazines (e.g. GQ, Arena, Loaded, whatever) which are heavy on 'non-factual' ads.
I'm specifically talking about the ads in a webpage, but even popup blockers can cause problems with me using a site.
Privoxy doesn't cause me significant problems (indeed, it can help out some pages that otherwise have problems in non-IE browsers!), and for the few sites that it does break, you can selectively disable certain aspects of its blocking functionality.
If the software doesn't come without source, the user has to take its reliability on trust, and the vendor should be prepared to indemnify the user if and when it fails.
Whether or not the software is sold or given away is irrelevant.
But the code was released under the GPL. The 'competitors' merely manufactured a device that (legitimately) included a copy of code made available under the GPL.
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, under the terms of the present GPL, hence I didn't say that competitors had "abused the license" or whatever. However, Nessus has been one of the most shamelessly exploited GPLed projects, and it that respect, it abuses Renaud's generosity.
By 'shamelessly exploited' I refer to the hordes of so-called "penetration testers" whose business model consists of little more than a) downloading a copy of Nessus b) whining on the mailing lists when they can't get it built c) eventually getting it built and working e) charging their customers large sums to run scans f) sending their customers virtually unaltered Nessus reports, often unchecked g) neglecting to give anything at all (be it money, or code, or even su) to the Nessus project. The present GPL doesn't require them to do anything more than that, but you'd kind of hope that ethics would dictate that they would. And if not ethics, then maybe a rather less short-sighted view of the necessity of certain bits of software to their business model.
No. It either belongs to a former employer (since it was developed on their equipment and time) or to Nessus (if by contributing it, it was assumed to be a "donation" to Nessus' copyright owners). Whichever, I'm in no place to do anything to contest it, unless my former employer kicks up a fuss.
That said...
They cannot take your GPL-contributed code and make it proprietary.
Correct, but they can rip it out and write something functionally equivalent. As all my code did was extend Nessus to scan ranges of IP addresses (e.g. 10.1.2.20-10.1.2.254) this is distinctly achievable.
Hopefully, the time will come when Renaud and crew feel that they can re-open the code, possibly under GPLv3.
I tried the Linux version of their Download Manager and it was useless. The perl script here patched with the patch here worked perfectly for me.
OTOH, it is a useful 'certification of fitness'; if SuSE or Red Hat or whatever are usable enough for Linus, or Alan, or whoever, they'll probably be good enough for the likes of you and I. Too many people think that the work they're doing is unique and boundary-extending when really most of it isn't.
Correct, and cdrecord and friends know how to use ATAPI to do so now.
Further, ide-scsi isn't as stupid as it first seems; ATAPI is pretty much just the SCSI command set over the ATA physical layer.