Yes, I've cringed hearing the same thing. While we are on a roll, I once got into an argument at work, where one of the "programmers" insisted that calling an IEEE 32 bit floating point number a "real32" was a legitimate type equivalent. When I asked him about it, he said that was because it was a 32 bit "real" number. As a math person, you must be cringing on this one.:-P I did attempt to explain to him that the number was an ieee 32 bit float, and that's all it was, but exactly what it was. Nothing more and nothing less. No dicey.
Speaking of amusing technical arguments, I once told a friend that UDP stood for "user datagram protocol". He told me, "no, it's unreliable datagram protocol." To resolve the argument, he took out a textbook that indeed did state that it was "unreliable datagram protocol". He had a hard time digesting the information that the textbook was wrong. It happens.:-P
Intel's compiler is hard to beat, and so a great many people use it. The fair test would be the intel compiler on Intel, and a compiler of AMD's specification on AMD's chips.
On the plus side, perhaps I have found someone who will finally I understand me. I've had to explain with frustration to many a C "programmer" that python is dynamically, but strongly typed. It seems the entire school of programmers descending from "C" thing static typing = strong typing. Which is amusing, because C is weakly typed.
The more important thing for the OP to comprehend, I think, is that copyright law has a long tradition of strengthening, not weakening, the strength of a copyright claim when the copyrighted item is published/publicly displayed.
I've faced that question internally in our engineering practice, from naive engineers. "Hey, they put it on the internet, that must mean they are disclaiming any rights, right?" Not so fast.
I've thought for a while that situations like this, where the cop pushes to have charges pressed for being filmed, itself are a moral wrong. I.e., I was contemplating just as I was reading through the slash posts that the appropriate response to the police officer attempting to press these wiretapping charges is some sort of arrest of the police officer for so attempting this thing. You are correct; we need a right to observe government, and then it needs to be enforced by a body of law establishing criminal penalty similar to the civil rights laws.
It is only a felony if someone asks you for it in the first place.
The correct answer "depends on jurisdiction," but in most jurisdictions, witnessing a felony without reporting it is itself a felony. So, no, you are wrong about that.
It's not RAM they are licensing to you, it's vRAM, which means memory that you've allocated to the VM's, but may not be using. vRAM is calculated by summing up the allocated memory of each virtual machine. Which is to say, after spending years saying, "but our product is better than our competitors, because you can oversubscribe your memory," they have now said "gotcha!". This move was A) evil, as they told customers with fully paid up maintenance contracts "no, we won't honor the contract, you'll have to buy more product," and B) stupid, as the licensing model directly undermines one of VMware's principal advantages.
No, but you could look a Citrix XenServer. They are behind on features, however they license per SERVER. Unlimited cpus, unlimited cores, unlimited RAM. From a technical implementation perspective, they are second to VMware. Hyper-V is third technically, but of course will likely surpass XenServer in a year or two due to Microsoft's continued heavy investment.
While this point is reasonable, keep in mind that Google would not only be fined the stated amount, but also injuncted from continuing use of the infringing product. That's would sting, wouldn't you say?
One should absolute _not_ use a NAS system as an archival system without some kind of point-in-time restore capability (e.g., "snapshots"). The most common cause of data loss is not a failed hard drive. It is an "oops" by a systems admin or other human operator.
Good news is, you can just grab Solaris Express and set all this up on ZFS. Too bad ext4/LVM doesn't have a suitable snapshot system yet. That really hurts me, but so it is.
You assertion that leaving drives off leaves them to failing sooner isn't true. SGI/COPAN (the company that started the trend of turning off HD's in enterprise storage systems for tier 3 data) have reams of empirical data showing the opposite to be true: if they aren't spinning, they aren't wearing out.
While I agree with you, were you being deliberately ironic in using the word "irregardless" in a subthread introduced by a grammar nazi? "Regardless" or "irrespective" are the words to use, or Thou Shalt Be Disciplined(tm).
Anyway, IRL, when people say "could care less," I often retort, with a wry smile on my face:
"Well, I've had so much of the caring sucked out of me, there's no possibility of me caring any less at all."
I think people get it then, but I'm not really sure.
It gets a laugh, anyway.
BTW, if you want to pet peeve over something try "talking out loud". You know, when someone means to say "thinking out loud".
It doesn't have to be equal to the speed of the original. It has to be "just not slow enough that's it's slower than it was originally when emulated on a much newer processor." Anyway, a high end emulator, such as the type that was once made by the Transitive company for Apple's Rosetta product, is more like a just-in-time compiling emulator than anything else. I tested their SPARC-to-x86 version at one time, and it tore down SPECfp and SPECint benchmarks like no tomorrow.
So while you did not say this, I detect a sentiment that emulators have to be slow. That instinct is incorrect.
Of course there is the downside that there are few people in the whole world who can make just-in-time compiling emulators. IBM bought Transitive, and they were one of the few.
When you boldly assert that you have "refuted" my arguments, does it help you win an argument in your head? Is it like one of those moments after you have an argument with another person, where you recite out loud the winning words you wished you would have said in your car while driving down the street, to make you feel better? We're you hoping, some how, by repeating your past mistake of taking the condescending tone with me, that it would lead to some outcome you like? If so, what outcome was that?
I'm curious. Did you predict that I would say any of this?
No, they would not. The examples of substitute infrastructure getting built (in the absence of laws prohibiting it or increasing barrier for its entry) are plentiful.
Show me your examples of redundant competitive water infrastructure, line power, or "plentiful" competitive, redundant line comms.
The idea of "tacit collusion" is absurd.
Why do you find it so? Overt collusion occurs when it can, and would occur pretty aggressively without government intervention. Is it "inefficient" to prohibit monopolies, price fixing, and anti-competitive behaviors, such as business behaviors expressly targeted at putting competitors completely out of business?
Strong players in narrow and unthriving market are quite happy to manipulate that market into an "efficiency" which benefits themselves pretty heavily, at the expense of everyone else. To wit: they aren't very "efficient" if you put the dotted line around the entire market. These parties don't care about the market, though, just themselves. The Invisible Hand is an amazing thing, but let's not commit ideological idolatry, okay?
Anything which interferes with it (the free free market) introduces inefficiencies.
A free market is not always able to produce an economically effective result. What do you think of the concept of a "market failure"?
You do know that FIOS competes with cable, do you not?
Yes. Well, sorta. FiOS doesn't go everywhere, but be that as it may:
A duopoly (cable vs. AT&T) is hardly a thriving market. You need more than a few players in a market for it to thrive. Two is most assuredly not enough.
You wanna explain how cell phone service keep dropping in price and increasing in quality even though there is only 4 national providers?
Are you confident such a thing would keep happening if there were only 1 national provider? And why are price drops your only measurement of how well the market is doing? Do you think cell service is fungible, like pork, your throughput, quality, or services not to matter?
In any case, it would appear that you regard a market with a vertical monopolist operating in one silo and a very narrow market of nearby substitutes as a "free" one (e.g., municipal water vs bottled water). I do not agree. Conditions need to be changed such that this is not so. My observation is rather generic in nature, as in to say "what we have now sucks, and it shouldn't be merely left there." Additional regulation would be a silly answer; however pretending that privatization will fix everything flies in the face of observed facts. To wit: there are municipalities that have tried privatizing municipal water. As it turns out, the "inefficiency" of government-operating things isn't as bad as the inefficiency of corporately-managed things plus the need to extract private equity return on investment.
It's almost like giving up on your childhood by rejecting its beliefs.
When you assess your own self, how is it that you can be sure that your own mind is that of an adult? Have you ever really evaluated your inner self and asked, or have you never considered the matter?
For example, given the character of your the last paragraph in your message to me, do you find my response here surprising? Is it one you wished me to make? Would have you predicted I would? Was it a desired outcome, or did you lack the foresight to know one was forthcoming? Do you feel wounded by my questions, or introspective, or otherwise? If you feel my response is pointless, why did you bother to generate it? When you wrote an "abrasive" response, did you desire one in return? If not, what would an adult mind have reasonably expected?
Anyway. The monopoly of land-based cable is likely to persist for quite a while, as well as the power line monopoly. They would continue without government assistance. In the case of one, the power line, it would be relative madness to do it any other way than current, and the same forces I mentioned previously apply: no one would. Same for water, by the way. No one would, either. In the case the cable company, decades of cable in many, many municipal areas that do not grant monopolies is against you. Sure, this is a small and not very thriving market of folks attempting to compete with the select few who have already done the digging, but if what you want is bandwidth then they're not competing very well, thank you.
Also, "monopoly" is hardly the only concern of a thriving market. A handful of players is simply not enough, because these players will virtually always collude tacitly (on prices), if given any opportunity. Small markets tend to form ad-hoc oligopolies. These are not in your interests, no matter what you might feel about it.
The free market is often good. But it isn't always good, and doesn't always take you to that shining, happy place you wish it would. Look what's been happening with all the mega-telecomms for the last 20 years. Give them another 5 and they'd be Ma Bell again, if they could. Are you saying that government interventions forced them into their M&A spree? Get real.
I was citing CABLE as an example, and you cited things OTHER THAN cable as counter examples. Since you have placed your argument on shifting sand, what do you want me to do? It's not the cost of permits that permits classic cable from coming against other cable competitors: the math of the situation is obvious. The entrenched competitor has too much density, and therefore better costs per linear foot of trunk. If a competitor came in and starting laying down a second trunk, the company with existing lines can lower prices enough to put the new competitor out of business. Easy, shmeasy.
While it's obvious to me that the above is true, if the cost of permits is so prohibitive, how does the existing cable company manage it? Hint, hint, they did, and do.
I'm aware that there are alternative delivery systems. But they're aren't enough such systems, and without a critical mass of players, there will not be thriving competition. Small markets often behave collusively, through a principle known as "tacit" collusion. The competitors never have to meet or agree to lock-step prices, as there are so few of these competitors that they can do so without ever meeting or openly colluding.
Monopolies don't persist if there are no laws to protect them.
This isn't true, you know. Ever heard of the concept of a natural monopoly?
There are many regions in the US where cable companies have no legally granted monopoly, but because the cost of running/trenching redundant lines in parallel with an existing company with high service density, no second company will compete.
In markets like this a sort of monopoly naturally happens. Worse, in markets with just a few players tend towards a process called "tacit collusion".
The free market is good, but if one persists in treating it like a magical genie that can solve all woes, one will be as crazy as a communist.
Slashdot Mirror
VC++?
Yes, I've cringed hearing the same thing. While we are on a roll, I once got into an argument at work, where one of the "programmers" insisted that calling an IEEE 32 bit floating point number a "real32" was a legitimate type equivalent. When I asked him about it, he said that was because it was a 32 bit "real" number. As a math person, you must be cringing on this one. :-P I did attempt to explain to him that the number was an ieee 32 bit float, and that's all it was, but exactly what it was. Nothing more and nothing less. No dicey.
Speaking of amusing technical arguments, I once told a friend that UDP stood for "user datagram protocol". He told me, "no, it's unreliable datagram protocol." To resolve the argument, he took out a textbook that indeed did state that it was "unreliable datagram protocol". He had a hard time digesting the information that the textbook was wrong. It happens. :-P
Intel's compiler is hard to beat, and so a great many people use it. The fair test would be the intel compiler on Intel, and a compiler of AMD's specification on AMD's chips.
On the plus side, perhaps I have found someone who will finally I understand me. I've had to explain with frustration to many a C "programmer" that python is dynamically, but strongly typed. It seems the entire school of programmers descending from "C" thing static typing = strong typing. Which is amusing, because C is weakly typed.
Lisp being God's preferred programming language, as everyone should know.
God had something to say about this:
http://xkcd.com/224/
The more important thing for the OP to comprehend, I think, is that copyright law has a long tradition of strengthening, not weakening, the strength of a copyright claim when the copyrighted item is published/publicly displayed.
I've faced that question internally in our engineering practice, from naive engineers. "Hey, they put it on the internet, that must mean they are disclaiming any rights, right?" Not so fast.
I've thought for a while that situations like this, where the cop pushes to have charges pressed for being filmed, itself are a moral wrong. I.e., I was contemplating just as I was reading through the slash posts that the appropriate response to the police officer attempting to press these wiretapping charges is some sort of arrest of the police officer for so attempting this thing. You are correct; we need a right to observe government, and then it needs to be enforced by a body of law establishing criminal penalty similar to the civil rights laws.
It is only a felony if someone asks you for it in the first place.
The correct answer "depends on jurisdiction," but in most jurisdictions, witnessing a felony without reporting it is itself a felony. So, no, you are wrong about that.
Here's your reminder:
http://tinyurl.com/42jo3qv
While what you say is true, try looking at debt as a percentage of GDP in 2008 all the way through today. It's pants-wetting material.
C/.
But it all depends on confidence. U.S. currency (and bonds too, for that matter) has no real objective value.
Does anything have objective value?
It's worse than you say.
It's not RAM they are licensing to you, it's vRAM, which means memory that you've allocated to the VM's, but may not be using. vRAM is calculated by summing up the allocated memory of each virtual machine. Which is to say, after spending years saying, "but our product is better than our competitors, because you can oversubscribe your memory," they have now said "gotcha!". This move was A) evil, as they told customers with fully paid up maintenance contracts "no, we won't honor the contract, you'll have to buy more product," and B) stupid, as the licensing model directly undermines one of VMware's principal advantages.
C//
Evidence?
No, but you could look a Citrix XenServer. They are behind on features, however they license per SERVER. Unlimited cpus, unlimited cores, unlimited RAM. From a technical implementation perspective, they are second to VMware. Hyper-V is third technically, but of course will likely surpass XenServer in a year or two due to Microsoft's continued heavy investment.
Remember, China buying all these bonds is a policy that China instituted for the benefit of China and against the long-term interests of the USA.
U.S. "Hey, we need to borrow some money."
China: "Okay"
U.S. "Bad, China, bad!".
You do know how stupid this sounds, right?
C//
While this point is reasonable, keep in mind that Google would not only be fined the stated amount, but also injuncted from continuing use of the infringing product. That's would sting, wouldn't you say?
No they don't - GPLv2 mentions nothing of patents.
It doesn't have to.
C//
Your suggestion is incomplete.
One should absolute _not_ use a NAS system as an archival system without some kind of point-in-time restore capability (e.g., "snapshots"). The most common cause of data loss is not a failed hard drive. It is an "oops" by a systems admin or other human operator.
Good news is, you can just grab Solaris Express and set all this up on ZFS. Too bad ext4/LVM doesn't have a suitable snapshot system yet. That really hurts me, but so it is.
You assertion that leaving drives off leaves them to failing sooner isn't true. SGI/COPAN (the company that started the trend of turning off HD's in enterprise storage systems for tier 3 data) have reams of empirical data showing the opposite to be true: if they aren't spinning, they aren't wearing out.
C//
While I agree with you, were you being deliberately ironic in using the word "irregardless" in a subthread introduced by a grammar nazi? "Regardless" or "irrespective" are the words to use, or Thou Shalt Be Disciplined(tm).
Anyway, IRL, when people say "could care less," I often retort, with a wry smile on my face:
"Well, I've had so much of the caring sucked out of me, there's no possibility of me caring any less at all."
I think people get it then, but I'm not really sure.
It gets a laugh, anyway.
BTW, if you want to pet peeve over something try "talking out loud". You know, when someone means to say "thinking out loud".
C//
It doesn't have to be equal to the speed of the original. It has to be "just not slow enough that's it's slower than it was originally when emulated on a much newer processor." Anyway, a high end emulator, such as the type that was once made by the Transitive company for Apple's Rosetta product, is more like a just-in-time compiling emulator than anything else. I tested their SPARC-to-x86 version at one time, and it tore down SPECfp and SPECint benchmarks like no tomorrow.
So while you did not say this, I detect a sentiment that emulators have to be slow. That instinct is incorrect.
Of course there is the downside that there are few people in the whole world who can make just-in-time compiling emulators. IBM bought Transitive, and they were one of the few.
C//
When you boldly assert that you have "refuted" my arguments, does it help you win an argument in your head? Is it like one of those moments after you have an argument with another person, where you recite out loud the winning words you wished you would have said in your car while driving down the street, to make you feel better? We're you hoping, some how, by repeating your past mistake of taking the condescending tone with me, that it would lead to some outcome you like? If so, what outcome was that?
I'm curious. Did you predict that I would say any of this?
C//
No, they would not. The examples of substitute infrastructure getting built (in the absence of laws prohibiting it or increasing barrier for its entry) are plentiful.
Show me your examples of redundant competitive water infrastructure, line power, or "plentiful" competitive, redundant line comms.
The idea of "tacit collusion" is absurd.
Why do you find it so? Overt collusion occurs when it can, and would occur pretty aggressively without government intervention. Is it "inefficient" to prohibit monopolies, price fixing, and anti-competitive behaviors, such as business behaviors expressly targeted at putting competitors completely out of business?
Strong players in narrow and unthriving market are quite happy to manipulate that market into an "efficiency" which benefits themselves pretty heavily, at the expense of everyone else. To wit: they aren't very "efficient" if you put the dotted line around the entire market. These parties don't care about the market, though, just themselves. The Invisible Hand is an amazing thing, but let's not commit ideological idolatry, okay?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/technology/13panel.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/chipmaker-cartel-fined-331-million-for-dram-price-fixing.ars
Anything which interferes with it (the free free market) introduces inefficiencies.
A free market is not always able to produce an economically effective result. What do you think of the concept of a "market failure"?
You do know that FIOS competes with cable, do you not?
Yes. Well, sorta. FiOS doesn't go everywhere, but be that as it may:
A duopoly (cable vs. AT&T) is hardly a thriving market. You need more than a few players in a market for it to thrive. Two is most assuredly not enough.
You wanna explain how cell phone service keep dropping in price and increasing in quality even though there is only 4 national providers?
Are you confident such a thing would keep happening if there were only 1 national provider? And why are price drops your only measurement of how well the market is doing? Do you think cell service is fungible, like pork, your throughput, quality, or services not to matter?
In any case, it would appear that you regard a market with a vertical monopolist operating in one silo and a very narrow market of nearby substitutes as a "free" one (e.g., municipal water vs bottled water). I do not agree. Conditions need to be changed such that this is not so. My observation is rather generic in nature, as in to say "what we have now sucks, and it shouldn't be merely left there." Additional regulation would be a silly answer; however pretending that privatization will fix everything flies in the face of observed facts. To wit: there are municipalities that have tried privatizing municipal water. As it turns out, the "inefficiency" of government-operating things isn't as bad as the inefficiency of corporately-managed things plus the need to extract private equity return on investment.
It's almost like giving up on your childhood by rejecting its beliefs.
When you assess your own self, how is it that you can be sure that your own mind is that of an adult? Have you ever really evaluated your inner self and asked, or have you never considered the matter?
For example, given the character of your the last paragraph in your message to me, do you find my response here surprising? Is it one you wished me to make? Would have you predicted I would? Was it a desired outcome, or did you lack the foresight to know one was forthcoming? Do you feel wounded by my questions, or introspective, or otherwise? If you feel my response is pointless, why did you bother to generate it? When you wrote an "abrasive" response, did you desire one in return? If not, what would an adult mind have reasonably expected?
C//
Three responses to my message? Really?
Anyway. The monopoly of land-based cable is likely to persist for quite a while, as well as the power line monopoly. They would continue without government assistance. In the case of one, the power line, it would be relative madness to do it any other way than current, and the same forces I mentioned previously apply: no one would. Same for water, by the way. No one would, either. In the case the cable company, decades of cable in many, many municipal areas that do not grant monopolies is against you. Sure, this is a small and not very thriving market of folks attempting to compete with the select few who have already done the digging, but if what you want is bandwidth then they're not competing very well, thank you.
Also, "monopoly" is hardly the only concern of a thriving market. A handful of players is simply not enough, because these players will virtually always collude tacitly (on prices), if given any opportunity. Small markets tend to form ad-hoc oligopolies. These are not in your interests, no matter what you might feel about it.
The free market is often good. But it isn't always good, and doesn't always take you to that shining, happy place you wish it would. Look what's been happening with all the mega-telecomms for the last 20 years. Give them another 5 and they'd be Ma Bell again, if they could. Are you saying that government interventions forced them into their M&A spree? Get real.
Natural monopolies are no myth.
C//
I was citing CABLE as an example, and you cited things OTHER THAN cable as counter examples. Since you have placed your argument on shifting sand, what do you want me to do? It's not the cost of permits that permits classic cable from coming against other cable competitors: the math of the situation is obvious. The entrenched competitor has too much density, and therefore better costs per linear foot of trunk. If a competitor came in and starting laying down a second trunk, the company with existing lines can lower prices enough to put the new competitor out of business. Easy, shmeasy.
While it's obvious to me that the above is true, if the cost of permits is so prohibitive, how does the existing cable company manage it? Hint, hint, they did, and do.
I'm aware that there are alternative delivery systems. But they're aren't enough such systems, and without a critical mass of players, there will not be thriving competition. Small markets often behave collusively, through a principle known as "tacit" collusion. The competitors never have to meet or agree to lock-step prices, as there are so few of these competitors that they can do so without ever meeting or openly colluding.
The free market isn't everything.
C//
Monopolies don't persist if there are no laws to protect them.
This isn't true, you know. Ever heard of the concept of a natural monopoly?
There are many regions in the US where cable companies have no legally granted monopoly, but because the cost of running/trenching redundant lines in parallel with an existing company with high service density, no second company will compete.
In markets like this a sort of monopoly naturally happens. Worse, in markets with just a few players tend towards a process called "tacit collusion".
The free market is good, but if one persists in treating it like a magical genie that can solve all woes, one will be as crazy as a communist.
C//