Some years ago, I was under the impression that (A) drunk drivers account for the vast amount of fatalities, and (B) about 50,000 people / year die from drunk drivers.
Assuming the above is correct (can anyone show better facts?) that would work out to less than a couple hundred deaths per day.
The reason people aren't pushing to ban automobiles is because, even though the numbers sound large, the percentages, and therefore, the risks aren't. You are unlikely to personally be affected.
>>but with a world on the brink of war, a confirmation of an alien civilization would be an amazing thing right now. Maybe give our leaders a kick in the ass
>I can imagine a beautiful, peaceful alien race. Free of crime, war, and violence.
The aliens land. They want peaceful relations with us.
I can then imagine some insane nutcase attacking the aliens using chemical weapons. Probably for religious reasons (they don't worship Ala or somesuch, even though the political leadership may not actually be "believers" themselves). Or perhaps for political reasons, they aren't picking sides in <favorite conflict>. Or the aliens pick the wrong side by siding against the blowing up of civilian busses, pizza parlors, etc. Or the aliens interfere with soverign powers because the aliens are against the poverty and oppression of the mass population by a few nutcase greedy dictators.
But hey, I'm being too pessimistic. I should trust in the goodwill of insane madmen not to do stupid things. The discovery of aliens would completely invalidate any possible motive (right or wrong, regardless of disagreements with other nations) for being on the brink of war.
I keep remembering that YAST is a proprietary installer. Something I consider quite bad, however technically excellent it may be.
The installer and yast are outstanding. The sources are included. The license is not what you want based upon reading your post.
But I should point out...
SuSE does allow you to copy the CD's for your friends providing no money changes hands. (Last time I read their license. SuSE people have also stated this on usenet.)
SuSE does allow you to buy a box and install on many boxes.
Since you can inspect the YaST sources, you can use techniques learned there to improve other Free install and management systems.
Yes, ideally we'll eventually get a totally Free, high quality, non-geek friendly distro that is easy to install, set up, configure, manage and auto-upgrade. In the meantime, for pragmatic reasons, I continue to buy each and every box of SuSE that comes out. (About 2 or 3 per year.)
except for the fact that Gnutella and Kazaa have built-in automated global search capabilities. You could do basically the same thing with ftp search sites...
Back in the day, I seem to rember these tools called Archie and Veronica. These were, well basically, search engines. You could search for a file, and it would tell you what FTP site and directory where you could get it.
Create a P2P *wireless* sharing device. Just load it up with stuff and go cruise around at your favorite public sharing area... I'm sure that we'll see this in campus yards as soon as students lose the right to steal their music and other stuff.
Back in the day we used to commit exactly the crime you are suggesting!
One person would bring their sharing device out into a public area. He might have something popular that everyone would enjoy sharing. As you say, he would load it up with stuff and go cruise around at his favorite public sharing area. And it was done in campus yards regularly.
And the technology was wireless. There were no wires from his speakers to my ears.
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I'm not sure I agree. Please give an example of a just law that can only be enforced if people squeal on one another. For example, murder, would not qualify, because its enforcement does not rely on the fact that someone must report "I saw John kill Mary." But anything that you do in the privacy of your home that does not produce a victim would pretty much fit the unjust laws we're talking about. The only means of enforcement is to invade my privacy.
They'll get the ISP to enforce it, so I'll just start encrypting my filesharing. Etc. It will just escalate. It will ultimately depend on one party reporting that they observed another party doing it. Like photocopying from a library book for a report to get you thrown in the slammer.
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I don't agree. The enforcability hangs on the justness. Any just law can be enforced. Many unjust laws can be enforced. But there are, IMHO, my whole argument here, NO just laws that cannot be enforced.
We're going to make it illegal to have oral sex in your own bedroom. To protect public morality, of course. How can such a law be enforced?
What Intuit needs to question is what effect this will have on next year's profits
What? Never heard of such a thing. What profits are you reffing to? You mean some hypothetical profits far into the remote distant future?
Get your feet back on the ground. This is business. We need to worry about this quarter's profits and that's all. As long as we can get this quarter's profits bigger than last quarter, and also of the same quarter a year ago, then we don't care what we have to do! We would shoot ourselves in the foot if it will just increase this quarter's profits. That is all that matters. That is the goal.
Otherwise the executives won't get their bonuses. If it looks like next quarter's profits might sink lower, or next year, then the executives will be elsewhere and it will be somebody else's problem. New executives will be here trying to figure out what new lows to sink to in order to fix this quarter's profits.
Perhaps just as importantly is today's stock price. Just like this quarter's profits. The stock price is the other primary goal. Otherwise, how would the executives sell their options, make a profit, and then take their golden parachute?
shippers like UPS have decided to stop carrying "explosives" altogether, meaning that rocket motors are now virtually impossible to ship, even by UPS ground.
This is no worse than declaring development tools, compilers, and network sniffers to be terrorist cyber warfare tools. The solution is obvious. Anyone needing such tools needs to pass a background check and get a Microsoft certification. Microsoft can be issued a government license to distribute these so called "development tools" to people who are deemed to really need them.
People can learn about programming on a need to know basis. The fewer people who understand this stuff, the less of a threat we face. Just as is the case currently with nuclear weapons designers.
Why should model rocketry be any different?
What we need is a groundswell of support to write a letter to John Asscroft to make him aware of these issues.
"For servers, not desktops," is an expression of Intel's
wish to get into servers.
No, it's a wish to sell a very high-margin chip.
A classic monopolist trick. Segment your market.
By creating a seperate market segment for one particular line of chip, if that market segment has lots of dollars to spend, then Intel can milk those dollars. Hey, this is a high performance chip, but sold into a limited market willing to pay for high performance, so we can make insanely high margins.
Unfortunantly, some heathens want high performance desktops. Bastards. Wrecking Intel's high-margin aspirations.
Segment the market. That's why we have WinXP Home, WinXP Embedded, WinXP Pro, WinXP Server, WinXP DataCenter, etc.
Red Hat seems to be learning the same trick.
Why is this segmenting the market? Because it's the same basic parts. We offer a "high-end" printer and a "entry-level" printer. The difference? Which pully some belt is attached to. An old IBM trick. The "field upgrade"? Just move which pully the belt is attached to while pretending to be busy.
No, the first PPC601's emulated the 68LC040 (SP?) chips, the ones that were used in the performas at that time. Definitely not the same class as the "real" '040 processor.
The emulation was of the instruction set of the 68LC040. They did not emulate the performance. The emulated performance was better than that of a 68LC040.
Let me paint a higher contrast example. I could use a modern fire-breathing Athlon machine to emulate, say a, TRS-80. That is a Z80, 8-bit machine running at about 2 MHz. Now my emulator would emulate the exact Z80 instructions, executing them faithfully. The execution speed, however, would vastly exceed the performance of the old Z80 hardware executing those same instructions.
See my point?
Apple choose to emulate the 68LC040 chip because it had fewer instructions. All known 68000 Mac software would run on it, because that software would check for, and was prepared for the absence of some features, such as a math coprocessor. So a software program would come along and say, "Oh, no fast math coprocessor, I'll just have to make slow calls into Apple's SANE library to do math." Of course, as soon as you called a SANE library routine, it was natively coded in PowerPC and was blazingly fast, and might even use any hardware assistance at the PPC level.
In a surprise announcement today, it was revealed that Microsoft, through a chain of holding companies, actually owns Timeline. A Microsoft executive who wished to remain anonym0us cow herd said that Timeline would continue to persue patent infringements against all affected for the 3-1/2 year period during which infringement has occured. This should materially affect Timeline's financial performance, which should also boost Microsoft's sagging sales as fewer customers find a reason to upgrade according to Microsoft's schedule.
Sig: I can't understand why people who hate Linux and Apple read slashdot.
Maybe because they are paid by Microsoft to do so?
Can you say "shill" ? That is a word referring to someone in the employ of a faith healer who feigns some illness only to be miraculously healed on stage.
The BIOS needs to have a web browser. A Linux BIOS can help make this a reality. Think of the ad revenue opportunities. Of course, we'll have to make the BIOS "trusted" so you can't bypass the ad, which is equivalent to stealing.
three instructions (PUSHF, POPF, and IRET) don't cause a kernal trap, which is the problem. There's no way to trap the instructions, but they behave differently in ring 0 than they do in ring 3 (e.g. setting the flags differently or something like that).
Ouch, that's ugly.
Maybe some enterprising chip maker, AMD, might introduce a mode to trap these. If this were all it took to make the chip fully virtualizable, then they would have a competitive advantage.
Is there something missing from x86 hardware that makes it difficult to virtualize?
What if Intel or maybe AMD were in some future product line to offer a few additional instructions or features that would enable complete virtualization of the hardware, IBM style. If, AMD, for instance, did this, they would have a competitive advantage. You could efficiently run multiple OSes under a VM. In fact, a VM-OS could be written. By this, I mean an OS that only runs virtual machines. From the console you could allocate virtual machines, and pick a partition or boot record to boot into one of the allocated virtual machines. You could assign resources to virtual machines, such as the sound card appears in virtual machine #2.
If they keep it lightweight and user-mode like they say they will, and Plex86 won't allow 2 or 3 instructions to execute, then running binary-only OSes might be a problem
Please correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm not a kernel hacker.)
A program is running. One of these 2,3 bad instructions is encountered in the instruction stream. The processor hardware generates a vectored interrupt. Kernel code executes. Normally, this results in your program being aborted. Why couldn't there be a kernel api feature to send you a signal, pointing to the offending instruction. Any user program could take advantage of this facility.
In the case of a program like Plex86, or any similar type program like VMWare, when this signal is received, the program does Bochs style emulation of the single offending instruction. Affects the saved register states or virtualized hardware state in exactly the same way. Then the program uses a kernel api to resume execution at the following instruction.
Magic! Now you've got complete virtualization. Even of privileged instructions not executable from user mode. All it would take would be a facility in the kernel which enables user programs to virtualize even privileged instructions.
I must be not understand something correctly? I can't imagine that smart people closer to the problem haven't thought of this. So what am I missing?
There are various tests that a court uses to determine monopoly status. The 9th circuit court used those tests and found Microsoft to have a monopoly. (Among other findings.)
One of the tests is the ability to charge what economists call "monopoly rents" even in a down economy. (Can you say Licensing 6.0?)
Here's a message I found online that says it concisely...
And if you doubt that there ARE monopoly rents -- just look at the base
stock value, say in 1992, versus today -- and compare it with any other
firm that does not have a monopoly position in the marketplace. Wall
Street loves MS and Intel -- they generate above average returns for
investors at the expense of customers who have little choice. Classic
monopoly phenomena.
Kathy E. Gill
This message is interesting especially in light of statements in Microsoft's recent SEC 10-Q filing. In effect, they are warning investors that in the future they might not be able to charge monopoly rents.
A fact from the antitrust trial is that MS spent $150 million in developing IE. To give it away? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Financed by monopoly rents on other products that have lock-in? This is classic monopoly behavior. See IBM in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.
Is your argument that Microsoft does not have a monopoly? Do you believe we have such a vast array of competitively priced choices offered by a wide landscape of vendors all competing on a level playing field, and therefore Microsoft does not have exclusive control? This sounds more like the hardware market to me, the opposite of what we have with Microsoft. As an aside, Microsoft also has pretty much total control of all of the hardware vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of people die in cars every day
I'm skeptical of this.
Some years ago, I was under the impression that (A) drunk drivers account for the vast amount of fatalities, and (B) about 50,000 people / year die from drunk drivers.
Assuming the above is correct (can anyone show better facts?) that would work out to less than a couple hundred deaths per day.
The reason people aren't pushing to ban automobiles is because, even though the numbers sound large, the percentages, and therefore, the risks aren't. You are unlikely to personally be affected.
>>but with a world on the brink of war, a confirmation of an alien civilization would be an amazing thing right now. Maybe give our leaders a kick in the ass
>I can imagine a beautiful, peaceful alien race. Free of crime, war, and violence.
The aliens land. They want peaceful relations with us.
I can then imagine some insane nutcase attacking the aliens using chemical weapons. Probably for religious reasons (they don't worship Ala or somesuch, even though the political leadership may not actually be "believers" themselves). Or perhaps for political reasons, they aren't picking sides in <favorite conflict>. Or the aliens pick the wrong side by siding against the blowing up of civilian busses, pizza parlors, etc. Or the aliens interfere with soverign powers because the aliens are against the poverty and oppression of the mass population by a few nutcase greedy dictators.
But hey, I'm being too pessimistic. I should trust in the goodwill of insane madmen not to do stupid things. The discovery of aliens would completely invalidate any possible motive (right or wrong, regardless of disagreements with other nations) for being on the brink of war.
The installer and yast are outstanding. The sources are included. The license is not what you want based upon reading your post.
But I should point out...
- SuSE does allow you to copy the CD's for your friends providing no money changes hands. (Last time I read their license. SuSE people have also stated this on usenet.)
- SuSE does allow you to buy a box and install on many boxes.
- Since you can inspect the YaST sources, you can use techniques learned there to improve other Free install and management systems.
Yes, ideally we'll eventually get a totally Free, high quality, non-geek friendly distro that is easy to install, set up, configure, manage and auto-upgrade. In the meantime, for pragmatic reasons, I continue to buy each and every box of SuSE that comes out. (About 2 or 3 per year.)Apple did not just copy Xerox. Apple introduced many of their own original innovations.
Just as an example. The menu bar with pull down menus. This was not in any Xerox work. It first appeared on the Lisa in 1983.
Yet it seems to show up in all versions of Windows.
I don't think they listed OpenOffice.org as one of the copyright owners they represent.
except for the fact that Gnutella and Kazaa have built-in automated global search capabilities. You could do basically the same thing with ftp search sites...
Back in the day, I seem to rember these tools called Archie and Veronica. These were, well basically, search engines. You could search for a file, and it would tell you what FTP site and directory where you could get it.
Create a P2P *wireless* sharing device. Just load it up with stuff and go cruise around at your favorite public sharing area... I'm sure that we'll see this in campus yards as soon as students lose the right to steal their music and other stuff.
Back in the day we used to commit exactly the crime you are suggesting!
One person would bring their sharing device out into a public area. He might have something popular that everyone would enjoy sharing. As you say, he would load it up with stuff and go cruise around at his favorite public sharing area. And it was done in campus yards regularly.
And the technology was wireless. There were no wires from his speakers to my ears.
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I'm not sure I agree. Please give an example of a just law that can only be enforced if people squeal on one another. For example, murder, would not qualify, because its enforcement does not rely on the fact that someone must report "I saw John kill Mary." But anything that you do in the privacy of your home that does not produce a victim would pretty much fit the unjust laws we're talking about. The only means of enforcement is to invade my privacy.
They'll get the ISP to enforce it, so I'll just start encrypting my filesharing. Etc. It will just escalate. It will ultimately depend on one party reporting that they observed another party doing it. Like photocopying from a library book for a report to get you thrown in the slammer.
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I don't agree. The enforcability hangs on the justness. Any just law can be enforced. Many unjust laws can be enforced. But there are, IMHO, my whole argument here, NO just laws that cannot be enforced.
We're going to make it illegal to have oral sex in your own bedroom. To protect public morality, of course. How can such a law be enforced?
Universities have enough to deal with concerning their students, before they start wasting their money policing filesharing.
Darn right! Those students might be smoking weed. Or worse, drinking. Or even the unthinkable -- having sex.
What Intuit needs to question is what effect this will have on next year's profits
What? Never heard of such a thing. What profits are you reffing to? You mean some hypothetical profits far into the remote distant future?
Get your feet back on the ground. This is business. We need to worry about this quarter's profits and that's all. As long as we can get this quarter's profits bigger than last quarter, and also of the same quarter a year ago, then we don't care what we have to do! We would shoot ourselves in the foot if it will just increase this quarter's profits. That is all that matters. That is the goal.
Otherwise the executives won't get their bonuses. If it looks like next quarter's profits might sink lower, or next year, then the executives will be elsewhere and it will be somebody else's problem. New executives will be here trying to figure out what new lows to sink to in order to fix this quarter's profits.
Perhaps just as importantly is today's stock price. Just like this quarter's profits. The stock price is the other primary goal. Otherwise, how would the executives sell their options, make a profit, and then take their golden parachute?
shippers like UPS have decided to stop carrying "explosives" altogether, meaning that rocket motors are now virtually impossible to ship, even by UPS ground.
This is no worse than declaring development tools, compilers, and network sniffers to be terrorist cyber warfare tools. The solution is obvious. Anyone needing such tools needs to pass a background check and get a Microsoft certification. Microsoft can be issued a government license to distribute these so called "development tools" to people who are deemed to really need them.
People can learn about programming on a need to know basis. The fewer people who understand this stuff, the less of a threat we face. Just as is the case currently with nuclear weapons designers.
Why should model rocketry be any different?
What we need is a groundswell of support to write a letter to John Asscroft to make him aware of these issues.
(Score 2, Scary)
"For servers, not desktops," is an expression of Intel's wish to get into servers.
No, it's a wish to sell a very high-margin chip.
A classic monopolist trick. Segment your market.
By creating a seperate market segment for one particular line of chip, if that market segment has lots of dollars to spend, then Intel can milk those dollars. Hey, this is a high performance chip, but sold into a limited market willing to pay for high performance, so we can make insanely high margins.
Unfortunantly, some heathens want high performance desktops. Bastards. Wrecking Intel's high-margin aspirations.
Segment the market. That's why we have WinXP Home, WinXP Embedded, WinXP Pro, WinXP Server, WinXP DataCenter, etc.
Red Hat seems to be learning the same trick.
Why is this segmenting the market? Because it's the same basic parts. We offer a "high-end" printer and a "entry-level" printer. The difference? Which pully some belt is attached to. An old IBM trick. The "field upgrade"? Just move which pully the belt is attached to while pretending to be busy.
No, the first PPC601's emulated the 68LC040 (SP?) chips, the ones that were used in the performas at that time. Definitely not the same class as the "real" '040 processor.
The emulation was of the instruction set of the 68LC040. They did not emulate the performance. The emulated performance was better than that of a 68LC040.
Let me paint a higher contrast example. I could use a modern fire-breathing Athlon machine to emulate, say a, TRS-80. That is a Z80, 8-bit machine running at about 2 MHz. Now my emulator would emulate the exact Z80 instructions, executing them faithfully. The execution speed, however, would vastly exceed the performance of the old Z80 hardware executing those same instructions.
See my point?
Apple choose to emulate the 68LC040 chip because it had fewer instructions. All known 68000 Mac software would run on it, because that software would check for, and was prepared for the absence of some features, such as a math coprocessor. So a software program would come along and say, "Oh, no fast math coprocessor, I'll just have to make slow calls into Apple's SANE library to do math." Of course, as soon as you called a SANE library routine, it was natively coded in PowerPC and was blazingly fast, and might even use any hardware assistance at the PPC level.
In a surprise announcement today, it was revealed that Microsoft, through a chain of holding companies, actually owns Timeline. A Microsoft executive who wished to remain anonym0us cow herd said that Timeline would continue to persue patent infringements against all affected for the 3-1/2 year period during which infringement has occured. This should materially affect Timeline's financial performance, which should also boost Microsoft's sagging sales as fewer customers find a reason to upgrade according to Microsoft's schedule.
Timeline has a patent on data whorehouses?
Sig: I can't understand why people who hate Linux and Apple read slashdot.
Maybe because they are paid by Microsoft to do so?
Can you say "shill" ? That is a word referring to someone in the employ of a faith healer who feigns some illness only to be miraculously healed on stage.
Can you say "Microsoft shill" ?
It's a good thing IBM has a stable of defensive patents.
Adobe: We're making our own (closed) XDoc format to kill PDF.
The BIOS needs to have a web browser. A Linux BIOS can help make this a reality. Think of the ad revenue opportunities. Of course, we'll have to make the BIOS "trusted" so you can't bypass the ad, which is equivalent to stealing.
How would the telephone company implement an order to block, say, terrorist planning conversations?
The telephone company is hereby ordered to block phone numbers of terrorists.
three instructions (PUSHF, POPF, and IRET) don't cause a kernal trap, which is the problem. There's no way to trap the instructions, but they behave differently in ring 0 than they do in ring 3 (e.g. setting the flags differently or something like that).
Ouch, that's ugly.
Maybe some enterprising chip maker, AMD, might introduce a mode to trap these. If this were all it took to make the chip fully virtualizable, then they would have a competitive advantage.
Is there something missing from x86 hardware that makes it difficult to virtualize?
What if Intel or maybe AMD were in some future product line to offer a few additional instructions or features that would enable complete virtualization of the hardware, IBM style. If, AMD, for instance, did this, they would have a competitive advantage. You could efficiently run multiple OSes under a VM. In fact, a VM-OS could be written. By this, I mean an OS that only runs virtual machines. From the console you could allocate virtual machines, and pick a partition or boot record to boot into one of the allocated virtual machines. You could assign resources to virtual machines, such as the sound card appears in virtual machine #2.
If they keep it lightweight and user-mode like they say they will, and Plex86 won't allow 2 or 3 instructions to execute, then running binary-only OSes might be a problem
Please correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm not a kernel hacker.)
A program is running. One of these 2,3 bad instructions is encountered in the instruction stream. The processor hardware generates a vectored interrupt. Kernel code executes. Normally, this results in your program being aborted. Why couldn't there be a kernel api feature to send you a signal, pointing to the offending instruction. Any user program could take advantage of this facility.
In the case of a program like Plex86, or any similar type program like VMWare, when this signal is received, the program does Bochs style emulation of the single offending instruction. Affects the saved register states or virtualized hardware state in exactly the same way. Then the program uses a kernel api to resume execution at the following instruction.
Magic! Now you've got complete virtualization. Even of privileged instructions not executable from user mode. All it would take would be a facility in the kernel which enables user programs to virtualize even privileged instructions.
I must be not understand something correctly? I can't imagine that smart people closer to the problem haven't thought of this. So what am I missing?
Congress is just upset that they didn't think of it first.
One of the tests is the ability to charge what economists call "monopoly rents" even in a down economy. (Can you say Licensing 6.0?)
Here's a message I found online that says it concisely...
This message is interesting especially in light of statements in Microsoft's recent SEC 10-Q filing. In effect, they are warning investors that in the future they might not be able to charge monopoly rents.
A fact from the antitrust trial is that MS spent $150 million in developing IE. To give it away? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Financed by monopoly rents on other products that have lock-in? This is classic monopoly behavior. See IBM in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.
Is your argument that Microsoft does not have a monopoly? Do you believe we have such a vast array of competitively priced choices offered by a wide landscape of vendors all competing on a level playing field, and therefore Microsoft does not have exclusive control? This sounds more like the hardware market to me, the opposite of what we have with Microsoft. As an aside, Microsoft also has pretty much total control of all of the hardware vendors.