Uh... 106 degree showers aren't all that uncommon, and it's not likely to scald. The recommendation is to run your hot water heater at 120 degress Farenheight, since above that will scald, and do so quickly (especially for young children), and any equipment that needs hotter water (like your dishwasher) will have a booster heater that's more efficient anyway.
BTW, you'd need to expose some household bacteria to 160 deg. F to kill them... and I think we both know there's better ways to kill bacteria than squirting hot water all over the damn place:)
Regarding the thermodynamics -- I certainly don't know thermo much at all, but I really doubt you could use the output of this to reliably heat water. Even if you're cooling the refrigerator by 40 degrees from ambiant, that's mostly air that you're cooling. Heating water takes a considerably larger amount of energy than cooling air does. But, as you point out, we are running the refrigerator far more often than our hot water, so as long as you have a tank based system you can still heat dump into the water.
Except that ground water isn't 70 degrees -- it is often as little as 40 degrees. Even with perfect thermal transfer, that's just not going to output enough heat. It might work as a backup method, but not as a primary heat source.
Of course, like I said, I know very little about thermo, so I could be wrong. Correct me if so, please.
I suspect some people do use alternate addressing, since Intel put it in the Xeon -- it has a (slower) 36-bit mode that can address up to 8 GB of virtual memory.
The Hammer has a 48-bit virtual and 40-bit physical addressing -- not 64-bit, although there's a good bit of confusion on this (particularly since AMD's own docs refer to 64-bit addressing in some areas, but refer to the 40/48 bit addressing in others -- I doubt they implemented full 64-bit addressing; it'd be massive overkill for the lifetime of the CPU).
I agree that Hammer is important for much more than address space though.
Moreover, they're giving 30 days for the script kiddies to run amok while we are clueless
Which part of
there are a number of exceptions that can prompt faster disclosure [...] an in-depth discussion of the problem occurs on a public mailing list; active exploitation of any form of the vulnerability occurs on the Internet; ISS receives reliable evidence that a vulnerability is in the wild
did you not understand?
If ISS follows these guidelines, then any evidence of the vulnerability being actively used will mean an immediate (or at least accelerated) release of information.
This is a pretty good process, at least if it's held to for everyone fairly and equally.
Look, I can understand not reading the article, but when you don't even bother to read the freaking summary of the article and then postulate stupidly you're an idiot.
You just don't get it... the effort has been put into the software development. It was done many years ago, and it's been working since.
Yes, there's a shitload of mainframe apps out there that could really use replacing, and management won't spend the money to replace them. And they might be right -- the fiscal advantages of the new software might take too long to pay off. If the new software would cost $50M to write (remember, we're talking reliable here), and it saves you $1M/year, would you authorize the project? If you do, I hope your resume is in good order. You'll need it.
A lot of the mainframe apps that aren't going anywhere shouldn't... rewrite the air traffic control system. Have fun. Or maybe the software controlling the power grid. Or the water flow through the Grand Coulee Dam. Or the banking system. Or Wall Street.
Mainframe apps generally need tweaking, not wholesale replacement... the bugs were worked out decades ago, and we're talking about industries where having a working product is far more important than having the latest and greatest buzzword.
Of course, modern day mainframes can run all those buzzwords too. At reliabities that are so absurd it's not even worth talking about. And with throughput that is just mind boggling.
And how much I/O can your PC do? Or a cluster of PCs? Nowhere even close to what mainframes can handle... 24 GB/s -- take 96 Gigabit ethernet cards, stick them all in your PC (oh... you can't...), and then blast them at absolute maximum theoretical bandwidth.
Of course, if you want to be "realistic" you'll have to use 128 Gb ethernet interfaces, since the maximum realized bandwidth on a full duplex circuit is around 1.5 Gbps.
Oh... what's that? Your bus can't even handle the full bandwidth of a single Gigabit ethernet interface? Well, then I suppose your I/O is going to royally suck in comparison.
Oh, and let's not even get on the topic of reliability... PCs just aren't. I'm a PC guy (I shudder at the thought of having to deal with mainframes), but I know their limitations. And while you're dead wrong about travel reservation systems running on PC clusters (they don't - the entire backend system is still on mainframes), whoop de doo if it was run on PCs. This isn't something where a node going down would cause major problems.
If a node goes down on the air traffic control system, however, you can damn well bet there's problems. Big ones. Weighing several hundred tons, moving at a few hundred miles an hour, and disinclined to stay aloft while you take a few hours to get the system back up.
maybe live with a little data incoherency
Yes... a little data incoherency is no big deal. I'm sure the power grid will work just fine with a "little" incoherency. You don't mind a power plant (be it coal, nuke, whatever) having a massive cascade failure every couple years, right?
I have absolutely no desire to ever work on mainframes -- the software in place is largely old and crufty, but by god it works. The hardware isn't old crap either -- you can buy new machines that will run the old software perfectly. And have capabilities that us PC weenies can't even comprehend. You realize that virtually every advance in the PC industry was tested and proven in the mainframe world first, right?
And do you think that electricity forms out of nothingness?
A rather large amount of electric power in this country is provided by heavy oil plants -- which burn imported oil, at least in part.
A much larger amount of electric power is provided by coal fired plants, which produce a great deal of pollution -- both in byproduct greenhouse gases and in radioactive isotopes. Shame the greens shut down the much cleaner nuclear program in the US.
I do rather agree with your take on the hyper-huge SUVs though. And I do wish people would take a more serious attitude toward reducing fuel consumption -- the newer hybrid cars are a great step toward that goal. Just realize that electric vehicles are not inherently better than gas or diesel vehicles -- all that really happens is the energy source gets shifted (of course, it's theoretically easier to reduce emissions and choose fuel sources for a few thousand power plants than it is for a few hundred million vehicles).
I have a mere 4 mile commute... but doing it in anything but a car would be suicide. I do not live in a non-motorvehicle friendly city. Not by a long stretch.
rather than throwing money at problems and overengineering them
Yes, because it's so damn easy. Which is why, what, less than a dozen countries in the world have Earth to space launch capabilites right now.
Of course, we'll also ignore that NASA happened to pioneer a lot of the technology that all but one of those other countries now use...
If NASA has the attitude that having a space station that was 99% safe, instead of 99.99% safe
Then we'd have nothing at all in space. Let's do the math... if you have a system that is made up of 100 parts and is 99% safe then, on average, one part will malfunction every use. If you take that same system and it's 99.99% safe then you have one part malfunction every 100 uses. And since orbital systems are considerably more than 100 parts, you can pretty much guarantee that there's going to be a problem everytime, even at 99.999% reliability. The idea is to make it so that when that problem does occur it doesn't become fatal.
Has NASA made some mistakes? Hell yeah... the bureacracy is absurd, the NIH syndrome is rampant, and the reluctance to try new technologies is systemic. That said, most space buffs also tend to ignore the quibbling little issues that make NASA not pursue a lot of avenues... whether those issues are political, sociological, financial, or technical.
Any history buff can tell you just how far a few, determined, idealistic men can go in changing history
Mayhaps you should go looking into the X-Prize, which has this as its aim. I sincerely hope that one of the teams succeeds, since it would dramatically revolutionize the space game. I worry, however, that the teams with the most likelyhood of succeeding will be hamstrung by bureacrats that are too worried about turf and are, indeed, wiffles.
and altared history
Interesting typo there.. but I'll leave the troll bait alone.
For about the same reason you'd want to be using Windows 2000 in 2006 -- because you have a production system running it that's stable and smart sysadmins don't screw with stable systems.
Fine, so go and find a patch for a 2.0 kernel. The point remains the same.
The reason Microsoft still supports windows 98 is that people still use it
Oh, so I suppose all the people who were running Win95 when it ceased support 2 years ago were mythical... and all the people who got screwed by DX8.1a not being available for Win95 were also illusionary.
You realize there are still people running DOS and Win 3.x out there, right?
Products have a life cycle. And, frankly, as much as MS gets bashed, they have a pretty damn long life cycle for a consumer OS. It's considerably longer than you can reliably expect patches from the Linux community. The standard line is "just upgrade" or "so fix it yourself", neither of which are viable answers in the real world.
If people still used the older versions on Linux they would be supported. But since everyone has moved on there is no point
Uh huh. If you want to believe that particular delusion, keep going.
When was the last 2.1 patch? Oh... right... nobody is running 2.1 still. Sure. Uh huh. And yes, those are modifiable.
No, but go try and find security patches for a Slackware 1.0 system... or anything running the 1.x series of kernels. Good luck!
While the theory is nice, and I'm sure someone will note that the source is available so you can patch it yourself (which is most certainly not true of Windows), the reality is that outdated Linux systems are harder to find patches for than Windows in some cases. Most serious bugs aren't patchable by even above average programmers -- the time involved in learning the code base so you can figure out where the bug is and fix it is usually huge... hell, most programmers have a hard enough time fixing code they wrote 3 months ago, much less someone else's code!
As a case in point, MS is still providing patches to Win98. Trying to find patches for a Linux system 4 years out of date is a daunting task. No, it's not true in every case. But the majority of cases it is true. It's stuff like this that makes CTOs break out in cold sweats when they think about moving to Linux. You can't simply upgrade to the latest version of library X everytime one comes out -- that kills support because they have to test everything before every upgrade to make sure nothing breaks. But if you don't then you run the serious liability of not being able to patch a security hole several months or years down the line. Yeah, theoretically true for other OS's as well, but very few OS's have the level of constant flux that Linux exhibits.
That said, we're slowly moving to Linux here (Redhat specifically), and I couldn't be happier. AIX sucks. SCO sucks even more. But both have better long term support than Linux has shown thus far.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), the computer was developed for BBC. Even if Acorn did the work on it, it was work for hire - which, in the US at least, puts the copyright in the employer's name.
Of course, the DMCA is a US law anyway, and neither Acorn nor the BBC fall under its domain. Nor is the work in question under US purview. I suppose you could go after the University of Michigan researchers, who are in the US, but that's it.
Yes, I realize the whole Dmitry Skylarov issue, but that is a case of a foreign national violating the DMCA on a work owned by an US entity (a corporation). IANAL, but I think it's a considerable difference.
I suppose you'd like to simply ignore the fact that Iraq did, in fact, expel weapon inspectors on 30-Oct-1997 and 2-Nov-1997. UNSCOM inspectors of US nationality were expelled and/or refused entry on those dates. (Sources: 1, 2
Yes, Butler ordered the teams to leave after this point, but Iraq did indeed block the inspectors.
I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA
Well, gee, since the original project was done by the BBC, on a BBC microcomputer, and the emulation of said microcomputer was commissioned by the BBC, I don't think the DMCA applies.
The overall question you ask is a valid one, but the answer is "repeal idiotic laws like the DMCA". Not throw it all away and start over, in which case you'll just face the same problem a few years later.
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda
Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.
I could rape the previous/. thread for the info, but just click on the link in the main story and read it for yourself. Essentially "Domesday" translates to "Day of Judgements" in modern English.
Not on a modern MB... they'll query the SIMM and ask it what settings it likes. And use them. Anything beyond that is called "overclocking", and frankly, you buy so absurdly little with most OCing it's not worth it.
Yeah, I've OC'd before, and while it was stable at the time, it wasn't 3 years later. I've got a system that's pretty much unusable now because it was run over the limits of design... it would make a great fileserver, but it's just not stable.
I could probably squeek a bit of additional performance out of my brand new ASUS Nforce2 MB, but it's just not worth it. I've looked at the default timings - and they're exactly what Corsair said they're qualified for.
It's more about what kind of game you want to play than anything else.
FPS, RTS, Turn-based strategy (e.g. - Civ), and MMORPG are best on PCs. The controls do not lend themselves to the little hand controls on consoles. These kind of games evolved on the PC.
Driving games, shoot-em-ups, platform games, and fighting games are best on consoles. Their controllers are great for this kind of thing, and they largely evolved from the arcade, which is the same audience consoles were originally aimed at.
RPGs are something of a toss up -- they're usually fun on both platforms. Ditto Flight Sims, which essentially require a separate control system on either platform. Driving games often do too, but even so the console versions are generally better.
Basically, decide which kind of game you enjoy playing more and go for it. The other big advantage of a console system is that if you have friends over a lot then you're more likely to play head-to-head games on it than on PCs -- PC games just don't do well for multi-player-on-the-same-box generally.
It used to be that PCs were the only real choice for playing online, but as you mention, that's changing. I don't forsee the game types on each system changing dramatically though - the ones the PC rules in are usually because of the more complex controls needed. Maybe once consoles come with keyboard/mouse standard, but not until then.
B5 was an excellent series... at least up until season 5.
It's not surprising, really... the arc had to be abruptly shortened when TNT didn't indicate if they were renewing for season 5, and so season 4 packs in a good bit of what might have ended up in the next season.
I loved seasons 2-4 (as you said, the first season was rather slow, but it does have several key episodes that are important all the way to the 4th), but the last season was simply lackluster. It seemed much more jagged and lacking in direction than the prior ones, and you'd think there would be more fallout from the events in season 4 then there were.
I'll still get it all on DVD, but I do lament TNTs lack of commitment and the effect it had on the series as a whole.
Don't suggest that that makes him moral, or worthy of emulation, or that those of us who haven't given away 46% of our net worth are somehow inferior.
Worthy of emulation as far as his charitable donations go... but not his business practices (chicken and egg, I know). I made no statements regarding how good or not good of a person Bill Gates is.
What I was responding to was this:
Is Eric Raymond worth 1/1000th of what Bill Gates is? I give more of my net worth to charity than Mr. Gates does.
Which is outright false, as demonstrated by my post.
I don't like Bill Gates. I'm no MS fan. I'd be happy to see free software adopted by governments everywhere. But people who bash Gates's charitable donations or the Gates Foundation are full of crap, and usually Linux/OSS zealots that are just looking for something to whinge about.
Bill Gates cannot donate copies of MS Windows or Office. Microsoft's EULA prevents that.
MS can, but MS has no ties to the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates has funded the Gates Foundation to the tune of $21B+ -- largely by giving the foundation shares of MSFT which are then converted into cash. This minimizes the tax liability for everyone involved, since a charitable donation of stock has its value "reset" by donating - even if he paid $0.0000001/share for the stock the Gates Foundation can turn around and sell it at full price and not have any tax liability. Bill can also write off the donation at the difference between the face value and the paid value (essentially the face value). Of course, there are limits to charitable deductions and you kinda blow them by giving that much.
The Gates foundation has not put strings like you suggest on the money donated, at least not to my knowledge (and I very well could be wrong). Hell, there have been stories about it here on/., such as when a Maine (I think, too lazy to Google right now) school district used the $1M donation from the Gates Foundation to buy Macintosh laptops.
What MS does with it's charitable donations is a whole different matter - in their case I agree with your points. But MS != Gates Foundation.
For TiVo, you can tell it not to record suggestions. You can also call TiVo and tell them to exclude you from the aggragate profile data (they do not sell any data that can tie directly back to you, but they do sell aggregate data based on zip code).
For Amazon you can explictly exclude purchases from recommendations. I don't see a way to turn it off entirely, but I'm probably not poking around enough.
And, frankly, anything and everything will offend someone, somewhere. If you don't want it, don't enable the feature.
You realize, of course, that US charities must give away 5% of their net worth annually in order to remain classified as a charity.
The Gates Foundation alone has to give away over $1B/year in order to meet this requirement (Bill Gates has funded it to at least $21B).
Sure, you can give away an arbitrary amount of money rather easily. But to ensure that it's used properly and not just by scam artists is rather difficult.
Gates is in his late 40s. He still has a rather long time to go before he passes on. Andrew Carnagie, the renowned capatilist (and not renowned in a good way) and philanthropist (in a good way) didn't start giving out his money until he was 65.
Since he's given (in adjusted dollars) considerably more than even Carnagie, he'll wind up with foundations and grants in his name for well over a century. What a greedy bastard.
Of course, this will end up whitewashing his name in history, just like it has Carnagie, Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Nobel. And yes, that sucks, because I do think Microsoft's business practice's are abhorrant. But that doesn't change the fact that the money is being used for some very good causes now, and it's a helluva lot better than it sitting in a bank account. Personally, I'm able to separate the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Bill Gates as separate entities. It's just a shame that you can't.
Not knowing the industry or the apps, I'll just resort to ad hoc speculation. But, hey, this is/. afterall:)
What are the training costs for the two? Is OneWorld significantly easier to learn and use? Does it interoperate with more 3rd party programs? Is it more friendly with respect to data input and output?
Odds are good that ManMan is actually more efficient for a trained operator - but the cost of getting that trained operator is relatively high. On the other hand, you can plop down half a dozen monkeys in front of OneWorld and get results.
True or not? If not, then I definitely have to wonder what advantages OneWorld actually presents over ManMan, other than support and maintainability (which, without a doubt, are huge requirements in the business world).
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... 106 degree showers aren't all that uncommon, and it's not likely to scald. The recommendation is to run your hot water heater at 120 degress Farenheight, since above that will scald, and do so quickly (especially for young children), and any equipment that needs hotter water (like your dishwasher) will have a booster heater that's more efficient anyway.
:)
BTW, you'd need to expose some household bacteria to 160 deg. F to kill them... and I think we both know there's better ways to kill bacteria than squirting hot water all over the damn place
Regarding the thermodynamics -- I certainly don't know thermo much at all, but I really doubt you could use the output of this to reliably heat water. Even if you're cooling the refrigerator by 40 degrees from ambiant, that's mostly air that you're cooling. Heating water takes a considerably larger amount of energy than cooling air does. But, as you point out, we are running the refrigerator far more often than our hot water, so as long as you have a tank based system you can still heat dump into the water.
Except that ground water isn't 70 degrees -- it is often as little as 40 degrees. Even with perfect thermal transfer, that's just not going to output enough heat. It might work as a backup method, but not as a primary heat source.
Of course, like I said, I know very little about thermo, so I could be wrong. Correct me if so, please.
Well... kinda...
I suspect some people do use alternate addressing, since Intel put it in the Xeon -- it has a (slower) 36-bit mode that can address up to 8 GB of virtual memory.
The Hammer has a 48-bit virtual and 40-bit physical addressing -- not 64-bit, although there's a good bit of confusion on this (particularly since AMD's own docs refer to 64-bit addressing in some areas, but refer to the 40/48 bit addressing in others -- I doubt they implemented full 64-bit addressing; it'd be massive overkill for the lifetime of the CPU).
I agree that Hammer is important for much more than address space though.
Which part of
did you not understand?
If ISS follows these guidelines, then any evidence of the vulnerability being actively used will mean an immediate (or at least accelerated) release of information.
This is a pretty good process, at least if it's held to for everyone fairly and equally.
Look, I can understand not reading the article, but when you don't even bother to read the freaking summary of the article and then postulate stupidly you're an idiot.
You just don't get it... the effort has been put into the software development. It was done many years ago, and it's been working since.
Yes, there's a shitload of mainframe apps out there that could really use replacing, and management won't spend the money to replace them. And they might be right -- the fiscal advantages of the new software might take too long to pay off. If the new software would cost $50M to write (remember, we're talking reliable here), and it saves you $1M/year, would you authorize the project? If you do, I hope your resume is in good order. You'll need it.
A lot of the mainframe apps that aren't going anywhere shouldn't... rewrite the air traffic control system. Have fun. Or maybe the software controlling the power grid. Or the water flow through the Grand Coulee Dam. Or the banking system. Or Wall Street.
Mainframe apps generally need tweaking, not wholesale replacement... the bugs were worked out decades ago, and we're talking about industries where having a working product is far more important than having the latest and greatest buzzword.
Of course, modern day mainframes can run all those buzzwords too. At reliabities that are so absurd it's not even worth talking about. And with throughput that is just mind boggling.
And yes, they run Linux too.
And how much I/O can your PC do? Or a cluster of PCs? Nowhere even close to what mainframes can handle... 24 GB/s -- take 96 Gigabit ethernet cards, stick them all in your PC (oh... you can't...), and then blast them at absolute maximum theoretical bandwidth.
Of course, if you want to be "realistic" you'll have to use 128 Gb ethernet interfaces, since the maximum realized bandwidth on a full duplex circuit is around 1.5 Gbps.
Oh... what's that? Your bus can't even handle the full bandwidth of a single Gigabit ethernet interface? Well, then I suppose your I/O is going to royally suck in comparison.
Oh, and let's not even get on the topic of reliability... PCs just aren't. I'm a PC guy (I shudder at the thought of having to deal with mainframes), but I know their limitations. And while you're dead wrong about travel reservation systems running on PC clusters (they don't - the entire backend system is still on mainframes), whoop de doo if it was run on PCs. This isn't something where a node going down would cause major problems.
If a node goes down on the air traffic control system, however, you can damn well bet there's problems. Big ones. Weighing several hundred tons, moving at a few hundred miles an hour, and disinclined to stay aloft while you take a few hours to get the system back up.
maybe live with a little data incoherency
Yes... a little data incoherency is no big deal. I'm sure the power grid will work just fine with a "little" incoherency. You don't mind a power plant (be it coal, nuke, whatever) having a massive cascade failure every couple years, right?
I have absolutely no desire to ever work on mainframes -- the software in place is largely old and crufty, but by god it works. The hardware isn't old crap either -- you can buy new machines that will run the old software perfectly. And have capabilities that us PC weenies can't even comprehend. You realize that virtually every advance in the PC industry was tested and proven in the mainframe world first, right?
And do you think that electricity forms out of nothingness?
A rather large amount of electric power in this country is provided by heavy oil plants -- which burn imported oil, at least in part.
A much larger amount of electric power is provided by coal fired plants, which produce a great deal of pollution -- both in byproduct greenhouse gases and in radioactive isotopes. Shame the greens shut down the much cleaner nuclear program in the US.
I do rather agree with your take on the hyper-huge SUVs though. And I do wish people would take a more serious attitude toward reducing fuel consumption -- the newer hybrid cars are a great step toward that goal. Just realize that electric vehicles are not inherently better than gas or diesel vehicles -- all that really happens is the energy source gets shifted (of course, it's theoretically easier to reduce emissions and choose fuel sources for a few thousand power plants than it is for a few hundred million vehicles).
I have a mere 4 mile commute... but doing it in anything but a car would be suicide. I do not live in a non-motorvehicle friendly city. Not by a long stretch.
Er... oops. Thanks for the fix though. I honestly slept through my probability and statistics courses.
rather than throwing money at problems and overengineering them
Yes, because it's so damn easy. Which is why, what, less than a dozen countries in the world have Earth to space launch capabilites right now.
Of course, we'll also ignore that NASA happened to pioneer a lot of the technology that all but one of those other countries now use...
If NASA has the attitude that having a space station that was 99% safe, instead of 99.99% safe
Then we'd have nothing at all in space. Let's do the math... if you have a system that is made up of 100 parts and is 99% safe then, on average, one part will malfunction every use. If you take that same system and it's 99.99% safe then you have one part malfunction every 100 uses. And since orbital systems are considerably more than 100 parts, you can pretty much guarantee that there's going to be a problem everytime, even at 99.999% reliability. The idea is to make it so that when that problem does occur it doesn't become fatal.
Has NASA made some mistakes? Hell yeah... the bureacracy is absurd, the NIH syndrome is rampant, and the reluctance to try new technologies is systemic. That said, most space buffs also tend to ignore the quibbling little issues that make NASA not pursue a lot of avenues... whether those issues are political, sociological, financial, or technical.
Any history buff can tell you just how far a few, determined, idealistic men can go in changing history
Mayhaps you should go looking into the X-Prize, which has this as its aim. I sincerely hope that one of the teams succeeds, since it would dramatically revolutionize the space game. I worry, however, that the teams with the most likelyhood of succeeding will be hamstrung by bureacrats that are too worried about turf and are, indeed, wiffles.
and altared history
Interesting typo there.. but I'll leave the troll bait alone.
For about the same reason you'd want to be using Windows 2000 in 2006 -- because you have a production system running it that's stable and smart sysadmins don't screw with stable systems.
Fine, so go and find a patch for a 2.0 kernel. The point remains the same.
The reason Microsoft still supports windows 98 is that people still use it
Oh, so I suppose all the people who were running Win95 when it ceased support 2 years ago were mythical... and all the people who got screwed by DX8.1a not being available for Win95 were also illusionary.
You realize there are still people running DOS and Win 3.x out there, right?
Products have a life cycle. And, frankly, as much as MS gets bashed, they have a pretty damn long life cycle for a consumer OS. It's considerably longer than you can reliably expect patches from the Linux community. The standard line is "just upgrade" or "so fix it yourself", neither of which are viable answers in the real world.
If people still used the older versions on Linux they would be supported. But since everyone has moved on there is no point
Uh huh. If you want to believe that particular delusion, keep going.
When was the last 2.1 patch? Oh... right... nobody is running 2.1 still. Sure. Uh huh. And yes, those are modifiable.
No, but go try and find security patches for a Slackware 1.0 system... or anything running the 1.x series of kernels. Good luck!
While the theory is nice, and I'm sure someone will note that the source is available so you can patch it yourself (which is most certainly not true of Windows), the reality is that outdated Linux systems are harder to find patches for than Windows in some cases. Most serious bugs aren't patchable by even above average programmers -- the time involved in learning the code base so you can figure out where the bug is and fix it is usually huge... hell, most programmers have a hard enough time fixing code they wrote 3 months ago, much less someone else's code!
As a case in point, MS is still providing patches to Win98. Trying to find patches for a Linux system 4 years out of date is a daunting task. No, it's not true in every case. But the majority of cases it is true. It's stuff like this that makes CTOs break out in cold sweats when they think about moving to Linux. You can't simply upgrade to the latest version of library X everytime one comes out -- that kills support because they have to test everything before every upgrade to make sure nothing breaks. But if you don't then you run the serious liability of not being able to patch a security hole several months or years down the line. Yeah, theoretically true for other OS's as well, but very few OS's have the level of constant flux that Linux exhibits.
That said, we're slowly moving to Linux here (Redhat specifically), and I couldn't be happier. AIX sucks. SCO sucks even more. But both have better long term support than Linux has shown thus far.
people start using efficent filtering, the amount of spam they see, and possibly respond to, decreases
Except that the people who respond to spam (and thus make it worthwhile) are exactly the same ones who aren't going to filter.
There's a sucker born every minute, and if you mail out 250M emails daily then you're going to find the sucker. Repeatedly.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), the computer was developed for BBC. Even if Acorn did the work on it, it was work for hire - which, in the US at least, puts the copyright in the employer's name.
Of course, the DMCA is a US law anyway, and neither Acorn nor the BBC fall under its domain. Nor is the work in question under US purview. I suppose you could go after the University of Michigan researchers, who are in the US, but that's it.
Yes, I realize the whole Dmitry Skylarov issue, but that is a case of a foreign national violating the DMCA on a work owned by an US entity (a corporation). IANAL, but I think it's a considerable difference.
I suppose you'd like to simply ignore the fact that Iraq did, in fact, expel weapon inspectors on 30-Oct-1997 and 2-Nov-1997. UNSCOM inspectors of US nationality were expelled and/or refused entry on those dates. (Sources: 1, 2
Yes, Butler ordered the teams to leave after this point, but Iraq did indeed block the inspectors.
If it's a transcription, exactly, of the original Old English then there is probably no copyright.
If it's a photograph then there's a copyright on the photo.
If it's a translation from Old English to Modern English or another language then there's a copyright on the translation.
But, all in all, yes, it's rather silly.
I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA
Well, gee, since the original project was done by the BBC, on a BBC microcomputer, and the emulation of said microcomputer was commissioned by the BBC, I don't think the DMCA applies.
The overall question you ask is a valid one, but the answer is "repeal idiotic laws like the DMCA". Not throw it all away and start over, in which case you'll just face the same problem a few years later.
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda
/. thread for the info, but just click on the link in the main story and read it for yourself. Essentially "Domesday" translates to "Day of Judgements" in modern English.
Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.
I could rape the previous
Not on a modern MB... they'll query the SIMM and ask it what settings it likes. And use them. Anything beyond that is called "overclocking", and frankly, you buy so absurdly little with most OCing it's not worth it.
Yeah, I've OC'd before, and while it was stable at the time, it wasn't 3 years later. I've got a system that's pretty much unusable now because it was run over the limits of design... it would make a great fileserver, but it's just not stable.
I could probably squeek a bit of additional performance out of my brand new ASUS Nforce2 MB, but it's just not worth it. I've looked at the default timings - and they're exactly what Corsair said they're qualified for.
It's more about what kind of game you want to play than anything else.
FPS, RTS, Turn-based strategy (e.g. - Civ), and MMORPG are best on PCs. The controls do not lend themselves to the little hand controls on consoles. These kind of games evolved on the PC.
Driving games, shoot-em-ups, platform games, and fighting games are best on consoles. Their controllers are great for this kind of thing, and they largely evolved from the arcade, which is the same audience consoles were originally aimed at.
RPGs are something of a toss up -- they're usually fun on both platforms. Ditto Flight Sims, which essentially require a separate control system on either platform. Driving games often do too, but even so the console versions are generally better.
Basically, decide which kind of game you enjoy playing more and go for it. The other big advantage of a console system is that if you have friends over a lot then you're more likely to play head-to-head games on it than on PCs -- PC games just don't do well for multi-player-on-the-same-box generally.
It used to be that PCs were the only real choice for playing online, but as you mention, that's changing. I don't forsee the game types on each system changing dramatically though - the ones the PC rules in are usually because of the more complex controls needed. Maybe once consoles come with keyboard/mouse standard, but not until then.
B5 was an excellent series... at least up until season 5.
It's not surprising, really... the arc had to be abruptly shortened when TNT didn't indicate if they were renewing for season 5, and so season 4 packs in a good bit of what might have ended up in the next season.
I loved seasons 2-4 (as you said, the first season was rather slow, but it does have several key episodes that are important all the way to the 4th), but the last season was simply lackluster. It seemed much more jagged and lacking in direction than the prior ones, and you'd think there would be more fallout from the events in season 4 then there were.
I'll still get it all on DVD, but I do lament TNTs lack of commitment and the effect it had on the series as a whole.
Worthy of emulation as far as his charitable donations go... but not his business practices (chicken and egg, I know). I made no statements regarding how good or not good of a person Bill Gates is.
What I was responding to was this:
Which is outright false, as demonstrated by my post.
I don't like Bill Gates. I'm no MS fan. I'd be happy to see free software adopted by governments everywhere. But people who bash Gates's charitable donations or the Gates Foundation are full of crap, and usually Linux/OSS zealots that are just looking for something to whinge about.
You're deeply, deeply confused.
/., such as when a Maine (I think, too lazy to Google right now) school district used the $1M donation from the Gates Foundation to buy Macintosh laptops.
Bill Gates cannot donate copies of MS Windows or Office. Microsoft's EULA prevents that.
MS can, but MS has no ties to the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates has funded the Gates Foundation to the tune of $21B+ -- largely by giving the foundation shares of MSFT which are then converted into cash. This minimizes the tax liability for everyone involved, since a charitable donation of stock has its value "reset" by donating - even if he paid $0.0000001/share for the stock the Gates Foundation can turn around and sell it at full price and not have any tax liability. Bill can also write off the donation at the difference between the face value and the paid value (essentially the face value). Of course, there are limits to charitable deductions and you kinda blow them by giving that much.
The Gates foundation has not put strings like you suggest on the money donated, at least not to my knowledge (and I very well could be wrong). Hell, there have been stories about it here on
What MS does with it's charitable donations is a whole different matter - in their case I agree with your points. But MS != Gates Foundation.
There is an opt-in on both Amazon and TiVo.
For TiVo, you can tell it not to record suggestions. You can also call TiVo and tell them to exclude you from the aggragate profile data (they do not sell any data that can tie directly back to you, but they do sell aggregate data based on zip code).
For Amazon you can explictly exclude purchases from recommendations. I don't see a way to turn it off entirely, but I'm probably not poking around enough.
And, frankly, anything and everything will offend someone, somewhere. If you don't want it, don't enable the feature.
You realize, of course, that US charities must give away 5% of their net worth annually in order to remain classified as a charity.
The Gates Foundation alone has to give away over $1B/year in order to meet this requirement (Bill Gates has funded it to at least $21B).
Sure, you can give away an arbitrary amount of money rather easily. But to ensure that it's used properly and not just by scam artists is rather difficult.
Gates is in his late 40s. He still has a rather long time to go before he passes on. Andrew Carnagie, the renowned capatilist (and not renowned in a good way) and philanthropist (in a good way) didn't start giving out his money until he was 65.
Since he's given (in adjusted dollars) considerably more than even Carnagie, he'll wind up with foundations and grants in his name for well over a century. What a greedy bastard.
Of course, this will end up whitewashing his name in history, just like it has Carnagie, Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Nobel. And yes, that sucks, because I do think Microsoft's business practice's are abhorrant. But that doesn't change the fact that the money is being used for some very good causes now, and it's a helluva lot better than it sitting in a bank account. Personally, I'm able to separate the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Bill Gates as separate entities. It's just a shame that you can't.
Not knowing the industry or the apps, I'll just resort to ad hoc speculation. But, hey, this is /. afterall :)
What are the training costs for the two? Is OneWorld significantly easier to learn and use? Does it interoperate with more 3rd party programs? Is it more friendly with respect to data input and output?
Odds are good that ManMan is actually more efficient for a trained operator - but the cost of getting that trained operator is relatively high. On the other hand, you can plop down half a dozen monkeys in front of OneWorld and get results.
True or not? If not, then I definitely have to wonder what advantages OneWorld actually presents over ManMan, other than support and maintainability (which, without a doubt, are huge requirements in the business world).