DIVX failed because people didn't like the idea of ONLY being able to pay-per-view. It was companies like Disney announcing that they were going to release everything exclusively on DIVX and mainly on the silver (pay per unlock) instead of the gold format which really killed the idea.
People realized that buying any movie they'd want to watch many times (most ones you'd be motivated to buy) would end up costing them much more than the purchase price of a DVD even if the up-front cost was low.
Now, if DIVX's rental scheme worked, but they also sold gold (the unlimited play, like regular DVD) discs as the default, the format might have been more popular. As it was, it just screwed the consumer.
Non-techie friends of my dad made a point of telling everyone they knew not to get a DIVX. They weren't open-source spouting geeks, these were "average joes" in their fifties who had seen that DIVX was all about gouging the viewer and they spoke out against it. If they didn't like it, who did? IMHO just corporate execs.
I don't think buying direct would work, because the artist would still have to buy the CD from their label. At least they'd make the retail markup instead of a store, but that's nowhere near all the cost.
Instead, simply pirate the music and tip the artist with Fairtunes or a similar site. It's not legal, but it supports the people you want to support while not supporting the profiteering jerks who want to restrict your freedom.
Even if I wanted CDs, I wouldn't buy them. The RIAA (and MPAA, this also applies to DVDs) have pissed me off with their cavalier attitude towards law (judge Kaplan on the payroll, etc.). When there's an artist I want to support, I'll do it directly, but they'll never get a penny from me via the studios, because out of $15 a penny is about all they would get. The rest helps the enemy, which isn't a good trade IMHO.
Well, the GPL doesn't really come into play until you're ready to distribute your own program, so you do have modifications that you're prepared to release. That's the consideration.
And if that's not valid, it falls back to the unlicensed state where you aren't allowed to make a derivative work anyways, so...
LGPL would be better. Then MS could do the rest of the OS as closed-source, but we'd have had the source code necessary to fix the network overflows that allowed for WinNuke, TearDrop, and all ninety other exploits that crashed windows machines.
Ummm, if it costs money to develop a GPLed app, that money goes to the programmers. They'll spend their wages just like they would otherwise.
Seriously, what do you think would happen?
You'll actually *help* the economy by paying workers directly. Middle-class individuals tend to spend or invest more of their money than a company who would want to hold onto a lot of it in a very liquid state for emergencies.
So if you want $1B spent, give it to twenty thousand people, not to one large company.
So, this proves we should disolve MS corp, they harm the economy.:) (It's a joke!)
I'm sure MS does check out the Linux kernel, both independant developers and MS themselves.
The GPL doesn't even have a problem with MS looking, finding innovation, and implementing their own version of the code. That's what's supposed to happen if someone doesn't want to actually use the GPLed code (and thus the GPL).
Microsoft would be insane to pass up the opportunity to see the codebase of another leading OS.
But I doubt they steal a lot of GPLed code. It's pretty easy to take complex routines, compile them in MS's compiler (VC++6) and scan executables for something similar. If they used much GPLed code they'd probably be caught.
I'm sure Microsoft is bashing the GPL now, trying to taint it as communist, so that when they do challenge it at some point, it'll be easier. Even if they never plan on a direct challenge, it's good to be safe...
And how safe is safe? If Duff's Device (for example) was GPLed and someone found it in Microsoft code, it'd be Duff vs MS. Legally they'd tie it up in court, doing just enough to cost him thousands of dollars a year, until he dropped the suit.
But, that's law in the USA for you (and really, much of the rest of the world). Big companies always win direct action because they're satisfied in breaking the other party, not just in winning in court.
People who GPL code don't care about greedy assholes like yourself. They care about everyone else. The programmers in the next generation who need access to existing code if they're going to learn.
As for you, take the code and quit whining, or leave it, and quit whining. You can make the choice to use it or not, but accept the price.
I myself license the stuff I write (not much) under the GPL because if I've invented anything and given it away for people to use, I don't want them hiding it and declaring it their own, depriving other people of seeing how it worked. This is all choice based, nothing is forcing anyone to use it.
The great thing about copyright is that unlike patents, copyrights cover a specific implementation only instead of the fundamental ideas. If you see something I wrote, write your own. If you can't, you don't have the right to steal what I wrote.
So, what mechanism exists to screen information presented about the holocaust?
If anyone who says something didn't happen if a racist, then anything someone says did happen should be accepted. Right?
So, if I tell you that the Nazis were puppets of the blue squirrels from Atlantis, you have to agree with me, right?
Or do you only believe what someone Jewish says? What if I show you ID that verifies my religion? Do you then believe everything I say?
The point is, some people say that some things happened, some people say other things happened, other people deny anything happened. It's not always the same people.
For instance, the jews (to make a generalization here) say that the holocaust happened. They also deny being in charge of the Knights Templar and the Illuminati, using the world banks to make us dance to their evil whims. Now, the Nazi sympathizers will deny the holocaust and support the conspiracy theory. So, it's not all denials that are wrong...
Back to the original question. How do you know what really happened?
You discuss it. You take claims and check them against available evidence. You make judgements as to the reliability of the speaker and to the likelihood of their arguments. You make up your own mind.
Never write someone off. Even by listening to what you're sure is 100% wrong, you at least learn what the other side if saying and what you should research to be able to counter.
Nah, just have a railgun and a bot. Lamers with bots are really starting to clog the servers these days. And they're nowhere near as subtle as they were in the old days, the simply sit on the railgun and shoot in all directions without turning or anything.
That's why id keeps releasing new binaries, to try to keep a handle on this. They keep coming back faster every time.
Re:That's not what they mean by "unique."
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Who Owns Your Body?
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· Score: 2
Henrietta Lacks, they named the cells from the first two letters of each name, thus HeLa.
Seriously, if you don't need the patient, why use them? If you're trying to find something you can use, you want a sample you can trust. If you could take a sample from a patient whose life you know nothing about or a researcher who can give you a much better idea about any outside influences that might affect the sample, which would you choose?
But you don't, so either you need more samples, or you need a wide range of samples. Either way, if you require the help of a patient, compensate that patient.
I don't care if you say that patient wasn't important and that any one would have done. I hired movers, but they were really just a generic strong guy with a truck. Should I not bother paying them because any other mover could have done the same thing? The service they provided wasn't unique to them.
You make it sound like there are two players in this. One is the hard-working, long-suffering doctor and the other is the fat, lazy, greedy patient. The patient is saved from his laziness by the benevolent doctor who merely asks for the ability to keep saving these ungrateful slobs...
Let me instead offer another option... It involves poor (by comparison to anyone else in this discussion) patients, doctors, and researchers. Then it also involves lawyers, and managers. The researcher does honestly want to research, the doctor honestly wants to treat, and the patient wants to get better and go back to their life. They all receive a wage for a job. Then the lawyers and the managers come in, each making twenty times what anyone else does and not producing a thing. The company gets billions from some cure, the researcher gets a christmas bonus and a new labcoat, the patient gets to mortgage their house to pay a cure.
And then people question why the patient, whose cells were used to research this wonder drug, asks that they might get a little out of this. Perhaps even free treatment.
It's not patient vs researcher. It's patient/doctor/researcher vs lawyer/manager. I agree that the researchers probably aren't making a lot, but that's not the fault of the patient, it's the fault of the lawyers and managers who exist to milk to process for everything they can, at the expense of everyone else.
Re:That's not what they mean by "unique."
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Who Owns Your Body?
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· Score: 2
Sure, the doctors aren't rich. But the companies hiring them are. The guy at Amazon who actually developed the 1-click ordering system probably isn't rich either, nor the one who did the HTML, or the one who did the back-end systems. But Bezos...
If I wrote a program and distributed it, I'd be really pissed if someone FOUND something in that program and patented it, then started charging. So why should it be any different if someone FINDS something in my genes and patents it, then starts charging?
It used to be that you couldn't patent something you found, despite any funky uses it may have. You had to invent something to patent it. Otherwise people would have patented 3.141592... So why is it suddenly different with biotech? You can come along, have a rough idea of what something does, and lock it off from pursuit by other developers for years.
I realize money is an essential part of paying for research, but I'd be happy if Amazon didn't make any money related to 1-click and I'd be happy if biotech companies couldn't make any money from patenting genes.
And I know how patents are used. Offensively! You don't patent just what you know you'll focus on, you patent everything possible because you can keep a competitor from developing something...
Many patents retard development instead of helping it. If a field is so full of patents that any action taken is likely to infringe then you get companies like Rambus who exist just to sue companies who happen to trip over their overbroad patents.
Just change the rules a bit to only allow a patent on a finished drug that is ready for bottling. This patenting of discoveries is fucking pathetic. It's like an astronomer patenting a galaxy, just as insane.
And give up on that tired refrain about patents being required for industry. Patents just replace secrecy. The world developed without patents and would continue to do so if they were abolished. They may be helpful but that doesn't mean they're a natural law. If industry keeps abusing them to HAMPER growth then you shouldn't be suprised that people are starting to question the usefullness.
Many architectures support interleaving. If the CPU wants 32b at a time and the RAM is 16b wide, you simply use two banks. It's a bit more complex, but not by much.
What modern chipsets do is decouple the CPU and the RAM. In old computers traces ran straight from one to the other. Today they use the chipset as a gateway. For the most part these chipsets are fairly stupid, the IDE drives of the RAM world. They simply take one request and pass it along, interleaving directly across banks.
A server-level chipset is more like SCSI, it takes a list of requests and fills them in the quickest order. It also doesn't interleave just to get the number of bits / transfer that the CPU wants, it interleaves data across multiple banks which are each as wide as the regular data path.
With a translator (the chipset) between the RAM and CPU, you're free to fetch the data in any way you want and then just assemble it for transfer to the CPU in the most convenient way. Complex chipsets are able to do this with more banks at once.
That's a fairly gross oversimplification, but it's the jist of it.
As to why it's not done... chip size and number of traces. DIMMs are 168 pins, you basically need that many traces between the chipset and the RAM, and for two banks, you need twice that many. In addition to the traces from the chipset to the CPU, and everything else it handles.
Being that traces can only be so thin, you need more layers on the motherboard to cram them all in, which increases complexity and thus cost. Not to mention the chips being so big simply from the number of pins sticking out the bottom.
This is where RDRAM comes in, it's got a narrow bus so it takes less pins per bank. But, RDRAM is much more complex than SDRAM, making it take longer to do something, like ask for the data at a certain address. That latency makes it slower start sending data even though with more channels it's faster once it starts.
Compare this to SDRAM which is very fast to make requests of, meaning that it may be slower in the long haul but it's faster off the line.
So it comes down to a price/performance tradeoff. Multiple channels of SDRAM is always better, but more expensive and harder to do. So for some things where a little latency is less important, RDRAM might make sense. Unfortunately this isn't (IMHO) in regular computers, but instead in texture cache on a PS2 or something.
Well, I haven't really thought about the best way of interleaving data across banks with parallelization in mind. I think it's one of those things I'd have to see simulated before I could really picture it. You'd definately want more per bank in a higher-latency design, but the exact ratio isn't clear.
I can definately agree with the idea of needing out of order transactions, that's one of the wins with SCSI. With many small requests you end up getting fairly large gains from serving some out of order where with large transfers the access cost is outweighed by raw transfer speed.
As for the job stuff... I have to agree with the idea of people being cross trained. I myself rant about high-level programmers not having any low-level experience, they think that all instructions take as long to process, despite one translating easily into a single opcode and the other being a o(n^2) list operation on complex data. Argh.:)
Anyways, I have to agree. People should know all parts of the system, even if they tend to specialize, because it enables them to better use the tools.
And yeah, the short build cycle of software is a huge plus compared to an actual physical process. I remember making circuit boards (simple stuff in high school) and how screwing something up meant spending about an hour, with correcting the mistake, reprinting the board, etching it (and dying your hands green in the process) and then redrilling and soldering the components on.
I'm so spoiled these days because I'm doing a lot of prototyping in stuff like perl. When I have to go to C I find myself saving the code and immediately trying to run the executable, forgetting completely about having to build it... heh. In some ways I can't imagine going back to a long build cycle.
Regardless, hardware seems more tangible, mainly because it's hard to just hack together, so it's a larger achievement. I've only done little projects, but they still feel more impressive than the much more complex stuff I've written in code, most of the time.
I guess a good mix of the two would be best. Some hardware design, but mainly writing the code to make the hardware do funky stuff. But then, being able to fix a hardware bug instead of having to just work around it.
I agree with you on that "use it where it makes sense". I just don't think that RDRAM makes sense as the main memory of a general purpose computer.
For video, which is dealing with large concurrent data, it's fairly good. For databases which are small non-linear pieces of data, it's not.
Your point about the concurrent memory busses is interesting, but I still think a general CPU would be best served by lower latency. And it'd be a different architecture, because you'd need to interleave the data across physical RAM a MB or so at a time instead of at the bit/byte level, or you'd need to hit all the busses anyways.
I personally think you'd be better served by a decent L3 cache which could actually deal with this sort of issue better than a general-purpose memory architecture. Sort of the way an L1 cache can be so low-latency because of the tradeoffs being made in design.
I can't say that I've tested this theory, but I think with the complexity of the controller you'd basically lose any speed benefits of the architecture.
Sounds like you've got a great job. I often think I was born many years too late considering I love playing with the bare metal so much.
Yup. RDRAM is best utilized in something like streaming video, or textures. Anything where you store a lot of large 512kB or larger chunks of data and want them to come in quickly.
It does very poorly where you have data that's between 16 and 128B and you want many different little chunks from different places.
RDRAM would shine in something like video encoding, or pumping textures to a video chip, or sending large static webpages. Stuff that benchmarks easily.
RDRAM falls over doing things like Slashdot, where each page view might be constructed from five to five hundred database accesses and many little perl scripts.
RDRAM is a quest for more bandwidth at any cost, whereas SDRAM is the quest for lower latency. DDR-SDRAM is a good middle-ground.
RDRAM is fundamentally high-latency with its complex architecture. You can add more RDRAM channels and you can't combat that basic flaw. But if you take nice low-latency SDR-SDRAM and add more channels you get more bandwidth, thus counteracting any benefit RDRAM has.
Now, slow RDRAM would actually be useful in low-end PCs, the sub-$500 market. You could make a very cheap motherboard because it requires less traces. You also wouldn't care about it being really slow because, hell, it's a $500 PC running a Winchip or something. But, Rambus killed that idea with their license fees, they'll end up making it so expensive that nobody could use it except in a server, where it really really sucks.
I know you're trolling, but other people have bitten, so I'll correct your lies.
RDRAM tends to be the worst for servers. The large cache on servers negates much of the benefit of high bandwidth RAM. Instead it calls for very low latency. SDR-SDRAM is lower bandwidth, but also lower latency. RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM are higher bandwidth but also higher latency.
Few real server applications involve sending fifty megabytes of static data per second, servers are called on to do dynamic data, sites like Slashdot, or CNN, or Google, where data is processed in complex ways and then presented. There's little locality of access (it's unlikely two things near each other in memory will both be wanted) so what really matters is how little time it takes for the server to fetch these isolated bits of information that it needs.
A gaming station, on the other hand, frequently loads.5MB-4MB textures and sends them to a video card. This is only one primary read request and then a nice long stream. Both DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM shine in this area. Unfortunately, this benefit is negated by video cards with texture compression and 64MB (like all of the upcoming generation). The consumer-level chipsets used also negate many of the benefits of any technology.
Low-end PC chipsets (the stuff most of us use) handle RAM a little inefficiently and most RDRAM/SDRAM comparisons are based on a consumer-level SDRAM chipset and a server-level RDRAM chipset, so they claim that the low-end chipsets deficiencies are problems with SDRAM where they're really just a problem with a consumer-level product. People are spending $400 for a GeForce 2 Pro, yet the chipsets for their motherboards cost $15 in bulk... It's like actually putting a porsche engine in a volkswagen, you might be able to make it fit but you'll realize that a porsche is much more than a fast engine.
A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels. It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.
RDRAM only looks good on paper and a few carefully constructed (ie, outright lies) benchmarks. All the claims of Rambus are outright lies. And you can quote me on this. They're thieves, cheats, and liars. They produce no product and exist merely to patent technology invented by other people. If there's a list of people most deserving of prison, these guys and all their shareholders belong on it.
Re:How can a disc detect anything about the player
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Play DVDs On Linux
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· Score: 2
The disc doesn't actually detect, but it offers region free content, and zone X content, if the drive chooses the region free content it gets a black screen. Sort of a primative denial of service attack.
I'd personally love to sue the studios over this, if you buy a disk and find out it won't play because they crippled it. Just find an unmodded player that is hit by that bug, buy it, and sue the studios for false advertising. "They said it was a movie, it's a DVD of a black screen, and they did it intentionally!"
If you're anal about picture, as it sounds, get a matrox card. I can barely tell the difference, but friends of mine really do. Especially in very high resolutions. (I run my Viewsonic GS815 21" in 1920x1440 from my ASUS GeForce DDR) Matrox might not have the framerate in 3D apps, but in 2D they're the best consumer-level card.
And the only reason the G4 is faster decoding is that the ATI card has DVD decoding hardware. And the Athlon is borderline for software decoding. It'll work 98%, but you'll get skips in complex scenes. Both my p3-800 (600 OCed) and my GF's Thunderbird 900 do fine, but if I clock the 800 to 600 or lower (I was testing some software I wrote and forgot to return it) the jerkiness is terrible.
Has it occurred to you that perhaps they've considered the alternatives and rejected them? Would that not fall under the definition of "self thinking" and "independance" [sic] ?
No, it hasn't. Or rather, it had and I laughed at the thought.
I only know one christian who has anything like a rational view of religion, he was a minister and studied the bible in the original languages, decided what survived the translation, and tries to base his views on what he thinks a god who had said those things would now want him to do.
Every other christian I know blindly follows either what they read or what their minister reads and tells them. They're incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that the bible isn't the inspired word of god. Those bible contradiction sites that have two passages from different 'translations' that directly conflict, or that point out how the original King James talked about unicorns freak these people out. They think one of the translations must be a false one by satan, or that maybe there really were unicorns. (All because some tired monk wrote down the wrong word...)
I pick on christians here just because they're the most common, and most vocal, by far. I know some jews but they've never mentioned their beliefs (they're not orthodox, so they don't eat kosher or anything.) And I'm sure some of my other friends have beliefs that are less western than that, but they too have kept silent.
And very few people question their beliefs. When I realize I'm at odds with what many people think, I try to check my opinions. But religious people just say that faith is required and ignore any contradictions. It's like a flat-earther who realizes they don't hold the majority view, but who refuses a ride in an airplane where they could see this theoretical curvature of the earth and prove once and for all which is true...
Ignorance is perfectly acceptable, everyone is ignorant and always will be, there's just too much to learn. What isn't acceptable is someone who ignores the chance to trade some ignorance in for knowledge.
Re:Get used to it. We're in for a wild ride.
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Spidergoats
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· Score: 2
Nah. Once we get rolling we won't bother engineering a cow to make the perfect meat, we'll simply engineer meat to grow without a cow.
If you think about it, all the bits you don't eat are a waste product. It's much more efficient if you simply don't grow it.
Imagine a machine that extrudes perfectly marbled sirloin, without any gristle. Just chop them to the desired thickness and you've got your steak. Quality control could be almost perfect because you'd dump pure raw materials in and get steak out, no need to use anything like ground sheep parts and risk BSE.
Who needs a cow, which is just a circulatory system for nutrients, to grow a steak? The steak doesn't need exercise, it just needs to be 'told' to grow as if it was exercised. That's just chemical cues.
Sure, but for a tinkerer, it's a pain to have to go and buy a new PCI card when you just want to plug that ISA card in for a minute...
I've got IDE now, but I wanted to grab data off of an old SCSI drive (old - 5.25, full height) that I had kicking around. I had to go set up my old 486 because I don't have a PCI SCSI card, just an ISA and a VLB one. That ISA SCSI card is nowhere near fast, but considering the drive and the short-term nature of the task, it would have been good enough.
I also wanted to test an old sound card, an Awe 64, that I was giving to someone. I couldn't plug it in. Major pain. If I wanted to bring one of the old A/D boards home from work and fiddle with remote sensors, I couldn't because they're all ISA.
If I could replace any ISA card with a PCI card, at midnight, without leaving the house, within five minutes, that'd be okay. But if I can't, it's not so handy.
Do you understand context? When quoting, use enough of the original text to maintain proper context.
The full sentence was "Schools have no place teaching ethics or morals, asside from those directly releated to the job, and even then it's a "peer-accepted code of conduct".
That "Code of Ethics" you posted was directly work related.
Even if a school should be teaching ethics or morals outside of a work environment, #2 was directly work related. "... professional assignments..." That explicitly refers to a paid working environment, instead of pranks or back-yard projects.
You're obviously over your head here, relying on personal attacks. I said nothing about my view of how things WERE, I stated my views on how they should be.
A certain level of professional conduct is required from an engineer, but professional conduct means the way they conduct themselves professionally. If they're not working, the code of ethics is inapplicable. The code could directly say "... shall never hang cars from bridges..." and still not apply because it's PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT they're talking about. Unless these engineers took a contract to hang this car, it wasn't a work situation.
Then you skip everything you don't have an easy answer for to support your views....
I mentioned that they were threatened with a lawsuit instead of being asked for damages; it is unclear if anything was even damaged.
I also asked if you felt the need to submit to my arbitrary punishments for your actions, as misguided as you may consider them. And if not, why you see wild threats and accusations as being meaningful just because they're from a government official and not when they're from a private citizen?
Face it, they did something you couldn't do, you're jealous. If you had anything to base your complaints on you'd have posted something on-topic and meaningful.
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DIVX failed because people didn't like the idea of ONLY being able to pay-per-view. It was companies like Disney announcing that they were going to release everything exclusively on DIVX and mainly on the silver (pay per unlock) instead of the gold format which really killed the idea.
People realized that buying any movie they'd want to watch many times (most ones you'd be motivated to buy) would end up costing them much more than the purchase price of a DVD even if the up-front cost was low.
Now, if DIVX's rental scheme worked, but they also sold gold (the unlimited play, like regular DVD) discs as the default, the format might have been more popular. As it was, it just screwed the consumer.
Non-techie friends of my dad made a point of telling everyone they knew not to get a DIVX. They weren't open-source spouting geeks, these were "average joes" in their fifties who had seen that DIVX was all about gouging the viewer and they spoke out against it. If they didn't like it, who did? IMHO just corporate execs.
I don't think buying direct would work, because the artist would still have to buy the CD from their label. At least they'd make the retail markup instead of a store, but that's nowhere near all the cost.
Instead, simply pirate the music and tip the artist with Fairtunes or a similar site. It's not legal, but it supports the people you want to support while not supporting the profiteering jerks who want to restrict your freedom.
Even if I wanted CDs, I wouldn't buy them. The RIAA (and MPAA, this also applies to DVDs) have pissed me off with their cavalier attitude towards law (judge Kaplan on the payroll, etc.). When there's an artist I want to support, I'll do it directly, but they'll never get a penny from me via the studios, because out of $15 a penny is about all they would get. The rest helps the enemy, which isn't a good trade IMHO.
Well, the GPL doesn't really come into play until you're ready to distribute your own program, so you do have modifications that you're prepared to release. That's the consideration.
And if that's not valid, it falls back to the unlicensed state where you aren't allowed to make a derivative work anyways, so...
LGPL would be better. Then MS could do the rest of the OS as closed-source, but we'd have had the source code necessary to fix the network overflows that allowed for WinNuke, TearDrop, and all ninety other exploits that crashed windows machines.
Ummm, if it costs money to develop a GPLed app, that money goes to the programmers. They'll spend their wages just like they would otherwise.
:) (It's a joke!)
Seriously, what do you think would happen?
You'll actually *help* the economy by paying workers directly. Middle-class individuals tend to spend or invest more of their money than a company who would want to hold onto a lot of it in a very liquid state for emergencies.
So if you want $1B spent, give it to twenty thousand people, not to one large company.
So, this proves we should disolve MS corp, they harm the economy.
I'm sure MS does check out the Linux kernel, both independant developers and MS themselves.
The GPL doesn't even have a problem with MS looking, finding innovation, and implementing their own version of the code. That's what's supposed to happen if someone doesn't want to actually use the GPLed code (and thus the GPL).
Microsoft would be insane to pass up the opportunity to see the codebase of another leading OS.
But I doubt they steal a lot of GPLed code. It's pretty easy to take complex routines, compile them in MS's compiler (VC++6) and scan executables for something similar. If they used much GPLed code they'd probably be caught.
I'm sure Microsoft is bashing the GPL now, trying to taint it as communist, so that when they do challenge it at some point, it'll be easier. Even if they never plan on a direct challenge, it's good to be safe...
And how safe is safe? If Duff's Device (for example) was GPLed and someone found it in Microsoft code, it'd be Duff vs MS. Legally they'd tie it up in court, doing just enough to cost him thousands of dollars a year, until he dropped the suit.
But, that's law in the USA for you (and really, much of the rest of the world). Big companies always win direct action because they're satisfied in breaking the other party, not just in winning in court.
Here's what you missed.
People who GPL code don't care about greedy assholes like yourself. They care about everyone else. The programmers in the next generation who need access to existing code if they're going to learn.
As for you, take the code and quit whining, or leave it, and quit whining. You can make the choice to use it or not, but accept the price.
I myself license the stuff I write (not much) under the GPL because if I've invented anything and given it away for people to use, I don't want them hiding it and declaring it their own, depriving other people of seeing how it worked. This is all choice based, nothing is forcing anyone to use it.
The great thing about copyright is that unlike patents, copyrights cover a specific implementation only instead of the fundamental ideas. If you see something I wrote, write your own. If you can't, you don't have the right to steal what I wrote.
So, what mechanism exists to screen information presented about the holocaust?
If anyone who says something didn't happen if a racist, then anything someone says did happen should be accepted. Right?
So, if I tell you that the Nazis were puppets of the blue squirrels from Atlantis, you have to agree with me, right?
Or do you only believe what someone Jewish says? What if I show you ID that verifies my religion? Do you then believe everything I say?
The point is, some people say that some things happened, some people say other things happened, other people deny anything happened. It's not always the same people.
For instance, the jews (to make a generalization here) say that the holocaust happened. They also deny being in charge of the Knights Templar and the Illuminati, using the world banks to make us dance to their evil whims. Now, the Nazi sympathizers will deny the holocaust and support the conspiracy theory. So, it's not all denials that are wrong...
Back to the original question. How do you know what really happened?
You discuss it. You take claims and check them against available evidence. You make judgements as to the reliability of the speaker and to the likelihood of their arguments. You make up your own mind.
Never write someone off. Even by listening to what you're sure is 100% wrong, you at least learn what the other side if saying and what you should research to be able to counter.
Nah, just have a railgun and a bot. Lamers with bots are really starting to clog the servers these days. And they're nowhere near as subtle as they were in the old days, the simply sit on the railgun and shoot in all directions without turning or anything.
That's why id keeps releasing new binaries, to try to keep a handle on this. They keep coming back faster every time.
Henrietta Lacks, they named the cells from the first two letters of each name, thus HeLa.
http://www.unl.edu/wglider/biofacts/hela.html
Ok then, take the samples from yourself.
Seriously, if you don't need the patient, why use them? If you're trying to find something you can use, you want a sample you can trust. If you could take a sample from a patient whose life you know nothing about or a researcher who can give you a much better idea about any outside influences that might affect the sample, which would you choose?
But you don't, so either you need more samples, or you need a wide range of samples. Either way, if you require the help of a patient, compensate that patient.
I don't care if you say that patient wasn't important and that any one would have done. I hired movers, but they were really just a generic strong guy with a truck. Should I not bother paying them because any other mover could have done the same thing? The service they provided wasn't unique to them.
But, strangely enough, they expected to be paid.
You make it sound like there are two players in this. One is the hard-working, long-suffering doctor and the other is the fat, lazy, greedy patient. The patient is saved from his laziness by the benevolent doctor who merely asks for the ability to keep saving these ungrateful slobs...
Let me instead offer another option... It involves poor (by comparison to anyone else in this discussion) patients, doctors, and researchers. Then it also involves lawyers, and managers. The researcher does honestly want to research, the doctor honestly wants to treat, and the patient wants to get better and go back to their life. They all receive a wage for a job. Then the lawyers and the managers come in, each making twenty times what anyone else does and not producing a thing. The company gets billions from some cure, the researcher gets a christmas bonus and a new labcoat, the patient gets to mortgage their house to pay a cure.
And then people question why the patient, whose cells were used to research this wonder drug, asks that they might get a little out of this. Perhaps even free treatment.
It's not patient vs researcher. It's patient/doctor/researcher vs lawyer/manager. I agree that the researchers probably aren't making a lot, but that's not the fault of the patient, it's the fault of the lawyers and managers who exist to milk to process for everything they can, at the expense of everyone else.
Sure, the doctors aren't rich. But the companies hiring them are. The guy at Amazon who actually developed the 1-click ordering system probably isn't rich either, nor the one who did the HTML, or the one who did the back-end systems. But Bezos...
If I wrote a program and distributed it, I'd be really pissed if someone FOUND something in that program and patented it, then started charging. So why should it be any different if someone FINDS something in my genes and patents it, then starts charging?
It used to be that you couldn't patent something you found, despite any funky uses it may have. You had to invent something to patent it. Otherwise people would have patented 3.141592... So why is it suddenly different with biotech? You can come along, have a rough idea of what something does, and lock it off from pursuit by other developers for years.
I realize money is an essential part of paying for research, but I'd be happy if Amazon didn't make any money related to 1-click and I'd be happy if biotech companies couldn't make any money from patenting genes.
And I know how patents are used. Offensively! You don't patent just what you know you'll focus on, you patent everything possible because you can keep a competitor from developing something...
Many patents retard development instead of helping it. If a field is so full of patents that any action taken is likely to infringe then you get companies like Rambus who exist just to sue companies who happen to trip over their overbroad patents.
Just change the rules a bit to only allow a patent on a finished drug that is ready for bottling. This patenting of discoveries is fucking pathetic. It's like an astronomer patenting a galaxy, just as insane.
And give up on that tired refrain about patents being required for industry. Patents just replace secrecy. The world developed without patents and would continue to do so if they were abolished. They may be helpful but that doesn't mean they're a natural law. If industry keeps abusing them to HAMPER growth then you shouldn't be suprised that people are starting to question the usefullness.
To answer you and the AC who responded:
Many architectures support interleaving. If the CPU wants 32b at a time and the RAM is 16b wide, you simply use two banks. It's a bit more complex, but not by much.
What modern chipsets do is decouple the CPU and the RAM. In old computers traces ran straight from one to the other. Today they use the chipset as a gateway. For the most part these chipsets are fairly stupid, the IDE drives of the RAM world. They simply take one request and pass it along, interleaving directly across banks.
A server-level chipset is more like SCSI, it takes a list of requests and fills them in the quickest order. It also doesn't interleave just to get the number of bits / transfer that the CPU wants, it interleaves data across multiple banks which are each as wide as the regular data path.
With a translator (the chipset) between the RAM and CPU, you're free to fetch the data in any way you want and then just assemble it for transfer to the CPU in the most convenient way. Complex chipsets are able to do this with more banks at once.
That's a fairly gross oversimplification, but it's the jist of it.
As to why it's not done... chip size and number of traces. DIMMs are 168 pins, you basically need that many traces between the chipset and the RAM, and for two banks, you need twice that many. In addition to the traces from the chipset to the CPU, and everything else it handles.
Being that traces can only be so thin, you need more layers on the motherboard to cram them all in, which increases complexity and thus cost. Not to mention the chips being so big simply from the number of pins sticking out the bottom.
This is where RDRAM comes in, it's got a narrow bus so it takes less pins per bank. But, RDRAM is much more complex than SDRAM, making it take longer to do something, like ask for the data at a certain address. That latency makes it slower start sending data even though with more channels it's faster once it starts.
Compare this to SDRAM which is very fast to make requests of, meaning that it may be slower in the long haul but it's faster off the line.
So it comes down to a price/performance tradeoff. Multiple channels of SDRAM is always better, but more expensive and harder to do. So for some things where a little latency is less important, RDRAM might make sense. Unfortunately this isn't (IMHO) in regular computers, but instead in texture cache on a PS2 or something.
Well, I haven't really thought about the best way of interleaving data across banks with parallelization in mind. I think it's one of those things I'd have to see simulated before I could really picture it. You'd definately want more per bank in a higher-latency design, but the exact ratio isn't clear.
:)
I can definately agree with the idea of needing out of order transactions, that's one of the wins with SCSI. With many small requests you end up getting fairly large gains from serving some out of order where with large transfers the access cost is outweighed by raw transfer speed.
As for the job stuff... I have to agree with the idea of people being cross trained. I myself rant about high-level programmers not having any low-level experience, they think that all instructions take as long to process, despite one translating easily into a single opcode and the other being a o(n^2) list operation on complex data. Argh.
Anyways, I have to agree. People should know all parts of the system, even if they tend to specialize, because it enables them to better use the tools.
And yeah, the short build cycle of software is a huge plus compared to an actual physical process. I remember making circuit boards (simple stuff in high school) and how screwing something up meant spending about an hour, with correcting the mistake, reprinting the board, etching it (and dying your hands green in the process) and then redrilling and soldering the components on.
I'm so spoiled these days because I'm doing a lot of prototyping in stuff like perl. When I have to go to C I find myself saving the code and immediately trying to run the executable, forgetting completely about having to build it... heh. In some ways I can't imagine going back to a long build cycle.
Regardless, hardware seems more tangible, mainly because it's hard to just hack together, so it's a larger achievement. I've only done little projects, but they still feel more impressive than the much more complex stuff I've written in code, most of the time.
I guess a good mix of the two would be best. Some hardware design, but mainly writing the code to make the hardware do funky stuff. But then, being able to fix a hardware bug instead of having to just work around it.
I agree with you on that "use it where it makes sense". I just don't think that RDRAM makes sense as the main memory of a general purpose computer.
For video, which is dealing with large concurrent data, it's fairly good. For databases which are small non-linear pieces of data, it's not.
Your point about the concurrent memory busses is interesting, but I still think a general CPU would be best served by lower latency. And it'd be a different architecture, because you'd need to interleave the data across physical RAM a MB or so at a time instead of at the bit/byte level, or you'd need to hit all the busses anyways.
I personally think you'd be better served by a decent L3 cache which could actually deal with this sort of issue better than a general-purpose memory architecture. Sort of the way an L1 cache can be so low-latency because of the tradeoffs being made in design.
I can't say that I've tested this theory, but I think with the complexity of the controller you'd basically lose any speed benefits of the architecture.
Sounds like you've got a great job. I often think I was born many years too late considering I love playing with the bare metal so much.
Yup. RDRAM is best utilized in something like streaming video, or textures. Anything where you store a lot of large 512kB or larger chunks of data and want them to come in quickly.
It does very poorly where you have data that's between 16 and 128B and you want many different little chunks from different places.
RDRAM would shine in something like video encoding, or pumping textures to a video chip, or sending large static webpages. Stuff that benchmarks easily.
RDRAM falls over doing things like Slashdot, where each page view might be constructed from five to five hundred database accesses and many little perl scripts.
RDRAM is a quest for more bandwidth at any cost, whereas SDRAM is the quest for lower latency. DDR-SDRAM is a good middle-ground.
RDRAM is fundamentally high-latency with its complex architecture. You can add more RDRAM channels and you can't combat that basic flaw. But if you take nice low-latency SDR-SDRAM and add more channels you get more bandwidth, thus counteracting any benefit RDRAM has.
Now, slow RDRAM would actually be useful in low-end PCs, the sub-$500 market. You could make a very cheap motherboard because it requires less traces. You also wouldn't care about it being really slow because, hell, it's a $500 PC running a Winchip or something. But, Rambus killed that idea with their license fees, they'll end up making it so expensive that nobody could use it except in a server, where it really really sucks.
I know you're trolling, but other people have bitten, so I'll correct your lies.
.5MB-4MB textures and sends them to a video card. This is only one primary read request and then a nice long stream. Both DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM shine in this area. Unfortunately, this benefit is negated by video cards with texture compression and 64MB (like all of the upcoming generation). The consumer-level chipsets used also negate many of the benefits of any technology.
RDRAM tends to be the worst for servers. The large cache on servers negates much of the benefit of high bandwidth RAM. Instead it calls for very low latency. SDR-SDRAM is lower bandwidth, but also lower latency. RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM are higher bandwidth but also higher latency.
Few real server applications involve sending fifty megabytes of static data per second, servers are called on to do dynamic data, sites like Slashdot, or CNN, or Google, where data is processed in complex ways and then presented. There's little locality of access (it's unlikely two things near each other in memory will both be wanted) so what really matters is how little time it takes for the server to fetch these isolated bits of information that it needs.
A gaming station, on the other hand, frequently loads
Low-end PC chipsets (the stuff most of us use) handle RAM a little inefficiently and most RDRAM/SDRAM comparisons are based on a consumer-level SDRAM chipset and a server-level RDRAM chipset, so they claim that the low-end chipsets deficiencies are problems with SDRAM where they're really just a problem with a consumer-level product. People are spending $400 for a GeForce 2 Pro, yet the chipsets for their motherboards cost $15 in bulk... It's like actually putting a porsche engine in a volkswagen, you might be able to make it fit but you'll realize that a porsche is much more than a fast engine.
A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels. It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.
RDRAM only looks good on paper and a few carefully constructed (ie, outright lies) benchmarks. All the claims of Rambus are outright lies. And you can quote me on this. They're thieves, cheats, and liars. They produce no product and exist merely to patent technology invented by other people. If there's a list of people most deserving of prison, these guys and all their shareholders belong on it.
The disc doesn't actually detect, but it offers region free content, and zone X content, if the drive chooses the region free content it gets a black screen. Sort of a primative denial of service attack.
I'd personally love to sue the studios over this, if you buy a disk and find out it won't play because they crippled it. Just find an unmodded player that is hit by that bug, buy it, and sue the studios for false advertising. "They said it was a movie, it's a DVD of a black screen, and they did it intentionally!"
If you're anal about picture, as it sounds, get a matrox card. I can barely tell the difference, but friends of mine really do. Especially in very high resolutions. (I run my Viewsonic GS815 21" in 1920x1440 from my ASUS GeForce DDR) Matrox might not have the framerate in 3D apps, but in 2D they're the best consumer-level card.
And the only reason the G4 is faster decoding is that the ATI card has DVD decoding hardware. And the Athlon is borderline for software decoding. It'll work 98%, but you'll get skips in complex scenes. Both my p3-800 (600 OCed) and my GF's Thunderbird 900 do fine, but if I clock the 800 to 600 or lower (I was testing some software I wrote and forgot to return it) the jerkiness is terrible.
No, it hasn't. Or rather, it had and I laughed at the thought.
I only know one christian who has anything like a rational view of religion, he was a minister and studied the bible in the original languages, decided what survived the translation, and tries to base his views on what he thinks a god who had said those things would now want him to do.
Every other christian I know blindly follows either what they read or what their minister reads and tells them. They're incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that the bible isn't the inspired word of god. Those bible contradiction sites that have two passages from different 'translations' that directly conflict, or that point out how the original King James talked about unicorns freak these people out. They think one of the translations must be a false one by satan, or that maybe there really were unicorns. (All because some tired monk wrote down the wrong word...)
I pick on christians here just because they're the most common, and most vocal, by far. I know some jews but they've never mentioned their beliefs (they're not orthodox, so they don't eat kosher or anything.) And I'm sure some of my other friends have beliefs that are less western than that, but they too have kept silent.
And very few people question their beliefs. When I realize I'm at odds with what many people think, I try to check my opinions. But religious people just say that faith is required and ignore any contradictions. It's like a flat-earther who realizes they don't hold the majority view, but who refuses a ride in an airplane where they could see this theoretical curvature of the earth and prove once and for all which is true...
Ignorance is perfectly acceptable, everyone is ignorant and always will be, there's just too much to learn. What isn't acceptable is someone who ignores the chance to trade some ignorance in for knowledge.
Nah. Once we get rolling we won't bother engineering a cow to make the perfect meat, we'll simply engineer meat to grow without a cow.
If you think about it, all the bits you don't eat are a waste product. It's much more efficient if you simply don't grow it.
Imagine a machine that extrudes perfectly marbled sirloin, without any gristle. Just chop them to the desired thickness and you've got your steak. Quality control could be almost perfect because you'd dump pure raw materials in and get steak out, no need to use anything like ground sheep parts and risk BSE.
Who needs a cow, which is just a circulatory system for nutrients, to grow a steak? The steak doesn't need exercise, it just needs to be 'told' to grow as if it was exercised. That's just chemical cues.
Sure, but for a tinkerer, it's a pain to have to go and buy a new PCI card when you just want to plug that ISA card in for a minute...
I've got IDE now, but I wanted to grab data off of an old SCSI drive (old - 5.25, full height) that I had kicking around. I had to go set up my old 486 because I don't have a PCI SCSI card, just an ISA and a VLB one. That ISA SCSI card is nowhere near fast, but considering the drive and the short-term nature of the task, it would have been good enough.
I also wanted to test an old sound card, an Awe 64, that I was giving to someone. I couldn't plug it in. Major pain. If I wanted to bring one of the old A/D boards home from work and fiddle with remote sensors, I couldn't because they're all ISA.
If I could replace any ISA card with a PCI card, at midnight, without leaving the house, within five minutes, that'd be okay. But if I can't, it's not so handy.
Do you understand context? When quoting, use enough of the original text to maintain proper context.
..." and still not apply because it's PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT they're talking about. Unless these engineers took a contract to hang this car, it wasn't a work situation.
The full sentence was "Schools have no place teaching ethics or morals, asside from those directly releated to the job, and even then it's a "peer-accepted code of conduct".
That "Code of Ethics" you posted was directly work related.
Even if a school should be teaching ethics or morals outside of a work environment, #2 was directly work related. "... professional assignments..." That explicitly refers to a paid working environment, instead of pranks or back-yard projects.
You're obviously over your head here, relying on personal attacks. I said nothing about my view of how things WERE, I stated my views on how they should be.
A certain level of professional conduct is required from an engineer, but professional conduct means the way they conduct themselves professionally. If they're not working, the code of ethics is inapplicable. The code could directly say "... shall never hang cars from bridges
Then you skip everything you don't have an easy answer for to support your views....
I mentioned that they were threatened with a lawsuit instead of being asked for damages; it is unclear if anything was even damaged.
I also asked if you felt the need to submit to my arbitrary punishments for your actions, as misguided as you may consider them. And if not, why you see wild threats and accusations as being meaningful just because they're from a government official and not when they're from a private citizen?
Face it, they did something you couldn't do, you're jealous. If you had anything to base your complaints on you'd have posted something on-topic and meaningful.