Perhaps not, but people will say that without a corporate vendor to fall back on, you could lose thousands waiting for the patch, if it ever comes...
I've waited five years for MS to fix some bugs in Win95, they haven't. Likely never will. They're still in W-ME from what I've heard. That's not a great track record as far as product support goes. And I'm representing a company with over a hundred licenses who has complained many times, by email, fax, phone, and snail mail. I doubt any open project could ignore me more thoroughly.
But, if we had the source, I'm sure in five years I could have tracked some of the bugs down, or, if nothing else, spent some of our budget to hire a consultant to do so. It'd be money we wasted writing our software to avoid the bugs, and in dealing with incompatibilities.
I'd much rather spend a few bucks contributing to a worthy open source project than sitting on a phone, racking up the charges, waiting to talk to a tech who'll assure me that the next release will fix it, if I pay for the upgrade...
If I bought a product instead of at least evaluating the open source solutions out there, I'd be called to task for it, especially if it was an expensive product. And if it turns out I'd only done it to have someone to blame, with no idea of which product was really better, I'd be fired, justifiably so.
The funny thing is that many of the best products around are the free ones. PERL is one of the best languages, Python too if you're not a PERL nut, but I challenge you to go buy the MS version.
Many idiots will use VB and Active X, etc, where simpler, free, solutions would easily work, risking many unpublished bugs than MS can now (UCITA) sue you for making public... I'd rather investigate the options and choose. Any boss who won't let you is one you shouldn't work for. The market for tech type jobs is very good, don't work for morons who're stuck on blame games and corporate name power.
It's much different to give something away for free when it doesn't cost you anything than when you'd have to go collect the raw materials and build each copy manually.
Until people understand this basic concept, they shouldn't be writing articles, or coming up with awkward metaphors. The only thing that is directly comparable to software is software, if you have to use a metaphor to make your point then it's because your argument is broken in the original context. If your argument was any good, you'd just make it.
PPros were cool chips, but for their time. Even if you could setup a quad PPro 233 (how high did they go) system and get it setup, it wouldn't be as fast as a dual celeron box if all you wanted was raw cycles, and the celerons have FPU tweaks which would make them better at rendering.
And if you need the huge cache and want to do server type things with them, then buy a Xeon now, they're fairly cheap, only $200 above a regular P3 when you count the special board and all, and with its much higher clockspeed it'll kick whatever you could do with the older CPUs.
One of the author's points against Stallman was that Stallman had alledged that scientists had cooperated, regardless of their countrys' being at war at the time. This was derided because the Japanese commited many attrocities.
From this we learn that nothing ever done by a Japanese person could be worth anything because the dictatorship (monarchy, empire, all the same) that once ruled the country did so in a cruel fashion.
I have a bit of a problem with that...
Those scientists could have been trying to cooperate with their American counterparts, and for no sinister motives. I don't doubt that Japan still carried on research during the war, and I don't doubt that many scientists would love to see something come of their work, if they had to give it up.
Nothing there sounds so unlikely as to make me question the story, and the actions of the people around those scientists don't colour the morality of the actions of the scientists themselves.
And then his whole critique on ESR's views of open source software is that guns kill people, and only hideous, very very evil people would ever own guns. That's it. Nothing about the open source. I don't think he got that far on ESR's web page, he simply got sidetracked on the gun issue.
And he doesn't realize that not everyone agrees about things, even the most fundamental things. I myself am not (well, am not a US citizen, so it's accademic) a strong supporter of pro-gun laws, but that doesn't mean I can't read anything ESR writes.
In the end, all Bertrand Meyer ends up doing is kicking around a few straw men, alleging that anyone who doesn't agree with him on all issues should be publically shunned by all leading open source people, and then proclaiming that his views are the only rational ones. Presumably because he isn't Japanese and doesn't own guns.
This guy is barely eligible to troll and they let him write a article? Fame or ability in one area does not translate into ability or intellect in another area. Nobody would expect kick-boxing from Einstein, or Downhill skiing from Napolean, or... Why should we expect well reasonned commentary on open source from someone just because they write a book on OO?
This commentary on open source thing has been done to death, unless we can get someone who can evaluate it for what it is, without getting stuck on Stallman's attitude and ESR's guns, then let's just let it go, ok?
They wanted to add more cache than they could affordably fit onto one die, and thus into one chip. They had before done socket chips with external cache, the pentium pros, but they were large and unwieldly.
Now they refined the manufacturing processes again to allow them to fit the cache on die and they're going back to the much cheaper, better, socket design.
The slot cost more because it was bigger, required a seperate PCB, and a bunch of components required to make seperate chips interoperate. The socket chip avoids all of this, not only making it cheaper, but allowing it to dissipate all of its heat through one small plate, instead of three seperate ones. Much more easily cooled, thus higher yields. And it's also easier to strap a big fan onto a socket chip than a slot one, and the important thing is that the fan, the big part, points away from the board.
And yeah, the K6-3 was nice, a lot of K6-2s are supposedly 3s which were remarked and had some features removed at the silicon level, because people were more willing to buy the 2s than the 3s. Weird.
My account is gone, I tried to login and couldn't. (I'm assuming it's because of this.)
I scanned my MP3 drives and the only thing I have with their name in it is
f:\mp3\misc\friends\Mark - Covering Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3
For them to get me kicked off of Napster, they have to be alleging a criminal violation of some sort, and I don't think me having a copy of a garage band's music is a criminal violation (at least on my part, I have no idea about covers in general).
So, can I sue them for defemation of character or something? Or at least to get them to go to Napster and reinstate my account?
I think defamation has to have damages and be public, but there's got to be something appropriate for this case.
For certain though, I'll never buy another MP3 from those thieving bastards again. Another example of a big company (or band, backed by a big company) throwing their legal weight around and crushing anyone who gets in their way. Fuck Metallica, and fuck the RIAA.
Well, fucking pardon me if I'd rather not deal with that. It'd bad enough now, so I'd rather stop it before it gets to that point. And yes, I do have some experience with older unixes, though I never admined them.
But I still see small differences between Linux distros to be more damaging because we want Linux distros to work together. The unix manufacturers didn't want their product to coexist with other products.
I'd like to see one package be able to install and run on any x86 Linux, at a minimum, and preferably, on any full-featured Linux on any chip, with the exception of things like Q3 that require special hardware, or chopped down distros like for embedded systems or very old hardware.
And I find it a bit irrelevant if old unixes were worse. I'm not using them, not, for the most part, is anyone with a choice, because they did suck. I'd just like to keep Linux from ever ending up like that.
And yes, you are a coward, to afraid to post a flame under your own name.
Differences between distros can be harder to overcome.
If I'm in Windows, I know the config data is in the registry. If I'm in Linux I know it's mostly in text files in/etc....
But, how I do remember the six different flavours of Linux, and the specifics of their Java distros? Especially when the distros look a lot alike when you're just sitting in a directory.
And there's no reason for us to have to know where specific things go in each distro, they could either keep everything in the same places, or they could read the locations out of standardized config files. Anything but the confused mess it's in now.
That's the main reason I want open source DVD players, so I can get one without that lame feature. Either that, or a crack for one of the existing soft players.
You're lucky you can speed through, *all* the buttons other than stop are ignored on mine.
And you're right, movies are now showing third party advertising, what's to stop them from shoving it onto a DVD? And then forcing people to watch it.
I'll just install a DVD player that automatically skips any section of the disk that has the "can't fast forward" flag set. And never go back to using this lame standalone player again.
Well, a common carrier can't judge messages based on content and forward only certain ones, but they are free to choose their customers (in most circumstances) and to reject those who break the rules to send messages, whatever the content.
So ISPs just need to say that identical email sent to more than 'n' people is in violation of your terms of service, as is nearly identical (just enough to pass a dumb CRC check) bulk email, without an account specifically for running a mailing list, which would be a free upgrade, but would entitle them to monitor the account usage and determine that a subscription based mailing list was being run, not a spam list.
The phone company must let me call people, even if they don't like what I say, but if I hook up nonstandard equipment, or try to send control signals (blue boxing type stuff) or anything else that breaks their rules, they can shut me down. (Without needing to prove criminal actions or intent.)
I think people should care. You never know if someone will turn out to be different than you expected, but you can certainly avoid the people who've already proven to be sleaze.
And it matters if a big company gets control of a project because corporate goals are almost always different than the goals of the community.
And what's wrong with not wanting to donate your time to help a megacorp? I'd be relucatant to help MS for free because they can pay for what they need, but there are many free projects that count of volunteers. If MS was to buy the project from a nominal owner, regardless of the people who put time and effort in, they'd have a right to feel cheated.
If I help an open source/open content project, everyone benefits, the longhaired geeks and the corporations. I see this as being a good goal. If I helped a corporate project, only the corporation would benefit. Now if I don't get paid either way, which is a better use of time?
If you design a project to be corporate from the beginning, and don't solicit help appearing to be a free project, then do whatever you want. I'm willing to invest some time helping/. because even as a corporation, they return to the community. But if they'd said they'd always be free, run by volunteers, and then after I (theoretically) donated a few hundred hours of time, sold the company, I'd want my piece of the pie.
And the volunteer laws, that AOL ran afoul of, seem to support that. (If you do volunteer work that they pay people for, or later pay people for, you're eligible for compensation, in some cases.)
And then there's the dark side. What if the information is taken and not just closed, but used to help their other projects? Imagine if you could only access the IMDB using IE, or only access CDDB records with WinAmp, because MS or AOL bought the database? That's be getting pretty sleezy. Especially since both project were volunteer based and counted on unpaid user submissions in the early days.
The post you replied to seemed to be saying "We can't guard our GPL'd software without these facist measures which are too horible to contemplate, so we can't guard it." not "We need to implement these facist policies."
I doubt any ammount of intelligence can turn a finite ammount of gold into an infinite ammount. It may be possible to make more eventually, or to make what we have go farther, but if people want solid block of it, for whatever reason, they want a solid block, not a larger, gold plated block. That means that if gold is used as an arbitrary monetary backing, that it's supply, assuming it was all discovered, would diminish per capita, as the population increased.
The French government is just as entitled to refuse to use any closed-source application as the US Military is to refuse to use any single-source hardware.
This is the perfect answer. Use capitalism means to control the capitalist market. If you don't like what someone does, refuse to deal with them.
The US Military doesn't want to end up with a situation where a $25 million dollar jet is grounded because the only supplier of a $5 part is suddenly charging $500,000 for it. That's why they refuse to buy anything that they can't replace from at least two independant sources.
The French government doesn't want to be trapped, forced to buy new copies of MS Office for every public employee just because their copies of Win2k expired and Win2003 broke old Office packages. (Not an unprecedented thing.)
And then there's the security issue. Closed source software can contain any number of evil features. And even if you went through it with a debugger you could never be sure you didn't miss something. That'd be like the Russians (during the cold war) licensing an encryption package from the NSA. By using only open source software, the government ensures that its software is open to wide scrutiny.
True. The only exception would be if there was a small finite ammount and more could not be discovered, and it could not be lost. That way the supply would stay the same as would the money.
But, that has a problem in a world of increasing population.
Ideally we'd have a 'foo' standard, where 'foo' existed in relationship to the number of people, and where 'foo' was directly consumable, so that cashing in your cash and getting 'foo' did you some good. But we'd also need something where creating 'foo' was as hard to make as you'd expect, given the trade-in value of 'foo' to cash. That way counterfitters would work for the government, creating more 'foo', and thus more value.
But that gets into the idea of work units, and other fairly unworkable ideas.
Sure, machine flight was said to be impossible and now we do it routinely.
But only by abandoning the idea of flapping wings and going to an airfoil and lateral thrusters. (Yes, I know some people are still trying flapping aircraft, and with some degree of success, barely.)
I have no doubt that there's a lower size limit beyond which silicon chips will *not* reach. At best, this is one atom-wide pathways.
That doesn't mean that we'll never get anything better, just that the current 'cheap and easy' process will have reached its limits and we'll be using the less popular (because of price, or whatever) techniques, until those too run out, and we move to whatever new technologies we've found.
There are a lot of things that can done with chips to make them faster. Silicon density can be made higher by utilizing more of the third dimension. If layer-to-layer connections can be made to waste as little energy as connections on the same layer, then with the limits of heat disipation, we'll be able to get a lot more silicon close to other silicon.
Better software techniques could be used to get parallel calculation benefits out of almost anything, if nothing else, simply by precalculation all possible choices at any branch.
And sure, some software runs serially, only. But we've already found unsolvable problems, or classes of problems, that will be unsolvable in the life of the universe, even with unimaginably powerful computers. We need to come up with better ways of solving these problems, just throwing a faster CPU at them simply reduces an eternity long wait to merely half that.
Software could, imho, be made ten times faster in most cases, were hardware designed with the idea of finite cycles, and if the software were properly written.
(By this, I mean that hardware is often designed to get more cycles, instead of to make software development easier. If it were designed to be easier to write good code for, it'd probably do better, on average, at any given clock speed. And eventually, the same hardware speed limits will be hit. The G4 CPU architecture with tons (128+ registers, most 128b wide), will be usefull a lot longer than the x86 architecture, with a handful of registers, most only 32b wide, and a weird floating point stack, etc, etc, with speciality registers layered on top, like the MMX.)
That's as it should be. Because with the Linux kernel you can go through turning off the stuff you don't need. If I could install MS Office (to keep compatible with my coworkers) and just turn off the assistants, the installation of gramma chicken, and many other wasted things, then I'd be happy. But even if the base speed did increase, I wouldn't know it because it's buried under 400MB of crap, and required 64MB to load properly.
Feature bloat is cool, if done right. Dynamically linkable code, conditional installation, and decent application design can cope with this. Simply code all possibly unwanted modules as externals, and if the user wants, then can install them, then make calls to the external code. That way not only does the memory footprint get smaller (only what's actually used now is loaded) but the disk footprint, where only what you want gets copied from the CD.
And the features themselves don't take CPU resources, unless used. The animated paperclip doesn't draw a lot of resources if it's not running. The trick is to not run it if the user doesn't want it.
But, coding this way is like writing good portable, and standard (indenting, etc) code, doable, but a pain in the ass. As long as it's possible to get by without doing much, everyone will.
I long for a day when Abrash's optimization books, or similar ones for the processors of the day, are required reading in university programming courses, and classes on optimization are standard. There's a lot compilers will never be able to do, because we influence it with our high-level design. We need to think smart to get good results.
Copyrights are granted by the government because it was decided that some protection of written works benefited the public by encouraging authors.
This protection is enforced by the justice system, paid for by the public, if they don't get eventual access to the copyrighted material, why should they bother paying to protect it?
IMHO, any copyrights longer than 25 years are unconscionable. You're asking people to pay for copyright protection that will extend for upwards of four generations, and by that time, will almost assuredly have been extended. They're paying for something that not even their great grandchildren will reap the benefits of.
I'd say that 25 years from the date of creation is pretty good.
If that's not good enough, perhaps trademarks and copyrights could be merged a bit, to prevent the use of trademarked characters even once the copyrighted material goes public. That way, Aladin, and Beauty and the Beast would both be public, as would all the content in a Mickey Mouse cartoon, except the image of the mouse. But you could replace the mouse with another character and display the work.
I really don't see why we should bother protecting copyrights when they last so long.
And if someone's family needs to eat, they've had 25 years to do something about it.
As we grant wider and wider protections, so that any talking mouse with big ears is a violation, and so that any game with the same basic gameplay is a violation, we limit the scope of what people can do without stepping on the toes of the corporation that snapped up some old IP, not for its direct value, but for its value in blocking any material the competition could make.
Anyways, I think it's fairly obvious that the only entities really server by 100+ year copyrights are corporations. I personally value the rights of people over those of corporations. Perhaps my off-the-cuff ideas aren't the best, but something needs to be done to change the IP laws to help the people, not the corporations. To some degree helping the corporations helps the people, past that degree, the people begin to lose these benefits and eventually suffer. Some reworking needs to be done.
The UI, if it's built all with browser components, is VERY complex, but it doesn't have all the features we've come to expect, so in a way, it is simplistic (ie, forcing you to use the menus and buttons instead of shortcuts, etc.)
And in many ways, it's too complex. If I look at a page side-by-side in N6 and N4.5, N6 wastes *so* much screen space, with those big ugly buttons (sorry) and the sidebar you can't get rid of, and the extra bar at the bottom.
That and that N6 uses weird spacing compared to N4.5, such that many pages I viewed seemed to have 1.5 lines between text instead of one. And N6 uses huge fonts in some cases.
www.arstechnica.com - looks like it's in 640x480 it's so huge www.anandtech.com - the search boxes/etc are screwed up
Those are just the two most obvious examples.
If N6 could be made to look exactly like N4.5 with the exception of a new logo in the corner, and to render pages nearly identically, I'd switch, *now*.
btw, the java at the Soda constructor site and a few others refused to work, but it was turned on, and it worked in 4.5, so I dunno what's up.
I reported this and a few other actual bugs, what I'm talking about here for the most part is features that I don't like, not 'bugs'...
Not quite a pure capitalism society, much more of a socialism.
In a free-market economy, there wouldn't be IP laws, no such thing as copyright. It's the fact that we have a government that taxes the people in order to pay for laws, that gives us IP protection. That's socialism. Theoretically the government spending is for your benefit, like socialized medicine. It may not end up that way in practice, but then, we don't use live in a socialism, we live in a somewhat corrupt socialism.
Do you anticipate that we'll need specialized hardware to support AIs, or can everything be done on a traditional machine, assuming it's fast enough and has enough storage? Will we need specialized neural net processors, or (if NNs are even used) will software emulation of them be sufficient?
Kaa: [snip]... "the reality is that people believe they own software/music/etc that they bought, so legal attempt to do it differently will fail". My point was that this reality is just a perception and as such could be easily changed.
The reality is what happens. That things will remain this way forever because it's the only right way is the perception.
If I punch a police officer, I will get arrested, that's reality. My perception that this will always be the way it works, or should be the way it works, is just a perception. I could believe differently but if I punched the cop again, the result would be the same.
Kaa: It so happens that most everybody is selling software in such a way that the set of rights that you are buying is a license to use and not much more.
You are making a point that a contract is enforceable only if a court agrees to enforce it and that's a problem with click-wrap sales contracts. Maybe. We don't know. But that's still the contract under which you are buying (buying, not using) software.
The contract doesn't have to hit the courts to be invalid. If I draw up a contract, never show you, yet try to sue you for violation of this contract, do you have to take it to court to know it's bogus?
If the buyer doesn't know there are additional restrictions imposed before the purchase, then those restrictions have no force. There was a similar case with a car rental agency. They had a list of what you couldn't do with the car, but they gave this 'contract' to you on the back of the receipt, which you didn't see until the transaction was finalized. It doesn't matter if they offered your money back if you read the contract and didn't agree, because the contract had no force. So anyways, someone did something that was on the list, the company sued them for damages (from a reasonable use of the car, not something stupid like lighting it on fire.) and lost, because the customer had no way of knowing, at the time of agreement, about these clauses, thus they were irrelevant.
It's not hard to extrapolate from that to showing that all cases where you have a contract that one party doesn't know about are void. It doesn't have to go to trial each time.
A shrinkwrap license, of EULA clickthrough, that you only see after purchasing the program and weren't specifically told the contents of before, is invalid. This is why the software companies want to push through a law to make these binding, because under current law, they aren't.
If shrinkwrap licenses were valid, do you think they'd waste millions lobbying for a redundant law?
Kaa: Again you are confusing the act of using something and the act of buying something. The analogy, in your terms, is not to reading a book, but to buying a book.
Nope. Buying something gives you the right to use it in all ways that aren't prohibited by law or pre-existing (before or as part of the purchase) contracts.
It's the old argument of, I can buy a book and burn it, or laugh at it, or read it, etc. The seller has no control over my actions. Copyright law does limit some things I can do with it, but those restrictions have nothing to do with the specific book or seller.
Software is exactly the same way, except that it's more functional than a book, so some wise guy decided to try click-through licenses. But the software can't offer you anything of value (consideration in legal terms) to sign the contract, so it's void. They could offer you usage of the software, in trade for money, but you've already paid for, and have the right to use the software, so what they offer you has no value. They *could* offer extras, like a service contract, in trade for you agreeing to the EULA. But there'd have to be a way for you to use the software fully without agreeing, or they'd be using coercion (illegally withholding your rights) to force you to sign.
There is *no* way under current law that a shrinkwrap or click-through license is valid.
The GPL is a different animal because it allows you the usage you're entitled to, but if you agree to a further contract, it lets you do more.
The GPL has more restrictions that freeware, but less than a book or un-GPLed program, because there's no way to legally distribute a changed copy of the book, without specifically contacting the author/publisher and asking. The GPL removes a step, offering you a contract, that you may choose to accept.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not, but people will say that without a corporate vendor to fall back on, you could lose thousands waiting for the patch, if it ever comes...
I've waited five years for MS to fix some bugs in Win95, they haven't. Likely never will. They're still in W-ME from what I've heard. That's not a great track record as far as product support goes. And I'm representing a company with over a hundred licenses who has complained many times, by email, fax, phone, and snail mail. I doubt any open project could ignore me more thoroughly.
But, if we had the source, I'm sure in five years I could have tracked some of the bugs down, or, if nothing else, spent some of our budget to hire a consultant to do so. It'd be money we wasted writing our software to avoid the bugs, and in dealing with incompatibilities.
I'd much rather spend a few bucks contributing to a worthy open source project than sitting on a phone, racking up the charges, waiting to talk to a tech who'll assure me that the next release will fix it, if I pay for the upgrade...
If I bought a product instead of at least evaluating the open source solutions out there, I'd be called to task for it, especially if it was an expensive product. And if it turns out I'd only done it to have someone to blame, with no idea of which product was really better, I'd be fired, justifiably so.
The funny thing is that many of the best products around are the free ones. PERL is one of the best languages, Python too if you're not a PERL nut, but I challenge you to go buy the MS version.
Many idiots will use VB and Active X, etc, where simpler, free, solutions would easily work, risking many unpublished bugs than MS can now (UCITA) sue you for making public... I'd rather investigate the options and choose. Any boss who won't let you is one you shouldn't work for. The market for tech type jobs is very good, don't work for morons who're stuck on blame games and corporate name power.
Apples and oranges.
Software is free to duplicate, cars are not.
It's much different to give something away for free when it doesn't cost you anything than when you'd have to go collect the raw materials and build each copy manually.
Until people understand this basic concept, they shouldn't be writing articles, or coming up with awkward metaphors. The only thing that is directly comparable to software is software, if you have to use a metaphor to make your point then it's because your argument is broken in the original context. If your argument was any good, you'd just make it.
imho, don't bother.
PPros were cool chips, but for their time. Even if you could setup a quad PPro 233 (how high did they go) system and get it setup, it wouldn't be as fast as a dual celeron box if all you wanted was raw cycles, and the celerons have FPU tweaks which would make them better at rendering.
And if you need the huge cache and want to do server type things with them, then buy a Xeon now, they're fairly cheap, only $200 above a regular P3 when you count the special board and all, and with its much higher clockspeed it'll kick whatever you could do with the older CPUs.
One of the author's points against Stallman was that Stallman had alledged that scientists had cooperated, regardless of their countrys' being at war at the time. This was derided because the Japanese commited many attrocities.
... Why should we expect well reasonned commentary on open source from someone just because they write a book on OO?
From this we learn that nothing ever done by a Japanese person could be worth anything because the dictatorship (monarchy, empire, all the same) that once ruled the country did so in a cruel fashion.
I have a bit of a problem with that...
Those scientists could have been trying to cooperate with their American counterparts, and for no sinister motives. I don't doubt that Japan still carried on research during the war, and I don't doubt that many scientists would love to see something come of their work, if they had to give it up.
Nothing there sounds so unlikely as to make me question the story, and the actions of the people around those scientists don't colour the morality of the actions of the scientists themselves.
And then his whole critique on ESR's views of open source software is that guns kill people, and only hideous, very very evil people would ever own guns. That's it. Nothing about the open source. I don't think he got that far on ESR's web page, he simply got sidetracked on the gun issue.
And he doesn't realize that not everyone agrees about things, even the most fundamental things. I myself am not (well, am not a US citizen, so it's accademic) a strong supporter of pro-gun laws, but that doesn't mean I can't read anything ESR writes.
In the end, all Bertrand Meyer ends up doing is kicking around a few straw men, alleging that anyone who doesn't agree with him on all issues should be publically shunned by all leading open source people, and then proclaiming that his views are the only rational ones. Presumably because he isn't Japanese and doesn't own guns.
This guy is barely eligible to troll and they let him write a article? Fame or ability in one area does not translate into ability or intellect in another area. Nobody would expect kick-boxing from Einstein, or Downhill skiing from Napolean, or
This commentary on open source thing has been done to death, unless we can get someone who can evaluate it for what it is, without getting stuck on Stallman's attitude and ESR's guns, then let's just let it go, ok?
They wanted to add more cache than they could affordably fit onto one die, and thus into one chip. They had before done socket chips with external cache, the pentium pros, but they were large and unwieldly.
Now they refined the manufacturing processes again to allow them to fit the cache on die and they're going back to the much cheaper, better, socket design.
The slot cost more because it was bigger, required a seperate PCB, and a bunch of components required to make seperate chips interoperate. The socket chip avoids all of this, not only making it cheaper, but allowing it to dissipate all of its heat through one small plate, instead of three seperate ones. Much more easily cooled, thus higher yields. And it's also easier to strap a big fan onto a socket chip than a slot one, and the important thing is that the fan, the big part, points away from the board.
And yeah, the K6-3 was nice, a lot of K6-2s are supposedly 3s which were remarked and had some features removed at the silicon level, because people were more willing to buy the 2s than the 3s. Weird.
My account is gone, I tried to login and couldn't. (I'm assuming it's because of this.)
I scanned my MP3 drives and the only thing I have with their name in it is
f:\mp3\misc\friends\Mark - Covering Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3
For them to get me kicked off of Napster, they have to be alleging a criminal violation of some sort, and I don't think me having a copy of a garage band's music is a criminal violation (at least on my part, I have no idea about covers in general).
So, can I sue them for defemation of character or something? Or at least to get them to go to Napster and reinstate my account?
I think defamation has to have damages and be public, but there's got to be something appropriate for this case.
For certain though, I'll never buy another MP3 from those thieving bastards again. Another example of a big company (or band, backed by a big company) throwing their legal weight around and crushing anyone who gets in their way. Fuck Metallica, and fuck the RIAA.
Well, fucking pardon me if I'd rather not deal with that. It'd bad enough now, so I'd rather stop it before it gets to that point. And yes, I do have some experience with older unixes, though I never admined them.
But I still see small differences between Linux distros to be more damaging because we want Linux distros to work together. The unix manufacturers didn't want their product to coexist with other products.
I'd like to see one package be able to install and run on any x86 Linux, at a minimum, and preferably, on any full-featured Linux on any chip, with the exception of things like Q3 that require special hardware, or chopped down distros like for embedded systems or very old hardware.
And I find it a bit irrelevant if old unixes were worse. I'm not using them, not, for the most part, is anyone with a choice, because they did suck. I'd just like to keep Linux from ever ending up like that.
And yes, you are a coward, to afraid to post a flame under your own name.
Differences between distros can be harder to overcome.
/etc....
If I'm in Windows, I know the config data is in the registry. If I'm in Linux I know it's mostly in text files in
But, how I do remember the six different flavours of Linux, and the specifics of their Java distros? Especially when the distros look a lot alike when you're just sitting in a directory.
And there's no reason for us to have to know where specific things go in each distro, they could either keep everything in the same places, or they could read the locations out of standardized config files. Anything but the confused mess it's in now.
Five previews, as I counted.
The Sixth Sense and The Mummy both do that.
That's the main reason I want open source DVD players, so I can get one without that lame feature. Either that, or a crack for one of the existing soft players.
You're lucky you can speed through, *all* the buttons other than stop are ignored on mine.
And you're right, movies are now showing third party advertising, what's to stop them from shoving it onto a DVD? And then forcing people to watch it.
I'll just install a DVD player that automatically skips any section of the disk that has the "can't fast forward" flag set. And never go back to using this lame standalone player again.
Well, a common carrier can't judge messages based on content and forward only certain ones, but they are free to choose their customers (in most circumstances) and to reject those who break the rules to send messages, whatever the content.
So ISPs just need to say that identical email sent to more than 'n' people is in violation of your terms of service, as is nearly identical (just enough to pass a dumb CRC check) bulk email, without an account specifically for running a mailing list, which would be a free upgrade, but would entitle them to monitor the account usage and determine that a subscription based mailing list was being run, not a spam list.
The phone company must let me call people, even if they don't like what I say, but if I hook up nonstandard equipment, or try to send control signals (blue boxing type stuff) or anything else that breaks their rules, they can shut me down. (Without needing to prove criminal actions or intent.)
I think people should care. You never know if someone will turn out to be different than you expected, but you can certainly avoid the people who've already proven to be sleaze.
/. because even as a corporation, they return to the community. But if they'd said they'd always be free, run by volunteers, and then after I (theoretically) donated a few hundred hours of time, sold the company, I'd want my piece of the pie.
And it matters if a big company gets control of a project because corporate goals are almost always different than the goals of the community.
And what's wrong with not wanting to donate your time to help a megacorp? I'd be relucatant to help MS for free because they can pay for what they need, but there are many free projects that count of volunteers. If MS was to buy the project from a nominal owner, regardless of the people who put time and effort in, they'd have a right to feel cheated.
If I help an open source/open content project, everyone benefits, the longhaired geeks and the corporations. I see this as being a good goal. If I helped a corporate project, only the corporation would benefit. Now if I don't get paid either way, which is a better use of time?
If you design a project to be corporate from the beginning, and don't solicit help appearing to be a free project, then do whatever you want. I'm willing to invest some time helping
And the volunteer laws, that AOL ran afoul of, seem to support that. (If you do volunteer work that they pay people for, or later pay people for, you're eligible for compensation, in some cases.)
And then there's the dark side. What if the information is taken and not just closed, but used to help their other projects? Imagine if you could only access the IMDB using IE, or only access CDDB records with WinAmp, because MS or AOL bought the database? That's be getting pretty sleezy. Especially since both project were volunteer based and counted on unpaid user submissions in the early days.
The post you replied to seemed to be saying "We can't guard our GPL'd software without these facist measures which are too horible to contemplate, so we can't guard it." not "We need to implement these facist policies."
I doubt any ammount of intelligence can turn a finite ammount of gold into an infinite ammount. It may be possible to make more eventually, or to make what we have go farther, but if people want solid block of it, for whatever reason, they want a solid block, not a larger, gold plated block. That means that if gold is used as an arbitrary monetary backing, that it's supply, assuming it was all discovered, would diminish per capita, as the population increased.
It's obvious what'd happen to the tax money, it'd stay in your country, perhaps being used to pay you, instead of going overseas to help someone else.
The French government is just as entitled to refuse to use any closed-source application as the US Military is to refuse to use any single-source hardware.
This is the perfect answer. Use capitalism means to control the capitalist market. If you don't like what someone does, refuse to deal with them.
The US Military doesn't want to end up with a situation where a $25 million dollar jet is grounded because the only supplier of a $5 part is suddenly charging $500,000 for it. That's why they refuse to buy anything that they can't replace from at least two independant sources.
The French government doesn't want to be trapped, forced to buy new copies of MS Office for every public employee just because their copies of Win2k expired and Win2003 broke old Office packages. (Not an unprecedented thing.)
And then there's the security issue. Closed source software can contain any number of evil features. And even if you went through it with a debugger you could never be sure you didn't miss something. That'd be like the Russians (during the cold war) licensing an encryption package from the NSA. By using only open source software, the government ensures that its software is open to wide scrutiny.
True. The only exception would be if there was a small finite ammount and more could not be discovered, and it could not be lost. That way the supply would stay the same as would the money.
But, that has a problem in a world of increasing population.
Ideally we'd have a 'foo' standard, where 'foo' existed in relationship to the number of people, and where 'foo' was directly consumable, so that cashing in your cash and getting 'foo' did you some good. But we'd also need something where creating 'foo' was as hard to make as you'd expect, given the trade-in value of 'foo' to cash. That way counterfitters would work for the government, creating more 'foo', and thus more value.
But that gets into the idea of work units, and other fairly unworkable ideas.
Sure, machine flight was said to be impossible and now we do it routinely.
But only by abandoning the idea of flapping wings and going to an airfoil and lateral thrusters. (Yes, I know some people are still trying flapping aircraft, and with some degree of success, barely.)
I have no doubt that there's a lower size limit beyond which silicon chips will *not* reach. At best, this is one atom-wide pathways.
That doesn't mean that we'll never get anything better, just that the current 'cheap and easy' process will have reached its limits and we'll be using the less popular (because of price, or whatever) techniques, until those too run out, and we move to whatever new technologies we've found.
There are a lot of things that can done with chips to make them faster. Silicon density can be made higher by utilizing more of the third dimension. If layer-to-layer connections can be made to waste as little energy as connections on the same layer, then with the limits of heat disipation, we'll be able to get a lot more silicon close to other silicon.
Better software techniques could be used to get parallel calculation benefits out of almost anything, if nothing else, simply by precalculation all possible choices at any branch.
And sure, some software runs serially, only. But we've already found unsolvable problems, or classes of problems, that will be unsolvable in the life of the universe, even with unimaginably powerful computers. We need to come up with better ways of solving these problems, just throwing a faster CPU at them simply reduces an eternity long wait to merely half that.
Software could, imho, be made ten times faster in most cases, were hardware designed with the idea of finite cycles, and if the software were properly written.
(By this, I mean that hardware is often designed to get more cycles, instead of to make software development easier. If it were designed to be easier to write good code for, it'd probably do better, on average, at any given clock speed. And eventually, the same hardware speed limits will be hit. The G4 CPU architecture with tons (128+ registers, most 128b wide), will be usefull a lot longer than the x86 architecture, with a handful of registers, most only 32b wide, and a weird floating point stack, etc, etc, with speciality registers layered on top, like the MMX.)
That's as it should be. Because with the Linux kernel you can go through turning off the stuff you don't need. If I could install MS Office (to keep compatible with my coworkers) and just turn off the assistants, the installation of gramma chicken, and many other wasted things, then I'd be happy. But even if the base speed did increase, I wouldn't know it because it's buried under 400MB of crap, and required 64MB to load properly.
Feature bloat is cool, if done right. Dynamically linkable code, conditional installation, and decent application design can cope with this. Simply code all possibly unwanted modules as externals, and if the user wants, then can install them, then make calls to the external code. That way not only does the memory footprint get smaller (only what's actually used now is loaded) but the disk footprint, where only what you want gets copied from the CD.
And the features themselves don't take CPU resources, unless used. The animated paperclip doesn't draw a lot of resources if it's not running. The trick is to not run it if the user doesn't want it.
But, coding this way is like writing good portable, and standard (indenting, etc) code, doable, but a pain in the ass. As long as it's possible to get by without doing much, everyone will.
I long for a day when Abrash's optimization books, or similar ones for the processors of the day, are required reading in university programming courses, and classes on optimization are standard. There's a lot compilers will never be able to do, because we influence it with our high-level design. We need to think smart to get good results.
Copyrights are granted by the government because it was decided that some protection of written works benefited the public by encouraging authors.
This protection is enforced by the justice system, paid for by the public, if they don't get eventual access to the copyrighted material, why should they bother paying to protect it?
IMHO, any copyrights longer than 25 years are unconscionable. You're asking people to pay for copyright protection that will extend for upwards of four generations, and by that time, will almost assuredly have been extended. They're paying for something that not even their great grandchildren will reap the benefits of.
I'd say that 25 years from the date of creation is pretty good.
If that's not good enough, perhaps trademarks and copyrights could be merged a bit, to prevent the use of trademarked characters even once the copyrighted material goes public. That way, Aladin, and Beauty and the Beast would both be public, as would all the content in a Mickey Mouse cartoon, except the image of the mouse. But you could replace the mouse with another character and display the work.
I really don't see why we should bother protecting copyrights when they last so long.
And if someone's family needs to eat, they've had 25 years to do something about it.
As we grant wider and wider protections, so that any talking mouse with big ears is a violation, and so that any game with the same basic gameplay is a violation, we limit the scope of what people can do without stepping on the toes of the corporation that snapped up some old IP, not for its direct value, but for its value in blocking any material the competition could make.
Anyways, I think it's fairly obvious that the only entities really server by 100+ year copyrights are corporations. I personally value the rights of people over those of corporations. Perhaps my off-the-cuff ideas aren't the best, but something needs to be done to change the IP laws to help the people, not the corporations. To some degree helping the corporations helps the people, past that degree, the people begin to lose these benefits and eventually suffer. Some reworking needs to be done.
The UI, if it's built all with browser components, is VERY complex, but it doesn't have all the features we've come to expect, so in a way, it is simplistic (ie, forcing you to use the menus and buttons instead of shortcuts, etc.)
And in many ways, it's too complex. If I look at a page side-by-side in N6 and N4.5, N6 wastes *so* much screen space, with those big ugly buttons (sorry) and the sidebar you can't get rid of, and the extra bar at the bottom.
That and that N6 uses weird spacing compared to N4.5, such that many pages I viewed seemed to have 1.5 lines between text instead of one. And N6 uses huge fonts in some cases.
www.arstechnica.com - looks like it's in 640x480 it's so huge
www.anandtech.com - the search boxes/etc are screwed up
Those are just the two most obvious examples.
If N6 could be made to look exactly like N4.5 with the exception of a new logo in the corner, and to render pages nearly identically, I'd switch, *now*.
btw, the java at the Soda constructor site and a few others refused to work, but it was turned on, and it worked in 4.5, so I dunno what's up.
I reported this and a few other actual bugs, what I'm talking about here for the most part is features that I don't like, not 'bugs'...
Not quite a pure capitalism society, much more of a socialism.
In a free-market economy, there wouldn't be IP laws, no such thing as copyright. It's the fact that we have a government that taxes the people in order to pay for laws, that gives us IP protection. That's socialism. Theoretically the government spending is for your benefit, like socialized medicine. It may not end up that way in practice, but then, we don't use live in a socialism, we live in a somewhat corrupt socialism.
Well, InTouch is as full of shit as Amazon, or maybe moreso, but they really deserve each other.
Do you anticipate that we'll need specialized hardware to support AIs, or can everything be done on a traditional machine, assuming it's fast enough and has enough storage? Will we need specialized neural net processors, or (if NNs are even used) will software emulation of them be sufficient?
The reality is what happens. That things will remain this way forever because it's the only right way is the perception.
If I punch a police officer, I will get arrested, that's reality. My perception that this will always be the way it works, or should be the way it works, is just a perception. I could believe differently but if I punched the cop again, the result would be the same.
The contract doesn't have to hit the courts to be invalid. If I draw up a contract, never show you, yet try to sue you for violation of this contract, do you have to take it to court to know it's bogus?
If the buyer doesn't know there are additional restrictions imposed before the purchase, then those restrictions have no force. There was a similar case with a car rental agency. They had a list of what you couldn't do with the car, but they gave this 'contract' to you on the back of the receipt, which you didn't see until the transaction was finalized. It doesn't matter if they offered your money back if you read the contract and didn't agree, because the contract had no force. So anyways, someone did something that was on the list, the company sued them for damages (from a reasonable use of the car, not something stupid like lighting it on fire.) and lost, because the customer had no way of knowing, at the time of agreement, about these clauses, thus they were irrelevant.
It's not hard to extrapolate from that to showing that all cases where you have a contract that one party doesn't know about are void. It doesn't have to go to trial each time.
A shrinkwrap license, of EULA clickthrough, that you only see after purchasing the program and weren't specifically told the contents of before, is invalid. This is why the software companies want to push through a law to make these binding, because under current law, they aren't.
If shrinkwrap licenses were valid, do you think they'd waste millions lobbying for a redundant law?
Nope. Buying something gives you the right to use it in all ways that aren't prohibited by law or pre-existing (before or as part of the purchase) contracts.
It's the old argument of, I can buy a book and burn it, or laugh at it, or read it, etc. The seller has no control over my actions. Copyright law does limit some things I can do with it, but those restrictions have nothing to do with the specific book or seller.
Software is exactly the same way, except that it's more functional than a book, so some wise guy decided to try click-through licenses. But the software can't offer you anything of value (consideration in legal terms) to sign the contract, so it's void. They could offer you usage of the software, in trade for money, but you've already paid for, and have the right to use the software, so what they offer you has no value.
They *could* offer extras, like a service contract, in trade for you agreeing to the EULA. But there'd have to be a way for you to use the software fully without agreeing, or they'd be using coercion (illegally withholding your rights) to force you to sign.
There is *no* way under current law that a shrinkwrap or click-through license is valid.
The GPL is a different animal because it allows you the usage you're entitled to, but if you agree to a further contract, it lets you do more.
The GPL has more restrictions that freeware, but less than a book or un-GPLed program, because there's no way to legally distribute a changed copy of the book, without specifically contacting the author/publisher and asking. The GPL removes a step, offering you a contract, that you may choose to accept.