My system is never idle. It runs seti@home and/or folding@home 24/7 in the background. So I don't think the power saving features will work for me if they depend on the processor being idle.
I bought a Dell 500SC for home. It has been rock solid, but the fan is very noisy, and the DMA on the secondary IDE is busted (chipset bug). When I upgrade, I don't care about bleeding edge performance, I want it to be quiet. Wouldn't you know, after I bought the 500SC, Dell came out with the 400SC, which I've installed at several customers. That thing is quiet as a mouse. Sigh. I thought about switching and telling them, "See, 500 is better 400!"
The English used in the Book of Mormon is more recent than that of the Bible so it would be a better candidate, than say, the Bible.
You missed the point. The Bible is *not* an English book! It is a Jewish book. Most of the authors were Hebrews and spoke Hebrew, although some wrote in Aramaic or Greek, and there was one Greek, one Roman and one Babylonian in the lot.
There are English translations, of which the King James is just one, but the Bible was completed centuries before King Authur. More modern translations like NIV do not have the archaic English forms.
the Bible uses many outdated or non-standard phrases and sentence structures
The King James translation of the Bible uses current standard phrases and sentence structures - for Elizabethan England. Modern translations of the Bible use, well, modern phrases and sentence structures. The original texts of the Bible used phrases and sentence structures that were current for the time they were written. For instance, new Testament Greek comes from a relatively small time period, and includes a variety of styles from authors who ranged from highly educated (Paul, Luke) to little formal education (Peter, John).
The Book of Mormon does have the problems you mention since we don't have the original text (it having vanished in a golden mist as it was magically translated), but even there, the language is a dialect of English that was wide spread in communities greatly influenced by the King James translation of the Bible. You'll find Elizabethan forms used to this day in Apalatia.
As to legalese, well, legalese is a dialect you may very well wish to have translated on the web. So including that corpus is quite appropriate.
The key to handling dialects is to categorize translations of a corpus into dialect as well as language. American Legalese would be a dialect of English.
The Jalepeno VM is a JIT, so it generates native machine code as part of its normal operation. Extending Java bytecodes to provide privileged extensions for Memory management and I/O is straightforward (and interesting - I wish I could have worked on that project).
Bootstrapping is tricky. Jalapeno bootstraps by giving the JIT a method of saving compiled classes on disk. Another tool (still written in Java) packages the JIT compiled classes with a bootstrap loader. The bootstrap loader was written in C with asm - but the docs point out that it is just a constant preamble and could be coded by hand if necessary.
All of the above have been done in Java (JavaPC, Jalapeno), and therefore shouldn't be that big of a deal in.NET. In the case of IBM's Jalapeno, the VM itself is written in Java. Technically, it is just a matter of the VM providing a built-in class with methods for arrays mapped to physical memory and I/O space, and converting interrupts to method callbacks. When the VM is a JIT, generating and installing interrupt handlers or generating I/O code for magic methods is not a big deal. The big obstacle is legacy code. MS doesn't want to make every Windows hardware maker rewrite all their proprietary drivers in.NET. Making.NET and C++ drivers coexist is harder.
He wasn't talking about uncompressed for the consumer, but a standard lossless format for creators. A musician records in 24 or 32 bit format, then mixes down to 16 bit CD audio and MP3. Similarly, video creators want a standard format for their original takes - before it is edited and compressed down to a DVD movie (or its successor).
At first, digital audio recording equipment had proprietary formats for the 24 bit data - and you could only get mixed CD audio out of your recorder. My brother still has one of those beasts. Naturally, you would like to be able to import your 24 or 32 bit data to new generation equipment or software - even if it is not the same brand. It really bites when you can't export your own recording.
In 1999, I made the mistake of doing 10 hours of recording in a studio with a 24 bit recorder and high quality mike and piano lent by a friend. Only after I spent the time, did I learn that you couldn't actually get the data out of the system in a usable form (other than by buying their brand of equipment). It even had proprietary Windows drivers to back up the data. All it could export was a 16-bit copy protected CD. After I got a CD out, I eventually found a MAC program to bypass the copy protection so I could RIP my own music. I was mad, but I couldn't complain to my generous friend about the free studio time. So here I am, getting it off my chest on/. after all these years!
When I write down passwords, I use some form of steganography. For example, one of my earlier systems was to add a fictictious address to my address book, with the password encoded within the address using a mnemonic mapping scheme.
I'll share a commonly used mnemonic mapping for numbers. It maps consonants to digits:
0 - 's', 'z' (think 'zero' and hissing like snakes) 1 - 't', 'd' (1 looks kind of like t) 2 - 'n' (n has two legs) 3 - 'm' (m has three legs) 4 - 'r' (four ends with r) 5 - 'l' (L is latin for fifty) 6 - 'j', 'g' (soft g, like upside down 6) 7 - 'k', 'g' (hard g, k and 7 have diagonals) 8 - 'f', 'ph' (cursive f like 8) 9 - 'p', 'b'
Hard c goes with k, soft c with s, etc. So say you wanted to remember your bike combination of (rolls random number with python...) 3254. You construct a phrase with any vowels and spacing desired with the consonants m,n,l,r. For instance, "mine lore" comes to my mind, and I envision Tolkein dwarves chatting up their favorite topic. If needed, you would then write a paragraph about dwarves and mine lore in Lord of the Rings in your notebook.
So the law determines what is morally right or wrong? So hiding Jews in Nazi germany is morally wrong?
Good catch! But I suspect you knew that I was referring to law in the "Ten Commandments" (laws given by Divine revelation to instruct us on right and wrong) and "Natural Law" (referred to in the Bible as God "writing his law on our hearts", and by Justice Thomas as things universally known as right or wrong at a deep level) sense rather than the legal sense. The context of the quotations from Paul are the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament.
get a girlfriend, then you can brag to her about your Linux skills
I'm married with four kids. And whenever I get too long winded on an anti-microsoft rant, my wife starts crying. That means it's time to get back to the real world. She understands the social and political aspects of open source, but not the technical. The book that really helped her understand was "The Joy of Linux".
Her favorite famous geek is Richard Stallman - because he is focused on long term goals of freedom and social justice, explains them in non-technical language, and doesn't get hung up on the technical issues of the day.
Answer the question! Is abortion morally acceptable, or is it murder?
It is murder.
> You seem to conflate the ability to know what's right/wrong with what is > right/wrong.
Do you evade answering all questions, or just the ones where you don't have a satisfactory answer?
Sometimes the answer can be "I don't know." It is possible that something can be wrong, but the people involved don't know that it is. That is why the Apostle Paul says "the law brings death". When you didn't know it was wrong, you had an excuse. When the law informs you of just how wrong what you are doing is, and you continue doing it, you are without excuse. If you didn't know anything about electricity, and stuck your primitive knife into an electrical outlet while exploring a house, your "shock" would be understandable. When you know about electricity, playing around with metal objects in sockets is just plain stupid. It is not the childs fault if a one year old gets into the paint cupboard. It is the teenaged childs fault if they decide to try sniffing glue despite repeated warnings about the destructive consequences.
The law is good. Things are wrong because in the long term, sometimes a very long term, they are destructive and bring death. Sin is not sustainable (yes, environmental destruction is sin, and is specifically mentioned as such in Revelation). But the law brings spiritual death, because with knowledge comes responsibility, and some deep spiritual flaw in human nature makes it very difficult,
if not impossible, to do all that we know is right. "There is pleasure in sin
for a season." "There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end
result is death."
Sometimes, hostility to moral truth arises from conscience. You didn't know it was wrong, but you had a nagging feeling deep inside that something is not right. When you hear the law, you instinctively know that if you accepted what you hear as true, you would be responsible to stop what you are doing - and that would be very painful. So you fight like hell to reject what you hear as false, despite acknowledging it as true at some not quite conscious level.
I only pay $3. I wait until it is second run, and see it at the local discount theatre. The popcorn is even reasonable - no reason to sneak in your own.
Presumably, that was a joke. But just to be clear - no, we did not provide the viruses. They are free (as in beer) software that comes to your mailbox - usually by an anonymous author. The license allows unlimited copying. In fact, the software forces you to make lots of copies before it trashes your machine.
It is funny to read theories from Democrats about how the Reps and Big Business rigged the voting machines, and then read theories from Republicans about how the Dems and Big Media rigged the exit polls.
Our users are trained to immediately delete any email with EXE, etc, regardless of who it claims to be from. When they use our mail server software (sendmail + python milter + uwimap), a milter deletes any such attachments for them leaving text intact. The few times they've disobeyed (while using some free webmail service), a nasty virus has erased the BIOS, trashed the disk, or deleted all their documents. So they know we aren't kidding. As a result, the only animated emails they see are done with Flash or Java - which work just fine in Linux.
That is the way it should be. Being virtual machines, both Flash and Java stand a chance of being safe to run untrusted code - Java more so than Flash since it is secured at a lower level.
DOS is still very useful for applications that need to get at the hardware. For instance, the Dell diagnostics make very good use of it. Each test get full control of the hardware - but FreeDOS provides a simple filesystem allowing easy upgrades of test components.
I have always found in hindsight that 'good' is not optional. The choice should always be between fast and good or cheap and good, depending on budget. Fast and cheap is always a disaster.
Have the system BIOS copy memory to a reserved disk cylinder when warm booting after a crash. If BIOS could be configured to leave memory intact on warm reboot, the boot loader could have a similar feature.
There is no need to release the source code. This is one of those obvious patents - everyone already knows how to do it. Indeed, it is only the Intel flavor of similar exception conventions used on other stack based processors since the 70's. This patent effectively patents an ABI. It is trivial to use some other convention - but then the code is not interoperable. I wonder if the judge who started us down the road of software patents regrets his decision.
The last attempt was Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), now known as Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA).
Of course, Microsoft is not the only ethically challenged big corporation/organization drooling over such a law - the MPAA and RIAA come to mind. But my personal bias makes me alway see Microsoft pulling the strings behind the scenes.
While Microsoft is not specifically mentioned in the text of SSSCA, somebody
has to be in charge of certifying the software and handing out the digital
certificates - and Microsoft keeps coming up as the logical choice.
Notice that SSSCA makes illegal "any device capable of transmitting and
receiving digital copyrighted works". That means any general purpose
computer.
Under DMCA, the present law, publishers can encrypt media such that it can
legally only be decrypted using an authorized player - e.g. DVD. That is why
I would be breaking the law if I actually watched any of the DVD movies I own
(or at least anyone providing me with an unauthorized player would be breaking
the law). The current situation is already so lopsided, you would think the
MPAA et al would be satisfied, but greed is never satisfied.
But it is such a complicated issue. First, there is the technical problem of backward compatibility illustrated by the Windows "shatter" attack. Second, there is the bigger issue of users. Even if your email client doesn't immediately execute every piece of code it encounters, users are still going to download and run it manually - because they "just have" to see the dancing pink elephants. It doesn't help to have user and admin modes. Users won't remember an admin password. And even if they do, they have no clue when to use it. ("Please enter your admin password so that Dancing Pink Elephants can be installed.")
Most of Microsoft's customers are of the completely security clueless variety. The only way to protect such customers from themselves is to take away their freedom to run the software of their choice (because their choices are so stupid - even discounting the choice of MS). This is why trusted/treacherous computing is so important to Microsoft. The end user is the biggest security hole.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It turns a Microsoft computer into a dedicated appliance rather than a general purpose computer - but there is a market for that. The danger for the free world is that Microsoft would like to make general purpose computers illegal except for (Microsoft) licensed developers.
I think he really hit the nail on the head. Mega media is shooting themselves in the foot short term (losing digital market opportunities) by taking away fair use rights and shooting themselves in the head long term (loss of respect for copyright) with the ever lengthening terms.
Those who put more weight on human factors want us to stop everything in the hope that temperatures will drop back down to natural levels (which are still pretty high at the top of the cycle). In many cases, it is a marxist war cry, with fear of environmental disaster replacing class envy as the new motive for turning all economic engines over to the state.
Those who put more weight on natural factors want to ignore the fact that nature has cycles. They just want business to go on as usual, and not have to deal proactively with problems brought about by climate change. They use the excuse that "you can't predict the weather" to justify waiting until something drastic happens instead of preparing beforehand, and perhaps even trying to find ways to soften the natural cycle (e.g. smog cools the earth via "global dimming" - perhaps not the ideal solution).
The truth is, that we do have inexact, but useful weather prediction. Failing to prepare for tornado or hurricane season would be foolish. We know that we are heading over the next few hundred years toward a new temperature maximum after the "little ice age" in the 1700s. That natural cycle may or may not be amplified by some unknown amount by large scale human activity - but higher temperatures (and higher sea levels) are coming none the less. It doesn't mean we are ruining the earth. It has happened many times before, and will keep happening without us.
In Genesis, the Pharaoh of Egypt was warned by a dream that seven years of famine would follow seven years of plenty. It was global (or at least middle eastern) climate change. He put Joseph in charge of preparing for the climate change. Joseph did his job well, and much suffering was averted throughout the known world (and Pharaoh became very rich selling the stored food).
Storing food won't help with long term global warming, but planning for equitable and orderly migration of farming to new locations is essential. We aren't very good at it - we don't seem to know what to do with people futilely torching the rain forest to replace their dead farm land. That dilemma will face many more people as warming picks up in a 100 years.
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My system is never idle. It runs seti@home and/or folding@home 24/7 in the background. So I don't think the power saving features will work for me if they depend on the processor being idle. I bought a Dell 500SC for home. It has been rock solid, but the fan is very noisy, and the DMA on the secondary IDE is busted (chipset bug). When I upgrade, I don't care about bleeding edge performance, I want it to be quiet. Wouldn't you know, after I bought the 500SC, Dell came out with the 400SC, which I've installed at several customers. That thing is quiet as a mouse. Sigh. I thought about switching and telling them, "See, 500 is better 400!"
He already did.
You missed the point. The Bible is *not* an English book! It is a Jewish book. Most of the authors were Hebrews and spoke Hebrew, although some wrote in Aramaic or Greek, and there was one Greek, one Roman and one Babylonian in the lot.
There are English translations, of which the King James is just one, but the Bible was completed centuries before King Authur. More modern translations like NIV do not have the archaic English forms.
The King James translation of the Bible uses current standard phrases and sentence structures - for Elizabethan England. Modern translations of the Bible use, well, modern phrases and sentence structures. The original texts of the Bible used phrases and sentence structures that were current for the time they were written. For instance, new Testament Greek comes from a relatively small time period, and includes a variety of styles from authors who ranged from highly educated (Paul, Luke) to little formal education (Peter, John).
The Book of Mormon does have the problems you mention since we don't have the original text (it having vanished in a golden mist as it was magically translated), but even there, the language is a dialect of English that was wide spread in communities greatly influenced by the King James translation of the Bible. You'll find Elizabethan forms used to this day in Apalatia.
As to legalese, well, legalese is a dialect you may very well wish to have translated on the web. So including that corpus is quite appropriate.
The key to handling dialects is to categorize translations of a corpus into dialect as well as language. American Legalese would be a dialect of English.
Bootstrapping is tricky. Jalapeno bootstraps by giving the JIT a method of saving compiled classes on disk. Another tool (still written in Java) packages the JIT compiled classes with a bootstrap loader. The bootstrap loader was written in C with asm - but the docs point out that it is just a constant preamble and could be coded by hand if necessary.
By the time these 850G drives come to the consumer market, hard drives will be 80T (terabytes).
At first, digital audio recording equipment had proprietary formats for the 24 bit data - and you could only get mixed CD audio out of your recorder. My brother still has one of those beasts. Naturally, you would like to be able to import your 24 or 32 bit data to new generation equipment or software - even if it is not the same brand. It really bites when you can't export your own recording.
In 1999, I made the mistake of doing 10 hours of recording in a studio with a 24 bit recorder and high quality mike and piano lent by a friend. Only after I spent the time, did I learn that you couldn't actually get the data out of the system in a usable form (other than by buying their brand of equipment). It even had proprietary Windows drivers to back up the data. All it could export was a 16-bit copy protected CD. After I got a CD out, I eventually found a MAC program to bypass the copy protection so I could RIP my own music. I was mad, but I couldn't complain to my generous friend about the free studio time. So here I am, getting it off my chest on /. after all these years!
I'll share a commonly used mnemonic mapping for numbers. It maps consonants to digits:
Hard c goes with k, soft c with s, etc. So say you wanted to remember your bike combination of (rolls random number with python...) 3254. You construct a phrase with any vowels and spacing desired with the consonants m,n,l,r. For instance, "mine lore" comes to my mind, and I envision Tolkein dwarves chatting up their favorite topic. If needed, you would then write a paragraph about dwarves and mine lore in Lord of the Rings in your notebook.Good catch! But I suspect you knew that I was referring to law in the "Ten Commandments" (laws given by Divine revelation to instruct us on right and wrong) and "Natural Law" (referred to in the Bible as God "writing his law on our hearts", and by Justice Thomas as things universally known as right or wrong at a deep level) sense rather than the legal sense. The context of the quotations from Paul are the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament.
I'm married with four kids. And whenever I get too long winded on an anti-microsoft rant, my wife starts crying. That means it's time to get back to the real world. She understands the social and political aspects of open source, but not the technical. The book that really helped her understand was "The Joy of Linux".
Her favorite famous geek is Richard Stallman - because he is focused on long term goals of freedom and social justice, explains them in non-technical language, and doesn't get hung up on the technical issues of the day.
It is murder.
Do you evade answering all questions, or just the ones where you don't have a satisfactory answer?Sometimes the answer can be "I don't know." It is possible that something can be wrong, but the people involved don't know that it is. That is why the Apostle Paul says "the law brings death". When you didn't know it was wrong, you had an excuse. When the law informs you of just how wrong what you are doing is, and you continue doing it, you are without excuse. If you didn't know anything about electricity, and stuck your primitive knife into an electrical outlet while exploring a house, your "shock" would be understandable. When you know about electricity, playing around with metal objects in sockets is just plain stupid. It is not the childs fault if a one year old gets into the paint cupboard. It is the teenaged childs fault if they decide to try sniffing glue despite repeated warnings about the destructive consequences.
The law is good. Things are wrong because in the long term, sometimes a very long term, they are destructive and bring death. Sin is not sustainable (yes, environmental destruction is sin, and is specifically mentioned as such in Revelation). But the law brings spiritual death, because with knowledge comes responsibility, and some deep spiritual flaw in human nature makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to do all that we know is right. "There is pleasure in sin for a season." "There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end result is death."
Sometimes, hostility to moral truth arises from conscience. You didn't know it was wrong, but you had a nagging feeling deep inside that something is not right. When you hear the law, you instinctively know that if you accepted what you hear as true, you would be responsible to stop what you are doing - and that would be very painful. So you fight like hell to reject what you hear as false, despite acknowledging it as true at some not quite conscious level.
I only pay $3. I wait until it is second run, and see it at the local discount theatre. The popcorn is even reasonable - no reason to sneak in your own.
this will give more ammunition to the "Linux is for commies" crowd.
Presumably, that was a joke. But just to be clear - no, we did not provide the viruses. They are free (as in beer) software that comes to your mailbox - usually by an anonymous author. The license allows unlimited copying. In fact, the software forces you to make lots of copies before it trashes your machine.
It is funny to read theories from Democrats about how the Reps and Big Business rigged the voting machines, and then read theories from Republicans about how the Dems and Big Media rigged the exit polls.
That is the way it should be. Being virtual machines, both Flash and Java stand a chance of being safe to run untrusted code - Java more so than Flash since it is secured at a lower level.
DOS is still very useful for applications that need to get at the hardware. For instance, the Dell diagnostics make very good use of it. Each test get full control of the hardware - but FreeDOS provides a simple filesystem allowing easy upgrades of test components.
I have always found in hindsight that 'good' is not optional. The choice should always be between fast and good or cheap and good, depending on budget. Fast and cheap is always a disaster.
Have the system BIOS copy memory to a reserved disk cylinder when warm booting after a crash. If BIOS could be configured to leave memory intact on warm reboot, the boot loader could have a similar feature.
There is no need to release the source code. This is one of those obvious patents - everyone already knows how to do it. Indeed, it is only the Intel flavor of similar exception conventions used on other stack based processors since the 70's. This patent effectively patents an ABI. It is trivial to use some other convention - but then the code is not interoperable. I wonder if the judge who started us down the road of software patents regrets his decision.
While Microsoft is not specifically mentioned in the text of SSSCA, somebody has to be in charge of certifying the software and handing out the digital certificates - and Microsoft keeps coming up as the logical choice. Notice that SSSCA makes illegal "any device capable of transmitting and receiving digital copyrighted works". That means any general purpose computer.
Under DMCA, the present law, publishers can encrypt media such that it can legally only be decrypted using an authorized player - e.g. DVD. That is why I would be breaking the law if I actually watched any of the DVD movies I own (or at least anyone providing me with an unauthorized player would be breaking the law). The current situation is already so lopsided, you would think the MPAA et al would be satisfied, but greed is never satisfied.
Most of Microsoft's customers are of the completely security clueless variety. The only way to protect such customers from themselves is to take away their freedom to run the software of their choice (because their choices are so stupid - even discounting the choice of MS). This is why trusted/treacherous computing is so important to Microsoft. The end user is the biggest security hole.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It turns a Microsoft computer into a dedicated appliance rather than a general purpose computer - but there is a market for that. The danger for the free world is that Microsoft would like to make general purpose computers illegal except for (Microsoft) licensed developers.
I think he really hit the nail on the head. Mega media is shooting themselves in the foot short term (losing digital market opportunities) by taking away fair use rights and shooting themselves in the head long term (loss of respect for copyright) with the ever lengthening terms.
Those who put more weight on natural factors want to ignore the fact that nature has cycles. They just want business to go on as usual, and not have to deal proactively with problems brought about by climate change. They use the excuse that "you can't predict the weather" to justify waiting until something drastic happens instead of preparing beforehand, and perhaps even trying to find ways to soften the natural cycle (e.g. smog cools the earth via "global dimming" - perhaps not the ideal solution).
The truth is, that we do have inexact, but useful weather prediction. Failing to prepare for tornado or hurricane season would be foolish. We know that we are heading over the next few hundred years toward a new temperature maximum after the "little ice age" in the 1700s. That natural cycle may or may not be amplified by some unknown amount by large scale human activity - but higher temperatures (and higher sea levels) are coming none the less. It doesn't mean we are ruining the earth. It has happened many times before, and will keep happening without us.
In Genesis, the Pharaoh of Egypt was warned by a dream that seven years of famine would follow seven years of plenty. It was global (or at least middle eastern) climate change. He put Joseph in charge of preparing for the climate change. Joseph did his job well, and much suffering was averted throughout the known world (and Pharaoh became very rich selling the stored food).
Storing food won't help with long term global warming, but planning for equitable and orderly migration of farming to new locations is essential. We aren't very good at it - we don't seem to know what to do with people futilely torching the rain forest to replace their dead farm land. That dilemma will face many more people as warming picks up in a 100 years.