One of my first lessons in capitalism after the change of the political system in Poland was the lesson about contracts:
if you trust each other, you don't need a written contract
if one of the parties insists on having a written contract, there's no place for "trust"; you must treat every single word and punctuation in a contract as something that will be brought in the court one day -- otherwise it wouldn't be there.
Want to terminate accounts of paedophiles and abusers? Place the wording about them in contract, but don't fucking pretend that "criticism of the AT&T and its affiliates" doesn't mean what my handicaped knowledge of English says it means.
The state of mind you describe has mania written all over it, for me. It is very unlikely for antidepressants to cause mania in a healthy brain. It is possible, but it's very unlikely[1]. On the other hand it happens very often for people suffering from bipolar disorder. Worse yet, treating bipolar with antidepressants alone causes severe complications, shortens period of cycling, deepens depressive and manic episodes.
What I'm trying to tell you, is that there are millions of people out there with undiagnosed BD, or misdiagnosed as unipolar recurring depression. Worse still, the average lag between the onset of BD and proper diagnosis is 10 years, almost universally all over the world. So if you experience cycling periods of elevated and lowered mood, visit your closest psychiatrist and stress the cycling nature of your problems. BD can range from minor mood swings perceived by environment and affected person as personality traits, to strong, debilitating changes, when one can become dangerous to himself and the others. With time and improper treatment it only gets worse.
Robert
PS I know what I'm talking about. I am BD suffering for over 20 yrs, properly diagnosed 2 yrs ago.
[1] I know, there is Venlafaxine, but it's not usually the first, second or fifth antidepresant prescribed;)
but I know for a fact, that there are people in Poland using local auction service that move tens if not hundreds of thousands $ worth of stuff monthly
The only Polish auction site to speak of is of course Allegro. As far as I'm concerned Ebay Polska is a joke. No category managment, tons of pirated/counterfeit stuff, no support staff helping with anything... Sometimes I think that they created Polish branch just to be able to show to their shareholders that they are expanding, no matter what it means to them financially.
I don't know about eBay, but I know for a fact, that there are people in Poland using local auction service that move tens if not hundreds of thousands $ worth of stuff monthly, without paying any taxes on that. Polish revenue service lately started monitoring it closely and collecting from those people, reassuring all the time, that they are not interested in people using internet auctions for a garage sale. As far as I know, that is true.
Whether you believe in taxes, is another matter, but I don't see why certain individuals should get a tax break just because it is difficult to hold them accountable. It's within a power of the state to levy taxes and create the law to help with it. And sometimes the state forces some reporting duties on some entities in order to help the state. Take for example your salaries: in most countries employers are forced to report the salaries of the employees to regulatory and/or revenue agencies, and I don't see anyone screaming bloody murder.
"[W]hat can a company do to boost its share price? Besides stopping to burn money and come up with a working business model, I mean."
Well, how about a reverse stock split? [...]
Quoting from TFA:
Reverse stock split: Instead of ten shares at $0.90, give the investor one share at $9.00. This is allowed under Nasdaq regulations, but has a fishy smell associated with it. There is an interesting article on MSN stating that 75% of stocks trade lower after a reverse split. My favorite quote is "A stock isn't trading under a dollar unless it is pretty close to bankruptcy or it has some other serious troubles".
Nice price points... According to exchange rates of my Central Bank it is roughly $816 in Ireland, $837 in UK and $776 in the rest of Eurozone. Just watch for those lines in front of the stores gathering any minute now.
For those that don't know, average European, from UK, IE or the rest of Europe still earns less than Americans.
Gee, I wonder, how much I could get for my domain... Maybe all those legions with their lives destroyed by write-only Perl code could bid some high $$ for it...
I'm surprised that no one picked up the fact that it is Japanese company suing French company in US court.
They won. SFW? How are they going to enforce this ruling in France? From the coverage of this ruling on Ars Technica I know, that the company is still offering those modchips on their web page. And they will. The only thing they can't do now is to visit US. And maybe Iraq or Afghanistan. All of the international treaties about enforcig court rulings abroad have one basic assumption written into them: no party to such treaty shall enforce a court ruling for something that's perfectly legal in the country of residence of defendant party.
If I had one dollar for every time I give this answer, I'd be frelling rich:
99% of businesses use sub 10Mb connection to the Internet and yet they are told the Cisco is the only way to connect them professionally. Moreover, the sub-$10k Cisco gear is a crap when it comes to performace, on par with good PCIe PC running on multiple Gbit eth interfaces.
RMS may be a freak but I think he's right in that we have to be careful about the language we use; it defines and affects the thought patterns of both speaker and listener.
The theory you are referring to is called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. So far it is neither confirmed nor busted, but there are strong arguments against it. I suggest further reading on the subject.
I don't understand why so many home users are against using a good, old fashioned tape backup. Look, you can get a DDS-4 tape drive from eBay for less than $100. In fact, I'm about to sell my Sun external DDS-4 drive there soon. You can then get a compatible SCSI card for about $20 if not less. Then you just have to get the tapes. A new box of ten DDS-4 tapes -- equivalent to about 480GB compressed -- can be found for around $50 on eBay.
Maybe because a said box is really only 200GB uncompressed, and needs good tape drive to work. For the same $50 (or 50eur in my case) I can buy 200GB ata/sata HDD, that works just as well, has a transfer of 30MB/s instead of 2.4MB/s and is random access instead of linear access. Add external USB2-IDE bridge w/ power supply for about $10 and you don't even have to reboot you computer to connect HDD.
And last time I checked, HDD's were much more resistant to overwriting. The only downside is that there are no HDD changers, but for the cost of reasonably sized tape library I can hire someone to do it manually;)
If two 64 bit encryptions equals one 128 bit, then 128 one-bit encryptions should also.
This means the file would have a password of either 1 or 0... you would be prompted for this password, and if you got it wrong, you could try again. Obviously you'd get it on the second try. You could repeat this 128 times, and that would be the total of all protection. Naturally, this means the most number of guesses you'd need to make is 256.
And how do you know, that you guessed right at every step? No, really. Good crypto doesn't let you distinguish from decryption with good or bad key, other than the content of the plaintext. And since the plaintext in this case is crypted text for another step, you have no chance of finding out, if it's right. So in reality, you have to check key 0 and 1 in first step, 0,1 for 0 from first step and 0,1 for 1 from first step etc...
Do the math wise ass, complexity of brute-forcing 128 1-bit passes is the same as complexity of brute-forcing single 128-bit pass -- 2^128
In the marine parks, the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water between the different pools," he said. Manger says the thought to jump over would simply not cross their unsophisticated minds.
So because the dolphin isn't brainless enough to jump out of its tank and beach itself and die in the process, that makes them stupid?
You like dolphins? Me too. But it didn't stop me from noticing, that the guy also talked about fences partitioning larger tanks. Doplhins can clearly see and interact with other dolphins on the other side of the fence, and they still don't jump through this one-foot-over-water fence. Not to bright in my book.
In the end, that reasoning is flawed. They were just standing on the shoulders of giants. Without civilian scientists, like Faraday and Maxwell, there wouldn't even be electricity to run computers.
Are you absolutelly positive, that there were no soldiers or people paid by military among those giants?
While being more or less "reasonable pacifist" I just can't side with guys condemning any kind of military, being born in Central Europe. I mean, if it weren't for the military, there wouldn't be anything left of my country anymore. There's this graphic joke universally known in my homeland. God stands over the map of Europe and says:
and for Poles we've got this special kind of surprise, we'll place them between Germany and Russia
I find it a hypocrytic for someone to ban the use of his software by military, when such person, his software and its proper functioning depend on the technology for which military paid the bills.
Don't want to have anything to do with the military? Get the fsck out of the Internet, researched and developed with military grants.
I feel it's time for Linux to grow up and find some kind of common ground with the closed source community.
I think it's time for closed source community to get real and stop hoping, that someone will do their work for them and they will cash out on this. Go, write software, if it's good people will buy it. It may not be. Well, tough.
Ok, I understand that right now you could sell shit, if it had shiny package and "iPod compatible" logo, but what's the point of this device?
From the/. story alone one can deduce, that this device will use iPod just as a portable HDD. Why not simply do away with iPod, and make a device that you can plug 2.5" ATA/SATA HDD into? I bet it would be cheaper and more power efficient. And you could have 160GB PVP, as opposed to iPod's maximum 60GB.
The same thing that happens when Citizen Joe doesn't pay. Couple of notices, first from authorities, then from collection agencies. Then freezing of assets. If it still doesn't help, liquidation of assets, or company.
It is pretty sad that marketing dollars can speak loudly enough that even supposed technically competent reporters just spew out the same crap that they have heard over and over again. What ever happened to critical thinking and investigation?
It's pretty simple, journalists are being lobbied the same as congresscritters. Some of them begin to repeat sensationalist claims about hundreds of billions of lost dollars (from the industry that barely gets 10b a year in total) or starving artists robbed by thieving p2p users. Some are so stupefied that they completely miss the point. But all of them are so completely drowned in misinfomation, which they pass on to their readers, that no one but some specialists from one field or another can see through the lies.
Unfortunatelly, 99% of any society are people who rely on the papers, magazines, tv to explain things to them. Hence the lobbying of journalists, and pressuring of their publishers/editors to tone down the few and far between who "get it".
I was talking more about theoretical limits of underlying physics, rather than practical problems of current technology. Which it has many. Just check how promising (not!) DRAM was after 10 years of development. I bet there were lots of people back then who discouraged everybody from investing in this nonsense, niche novelty instead of using tried and true core memory;)
The problem is that MRAM always seems to be 20 years behind SRAM in the cost/mb department.
What are you talking about?;) The physical phenomenon governing MRAM is known since 1989, and first theorethical/prototyping work didn't start before mid-nineties (I was mistaken about it being developed since the eighties). If I remember correctly, DRAM/SRAM twenty years ago was barely breaking 64KB per computer and reached these outrageous capabilities after twenty years of development. So, only 10 years from nothing to 4Mb available for sampling (and 16Mb in prototypes) is unbelievable speed;)
The problem is that these guys are shooting at a moving target, and they're barely keeping up.
Well, as everything in IT, DRAM and SRAM will soon hit the wall of diminishing returns in advances by process shrink alone. MRAM has a lot to catch up, but I think it will get there, eventually. But I wouldn't hold back with buying new RAM or Flash card just yet. Or for another ten years;)
I am not really suprised, that no one bothered to google for MRAM, not even tried to look it up in WP. What's missing in the article and most of the comments is that MRAM is one of those holy grails that most of the industry is chasing, because it promises great returns on investment. Basically MRAM (theoretically) can be:
as fast as SRAM (i.e. cache in your processor)
as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
non-volatile like Flash, but with random access and orders of magnitude faster, w/o "write penalty" and w/o erase/write cycles limit
much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
It's in development since the eighties and it will take time before we "get there" but it is possible, that one day MRAM could replace cache, main memory and memory cards in our computers.
When? I have no idea, but AFAIR transistors didn't get from prototype to 65nm in a decade. Hopefully engineergs and managers in some semiconductor companies have longer attention span than an avarage slashdot reader.
I find it very amusing, that you, an oponent of spelling reform and native English speaker, cannot spell properly "they're", substituting it with a homonym;) Actually, from my experience, it's only US-ians that make these errors, mistaking "they're", "their", "there", British and foreigners usually don't.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my first lessons in capitalism after the change of the political system in Poland was the lesson about contracts:
Want to terminate accounts of paedophiles and abusers? Place the wording about them in contract, but don't fucking pretend that "criticism of the AT&T and its affiliates" doesn't mean what my handicaped knowledge of English says it means.
No really, trust us.
Robert
The state of mind you describe has mania written all over it, for me. It is very unlikely for antidepressants to cause mania in a healthy brain. It is possible, but it's very unlikely[1]. On the other hand it happens very often for people suffering from bipolar disorder. Worse yet, treating bipolar with antidepressants alone causes severe complications, shortens period of cycling, deepens depressive and manic episodes.
;)
What I'm trying to tell you, is that there are millions of people out there with undiagnosed BD, or misdiagnosed as unipolar recurring depression. Worse still, the average lag between the onset of BD and proper diagnosis is 10 years, almost universally all over the world. So if you experience cycling periods of elevated and lowered mood, visit your closest psychiatrist and stress the cycling nature of your problems. BD can range from minor mood swings perceived by environment and affected person as personality traits, to strong, debilitating changes, when one can become dangerous to himself and the others. With time and improper treatment it only gets worse.
Robert
PS I know what I'm talking about. I am BD suffering for over 20 yrs, properly diagnosed 2 yrs ago.
[1] I know, there is Venlafaxine, but it's not usually the first, second or fifth antidepresant prescribed
I would give an arm and a leg, if they created such implant treating Bipolar Disorder. Living with pharmacology-resistant Bipolar II is PITA.
Robert
The only Polish auction site to speak of is of course Allegro. As far as I'm concerned Ebay Polska is a joke. No category managment, tons of pirated/counterfeit stuff, no support staff helping with anything... Sometimes I think that they created Polish branch just to be able to show to their shareholders that they are expanding, no matter what it means to them financially.
Robert
I don't understand what could be wrong with it.
I don't know about eBay, but I know for a fact, that there are people in Poland using local auction service that move tens if not hundreds of thousands $ worth of stuff monthly, without paying any taxes on that. Polish revenue service lately started monitoring it closely and collecting from those people, reassuring all the time, that they are not interested in people using internet auctions for a garage sale. As far as I know, that is true.
Whether you believe in taxes, is another matter, but I don't see why certain individuals should get a tax break just because it is difficult to hold them accountable. It's within a power of the state to levy taxes and create the law to help with it. And sometimes the state forces some reporting duties on some entities in order to help the state. Take for example your salaries: in most countries employers are forced to report the salaries of the employees to regulatory and/or revenue agencies, and I don't see anyone screaming bloody murder.
Robert
Quoting from TFA:
Reverse stock split: Instead of ten shares at $0.90, give the investor one share at $9.00. This is allowed under Nasdaq regulations, but has a fishy smell associated with it. There is an interesting article on MSN stating that 75% of stocks trade lower after a reverse split. My favorite quote is "A stock isn't trading under a dollar unless it is pretty close to bankruptcy or it has some other serious troubles".
Robert
Nice price points... According to exchange rates of my Central Bank it is roughly $816 in Ireland, $837 in UK and $776 in the rest of Eurozone. Just watch for those lines in front of the stores gathering any minute now.
For those that don't know, average European, from UK, IE or the rest of Europe still earns less than Americans.
Robert
Gee, I wonder, how much I could get for my domain... Maybe all those legions with their lives destroyed by write-only Perl code could bid some high $$ for it...
Robert
I'm surprised that no one picked up the fact that it is Japanese company suing French company in US court.
They won. SFW? How are they going to enforce this ruling in France? From the coverage of this ruling on Ars Technica I know, that the company is still offering those modchips on their web page. And they will. The only thing they can't do now is to visit US. And maybe Iraq or Afghanistan. All of the international treaties about enforcig court rulings abroad have one basic assumption written into them: no party to such treaty shall enforce a court ruling for something that's perfectly legal in the country of residence of defendant party.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Robert
If I had one dollar for every time I give this answer, I'd be frelling rich:
99% of businesses use sub 10Mb connection to the Internet and yet they are told the Cisco is the only way to connect them professionally. Moreover, the sub-$10k Cisco gear is a crap when it comes to performace, on par with good PCIe PC running on multiple Gbit eth interfaces.
That about sums it up.
RobertThis is what dislexia is really all about: inability to read properly. It's not $12, it's 12.99GBP, which roughly stands for $25.
For this money I can buy brand deltaV charger and 4xAA NiMH accus. Each one of them 2500mAh, or about twice the capacity of said USBCELL.
RobertThe theory you are referring to is called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. So far it is neither confirmed nor busted, but there are strong arguments against it. I suggest further reading on the subject.
Robert
Maybe because a said box is really only 200GB uncompressed, and needs good tape drive to work. For the same $50 (or 50eur in my case) I can buy 200GB ata/sata HDD, that works just as well, has a transfer of 30MB/s instead of 2.4MB/s and is random access instead of linear access. Add external USB2-IDE bridge w/ power supply for about $10 and you don't even have to reboot you computer to connect HDD.
And last time I checked, HDD's were much more resistant to overwriting. The only downside is that there are no HDD changers, but for the cost of reasonably sized tape library I can hire someone to do it manually ;)
Robert
And how do you know, that you guessed right at every step? No, really. Good crypto doesn't let you distinguish from decryption with good or bad key, other than the content of the plaintext. And since the plaintext in this case is crypted text for another step, you have no chance of finding out, if it's right. So in reality, you have to check key 0 and 1 in first step, 0,1 for 0 from first step and 0,1 for 1 from first step etc...
Do the math wise ass, complexity of brute-forcing 128 1-bit passes is the same as complexity of brute-forcing single 128-bit pass -- 2^128
RobertYou like dolphins? Me too. But it didn't stop me from noticing, that the guy also talked about fences partitioning larger tanks. Doplhins can clearly see and interact with other dolphins on the other side of the fence, and they still don't jump through this one-foot-over-water fence. Not to bright in my book.
Robert
Are you absolutelly positive, that there were no soldiers or people paid by military among those giants?
While being more or less "reasonable pacifist" I just can't side with guys condemning any kind of military, being born in Central Europe. I mean, if it weren't for the military, there wouldn't be anything left of my country anymore. There's this graphic joke universally known in my homeland. God stands over the map of Europe and says:
Robert
I find it a hypocrytic for someone to ban the use of his software by military, when such person, his software and its proper functioning depend on the technology for which military paid the bills.
Don't want to have anything to do with the military? Get the fsck out of the Internet, researched and developed with military grants.
Robert
I think it's time for closed source community to get real and stop hoping, that someone will do their work for them and they will cash out on this. Go, write software, if it's good people will buy it. It may not be. Well, tough.
Robert
Ok, I understand that right now you could sell shit, if it had shiny package and "iPod compatible" logo, but what's the point of this device?
/. story alone one can deduce, that this device will use iPod just as a portable HDD. Why not simply do away with iPod, and make a device that you can plug 2.5" ATA/SATA HDD into? I bet it would be cheaper and more power efficient. And you could have 160GB PVP, as opposed to iPod's maximum 60GB.
From the
Robert
The same thing that happens when Citizen Joe doesn't pay. Couple of notices, first from authorities, then from collection agencies. Then freezing of assets. If it still doesn't help, liquidation of assets, or company.
Robert
It's pretty simple, journalists are being lobbied the same as congresscritters. Some of them begin to repeat sensationalist claims about hundreds of billions of lost dollars (from the industry that barely gets 10b a year in total) or starving artists robbed by thieving p2p users. Some are so stupefied that they completely miss the point. But all of them are so completely drowned in misinfomation, which they pass on to their readers, that no one but some specialists from one field or another can see through the lies.
Unfortunatelly, 99% of any society are people who rely on the papers, magazines, tv to explain things to them. Hence the lobbying of journalists, and pressuring of their publishers/editors to tone down the few and far between who "get it".
Youp, we're screwed...
Robert
I was talking more about theoretical limits of underlying physics, rather than practical problems of current technology. Which it has many. Just check how promising (not!) DRAM was after 10 years of development. I bet there were lots of people back then who discouraged everybody from investing in this nonsense, niche novelty instead of using tried and true core memory ;)
Robert
What are you talking about? ;) The physical phenomenon governing MRAM is known since 1989, and first theorethical/prototyping work didn't start before mid-nineties (I was mistaken about it being developed since the eighties). If I remember correctly, DRAM/SRAM twenty years ago was barely breaking 64KB per computer and reached these outrageous capabilities after twenty years of development. So, only 10 years from nothing to 4Mb available for sampling (and 16Mb in prototypes) is unbelievable speed ;)
Well, as everything in IT, DRAM and SRAM will soon hit the wall of diminishing returns in advances by process shrink alone. MRAM has a lot to catch up, but I think it will get there, eventually. But I wouldn't hold back with buying new RAM or Flash card just yet. Or for another ten years ;)
Robert- as fast as SRAM (i.e. cache in your processor)
- as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
- non-volatile like Flash, but with random access and orders of magnitude faster, w/o "write penalty" and w/o erase/write cycles limit
- much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
It's in development since the eighties and it will take time before we "get there" but it is possible, that one day MRAM could replace cache, main memory and memory cards in our computers.When? I have no idea, but AFAIR transistors didn't get from prototype to 65nm in a decade. Hopefully engineergs and managers in some semiconductor companies have longer attention span than an avarage slashdot reader.
Robert
I find it very amusing, that you, an oponent of spelling reform and native English speaker, cannot spell properly "they're", substituting it with a homonym
Robert