This ruling doesn't let patent violators off the hook, it
just removes one tool of the patent holder - the injunction.
What other tools do they really have, though?
"okay, negotiate a fair contract with me for stealing my
patented idea." "Uhhh... No."
"No???" "No."
"If you don't, I'll sue!" "If you sue, we'll stall and appeal so long even your
grandchildren will live six feet under before you
ever see a penny. Assuming you don't bankrupt yourself
and need to drop the case long before then."
"Ummm... Okay, buy me lunch then and we'll call it good?" "No."
An injunction on infringement gives both sides a
strong motivation to quickly settle. Disallowing such
injunctions only gives the owner (not the infringer) a
motivation to settle ever.
Now, I fully agree that we need some solution to
the problem of patent trolls, but this seems far more like
a slap at all the small inventors than the big boys that can
afford prolonged litigation.
Apple isn't screwing you. Your government is
taxing the shit out of you. Deal with it, or change
it.
...Or just buy one in the US, online if possible (ship it
to a friend?) so you don't pay sales tax to either
country, while on a business trip or vacation.
For example, I don't mind that all consumer
cars have four wheels.
Why four?
One would have the least losses due to friction, though
can't remain upright on its own (even while spinning,
which only constrains falls to occuring along one axis).
Two will remain upright as long as it has a certain minimum
speed (basically stabilizes the one axis mentioned above).
Three gives the least friction while still remaining upright
without any need for a stabilizing force.
Five allows a single failure without losing the ability to
safely continue driving. Six allows (up to) two points
of failue, or three-dimensional traction control (think
"articulated body" for that to make sense).
What does four do for us? Overall, of the lower numbers,
it seems like the worst possible choice - Selected
only because it fits nicely on a basically-rectangular box
(also not necessarily the best shape for humans to safely
occupy at normal driving speeds).
NTP is somewhat coarse, IEEE 1588 gives much tighter
timing.
While true, the two also serve radically different
needs.
NTP makes it trivial to keep every machine on a LAN to
within less than 1ms of each other (though the FP comment
about "accurate to within a few millionths of a second"
struck me as laughable even for most stratum-1 (GPS PPS)
machines). NTP also makes it trivial to keep my LAN
within a few tens of ms of "real" UTC, and consequently
within a few (x2) tens of ms of any other computer on
the planet that bothers setting up an NTP client. And
due to ready availability of GPS receivers in recent years,
no admin has any good excuse for not running their NTP
server(s) as stratum-2 (if not right at stratum-1) and
the rest of their LAN as stratum-3 (or 2).
IEEE 1588 basically only exists to circumvent the idea that
you can't have a stratum-0 device act as a time source
right on the network (along with what amounts to a
primative "NTP first" QoS right in the switch). Depending
on the specific implementation, it may well make
sub-microsecond accuracy possible (though
I would seriously question such a claim solely on the
basis of clock drift between updates), but at the cost
of requiring dedicated hardware.
$50 for a new motherboard? Can I still use my
Athlon MP 2600+ processors? What about my RAM?
I think you've missed the point entirely.
At some point you have to accept that just about every
component in your system has grown obsolete, and you
have little choice but to go in for a whole new machine.
Perhaps you can boost your CPU a notch, you can max out
your RAM, you can upgrade to a faster (if not modern)
graphics card. But you can't turn a donkey into a
racehorse no matter how much you might want to.
In your case, I'd say your system probably still
performs decently due to having dual CPUs. But
you already know that you don't fall into the
majority of gamers (many of whom deliberately avoid
dual CPU or dual core even though they'll spend almost
without limit for a few more FPS). When you bought/built
that system, you made tradeoffs - You considered overall
performance more important that single-threaded execution;
you (presumeably, or you wouldn't have mentioned memory)
went with SDRAM rather than the already-becoming-ubiquitous
DDR; You chose a CPU that even AMD seemed unlikely to
continue right from the start (when AMD released the MP2600
in February 2003, they had already announced the Opteron
line as targetting the "server" market - Which all but
certainly included any form of N-way processor support).
So, while you have my sympathy, you can't seriously
expect card-makers to continue to release cards for obsolete
systems indefinitely. Why not ask for an VL version? How
about plain ol' ISA? When should they draw the line?
Not trying to sound like an ass here - I too have experienced
the joys of a "forced" upgrade of a perfectly good system.
But I have come to accept that, if I hope to have a gee-whiz
wonderful 16-core 33GHZ CPU (with quantum coprocessor?) in
another ten years, I have to accept that it won't depend on
a 20YO bus architecture; and that conversely, whatever bus it
does use will probably not retain backward compatibility
with what I have today.
Bite me. I'm still using my AthlonXP 2600 on an AGP
board, with a GF6600.
Then your video card already can greatly outperform
the CPU's ability to keep up, so I don't get the "bite me"
part of that... While perhaps not budget-conscious to the
extreme, you certainly don't sound like the target market
for the video cards in question...
And I would mention that I use a 6600 myself, because
it gives "good enough" performance, costs under $100, and
a year ago gave the best bang for a passively-cooled dual-DVI
card (which also meant not needing a new power supply just
to feed the damned thing).
I'm changing the CPU (and therefore mobo) when single
threaded (i.e. game) performance is tripled with a new
CPU (for a sane price).
That all depends on your idea of "sane". From an XP-2600,
you would see a huge performance boost (3x? I don't
know about that, but at least double) by going to to an
X2-3800 (yes, a dual core - Even though single-threaded
apps will only use one of them, the performance boost
of having the OS on a diffent core from your game would
amaze you), which has now dropped below the $300 mark
(and toss in another $50-$100 for a halfway decent
motherboard). Yet the fact that you do not
consider that worth the cost (by virtue of your not
having made such an upgrade yet) implies that you also
don't insist on unrealistic framerates at the highest
quality in the latest games.
I don't mean that insultingly, BTW... I suspect we have rather
similar upgrading criteria - I only upgraded my last
desktop machine (a dual P3) after getting five good
years of service out of it and learning that I couldn't
use more than 120GB of my nice new 300GB HDD in it (yeah,
I could have gotten an ATA133 add-in PCI card, but it
had already become apparent that I would need an upgrade
soon anyway).
Where are the AGP versions of these cards? You know, for
people who really are on a budget and can't afford to buy a
new motherboard to use with a new budget card...
People "really" on a budget don't look at the "low-end" of the
high-end 3d graphics card market. They first of all don't buy
a new graphics card unless their old one dies; and second, when
they do actually need a new one, they buy a GeForce
MX4000 or Radeon 7000 series card for under $25. And they
will feel absolutely thrilled at the HUGE performance boost
over their old Trident TGUI9440.
If you can't afford $50 for a new motherboard, you can't afford
$80 for a new graphics card.
If it's a condition of his probation to which he agreed in order to
stay out of prison, then he has no standing on which to object now.
How about an indirect condition of his probation? The intent of
which he has agreed to satisfy, if not the specific method?
Some stupid statute says he needs to let the FBI put his DNA in their
happy little database. Even in genetic research, they usually use a
cheek swab rather than draw blood, so why won't they accept another
method of DNA recovery?
If they want his DNA, we can debate the moral and privacy implications
of the issue, but most people will agree that it will probably
help solve certain classes of crimes. And it wouldn't matter if
they get that DNA from blood, from buccal cells, of from hair follicles.
If they just want his blood, we don't have much to debate - Nothing
more than a barbaric ritual of the supplicant allowing the alpha-ape
to ritually wound him to prove his subjugation. And that we
absolutely cannot allow, whatever the pretense.
and since when does the government expect everyone to give their fingerprints?
Not "big brother" government, but have you ever heard of the "CHIPS" program?
Basically, the local PD come into a school (usually at the request of the PTA or
some other group of well-intentioned but grossly misinformed parents) and fingerprint
everybody.
They do this on the pretext of helping track down kidnapping victims.
Anyone care to guess how many (still-living) kidnapping victims this has
recovered, out of the thousands that vanish yearly? If you raised your hand,
you've come pretty damned close.
But such programs happen on a strictly voluntary basis, right? Now who wants
to guess how many kids have experienced some form of punishment, up to and
including suspension, for refusing to cooperate - If you only raised one
hand, you've missed by a few orders of magnitude. Good luck finding
hard numbers on this one, though - I myself count as an undocumented statistic,
having refused to give my fingerprints in... third grade, I believe. As
punishment, I didn't get to go on the field-trip to tour the police station
(hey, sounds minor, but to an 8YO, suspension merely means a day off from
school, while social exclusion and missing a field trip means the end of
the world).
Unless they are providing some other way to
authenticate people when they sign up for a service
this doesn't seem to me like it will do much.
You mean something like "assign a pseudorandom 20-digit
account number"? Yeah, real challenge there
After all, who wants to pay your taxes?
The problem here directly relates to that answer - No one.
You should ONLY ever need to give your SS#
for the purpose of reporting taxable income to the SSA.
Period. End of valid reasons.
You should not need it on your driver's license, you should
not need it on non-interest-bearing financial accounts such
as credit cards or most checking accounts. You should not
need to give it to the phone, cable, gas, and electric
companies. You shouldn't even need to give it to the
town/city or possibly even the state (though, as far as
the state goes, since the IRS disgustingly considers the
state giving me back the excess of my withheld taxes as
"income", they've done a definitional end-run around
that exception). You shouldn't need to give it to your
university if you don't receive any fincial aid. You
shouldn't need to give it to your insurance company,
since they only reimburse you for losses. You shouldn't
need to give it to your doctor or pharmacist. You
shouldn't need it on your marriage license (though
again, we have a definitional end-run by the government
for that one, by having special tax rules for married
couples).
Personally, I find it telling that politicians "expressed
astonishment" that every company and their dog asks for
your SS#. How the hell do these guys live in the modern
world? Do they actually have servant even for such rare
tasks as signing up for a new long distance carrier or
ISP? And can someone even legally let a servant
sign up for credit cards or mortgages?
We need these assclowns out of office ASAP, and a
maximum allowable income and assets cap for any future
officeholders. Have over half a million in capital
or make over 100k per year? See ya.
And a piece of evidence that this is exactly
what happens emerged this week
Which justifies why EVERY sane man should quietly
(ie, if you want your penis still attached the next
morning, don't tell the wifey) get a paternity test
of any kid "his" mate pops out.
But then, the same traits a female looks for in the
daddy-wimp also most likely include a low risk that
the sucker will get such a test done.
Not that the courts really care about the actual
biological father when it comes to child support or
alimony, but, always nice to have the option of a
double-murder/suicide rather than give that cuckolding
whore another penny.
But then, the same traits a female looks for in the
daddy-wimp also most likely include a low risk that
the sucker will chain the doors and shutters closed
with everyone inside, douse the house in petrol, and
have a cigar (the smelly ones his wife always hated,
of course).
And no, I haven't married or had kids, nor do I want to.
Wow... Well written response! Consider me impressed, that
someone on Slashdot put together a coherent rebuttal to
each of my points, sufficient to partially sway my opinion.
On the last point, though (Bhopal), I still have to disagree.
Although I grant the late request for Andersen makes this a
more difficult situation, a fair trial would establish
the facts of your four points. Perhaps it would turn out that
Andersen had so little involvement that he bears no responsibility,
but others did. But I can't help think that if the request
involved an average Joe working the line, rather than a wealthy
greyback, that the US wouldn't hesitate to turn him over. But, just
my opinion there.
Your understanding of International Law is
woefully inadequate/misinformed.
And yours appears woefully naive. International
law means "The US gets what it wants, everyone
else can go pound sand".
Not saying I consider it right, just callin' it
as I see it.
The US has extradition treaties with countries
they determine are lawful, like the UK.
Or, say, Italy? Oh, but we just can't let them
have 22 CIA operatives charged with kidnapping and torture
on Italian soil.
Or Venezuela, seeking the extradition of a KNOWN terrorist
the US has decided to harbor, because he only terrorized
Cuba? How well would that fly if the UK responded to
the US request "Oh, well, we'd love to, and normally we
disapprove of cracking military computers, but well, he
only attacked the US, not anyone that matters"?
Or Spain, currently seeking the extradition of three US
soldiers for the murder of a Spanish reporter?
Or India, who currently wants Warren Andersen (former CEO
of Union Carbide) for that little Bhopal mess?
I could go on.
So... Yeah. International law... Whatever helps you sleep.
A ban on IM alone will ensure that no one uses their product.
Hey, at 7Mbps, I'd still use it...
...To RD/VNC from the top of a mountain to my home desktop machine where I can
run Yahoo/AIM/MSN/ICQ/whatever.
If they really want to ban IM, they can pay the price of increased
bandwidth to hide such use. Because really, no one will actually obey
such stupid rules.
But hey, at $0.10 per SMS, if I ran a cell company, I'd sure as hell want
to discourage my customers from using an ultra-low-bandwidth (and free)
alternative as well!
This guy's aim (ODF) is off, but he still has a valid point, which is that Microsoft
devotes more time/resources to making its products accessible than does the OSS community.
Your post made it seem as if that wasn't a problem.
My apologies... I didn't mean to imply that we couldn't do better. Just that...
If OSS solutions don't work for you, just use Word/Windows.
...People should just use what works.
(And you apparently did get my main point, that the FP may have
the right idea but attacked the wrong target, so I won't reiterate
that... Um... again).
So yes, I did mean that if OSS doesn't work, and Windows does, people
should use Windows. But I do far prefer an open solution (not
to mention a free one). Despite that preference, I wouldn't give up watching
DVDs just because I unwisely bought a Sony player and have lately come to
dislike their stance on DRM.
Most OSS advocates wouldn't be satisfied with
that scenario.
I agree, and would prefer otherwise. And over
time, OSS will come to include such support... But that
objection doesn't warrant complaints about the standard
itself.
Or to put it another way... If Microsoft dropped
accessibility support of the open standard, people could
switch to using a different app that supports those same
formats. If Microsoft dropped accessibility support of
their current closed standards, do you just never
upgrade your software again?
So, this seems (to me) like a case of lashing out at
the guy offering to buy you a beer because he didn't
also offer to pay your rent.
at least at a level comparable to that of products from
Microsoft, whose 40-person Accessibility Technology Group
is now widely praised by disabilities advocates."
Reality will not ever count as "disabled accessible".
A few companies will see the profit motive of targetting a
(excuse the pun) captive audience, and if you need such
software, you should support those companies by
buying their products.
But to complain about a standard, when you actually have
a problem with needing to pay for the best
implementation of that standard?
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just
buy Windows and use MS Office. I have ZERO patience for
people whining that they can't have it all - My sympathy
for your problems vanishes at the point that accomodating
you deprives me of something (in this case, a
standard a long time coming, for which an "accessible"
implementation already exists, just not a free one).
We have tens of thousands of agents who monitor and take
down websites here in the West also. They're called Intellectual
Property Lawyers.
Yeah, and we here at Slashdot so often express our
love and admiration for those fine men and women who help
protect our poor defenseless billionaire corporate
executives' bonuses. Golly, you've certainly hit on a
glaring hypocrisy there!
Funny how everyone (mainstream soceity atleast) thinks
it is so evil when other cultures impose their values, but
completely OK when we impose ours.
Who said anyone considers it okay here?
However, even as offensive as I find both groups
of pigeons, one substantial difference still remains...
The IP lawyers don't play nice to your face then run
off "to a little-known on-campus office crammed with
computers" to rat out their friends.
IP lawyers should just die. Scum like like Hu Yingying,
who betray their friends (a FAR worse moral crime than
actual treason) deserve a slow and painful death, if at
all possible by the very forces they normally wield.
Frame the bitch for doing exactly what they have her
monitoring, and rejoice at her life in one of China's
rape-and-forced-labor camps (and if that sounds misogynistic,
I'd say it sounds even worse for a male
rat).
So #1 was in play, but if he had risk factors such
as #2 or #3, that would have makedly increased his risk
for a DVT.
How dare you not toe the Slashdot line about
sedentary geeks destroying their bodies (with a
gleeful sense of self-debasement)? ;-)
Kudos on making a very good point that everyone else
seems to have overlooked - Prolonged sitting factors
into such problems, but rarely causes them in isolation.
For a simple proof-of-concept, why don't we constantly
hear about paraplegics dying of DVT? (and yes, they
do have a higher incidence of it, due to the factor
of sitting immobile all day, but they have an expected
lifespan considerably longer than 8 hours).
However, one possible solution to the problem you pose would be to design the chips with lots
of little holes and pumping fluid through it. A design could be based on a fractal 3D shape
Nevermind fluids... I seriously wonder hy we don't already use chips formed as Sierpinsky
carpets, with plain ol' copper or aluminum cooling running through the chip!
You wouldn't even need a true fractal on today's chips... A mere second or third order
carpet would vastly improve CPU cooling at almost no expense (well, it would cost silicon,
but you could probably use the cut-out bits as some other (smaller) chips such as memory).
Then once the manufacturing processes catch up, you could expand that to a Menger sponge for
similar heat dissipation efficiency in a truely 3d arrangement.
The Cox DVR is awful. From a usability
perspective, TiVo blows it away.
Ah, you apparently received one of the functional
models. Consider yourself lucky that it works well
enough to compare with TiVo.
The horror stories range from them simply not working at
all (regardless of how many times the customer has the unit
grudgingly replaced by a tech who mumbles about "signal
quality" and "poor power in this area"); to the DVR randomly
recording whatever the hell it wants (and of course,
not recording what the user wants); to resetting
at least once every five minutes (a close relative has that
problem with theirs - COX used the "poor power" excuse,
despite it sitting on a line-interactive UPS!).
Customers might "prefer" TiVO? Hah! More like "We expect
our DVR customers to start a class action in the next few
months".
You need to not think of this issue as a geek. Instead, look
at it from the point of view of the mass of early adopters - Namely,
18-30YO males, usually slightly more tech-saavy than average
but not actually geeks. They can set their DVD player's clock,
they can manage most AV equipment cabling, they can probably correctly
assemble an out-of-the-box computer (though not safely do anything
inside the case).
These folks will buy (at least) one of the next-gen consoles within
a few months of its release. If they buy a Wii, no impact on the DVD wars.
If they buy a 360, they only get a standard DVD player at the moment. But
if they buy a PS3, they have a BluRay player right from the start.
This means that, for probably a full year, BluRay wins.
Now, fast-forward a year. You have the PS3, you have possibly
the 360 shipping with the HD-DVD upgrade by default, and you have
standalone players of both formats. All four of these options
cost roughly the same price, in the neighborhood of $500. So we can
consider the standalone players DOA until they hit the WallyWorld sub-$50
price point 3-5 years down the road. Even non-gamers will have no trouble
figuring out that, for the price, they might as well get a next-gen
gaming console as part of the deal.
So which console will majority of consumers (the non-gamers, so they
won't pick based on a favorite game only available on one platform) pick?
"I dunno, honey, they sound about the same to me"... "Hey, doesn't your
nephew have a ton of those new BluRay things? Let's get one of those so
we can borrow movies from him."
And THAT explains why Sony could finally manage to win a media
format war, depending on what they do in the very near future (ie, at E3)
with the PS3.
The average consumer doesn't consider DRM because they don't understand
it or, in most cases, even know about it.
Hey, thanks! That deals with *one* of the issues (though that one
doesn't actually seem to crash the machine, just a nuissance), but
only two of the machines in question use the e1000 module.
I think at some point you need to draw the line regarding support for older hardware
and peripherals. I mean, excessive backwards compatability has retarded advancement of
the industry IMHO.
Although the FP link specifically refers to older hardware, the 2.6 kernel has SERIOUS
problems even on newer (and extremely common) hardware.
In the past six months, I have tried installing 2.6 distros (both Slack 10.2 and FC4)
on five different reasonably-modern machines (including two different "business-line"
P4 Dell PCs, a Dell Poweredge racked server, a home-built Abit KV-80 with a Sempron 2500+
(and no PCI cards whatsoever), and an EPIA ML6000.
And on ALL these systems, I see the same sort of problems with the 2.6 kernel...
First, during installation, I've learned not to ever try to format a drive
as journaled EXT3, as it has about a 30% chance of throwing a kernel panic.
Then, once I get the system up, the network keeps getting thousands of "too many
interrupts" - Even unplugged from the switch!
Then, as the coup de gras, the system will crash (with a message whose cause
scrolls off the top of the screen due to the stack trace - Who the fuck came up with
that brilliant idea? "Hey, Linux, let's give so much debugging info, to people
who probably can't even use it, that they can no longer see what actually triggered
the crash"?) within a day or two, at random, with nothing particularly exciting going
on. Once, just once, I managed to catch a glimpse of this as coming from the
VM manager (though I couldn't say for sure it *really* came from that, just that it
received an honorable mention in the first few lines of crap sent to the screen), but
it doesn't matter if I turn swap on or off
So, I've given up and gone back to installing Slackware 9.1 as my preferred distribution
(even the "2.6 ready" distros running a 2.4 kernel seem to exhibit most of the flakeyness
I describe above). And it just works, though I obviously sacrifice some of the newer
feature I'd really like to work (particularly the better USB and power management support).
So it goes. PLEASE, please please please guys, fix the 2.6 kernel. It doesn't matter
how well you make it perform if no one can use the damned thing!
Slashdot Mirror
This ruling doesn't let patent violators off the hook, it just removes one tool of the patent holder - the injunction.
What other tools do they really have, though?
"okay, negotiate a fair contract with me for stealing my patented idea."
"Uhhh... No."
"No???"
"No."
"If you don't, I'll sue!"
"If you sue, we'll stall and appeal so long even your grandchildren will live six feet under before you ever see a penny. Assuming you don't bankrupt yourself and need to drop the case long before then."
"Ummm... Okay, buy me lunch then and we'll call it good?"
"No."
An injunction on infringement gives both sides a strong motivation to quickly settle. Disallowing such injunctions only gives the owner (not the infringer) a motivation to settle ever.
Now, I fully agree that we need some solution to the problem of patent trolls, but this seems far more like a slap at all the small inventors than the big boys that can afford prolonged litigation.
Apple isn't screwing you. Your government is taxing the shit out of you. Deal with it, or change it.
...Or just buy one in the US, online if possible (ship it
to a friend?) so you don't pay sales tax to either
country, while on a business trip or vacation.
The black MacBook seems a bit weird - it's $200 more than the nearest equivalent white model
You forget the company that produced it...
The FP mentioning CPU, then color, then - nothing! - as the key specs of this product should give a bit of a clue on the target audience.
Not sayin' it doesn't sounds like a hell of a nice laptop (and for a decent price at that, amazingly enough). Just... Know your audience.
For example, I don't mind that all consumer cars have four wheels.
Why four?
One would have the least losses due to friction, though can't remain upright on its own (even while spinning, which only constrains falls to occuring along one axis).
Two will remain upright as long as it has a certain minimum speed (basically stabilizes the one axis mentioned above).
Three gives the least friction while still remaining upright without any need for a stabilizing force.
Five allows a single failure without losing the ability to safely continue driving. Six allows (up to) two points of failue, or three-dimensional traction control (think "articulated body" for that to make sense).
What does four do for us? Overall, of the lower numbers, it seems like the worst possible choice - Selected only because it fits nicely on a basically-rectangular box (also not necessarily the best shape for humans to safely occupy at normal driving speeds).
NTP is somewhat coarse, IEEE 1588 gives much tighter timing.
While true, the two also serve radically different needs.
NTP makes it trivial to keep every machine on a LAN to within less than 1ms of each other (though the FP comment about "accurate to within a few millionths of a second" struck me as laughable even for most stratum-1 (GPS PPS) machines). NTP also makes it trivial to keep my LAN within a few tens of ms of "real" UTC, and consequently within a few (x2) tens of ms of any other computer on the planet that bothers setting up an NTP client. And due to ready availability of GPS receivers in recent years, no admin has any good excuse for not running their NTP server(s) as stratum-2 (if not right at stratum-1) and the rest of their LAN as stratum-3 (or 2).
IEEE 1588 basically only exists to circumvent the idea that you can't have a stratum-0 device act as a time source right on the network (along with what amounts to a primative "NTP first" QoS right in the switch). Depending on the specific implementation, it may well make sub-microsecond accuracy possible (though I would seriously question such a claim solely on the basis of clock drift between updates), but at the cost of requiring dedicated hardware.
$50 for a new motherboard? Can I still use my Athlon MP 2600+ processors? What about my RAM?
I think you've missed the point entirely.
At some point you have to accept that just about every component in your system has grown obsolete, and you have little choice but to go in for a whole new machine. Perhaps you can boost your CPU a notch, you can max out your RAM, you can upgrade to a faster (if not modern) graphics card. But you can't turn a donkey into a racehorse no matter how much you might want to.
In your case, I'd say your system probably still performs decently due to having dual CPUs. But you already know that you don't fall into the majority of gamers (many of whom deliberately avoid dual CPU or dual core even though they'll spend almost without limit for a few more FPS). When you bought/built that system, you made tradeoffs - You considered overall performance more important that single-threaded execution; you (presumeably, or you wouldn't have mentioned memory) went with SDRAM rather than the already-becoming-ubiquitous DDR; You chose a CPU that even AMD seemed unlikely to continue right from the start (when AMD released the MP2600 in February 2003, they had already announced the Opteron line as targetting the "server" market - Which all but certainly included any form of N-way processor support).
So, while you have my sympathy, you can't seriously expect card-makers to continue to release cards for obsolete systems indefinitely. Why not ask for an VL version? How about plain ol' ISA? When should they draw the line?
Not trying to sound like an ass here - I too have experienced the joys of a "forced" upgrade of a perfectly good system. But I have come to accept that, if I hope to have a gee-whiz wonderful 16-core 33GHZ CPU (with quantum coprocessor?) in another ten years, I have to accept that it won't depend on a 20YO bus architecture; and that conversely, whatever bus it does use will probably not retain backward compatibility with what I have today.
Bite me. I'm still using my AthlonXP 2600 on an AGP board, with a GF6600.
Then your video card already can greatly outperform the CPU's ability to keep up, so I don't get the "bite me" part of that... While perhaps not budget-conscious to the extreme, you certainly don't sound like the target market for the video cards in question...
And I would mention that I use a 6600 myself, because it gives "good enough" performance, costs under $100, and a year ago gave the best bang for a passively-cooled dual-DVI card (which also meant not needing a new power supply just to feed the damned thing).
I'm changing the CPU (and therefore mobo) when single threaded (i.e. game) performance is tripled with a new CPU (for a sane price).
That all depends on your idea of "sane". From an XP-2600, you would see a huge performance boost (3x? I don't know about that, but at least double) by going to to an X2-3800 (yes, a dual core - Even though single-threaded apps will only use one of them, the performance boost of having the OS on a diffent core from your game would amaze you), which has now dropped below the $300 mark (and toss in another $50-$100 for a halfway decent motherboard). Yet the fact that you do not consider that worth the cost (by virtue of your not having made such an upgrade yet) implies that you also don't insist on unrealistic framerates at the highest quality in the latest games.
I don't mean that insultingly, BTW... I suspect we have rather similar upgrading criteria - I only upgraded my last desktop machine (a dual P3) after getting five good years of service out of it and learning that I couldn't use more than 120GB of my nice new 300GB HDD in it (yeah, I could have gotten an ATA133 add-in PCI card, but it had already become apparent that I would need an upgrade soon anyway).
Where are the AGP versions of these cards? You know, for people who really are on a budget and can't afford to buy a new motherboard to use with a new budget card...
People "really" on a budget don't look at the "low-end" of the high-end 3d graphics card market. They first of all don't buy a new graphics card unless their old one dies; and second, when they do actually need a new one, they buy a GeForce MX4000 or Radeon 7000 series card for under $25. And they will feel absolutely thrilled at the HUGE performance boost over their old Trident TGUI9440.
If you can't afford $50 for a new motherboard, you can't afford $80 for a new graphics card.
If it's a condition of his probation to which he agreed in order to stay out of prison, then he has no standing on which to object now.
How about an indirect condition of his probation? The intent of which he has agreed to satisfy, if not the specific method?
Some stupid statute says he needs to let the FBI put his DNA in their happy little database. Even in genetic research, they usually use a cheek swab rather than draw blood, so why won't they accept another method of DNA recovery?
If they want his DNA, we can debate the moral and privacy implications of the issue, but most people will agree that it will probably help solve certain classes of crimes. And it wouldn't matter if they get that DNA from blood, from buccal cells, of from hair follicles.
If they just want his blood, we don't have much to debate - Nothing more than a barbaric ritual of the supplicant allowing the alpha-ape to ritually wound him to prove his subjugation. And that we absolutely cannot allow, whatever the pretense.
and since when does the government expect everyone to give their fingerprints?
Not "big brother" government, but have you ever heard of the "CHIPS" program?
Basically, the local PD come into a school (usually at the request of the PTA or some other group of well-intentioned but grossly misinformed parents) and fingerprint everybody.
They do this on the pretext of helping track down kidnapping victims.
Anyone care to guess how many (still-living) kidnapping victims this has recovered, out of the thousands that vanish yearly? If you raised your hand, you've come pretty damned close.
But such programs happen on a strictly voluntary basis, right? Now who wants to guess how many kids have experienced some form of punishment, up to and including suspension, for refusing to cooperate - If you only raised one hand, you've missed by a few orders of magnitude. Good luck finding hard numbers on this one, though - I myself count as an undocumented statistic, having refused to give my fingerprints in... third grade, I believe. As punishment, I didn't get to go on the field-trip to tour the police station (hey, sounds minor, but to an 8YO, suspension merely means a day off from school, while social exclusion and missing a field trip means the end of the world).
Unless they are providing some other way to authenticate people when they sign up for a service this doesn't seem to me like it will do much.
You mean something like "assign a pseudorandom 20-digit account number"? Yeah, real challenge there
After all, who wants to pay your taxes?
The problem here directly relates to that answer - No one.
You should ONLY ever need to give your SS# for the purpose of reporting taxable income to the SSA. Period. End of valid reasons.
You should not need it on your driver's license, you should not need it on non-interest-bearing financial accounts such as credit cards or most checking accounts. You should not need to give it to the phone, cable, gas, and electric companies. You shouldn't even need to give it to the town/city or possibly even the state (though, as far as the state goes, since the IRS disgustingly considers the state giving me back the excess of my withheld taxes as "income", they've done a definitional end-run around that exception). You shouldn't need to give it to your university if you don't receive any fincial aid. You shouldn't need to give it to your insurance company, since they only reimburse you for losses. You shouldn't need to give it to your doctor or pharmacist. You shouldn't need it on your marriage license (though again, we have a definitional end-run by the government for that one, by having special tax rules for married couples).
Personally, I find it telling that politicians "expressed astonishment" that every company and their dog asks for your SS#. How the hell do these guys live in the modern world? Do they actually have servant even for such rare tasks as signing up for a new long distance carrier or ISP? And can someone even legally let a servant sign up for credit cards or mortgages?
We need these assclowns out of office ASAP, and a maximum allowable income and assets cap for any future officeholders. Have over half a million in capital or make over 100k per year? See ya.
And NO... MORE... LAWYERS!
And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week
Which justifies why EVERY sane man should quietly (ie, if you want your penis still attached the next morning, don't tell the wifey) get a paternity test of any kid "his" mate pops out.
But then, the same traits a female looks for in the daddy-wimp also most likely include a low risk that the sucker will get such a test done.
Not that the courts really care about the actual biological father when it comes to child support or alimony, but, always nice to have the option of a double-murder/suicide rather than give that cuckolding whore another penny.
But then, the same traits a female looks for in the daddy-wimp also most likely include a low risk that the sucker will chain the doors and shutters closed with everyone inside, douse the house in petrol, and have a cigar (the smelly ones his wife always hated, of course).
And no, I haven't married or had kids, nor do I want to.
Wow... Well written response! Consider me impressed, that someone on Slashdot put together a coherent rebuttal to each of my points, sufficient to partially sway my opinion.
On the last point, though (Bhopal), I still have to disagree. Although I grant the late request for Andersen makes this a more difficult situation, a fair trial would establish the facts of your four points. Perhaps it would turn out that Andersen had so little involvement that he bears no responsibility, but others did. But I can't help think that if the request involved an average Joe working the line, rather than a wealthy greyback, that the US wouldn't hesitate to turn him over. But, just my opinion there.
Your understanding of International Law is woefully inadequate/misinformed.
And yours appears woefully naive. International law means "The US gets what it wants, everyone else can go pound sand".
Not saying I consider it right, just callin' it as I see it.
The US has extradition treaties with countries they determine are lawful, like the UK.
Or, say, Italy? Oh, but we just can't let them have 22 CIA operatives charged with kidnapping and torture on Italian soil.
Or Venezuela, seeking the extradition of a KNOWN terrorist the US has decided to harbor, because he only terrorized Cuba? How well would that fly if the UK responded to the US request "Oh, well, we'd love to, and normally we disapprove of cracking military computers, but well, he only attacked the US, not anyone that matters"?
Or Spain, currently seeking the extradition of three US soldiers for the murder of a Spanish reporter?
Or India, who currently wants Warren Andersen (former CEO of Union Carbide) for that little Bhopal mess?
I could go on.
So... Yeah. International law... Whatever helps you sleep.
A ban on IM alone will ensure that no one uses their product.
...To RD/VNC from the top of a mountain to my home desktop machine where I can
run Yahoo/AIM/MSN/ICQ/whatever.
Hey, at 7Mbps, I'd still use it...
If they really want to ban IM, they can pay the price of increased bandwidth to hide such use. Because really, no one will actually obey such stupid rules.
But hey, at $0.10 per SMS, if I ran a cell company, I'd sure as hell want to discourage my customers from using an ultra-low-bandwidth (and free) alternative as well!
This guy's aim (ODF) is off, but he still has a valid point, which is that Microsoft devotes more time/resources to making its products accessible than does the OSS community. Your post made it seem as if that wasn't a problem.
...People should just use what works.
My apologies... I didn't mean to imply that we couldn't do better. Just that...
If OSS solutions don't work for you, just use Word/Windows.
(And you apparently did get my main point, that the FP may have the right idea but attacked the wrong target, so I won't reiterate that... Um... again).
So yes, I did mean that if OSS doesn't work, and Windows does, people should use Windows. But I do far prefer an open solution (not to mention a free one). Despite that preference, I wouldn't give up watching DVDs just because I unwisely bought a Sony player and have lately come to dislike their stance on DRM.
Most OSS advocates wouldn't be satisfied with that scenario.
I agree, and would prefer otherwise. And over time, OSS will come to include such support... But that objection doesn't warrant complaints about the standard itself.
Or to put it another way... If Microsoft dropped accessibility support of the open standard, people could switch to using a different app that supports those same formats. If Microsoft dropped accessibility support of their current closed standards, do you just never upgrade your software again?
So, this seems (to me) like a case of lashing out at the guy offering to buy you a beer because he didn't also offer to pay your rent.
at least at a level comparable to that of products from Microsoft, whose 40-person Accessibility Technology Group is now widely praised by disabilities advocates."
Reality will not ever count as "disabled accessible". A few companies will see the profit motive of targetting a (excuse the pun) captive audience, and if you need such software, you should support those companies by buying their products.
But to complain about a standard, when you actually have a problem with needing to pay for the best implementation of that standard?
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just buy Windows and use MS Office. I have ZERO patience for people whining that they can't have it all - My sympathy for your problems vanishes at the point that accomodating you deprives me of something (in this case, a standard a long time coming, for which an "accessible" implementation already exists, just not a free one).
We have tens of thousands of agents who monitor and take down websites here in the West also. They're called Intellectual Property Lawyers.
Yeah, and we here at Slashdot so often express our love and admiration for those fine men and women who help protect our poor defenseless billionaire corporate executives' bonuses. Golly, you've certainly hit on a glaring hypocrisy there!
Funny how everyone (mainstream soceity atleast) thinks it is so evil when other cultures impose their values, but completely OK when we impose ours.
Who said anyone considers it okay here?
However, even as offensive as I find both groups of pigeons, one substantial difference still remains... The IP lawyers don't play nice to your face then run off "to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers" to rat out their friends.
IP lawyers should just die. Scum like like Hu Yingying, who betray their friends (a FAR worse moral crime than actual treason) deserve a slow and painful death, if at all possible by the very forces they normally wield. Frame the bitch for doing exactly what they have her monitoring, and rejoice at her life in one of China's rape-and-forced-labor camps (and if that sounds misogynistic, I'd say it sounds even worse for a male rat).
So #1 was in play, but if he had risk factors such as #2 or #3, that would have makedly increased his risk for a DVT.
How dare you not toe the Slashdot line about sedentary geeks destroying their bodies (with a gleeful sense of self-debasement)?
;-)
Kudos on making a very good point that everyone else seems to have overlooked - Prolonged sitting factors into such problems, but rarely causes them in isolation.
For a simple proof-of-concept, why don't we constantly hear about paraplegics dying of DVT? (and yes, they do have a higher incidence of it, due to the factor of sitting immobile all day, but they have an expected lifespan considerably longer than 8 hours).
However, one possible solution to the problem you pose would be to design the chips with lots of little holes and pumping fluid through it. A design could be based on a fractal 3D shape
Nevermind fluids... I seriously wonder hy we don't already use chips formed as Sierpinsky carpets, with plain ol' copper or aluminum cooling running through the chip!
You wouldn't even need a true fractal on today's chips... A mere second or third order carpet would vastly improve CPU cooling at almost no expense (well, it would cost silicon, but you could probably use the cut-out bits as some other (smaller) chips such as memory).
Then once the manufacturing processes catch up, you could expand that to a Menger sponge for similar heat dissipation efficiency in a truely 3d arrangement.
The Cox DVR is awful. From a usability perspective, TiVo blows it away.
Ah, you apparently received one of the functional models. Consider yourself lucky that it works well enough to compare with TiVo.
The horror stories range from them simply not working at all (regardless of how many times the customer has the unit grudgingly replaced by a tech who mumbles about "signal quality" and "poor power in this area"); to the DVR randomly recording whatever the hell it wants (and of course, not recording what the user wants); to resetting at least once every five minutes (a close relative has that problem with theirs - COX used the "poor power" excuse, despite it sitting on a line-interactive UPS!).
Customers might "prefer" TiVO? Hah! More like "We expect our DVR customers to start a class action in the next few months".
Who REALLY CARES what format the consoles select?
You need to not think of this issue as a geek. Instead, look at it from the point of view of the mass of early adopters - Namely, 18-30YO males, usually slightly more tech-saavy than average but not actually geeks. They can set their DVD player's clock, they can manage most AV equipment cabling, they can probably correctly assemble an out-of-the-box computer (though not safely do anything inside the case).
These folks will buy (at least) one of the next-gen consoles within a few months of its release. If they buy a Wii, no impact on the DVD wars. If they buy a 360, they only get a standard DVD player at the moment. But if they buy a PS3, they have a BluRay player right from the start.
This means that, for probably a full year, BluRay wins.
Now, fast-forward a year. You have the PS3, you have possibly the 360 shipping with the HD-DVD upgrade by default, and you have standalone players of both formats. All four of these options cost roughly the same price, in the neighborhood of $500. So we can consider the standalone players DOA until they hit the WallyWorld sub-$50 price point 3-5 years down the road. Even non-gamers will have no trouble figuring out that, for the price, they might as well get a next-gen gaming console as part of the deal.
So which console will majority of consumers (the non-gamers, so they won't pick based on a favorite game only available on one platform) pick? "I dunno, honey, they sound about the same to me"... "Hey, doesn't your nephew have a ton of those new BluRay things? Let's get one of those so we can borrow movies from him."
And THAT explains why Sony could finally manage to win a media format war, depending on what they do in the very near future (ie, at E3) with the PS3.
The average consumer doesn't consider DRM because they don't understand it or, in most cases, even know about it.
ftp://download.intel.com/design/network/applnots/a p450.pdf
Hey, thanks! That deals with *one* of the issues (though that one doesn't actually seem to crash the machine, just a nuissance), but only two of the machines in question use the e1000 module.
I think at some point you need to draw the line regarding support for older hardware and peripherals. I mean, excessive backwards compatability has retarded advancement of the industry IMHO.
Although the FP link specifically refers to older hardware, the 2.6 kernel has SERIOUS problems even on newer (and extremely common) hardware.
In the past six months, I have tried installing 2.6 distros (both Slack 10.2 and FC4) on five different reasonably-modern machines (including two different "business-line" P4 Dell PCs, a Dell Poweredge racked server, a home-built Abit KV-80 with a Sempron 2500+ (and no PCI cards whatsoever), and an EPIA ML6000.
And on ALL these systems, I see the same sort of problems with the 2.6 kernel...
First, during installation, I've learned not to ever try to format a drive as journaled EXT3, as it has about a 30% chance of throwing a kernel panic.
Then, once I get the system up, the network keeps getting thousands of "too many interrupts" - Even unplugged from the switch!
Then, as the coup de gras, the system will crash (with a message whose cause scrolls off the top of the screen due to the stack trace - Who the fuck came up with that brilliant idea? "Hey, Linux, let's give so much debugging info, to people who probably can't even use it, that they can no longer see what actually triggered the crash"?) within a day or two, at random, with nothing particularly exciting going on. Once, just once, I managed to catch a glimpse of this as coming from the VM manager (though I couldn't say for sure it *really* came from that, just that it received an honorable mention in the first few lines of crap sent to the screen), but it doesn't matter if I turn swap on or off
So, I've given up and gone back to installing Slackware 9.1 as my preferred distribution (even the "2.6 ready" distros running a 2.4 kernel seem to exhibit most of the flakeyness I describe above). And it just works, though I obviously sacrifice some of the newer feature I'd really like to work (particularly the better USB and power management support).
So it goes. PLEASE, please please please guys, fix the 2.6 kernel. It doesn't matter how well you make it perform if no one can use the damned thing!