The kernel itself doesn't (and the same goes for Windows). But when you add X Windows and a GUI like KDE, the memory requirements of Linux are similar to Windows 2000. The one big difference is that you CAN run Linux in text mode, while the standard editions of Windows offer no such option (XP Embedded may be an option if you have plenty of time to configure it for your system).
I have to agree. Unless there is a way to do it semi-commercially, as in Open Source projects that sell some kind of output, projects will be limited to what average people can afford. Even with real enthusiasts, the equipment should fit into a garage and cost not more than, say, $10,000. Desktop computers are obviously cheaper and make a good environment for hobby projects. Small hardware engineering projects seem possible, but here you will run into limitations fast because you cannot have too sophisticated machinery as a prerequisite. An example for a rather hopeless project would be mass production of state-of-the-art computer chips. A fab for these wil cost a few hundred million dollars
Yes, DOD is definitely one of the better games around. Currently my favourite FPS, despite occasional technical problems. If those get too much, by buddies and me might move to Call Of Duty. Almost equally good in terms of gameplay and it seems to be more reliable.
I'm not a professional in the field either, but there is an interesting aspect in the psychological side of being in power.
There was an interesting article in the "Spiegel" news magazine about how people in charge tend to consider themselves as smarter than their employees/team members.
I've seen this myself in a former colleague: from the time he went from "normal" team member to team leader, he also became increasingly arrogant.
In many cases, the newly promoted bosses also act more agressively.
An extreme example is described in The Stanford Prison Experiment.
In this experiment, a group of 24 students was split at random into guards and prisoners. The guards soon turned into HUGE assholes...
Being from germany, I can comment on this:
During the era of Chancellor Kohl, the german government showed an almost ridicioulous disinterest in keeping the USA from spying on germany. With the new government under Schröder, Germany shows a little more energy in protecting its interests, but there is still a lot of leniency for US activities.
This may have encouraged the USA to become more bold in spying than one would normally expect from an ally. Add in the US mindset of "we are the good guys and have a right to police the world", and it seems quite credible that the CIA/NSA would try to use a backdoor they know about.
"Need for faster processor" misunderstood
on
Emergence of SMT
·
· Score: 1
From the article:
If the hardware and software portions of SMT come together, then the question of "why do I need a 1.5 GHz processor?' may be answered in very short order
Those guys got it totally wrong. The question of "why do I need a 1.5 GHz processor?" stems from the fact that current processors are more than fast enough for many applications.
This question isn't answered by introducing a system with higher performance. IMHO it might be answered by new, attractive applications that need the better performance (speaker-independent speech recognition?).
How about the reason that SQL server installs with user sa and no password
Having a standard or empty password on install (unless the user changes it during installation)is normal - somehow you need to access your newly installed system. Of course, any decent admin knows he should change that password...
Why does most apps that use SQL hard code this fact into the app so you CANT change the password
Plain stupid programming. Unless you write an unimportant little inhouse application without real security needs, don't do it this way.
Giving an application with hardcoded passwords to a customer will make you look VERY stupid.
More exactly, in case of the DVD the licenses for the encryption system (CSS) is only granted by the copyright holders under the condition that the manufacturers also implement region coding.
Without CSS, a DVD player would be only a "big CDROM" without the ability to decode the CSS-encrypted films. Such a drive would be difficult to sell...
BTW, DeCSS makes a big hole in this scheme, hence the massive efforts to squash it.
On harddrives, there is no such system you need to support in order to make your drives attrachtive. Thus, only (bought?) legislation could drive general-purpose harddrives from the market.
No one will manufacture user-control free media if they RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA get their way
While this seems (sadly) possible, it is not decided yet. If the supreme court kills the DCMA (the EFF is currently ligitating against it), this will set a strong precedent against outlawing user-control free media.
Besides, there are still other countries outside US jurisdiction.
Needless to say, this will tremendously retard advances in computer science, the physical sciences, and many other fields, but the powers that be don't give a fuck.
Now let's assume your worst case scenario comes true in the US.
As long as there are some countries without those restrictions, they will probably overtake the US in terms of wealth and knowledge.
This might create a powerful backlash, actually I believe that the GDR (eastern Germany) did crumble more over luxury goods than over personal freedom. It is sad I have to say this about my fellow Germans, but obviously people can get VERY pissed about being denied the things their neighbours have.
Likewise, once the Americans realize that their crippled computer industry puts them on the road to being a third world country, RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA are in for a BIG, BAD surprise.
A system that needs this kind of protection from bad publicity might have a lousy performance.
Once people realize that this is the only good reason to put a "don't publish benchmark results" in the EULA, their sales will (hopefully) crumble.
BTW, Oracle has a similar clause in their licence agreements.
Actually, in the RDBMS discussion lately someone pointed to
http://www.mysql.com/information/benchmarks.html
, where MySQL makes the "big" databases look pretty bad.
Now one might argue that MySQL doesn't have proper transactions and saves time by not doing those, but these results are still interesting.
No reason to worry about your neighbour - sending his robot to attack you would be just as illegal as shooting you.
Governments, however, will be interested in this technology -hello BattleMechs!!
As for the "user error" response - it does happen I'm afraid but let me say this. I get so many calls from people who are supposedly IT professionals who have no clue at all that it's real hard to stay un-cynical - but I try.
Um, even IT professionals sometimes have to handle an system "on the side" they don't know much about.
Has happened to me, too: I'm writing code for a very small company where I'm also the network and database administrator. While I know NT reasonably well, I didn't have the time to properly learn Oracle administration - which promptly led to a somewhat embarassing support call.
Thanks to the guy at Oracle support, however, we got it fixed nicely. He sounded a bit frustrated, but quickly found the problem.
So if you get another call like this, don't get mad - these things happen.
I think there should be anti-discrimination laws for ISPs and similar services. We already have such laws in most western countries for things like employment:
If an employer fires an employee or rejects someone who applies for a job solely on grounds of sex, color or religion, this is illegal and the victim can sue.
Since public discussion is increasingly happening through corporate-owned media, we need similar laws to protect legal speech online. The gist of those laws would have to be
"You shall not exclude someone from internet access/online forums/similar things just because you don't like his opinion"
Other things like not paying the service fees or distributing kiddie porn would still be reason for kicking that user (actually, german providers are legally obliged to remove illegal content from their servers if they discover it).
Generally yes, we'd have to rebuild step by step. However, we should be able to avoid some of the more stupid mistakes. Assuming that the knowledge is still available in form of man-readable textbooks, we could go straight to re-implementing things that worked out before, and bypass the known problems like
- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers or hard disk interfaces that can handle only 32MB drive size(first DOS versions)
- have dozens of crappy programming languages- a handful new ones should do to cover most applications. My personal favourite would be a C++ with clearer syntax...
I could find more examples, but I think you get my drift.
Yeah?? Has somebody developed a viable trinary logic design? Can you give us an URL?
I ask because I've once tried to figure out some simple trinary elements (logic gates) from transistors, resistors and diodes.
I quickly gave up because the circuitry became awfully complex, compared to the binary designs from my electrical engineering textbooks.
This seems dangerous to me, because it gives the government a tool to harass people they don't like. Don't agree with our politics?
We'll have to look at your behaviour EXTRA sharp, and then we'll prosecute you because of all the dumb little laws you casually broke.
I'm not saying the current governmment does this (actually I'm not familiar with australian day-to-day-policy), but it seems to undermine civil rights. Some day you might have a less reasonable government that does what I described above.
Guess I'm lucky I don't live in Australia.
Note that a strong glass for only one eye creates new problems:
I'm pretty myopic myself, and my glasses significantly reduce the apparent size of objects (when looking over the rim of the glasses, things appear larger but blurred). If I try looking through the glasses with one eye for a while, the size difference gives me headaches.
That's why the usual prescription for cases like Fishdude's is one contact lens (or maybe laser surgery).
Then you need a lot of money to fight it. Apple has plenty. Have fun.
Maybe they make the mistake of going after Microsoft over Whistler. Then M$ could use that prior art to kill the patent. For once, the big bad Borg might do us a favor.
Yeah, MAX1 was one of my all time favorites in terms of gameplay. Both the tactics and the strategic/building aspect were brilliant.
In MAX2 you could turn off real time too, but it was a dumbed down version with much less finesse in ressource management. I liked it a lot less.
Most unfortunately, however, the implementation sucked hard for both versions.
MAX1 had obviously trouble with fast machines: it crashed frequently on my old P133, and it ALWAYS crashes on my new Athlon 650 MHz (which is otherwise quite stable).
MAX2 ALWAYS crashed when resuming a saved game that was saved after turn 100.
Actually, the GPL is even more fair use than lending books through public libraries. After all, libraries take books that were written with commercial interests and make them available for free or a nominal fee.
The developers of GPL'ed code, however, know from the beginning that it will be available away for free.
This will bring the initial price of the system down, making the $1000 pc an $800 pc.
For those Linux/BSD/whatever fans who know what they're doing, this might be nice way to get a cheaper PC (make sure the hardware in the box is supported by your favorite OS before buying!).
Actually, I find that these days building a complete PC from parts is just as expensive as buying a complete one. Now assume the one year subscription is free to get you hooked, and the $800 instead of $1000 might be correct.
Get that PC, run it a few days with Windoze to see if all the hardware works, then format c:...
Hold on - I think they know EXACTLY how their going to deal with the Linux threat. The same way the RIAA dealt with MP3s...
Well, they might find this more difficult than the RIAA did. After all, the RIAA could point to some real theft of intellectual property while the open source community only gives away their own code.
Hard to build a case on that, and unless the U.S. congress is completely and openly corrupt(read: they can buy the congresspeople), they will fail to get Linux killed by legislation.
The nice thing about open software is that the apportioning is NOT a problem: you can make copys at the cost of blank media and handling.
In history, socialism failed partly because the central bureaucracy was unable to plan production according to needs and to distribute the goods properly.
With open source, the latter problem is moot and the former is greatly diminished. Companies can still pay programmers to make/extend software to their needs, and there is no clumsy bureaucracy to stop them.
Thus, open source might be considered a moderate form of socialism, but I think it can be successful where soviet socialism failed miserably.
quote:
So Carol proxies her request through Peter, an anonymizing proxy. Peter sends an http request to Bob. The request never makes it, because the routers are dropping all packets to Bob.
Anonymous proxies won't help at all.
unquote:
You're assuming that a censoring router is between Peter and Bob. This will not always be the cause, because even if the scheme gets implemented (which I doubt), only german routers will have the filter.
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel itself doesn't (and the same goes for Windows). But when you add X Windows and a GUI like KDE, the memory requirements of Linux are similar to Windows 2000.
The one big difference is that you CAN run Linux in text mode, while the standard editions of Windows offer no such option (XP Embedded may be an option if you have plenty of time to configure it for your system).
I have to agree. Unless there is a way to do it semi-commercially, as in Open Source projects that sell some kind of output, projects will be limited to what average people can afford. Even with real enthusiasts, the equipment should fit into a garage and cost not more than, say, $10,000.
Desktop computers are obviously cheaper and make a good environment for hobby projects. Small hardware engineering projects seem possible, but here you will run into limitations fast because you cannot have too sophisticated machinery as a prerequisite.
An example for a rather hopeless project would be mass production of state-of-the-art computer chips. A fab for these wil cost a few hundred million dollars
Yes, DOD is definitely one of the better games around. Currently my favourite FPS, despite occasional technical problems.
If those get too much, by buddies and me might move to Call Of Duty. Almost equally good in terms of gameplay and it seems to be more reliable.
My old Cherry keyboard (AT) from 1991 is still one of the best. It also doesn't have the stupid Windows keys.
I'm not a professional in the field either, but there is an interesting aspect in the psychological side of being in power.
There was an interesting article in the "Spiegel" news magazine about how people in charge tend to consider themselves as smarter than their employees/team members.
I've seen this myself in a former colleague: from the time he went from "normal" team member to team leader, he also became increasingly arrogant.
In many cases, the newly promoted bosses also act more agressively. An extreme example is described in
The Stanford Prison Experiment.
In this experiment, a group of 24 students was split at random into guards and prisoners. The guards soon turned into HUGE assholes...
Being from germany, I can comment on this:
During the era of Chancellor Kohl, the german government showed an almost ridicioulous disinterest in keeping the USA from spying on germany. With the new government under Schröder, Germany shows a little more energy in protecting its interests, but there is still a lot of leniency for US activities.
This may have encouraged the USA to become more bold in spying than one would normally expect from an ally. Add in the US mindset of "we are the good guys and have a right to police the world", and it seems quite credible that the CIA/NSA would try to use a backdoor they know about.
From the article: If the hardware and software portions of SMT come together, then the question of "why do I need a 1.5 GHz processor?' may be answered in very short order
Those guys got it totally wrong. The question of "why do I need a 1.5 GHz processor?" stems from the fact that current processors are more than fast enough for many applications.
This question isn't answered by introducing a system with higher performance. IMHO it might be answered by new, attractive applications that need the better performance (speaker-independent speech recognition?).
How about the reason that SQL server installs with user sa and no password
Having a standard or empty password on install (unless the user changes it during installation)is normal - somehow you need to access your newly installed system. Of course, any decent admin knows he should change that password...
Why does most apps that use SQL hard code this fact into the app so you CANT change the password
Plain stupid programming. Unless you write an unimportant little inhouse application without real security needs, don't do it this way.
Giving an application with hardcoded passwords to a customer will make you look VERY stupid.
More exactly, in case of the DVD the licenses for the encryption system (CSS) is only granted by the copyright holders under the condition that the manufacturers also implement region coding.
Without CSS, a DVD player would be only a "big CDROM" without the ability to decode the CSS-encrypted films. Such a drive would be difficult to sell...
BTW, DeCSS makes a big hole in this scheme, hence the massive efforts to squash it.
On harddrives, there is no such system you need to support in order to make your drives attrachtive. Thus, only (bought?) legislation could drive general-purpose harddrives from the market.
No one will manufacture user-control free media if they RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA get their way
While this seems (sadly) possible, it is not decided yet. If the supreme court kills the DCMA (the EFF is currently ligitating against it), this will set a strong precedent against outlawing user-control free media.
Besides, there are still other countries outside US jurisdiction.
Needless to say, this will tremendously retard advances in computer science, the physical sciences, and many other fields, but the powers that be don't give a fuck.
Now let's assume your worst case scenario comes true in the US. As long as there are some countries without those restrictions, they will probably overtake the US in terms of wealth and knowledge.
This might create a powerful backlash, actually I believe that the GDR (eastern Germany) did crumble more over luxury goods than over personal freedom. It is sad I have to say this about my fellow Germans, but obviously people can get VERY pissed about being denied the things their neighbours have.
Likewise, once the Americans realize that their crippled computer industry puts them on the road to being a third world country, RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA are in for a BIG, BAD surprise.
A system that needs this kind of protection from bad publicity might have a lousy performance.
Once people realize that this is the only good reason to put a "don't publish benchmark results" in the EULA, their sales will (hopefully) crumble.
BTW, Oracle has a similar clause in their licence agreements.
Actually, in the RDBMS discussion lately someone pointed to http://www.mysql.com/information/benchmarks.html , where MySQL makes the "big" databases look pretty bad.
Now one might argue that MySQL doesn't have proper transactions and saves time by not doing those, but these results are still interesting.
No reason to worry about your neighbour - sending his robot to attack you would be just as illegal as shooting you.
Governments, however, will be interested in this technology -hello BattleMechs!!
As for the "user error" response - it does happen I'm afraid but let me say this. I get so many calls from people who are supposedly IT professionals who have no clue at all that it's real hard to stay un-cynical - but I try.
Um, even IT professionals sometimes have to handle an system "on the side" they don't know much about.
Has happened to me, too: I'm writing code for a very small company where I'm also the network and database administrator. While I know NT reasonably well, I didn't have the time to properly learn Oracle administration - which promptly led to a somewhat embarassing support call.
Thanks to the guy at Oracle support, however, we got it fixed nicely. He sounded a bit frustrated, but quickly found the problem.
So if you get another call like this, don't get mad - these things happen.
I think there should be anti-discrimination laws for ISPs and similar services. We already have such laws in most western countries for things like employment:
If an employer fires an employee or rejects someone who applies for a job solely on grounds of sex, color or religion, this is illegal and the victim can sue.
Since public discussion is increasingly happening through corporate-owned media, we need similar laws to protect legal speech online. The gist of those laws would have to be
"You shall not exclude someone from internet access/online forums/similar things just because you don't like his opinion"
Other things like not paying the service fees or distributing kiddie porn would still be reason for kicking that user (actually, german providers are legally obliged to remove illegal content from their servers if they discover it).
Generally yes, we'd have to rebuild step by step. However, we should be able to avoid some of the more stupid mistakes.
Assuming that the knowledge is still available in form of man-readable textbooks, we could go straight to re-implementing things that worked out before, and bypass the known problems like
- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers or hard disk interfaces that can handle only 32MB drive size(first DOS versions)
- have dozens of crappy programming languages- a handful new ones should do to cover most applications. My personal favourite would be a C++ with clearer syntax...
I could find more examples, but I think you get my drift.
Yeah?? Has somebody developed a viable trinary logic design? Can you give us an URL?
I ask because I've once tried to figure out some simple trinary elements (logic gates) from transistors, resistors and diodes.
I quickly gave up because the circuitry became awfully complex, compared to the binary designs from my electrical engineering textbooks.
This seems dangerous to me, because it gives the government a tool to harass people they don't like. Don't agree with our politics? We'll have to look at your behaviour EXTRA sharp, and then we'll prosecute you because of all the dumb little laws you casually broke.
I'm not saying the current governmment does this (actually I'm not familiar with australian day-to-day-policy), but it seems to undermine civil rights. Some day you might have a less reasonable government that does what I described above.
Guess I'm lucky I don't live in Australia.
Note that a strong glass for only one eye creates new problems:
I'm pretty myopic myself, and my glasses significantly reduce the apparent size of objects (when looking over the rim of the glasses, things appear larger but blurred). If I try looking through the glasses with one eye for a while, the size difference gives me headaches.
That's why the usual prescription for cases like Fishdude's is one contact lens (or maybe laser surgery).
Then you need a lot of money to fight it. Apple has plenty. Have fun.
Maybe they make the mistake of going after Microsoft over Whistler. Then M$ could use that prior art to kill the patent. For once, the big bad Borg might do us a favor.
Yeah, MAX1 was one of my all time favorites in terms of gameplay. Both the tactics and the strategic/building aspect were brilliant.
In MAX2 you could turn off real time too, but it was a dumbed down version with much less finesse in ressource management. I liked it a lot less.
Most unfortunately, however, the implementation sucked hard for both versions.
MAX1 had obviously trouble with fast machines: it crashed frequently on my old P133, and it ALWAYS crashes on my new Athlon 650 MHz (which is otherwise quite stable).
MAX2 ALWAYS crashed when resuming a saved game that was saved after turn 100.
Actually, the GPL is even more fair use than lending books through public libraries. After all, libraries take books that were written with commercial interests and make them available for free or a nominal fee.
The developers of GPL'ed code, however, know from the beginning that it will be available away for free.
This will bring the initial price of the system down, making the $1000 pc an $800 pc. ...
For those Linux/BSD/whatever fans who know what they're doing, this might be nice way to get a cheaper PC (make sure the hardware in the box is supported by your favorite OS before buying!).
Actually, I find that these days building a complete PC from parts is just as expensive as buying a complete one. Now assume the one year subscription is free to get you hooked, and the $800 instead of $1000 might be correct.
Get that PC, run it a few days with Windoze to see if all the hardware works, then format c:
Hold on - I think they know EXACTLY how their going to deal with the Linux threat. The same way the RIAA dealt with MP3s...
Well, they might find this more difficult than the RIAA did. After all, the RIAA could point to some real theft of intellectual property while the open source community only gives away their own code.
Hard to build a case on that, and unless the U.S. congress is completely and openly corrupt(read: they can buy the congresspeople), they will fail to get Linux killed by legislation.
The nice thing about open software is that the apportioning is NOT a problem: you can make copys at the cost of blank media and handling.
In history, socialism failed partly because the central bureaucracy was unable to plan production according to needs and to distribute the goods properly.
With open source, the latter problem is moot and the former is greatly diminished. Companies can still pay programmers to make/extend software to their needs, and there is no clumsy bureaucracy to stop them.
Thus, open source might be considered a moderate form of socialism, but I think it can be successful where soviet socialism failed miserably.
quote:
So Carol proxies her request through Peter, an anonymizing proxy. Peter sends an http request to Bob. The request never makes it, because the routers are dropping all packets to Bob. Anonymous proxies won't help at all.
unquote:
You're assuming that a censoring router is between Peter and Bob. This will not always be the cause, because even if the scheme gets implemented (which I doubt), only german routers will have the filter.