I have never GPL'd any of my code. If I put code out there for people to use I put it out for them to use any way they want.
All the large computer companies have read the GPL and are aware of the implications. I have had the 'we can't use that code' discussion with folk from IBM, Microsoft and several other companies. That is why all the Web code from CERN was made public domain it was never at any time GPL.
I know RMS, I have shared a building with him. He is by anyone's definition 'high maintenance'. You can agree that 'open software is good' without accepting the premise that 'RMS and only RMS is the keeper of the true flame'.
Not all of the successful Web projects are GPL. Apache in particular is not GPL.
What GPL boils down to is 'I am going to force you to do everything my way'. I don't think that is a very 'Open Source' type notion.
Unlike RMS I am not out to prevent anyone making money from selling software. Unlike RMS I believe money has a social value (albeit disputing the GOP belief in money as an absolute good in its own right). For the past fifteen years RMS has lived in his office in 545 Tech square, I don't believe that programmers should be forced to aspire to live like hippies. I don't think Richard's utopia is scalable.
. If there is actually non-paper money being circulated in a large amount, how come I never get paid by any of it?
If you are paid in cash then you are probably either a stripper or a waiter.
Most of the dollars in circulation are electronic. Most accounts are settled electronically. The government does not 'print money' using printing presses, it can increase the supply simply by running a deficit and not borrowing to make up for it.
Equally the money supply can be increased by large numbers of dotcom companies trading while in bankrupcy:-)
You don't know much about. computing outside of the home desktop do you?
And how many supercomputers have you designed or built? I mean big ones with 1000+ nodes, not your glorified SMP boxes. I have built several.
Yet you post that speculative trash as if it were the God-given truth... I hate it when people do that.
Compaq still does quite a nice line of VMS servers that target exactly the market you describe. I would say that VMS had pretty much run its course by now, even if the number of systems being deployed was still rising numerically. Sure if LINUX had not come along pockets of UNIX would continue to subsist in the same gheto as has sustained MVS, OS/360, VMS etc. There are even some folk left who use OpenGenera.
But for Linux, Unix would be facing the same fate. UNIX only displaced VMS in the engineering market because the price performance was vastly better. People would put up with the unreliability, lack of security and scalability of a solaris box because it was three or four time the speed of a VAX.
Today the price performance argument is in favor of an Intel box. I used to spend $10K at a time on graphics cards, today a $500 AGP card will wipe the floor with practically anything.
Any operating system that is limited to the ultra high performance market is ultimately doomed. Without a large user base there is no market for applications - whether open source or commercial.
The mainstream will always overtake the niche market in the end.
A lower overhead method of achieving the same effect is to use SSL. This has the additional advantage that the encryption protects against countermeasures by the firewall admin.
There are quite a few commercial products that use this trick.
Just how many software applications were ever released for BeOs?
The sad fact of O/S life is that people don't buy machines for the O/S they buy them for the applications they can run. No apps, no customers for the O/S, no O/S userbase means no apps, a vicious circle that all but the most ideological libertarians accept. But for Linux appearing on the horizon Microsoft would be mopping up the remains of UNIX like a piece of fresh bread on a plate of gravy.
People get so invested in the O/S which is odd since all an O/S is is something to get between you and the hardware.
The original business plan for Be appeared to be to write the O/S that Apple could not write internaly. The reconed without Jobs and NeXT.
I can't see why any investor is going to finance another round of Be. There are plenty of more deserving dotComs folding for lack of cash.
The sad fact of Be is that the edge they had - an efficient GUI layer that did not waste its time because of a broken threads model is important. It is also duplicatable on a mainstream O/S albeit at the cost of rewritting the applications somewhat.
Windows is slow because the GUI kernel blocks frequently. One bad program brings down the machine. Be was doomed from the day it started, but I would have liked them to threaten Microsoft just enough to force them to fix that particular screw up.
Babbage's engine was a theoretical exercise which was never actually built - at least at the time. It demanded engineering tolerances way beyond what was available back then.
Actually the replica is built with tolerances easily obtainable at the time, the difference engine did not require tolerances any more demanding than a clock. The victorians were rather good at those.
Babbage never completed because he was the first nerd, he kept redesigning the system and would never commit the design to manufacture.
What Babbage needed was a PHB to kick his ass and force him to meet a ship date.
The article is still incorrect however, the ENIAC was only completed after the war. The Bletchley park machines were completed long before that, in time to actually be of use.
Mind you probably not surprising for an article that is probably written strraight from a corposate PR piece for UNISYS.
BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?
All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems.
Quite so, the most horrific scene in the HBO series OZ was not the drug dealer explaining how he would force a new inmate to give him a 'tossed salad', it was that scene where they would all line up and get their weekly pay for their prison labor.
If you look at payscales: I'm not sure about 1901, but in the 1880's a hard day's work (12 hours) would get an semiskilled laborer 1 dollar or less. A dollar was 1/16 ounce of gold. So 192 hours of work = 1 ounce of gold, then. Now 1 ounce of gold might pay for 30 to 50 hours of labor.
That might reflect a difference in living standards rather than a difference in value. But what it gets back to is whether there is any comparison between value over such long periods.
In any 30 year period it is almost certain that the value of a dollar invested in a bank account will be worth more than an 'investment' in any valuable metal.
The few exceptions to this are times of hyperinflation following major wars. I'll take that risk however since the risk of a war devaluing the US dollar is probably less than the risk that whoever is behind E-Gold simply absconds with the cash one day.
The value of investing in highly regulated markets is that the risk of fraud is very low and at the end of the day the government will be forced to make good any loss - remember savings and loans anyone?
Obscure offshore banks do go under from time to time, and when that happens it is not unusual to see a queue of irate pensioners complaining to the government whose taxes they were evading. This only really came to an end when the major UK banks started offshore outfits whose liquidity was tied to the liquidity of the main bank. I'll take the risk of Barclays going under.
The e-gold business model makes no more sense to me than that of E-Toys. I don't see how the transaction fees can carry the business. I have made more money shorting e-money schemes than anything else (Cybercash, ZixIt, First Virtual, etc.)
If gold went out of fashion, then it would lose value as surely as Amazon did when tech stocks went out of fashion.
Which it is, these days gold is no longer the standard for high end jewelry, go into Tiffanys and you will see much more platinum than gold in the wedding rings section.
Because Gold is FINITE substance, it has stable value.
Untrue, the gold supply has fluctuated significantly from time to time. The 1849 gold rush threw Karl Marx into a fit of depression because the additional gold supply would inflate the capitalist economies.
The industrial revolution was possible in large part because of the additional liquidity introduced through the shipments of spanish gold and silver from the 'new world'. The Industrial Revolution might have happened in Spain if Francis Drake was not such a clever pirate.
Today very little value is paper value. Printed money is a tiny proportion of the total in circulation. Modern economies grow at a rate of about 1% to 4% a year. If the money supply fails to keep pace the growth stops. Deflation is a very bad thing.
Another way liquidity is increased is through banks. I put $1000 in a bank who lends it to someone else. As a result both myself and the borrower have $1000 available to spend.
If you don't like modern finance then go to Afghanistan and join the Taleban. Not only can you live in a medieval society they will let you marry four wives.
One would think that attempting to serve a writ though Sashdot would rate a score higher than one eh?
Barry K. Downey
U.S. Counsel to e-gold Ltd.
Looks like you left out your full title there "Vice President of huffing and Puffing".
So you are running a site out of an obscure caribean island offering financial services whose principal attaction appears to be being beyond the reach of US regulatory powers.
If I were in such a situation my first plan of action would not be to initiate libel lawsuits in the US which not only makes libel lawsuits almost impossible for plaintifs, but also empowers litigants with sweeping powers of discovery.
Everyone knows that if you want to piss Declan off you simply go to Pittsberg and buy officers Haven and Hammond-Schrock a drink.
Respect for the news is an important part of the American way of life. It's written into the first amendment of our constitution, and it's taught in civics classes across the country: freedom of press reigns supreme.
Unfortunately if you watch some of the regular news channels this type of thinking is very much ingrained. One of the most frequent bleats heard about the Internet is that the people cannot be trusted to deal with 'unmediated' information from politicians.
The US is now very much in the situation the UK was in the late 1960s before the Monte Python crew ripped the establishment stiffs apart. The US had a chance to produce first rate comedy - like SOAP. And the Moral Majority and Bigot Brigade crushed it threatening an advertiser boycott.
These days the Southern Baptist church threatens a boycott and the Disney corporation flips them the bird. Things have definitely improved.
Over in the UK we watched the Spitting Image series 'The President's Brain is Missing'. As a result GOP claims that Reagan was widely respected abroad tend to leave me incredulous. I strongly suspect that 'That's My Bush" will utterly destroy the cretin in the Whitehouse. People will laugh at the jokes for the first few months. After a year they will laugh at the President.
Fact: Article 1 Section 8 Para 5 gives the (exclusive) power to the federal govt to 'coin' money. Art 1 Sec 10 Para 1, limits the states to *only* allowing gold or silver 'coin' as legal tender.
Thus the monetary system is illegal because the federal govt ceded it's power to 'coin' money to a seperate (private) entity, and that money is not backed by any hard currency as specifically required by the federal constitution.
Yes, heard that one before. If you think you have a case then take it to the supreme court.
Not that Renquist and co are particularly credible these days. But the fact that the US monetary system has not been successfully challenged for the hundred and fifty years since they started using paper money issued by the federal government indicates that this is pretty settled law.
At best you have identified a quaint inconsistency between the US written Constitution and the actual administration of the country. The Brits have hundreds of similar inconsistencies, all sturgeon caught in British waters are the property of the crown - why? Not because Brenda likes sturgeon but because of a 16th century belief that a narwhal tusk was a unicorn tusk and thus an antidote to all known poisons. Or more recently in 1977 during the silver jubilee a man was briefly charged with usurping the royal coat of arms after he sold a bed spread with the silver jubilee logo (which includes the Windsor royal arms) on it. The prosecution was dropped after it was discovered that the crime still carries the death penalty which might be considered somewhat excessive considering the circumstances.
It is one thing to point out that according to the Bible the value of PI is 3. It is quite another to go arround claiming that the value of PI actually is 3 and that it is reality that has it wrong.
Fact: Stupid people find it a lot easier to call someone crazy then to make the mental effort to attempt to understand their point of view.
Fact: Crazy people find it a lot easier to call someone stupid then to get a dose of reality.
If you read the literature, you'll notice that a conventional microwave has little or no effect on an 802.11b transfer.
Bzzzzttt!! if the guy had read the litterature he would have mistakenly thought the encryption protocol works.
There is no substitute for checking this type of stuff out for real. Just because the marketroid who wrote the manual claims there is no effect does not mean that the statement is true.
Believe it or not, marketting people often use a sophisticated technique to sell faulty products, it is called lying. Other prominent exponents of the technique are to be found in politics (no new taxes, no more greenhouse gases).
In my day research meant going into a lab and doing an experiment like the article describes. Going into the library to read up second hand research claims is not the same thing, nor is it superior.
A while back Black Unicorn gave a presentation
on money laundering laws. He is a New Yord lawyer who represents folk in money laundering cases.
Gold-Age was arguably acting as an agent for E-Gold, an entity that appears to be providing banking services aimed at the US market whose main differentiator is avoiding the US reporting requirements. It is not a great stretch for a prosecutor to claim that any US company trading with E-Gold is acting as an agent for them and thus conspiring to facilitate illegal financial transactions.
Essentially the Secret Service don't have to prove very much to win a case. There are numerous caes of foreign companies having their US funds confiscated under arbitrary pretexts and finding that they cannot get it back without a ten year lawsuit. These are civil proceedings so despite the obviously punitive nature there is no right to jury trial, presumption of innocence or even due process. Because the alledged target is drug dealers the courts tend to turn a blind eye to the civil liberties implications.
The E-Gold system is widely used for money laundering, read the slashdot thread on the diary of two hackers if you don't believe me. There is no particular advantage to using E-Gold over a more reputable bank (Barclays overseas banking, HKSB Channel Islands, USB, etc.). There is also a sizable disadvantage, you are forced to trust that the E-Gold folk don't run off with your money.
If the Secret Service can demonstrate that E-Gold is being used for money laundering, and the level of proof is very low they can then go off and target anyone acting as an agent for E-Gold.
Fact: Gold has about the same approximate buying power today as it did 100 years ago. US currency has approximatelybi 1/100th the buying power today as it did 100 years ago.
Not true actually, an once of gold used to buy a hand made suit, today it buys about a quarter of one.
Moreover the value of a dollar invested in an account paying 6% interest a year would be worth 3.4 times the buying power of a 1900 dollar.
Interest rates rarely fail to keep up with inflation over the long run.
Gold plays a very much reduced role in the world economy since Nixon abandoned the gold standard in the 1970s.
Fact: The current monetary system is illegal according to the US constitution
Fact: there are a lot of wierd loonies arround talking utter drivel.
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
on
Update From Cray World
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· Score: 1
Also, I could be reading you wrong, but you seem to be implying that supercomputer == vector supercomputer. I am including NUMA style machines like the Cray T3E and large SGI Origin machines as supercomputers.
Its been a while since I followed that market closely. My main point was that Seymour would not be building vector boxes, that architecture has passed its sell by date.
The reservation I have about NUMA is that the entire hardware design is built arround support for code written for single processors in languages that have a lot of baggage.
The number of times I have seen a physicist demand supercomputer time for a program code running bubble sort... I have frequently been able to tune code to run faster on a PC than the physicists could get it to run on a CRAY.
Point is that the whole approach of writing analysis code in FORTRAN and running it on parallel boxes is obsolete. What is needed is an operating system and language for manipulating mathematics directly. Something that combines the spreadsheet with Mathematica in a way that moves beyond the constraints of Visicalc and clones.
The imperative languages the physicists use make recovery of parallism a very hard job. A declarative approach to defining the problem would save a lot of time, avoid a lot of errors and parallelize better.
As Tony Hoare said "Physicists used to repeat each other's experiments, now they share each other's code".
My conclusion is that the physicists don't deserve fancy iron, they don't care to learn how to use it, they are simply using it as an alternative to thought and an ego boost.
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
on
Update From Cray World
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· Score: 1
The entire idea of supercomputing is obsolete?!?!?!?!?! Someone better tell that to the hundreds of places still buying supercomputers and SGI, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, Cray,
Yes a market for hundreds of machines being fought over by five plus large companies.
People still buy supercomputers even when they are obsolete. When DEC released the alpha they gave me one for evaluation. It outperformed the main IBM mainframe on the site by about 30% and cost less than 1% of the IBM annual maintenance.
There are a few applications for which a supercomputer is the answer. However my experience is that they tend to be a political purchase rather than a technically necessary one.
When I was at CERN the experimental physicists demanded time on the Cray since as CERN is an experimental lab they should get the best tools. GEANT, the piece of absolute crap they used at the time to simulate experiments runs no faster on a vector machine, the problem simply does not work well on the architecture.
Now there were plenty of theoretical physicists who had code that would work well. So guess what the CERN management did? They allowed a five man team to spend four years rewriting GEANT for the CRAY. The project would have taken longer but the machine was decomissioned first.
The World Wide Web was invented largely to circumvent the idiotic dictates of the incompetent CERN Network division management, although Tim will never admit that in public (nor will I for that matter without a nym:-)
They're fast machines taking advantages of all sorts of innovations in parallelization and clustering, but "Crays" in the classic sense of a machine developed as a best of breed, highly engineered supercomputer they ain't.
The distinctive aspect of Crays work was not the style of parallelism, it was the choice of gate technology. Seymour liked ECL and gallium arsenide.
If he were arround today he would be building MIMD machines, there are structural limits to SIMD that means the maximum number of vector processors you can keep running is about 16 and there are limits to backplane technology that cause the number of nodes in a shared backplane that can be kept busy tends to top out at about 16.
What would be different about Seymour's MIMD is that he would dunk it in a vast of cryonic coolant allowing the clock speed to be boosted by about three to four times.
He was trying similar tricks with his GaAs Cray-3 which the company that bears his name was too scared to build. He wouldn't be messing around with GaAs these days however, silicon processing gives better speed these days.
A few weeks ago, there was a real bombshell: Cray would drop the anti-dumping legal action, re-opening the US market to japanese supercomputers. Cray will even become the sole reseller of the NEC SX Series in North America!
Sounds like protectionism come corporate wealfare to me. Cray corp fails commercially then gets to blackmail their competitors into cutting them a distribution agreement to let them back into the protected market.
Like Cray wasn't subsidised itself. The NSA and Los Alamos bankrolled them from the Cray1 through at least the YMP.
For a piece of Mir, I'd trade my two Karma Whore accounts on Slashdot
OK. here is how I make them. First you go to a junkyard and find either a LADA or a SKODA. Then you chop off a bunch of stuff with an oxy-acetalene cutter.
Next you throw the stuff off the top of a large building.
Then you light a bonfire in the back garden, get the thing up to a really nice heat thenstick a couple of sacks of charcoal on the top.
When the flames have died back you have peak heat, stick your 'remains' on top.
By now your wreckage should be almost unidentifiable. So you will need to make it a bit more Soyuz like. Adding a hamer and sickle design or communist star is the next step. Make sure you don't make this too central or it will look suspicious.
Congratulations komrade you now have something that not only looks like MIR wreckage, it probably functions as well in its current state as the original did in orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
All the large computer companies have read the GPL and are aware of the implications. I have had the 'we can't use that code' discussion with folk from IBM, Microsoft and several other companies. That is why all the Web code from CERN was made public domain it was never at any time GPL.
I know RMS, I have shared a building with him. He is by anyone's definition 'high maintenance'. You can agree that 'open software is good' without accepting the premise that 'RMS and only RMS is the keeper of the true flame'.
Not all of the successful Web projects are GPL. Apache in particular is not GPL.
What GPL boils down to is 'I am going to force you to do everything my way'. I don't think that is a very 'Open Source' type notion.
Unlike RMS I am not out to prevent anyone making money from selling software. Unlike RMS I believe money has a social value (albeit disputing the GOP belief in money as an absolute good in its own right). For the past fifteen years RMS has lived in his office in 545 Tech square, I don't believe that programmers should be forced to aspire to live like hippies. I don't think Richard's utopia is scalable.
If you are paid in cash then you are probably either a stripper or a waiter.
Most of the dollars in circulation are electronic. Most accounts are settled electronically. The government does not 'print money' using printing presses, it can increase the supply simply by running a deficit and not borrowing to make up for it.
Equally the money supply can be increased by large numbers of dotcom companies trading while in bankrupcy :-)
And how many supercomputers have you designed or built? I mean big ones with 1000+ nodes, not your glorified SMP boxes. I have built several.
Yet you post that speculative trash as if it were the God-given truth... I hate it when people do that.
Compaq still does quite a nice line of VMS servers that target exactly the market you describe. I would say that VMS had pretty much run its course by now, even if the number of systems being deployed was still rising numerically. Sure if LINUX had not come along pockets of UNIX would continue to subsist in the same gheto as has sustained MVS, OS/360, VMS etc. There are even some folk left who use OpenGenera.
But for Linux, Unix would be facing the same fate. UNIX only displaced VMS in the engineering market because the price performance was vastly better. People would put up with the unreliability, lack of security and scalability of a solaris box because it was three or four time the speed of a VAX.
Today the price performance argument is in favor of an Intel box. I used to spend $10K at a time on graphics cards, today a $500 AGP card will wipe the floor with practically anything.
Any operating system that is limited to the ultra high performance market is ultimately doomed. Without a large user base there is no market for applications - whether open source or commercial.
The mainstream will always overtake the niche market in the end.
There are quite a few commercial products that use this trick.
The sad fact of O/S life is that people don't buy machines for the O/S they buy them for the applications they can run. No apps, no customers for the O/S, no O/S userbase means no apps, a vicious circle that all but the most ideological libertarians accept. But for Linux appearing on the horizon Microsoft would be mopping up the remains of UNIX like a piece of fresh bread on a plate of gravy.
People get so invested in the O/S which is odd since all an O/S is is something to get between you and the hardware.
The original business plan for Be appeared to be to write the O/S that Apple could not write internaly. The reconed without Jobs and NeXT.
I can't see why any investor is going to finance another round of Be. There are plenty of more deserving dotComs folding for lack of cash.
The sad fact of Be is that the edge they had - an efficient GUI layer that did not waste its time because of a broken threads model is important. It is also duplicatable on a mainstream O/S albeit at the cost of rewritting the applications somewhat.
Windows is slow because the GUI kernel blocks frequently. One bad program brings down the machine. Be was doomed from the day it started, but I would have liked them to threaten Microsoft just enough to force them to fix that particular screw up.
If the term 'all electronic' is left out then Konrad Zues's Z1 and Z2 computers beat UNIVAC by ten years.
Actually the replica is built with tolerances easily obtainable at the time, the difference engine did not require tolerances any more demanding than a clock. The victorians were rather good at those.
Babbage never completed because he was the first nerd, he kept redesigning the system and would never commit the design to manufacture. What Babbage needed was a PHB to kick his ass and force him to meet a ship date.
The article is still incorrect however, the ENIAC was only completed after the war. The Bletchley park machines were completed long before that, in time to actually be of use.
Mind you probably not surprising for an article that is probably written strraight from a corposate PR piece for UNISYS.
BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?
Quite so, the most horrific scene in the HBO series OZ was not the drug dealer explaining how he would force a new inmate to give him a 'tossed salad', it was that scene where they would all line up and get their weekly pay for their prison labor.
That might reflect a difference in living standards rather than a difference in value. But what it gets back to is whether there is any comparison between value over such long periods.
In any 30 year period it is almost certain that the value of a dollar invested in a bank account will be worth more than an 'investment' in any valuable metal.
The few exceptions to this are times of hyperinflation following major wars. I'll take that risk however since the risk of a war devaluing the US dollar is probably less than the risk that whoever is behind E-Gold simply absconds with the cash one day.
The value of investing in highly regulated markets is that the risk of fraud is very low and at the end of the day the government will be forced to make good any loss - remember savings and loans anyone?
Obscure offshore banks do go under from time to time, and when that happens it is not unusual to see a queue of irate pensioners complaining to the government whose taxes they were evading. This only really came to an end when the major UK banks started offshore outfits whose liquidity was tied to the liquidity of the main bank. I'll take the risk of Barclays going under.
The e-gold business model makes no more sense to me than that of E-Toys. I don't see how the transaction fees can carry the business. I have made more money shorting e-money schemes than anything else (Cybercash, ZixIt, First Virtual, etc.)
Which it is, these days gold is no longer the standard for high end jewelry, go into Tiffanys and you will see much more platinum than gold in the wedding rings section.
Untrue, the gold supply has fluctuated significantly from time to time. The 1849 gold rush threw Karl Marx into a fit of depression because the additional gold supply would inflate the capitalist economies.
The industrial revolution was possible in large part because of the additional liquidity introduced through the shipments of spanish gold and silver from the 'new world'. The Industrial Revolution might have happened in Spain if Francis Drake was not such a clever pirate.
Today very little value is paper value. Printed money is a tiny proportion of the total in circulation. Modern economies grow at a rate of about 1% to 4% a year. If the money supply fails to keep pace the growth stops. Deflation is a very bad thing.
Another way liquidity is increased is through banks. I put $1000 in a bank who lends it to someone else. As a result both myself and the borrower have $1000 available to spend.
If you don't like modern finance then go to Afghanistan and join the Taleban. Not only can you live in a medieval society they will let you marry four wives.
Barry K. Downey
U.S. Counsel to e-gold Ltd.
Looks like you left out your full title there "Vice President of huffing and Puffing".
So you are running a site out of an obscure caribean island offering financial services whose principal attaction appears to be being beyond the reach of US regulatory powers.
If I were in such a situation my first plan of action would not be to initiate libel lawsuits in the US which not only makes libel lawsuits almost impossible for plaintifs, but also empowers litigants with sweeping powers of discovery.
Everyone knows that if you want to piss Declan off you simply go to Pittsberg and buy officers Haven and Hammond-Schrock a drink.
They will face a monumental task making him look intelligent.
Unfortunately if you watch some of the regular news channels this type of thinking is very much ingrained. One of the most frequent bleats heard about the Internet is that the people cannot be trusted to deal with 'unmediated' information from politicians.
The US is now very much in the situation the UK was in the late 1960s before the Monte Python crew ripped the establishment stiffs apart. The US had a chance to produce first rate comedy - like SOAP. And the Moral Majority and Bigot Brigade crushed it threatening an advertiser boycott.
These days the Southern Baptist church threatens a boycott and the Disney corporation flips them the bird. Things have definitely improved.
Over in the UK we watched the Spitting Image series 'The President's Brain is Missing'. As a result GOP claims that Reagan was widely respected abroad tend to leave me incredulous. I strongly suspect that 'That's My Bush" will utterly destroy the cretin in the Whitehouse. People will laugh at the jokes for the first few months. After a year they will laugh at the President.
That is a good thing.
Yes, heard that one before. If you think you have a case then take it to the supreme court. Not that Renquist and co are particularly credible these days. But the fact that the US monetary system has not been successfully challenged for the hundred and fifty years since they started using paper money issued by the federal government indicates that this is pretty settled law.
At best you have identified a quaint inconsistency between the US written Constitution and the actual administration of the country. The Brits have hundreds of similar inconsistencies, all sturgeon caught in British waters are the property of the crown - why? Not because Brenda likes sturgeon but because of a 16th century belief that a narwhal tusk was a unicorn tusk and thus an antidote to all known poisons. Or more recently in 1977 during the silver jubilee a man was briefly charged with usurping the royal coat of arms after he sold a bed spread with the silver jubilee logo (which includes the Windsor royal arms) on it. The prosecution was dropped after it was discovered that the crime still carries the death penalty which might be considered somewhat excessive considering the circumstances.
It is one thing to point out that according to the Bible the value of PI is 3. It is quite another to go arround claiming that the value of PI actually is 3 and that it is reality that has it wrong.
Fact: Stupid people find it a lot easier to call someone crazy then to make the mental effort to attempt to understand their point of view.
Fact: Crazy people find it a lot easier to call someone stupid then to get a dose of reality.
Bzzzzttt!! if the guy had read the litterature he would have mistakenly thought the encryption protocol works.
There is no substitute for checking this type of stuff out for real. Just because the marketroid who wrote the manual claims there is no effect does not mean that the statement is true.
Believe it or not, marketting people often use a sophisticated technique to sell faulty products, it is called lying. Other prominent exponents of the technique are to be found in politics (no new taxes, no more greenhouse gases).
In my day research meant going into a lab and doing an experiment like the article describes. Going into the library to read up second hand research claims is not the same thing, nor is it superior.
The key lengths are 40 bits and 128 bits as advertised but the effective strength is not 128-24 bits it is 24 bits.
There is a fixed version of the protocol being worked on by the IEEE.
Gold-Age was arguably acting as an agent for E-Gold, an entity that appears to be providing banking services aimed at the US market whose main differentiator is avoiding the US reporting requirements. It is not a great stretch for a prosecutor to claim that any US company trading with E-Gold is acting as an agent for them and thus conspiring to facilitate illegal financial transactions.
Essentially the Secret Service don't have to prove very much to win a case. There are numerous caes of foreign companies having their US funds confiscated under arbitrary pretexts and finding that they cannot get it back without a ten year lawsuit. These are civil proceedings so despite the obviously punitive nature there is no right to jury trial, presumption of innocence or even due process. Because the alledged target is drug dealers the courts tend to turn a blind eye to the civil liberties implications.
The E-Gold system is widely used for money laundering, read the slashdot thread on the diary of two hackers if you don't believe me. There is no particular advantage to using E-Gold over a more reputable bank (Barclays overseas banking, HKSB Channel Islands, USB, etc.). There is also a sizable disadvantage, you are forced to trust that the E-Gold folk don't run off with your money.
If the Secret Service can demonstrate that E-Gold is being used for money laundering, and the level of proof is very low they can then go off and target anyone acting as an agent for E-Gold.
Not true actually, an once of gold used to buy a hand made suit, today it buys about a quarter of one.
Moreover the value of a dollar invested in an account paying 6% interest a year would be worth 3.4 times the buying power of a 1900 dollar.
Interest rates rarely fail to keep up with inflation over the long run.
Gold plays a very much reduced role in the world economy since Nixon abandoned the gold standard in the 1970s.
Fact: The current monetary system is illegal according to the US constitution
Fact: there are a lot of wierd loonies arround talking utter drivel.
Its been a while since I followed that market closely. My main point was that Seymour would not be building vector boxes, that architecture has passed its sell by date.
The reservation I have about NUMA is that the entire hardware design is built arround support for code written for single processors in languages that have a lot of baggage.
The number of times I have seen a physicist demand supercomputer time for a program code running bubble sort... I have frequently been able to tune code to run faster on a PC than the physicists could get it to run on a CRAY.
Point is that the whole approach of writing analysis code in FORTRAN and running it on parallel boxes is obsolete. What is needed is an operating system and language for manipulating mathematics directly. Something that combines the spreadsheet with Mathematica in a way that moves beyond the constraints of Visicalc and clones.
The imperative languages the physicists use make recovery of parallism a very hard job. A declarative approach to defining the problem would save a lot of time, avoid a lot of errors and parallelize better.
As Tony Hoare said "Physicists used to repeat each other's experiments, now they share each other's code".
My conclusion is that the physicists don't deserve fancy iron, they don't care to learn how to use it, they are simply using it as an alternative to thought and an ego boost.
Yes a market for hundreds of machines being fought over by five plus large companies.
People still buy supercomputers even when they are obsolete. When DEC released the alpha they gave me one for evaluation. It outperformed the main IBM mainframe on the site by about 30% and cost less than 1% of the IBM annual maintenance.
There are a few applications for which a supercomputer is the answer. However my experience is that they tend to be a political purchase rather than a technically necessary one.
When I was at CERN the experimental physicists demanded time on the Cray since as CERN is an experimental lab they should get the best tools. GEANT, the piece of absolute crap they used at the time to simulate experiments runs no faster on a vector machine, the problem simply does not work well on the architecture.
Now there were plenty of theoretical physicists who had code that would work well. So guess what the CERN management did? They allowed a five man team to spend four years rewriting GEANT for the CRAY. The project would have taken longer but the machine was decomissioned first.
The World Wide Web was invented largely to circumvent the idiotic dictates of the incompetent CERN Network division management, although Tim will never admit that in public (nor will I for that matter without a nym :-)
The distinctive aspect of Crays work was not the style of parallelism, it was the choice of gate technology. Seymour liked ECL and gallium arsenide.
If he were arround today he would be building MIMD machines, there are structural limits to SIMD that means the maximum number of vector processors you can keep running is about 16 and there are limits to backplane technology that cause the number of nodes in a shared backplane that can be kept busy tends to top out at about 16.
What would be different about Seymour's MIMD is that he would dunk it in a vast of cryonic coolant allowing the clock speed to be boosted by about three to four times.
He was trying similar tricks with his GaAs Cray-3 which the company that bears his name was too scared to build. He wouldn't be messing around with GaAs these days however, silicon processing gives better speed these days.
Turned out that he had one already.
Sounds like protectionism come corporate wealfare to me. Cray corp fails commercially then gets to blackmail their competitors into cutting them a distribution agreement to let them back into the protected market.
Like Cray wasn't subsidised itself. The NSA and Los Alamos bankrolled them from the Cray1 through at least the YMP.
OK. here is how I make them. First you go to a junkyard and find either a LADA or a SKODA. Then you chop off a bunch of stuff with an oxy-acetalene cutter.
Next you throw the stuff off the top of a large building.
Then you light a bonfire in the back garden, get the thing up to a really nice heat thenstick a couple of sacks of charcoal on the top. When the flames have died back you have peak heat, stick your 'remains' on top.
By now your wreckage should be almost unidentifiable. So you will need to make it a bit more Soyuz like. Adding a hamer and sickle design or communist star is the next step. Make sure you don't make this too central or it will look suspicious.
Congratulations komrade you now have something that not only looks like MIR wreckage, it probably functions as well in its current state as the original did in orbit.