I fully agree with 1) and 2) but I also think space research is a waste of effort since we cannot even feed people here on earth. Its a bit like adding insult to injury that starving people all around the world look up and see the "international" space station ($527bn and counting) orbiting over them every 80 minutes like some giant international insult.
You are thinking along the right lines with 1) and 2). Think a bit harder and you'll see that I am correct. Life is not "Star Trek" however much you might want it to be that way.
Look, just because I am not a zealot, promoting open source for everything, does not mean I am a troll. I have better things to do with my time. WHat I am getting at is that most people do not read the source code, and even if they did, it is quite easy to slip in a back door, if you are a good hacker. I mean, perl has subtleties which defy even the most hardcore hackers. Thats before we even start to look at unintentional backdoor entry.
So think about it for more than one second. Who are you going to sue if your billing software breaks down ? This is not a pissing contest, livielihoods are at stake.
Finally, read my.sig, noone can accuse me of being against open source.
I would not be too bothered by suid Perl scripts. So long as they 'use strict' and have been put through taintperl or whatever they should be fine. You should be looking at other things from a security perspective. Like is the OS you are using secure ???
There are areas (compilers, OS etc) where open source is fine. The political ideologies of the developers is unlikely to influence their code.
However, the area of 'billing' or making people pay for sometbing they use, is not one where I would trust open source developers to work.
How could you be sure they had not put a back door in ?
Think very carefully about what you are trying to achieve here (ie. make a profit) and about how well that might fit in with the motives of the open source movement.
Any country which is part of the United Nations, is also part of the so called 'free trade economic pact' these countries agree to enforce each others trade laws and cooperate. What do you think Interpol is there for ?
How was that Danish dude arrested in Denmark for for a crime committed in Denmark ? DeCSS was against the laws of Denmark (and coincidentally as it happend, the USA).
We need to start taking copyright infringement a bit more seriously.
My favorite analagy is with drunken driving. In the 40s we all did it. In the 50s and 60s the message came across, its dumb to drink and drive. Now only a few sociopaths would dream of getting behind the wheel after drinking.
The same social effect will eventually extend to ripping mp3s, once the public is better informed about the damage it is doing.
A troll is the name given by CmdrTaco to a posting on slashdot which does not match his editorial demographic. Apparently they have a whole group of people employed by Andover to post witless 'opinion' in order to stir up conversation and therefore, increase page hits. It seems to work just fine.
However, when you have an opinion that differs from the 'slashdot party line' (e.g. pro-copyright for example) you will be marked as 'troll' by slashdot readers who are unable to distinguish a fake post from a genuine opinion. They even have a website with an faq, and for a while a hidden sid where they discussed their tactics.
Its a bit sad that a controverial opinion has become drowned by Andovers greedy page-hit-grabbing techniques.
On something of such questionable usefulness as this. Its a bit pointless isn't it ?
Personally I think all space research should be canned until we have solved the problems of life here on Earth.That means no more NASA until we have eradicated poverty and hunger in the third world, put a stop to global warming, pollution, corporatism, and the myriad other environmental issue we face.
We do not have much time. The sea levels are rising even as I write this.
Right, so we have SPECINT and SPECFP etc etc etc.
All these numbers are 'bigger the better' what I want is to MULTIPLY THEM ALL TOGETHER to come up with the ABSOLUTE relative speed of a CPU.
Look, take the disk speed, multiply it by the cache speed, the L2 cache speed, the fsb speed, the internal bus speed etc, and you will get a number. Then do the same for another cpu, you will get another number. The one with the biggest number is the fastest.
The imformation is out there, but there does not seem to be a will to make it available. Could it be that CPU manufacturers don't want us to compare perfomance ?
Its even difficult to compare CPUs from the same manufacturer (intel) because they don't make it easy for me.
Its unusual to see someone on slashdot who actually understands the base reality that programmers, (and artists, and musicians) need to EAT in order to go on doing what they love best. I know that the average slashdot reader is either very rich, or living off their parents/ student loan or whatever, but they must realise that by taking others intellectual property they are doing much the same thing as the loggers who deforest south america, or the pollutors who dump nuclear waste in the sea. It will have a LONG TER M effect far in excess of its immediate impact.
So think twice the next time you download that Metallica mp3, how would you like it if Dave Mustaine came round your house and stole your stereo ?
There is only one thing that matters to me. Is this CPU (P4) better than that CPU (Thunderbird). At the moment I cannot compare based on SPEED. I am interested in ONE thing, how fast will this or that CPU run Linux. And don't ask me to look at BogoMips, we all know how fake and lame they are:-)
Why is it on slashdot that anyone posting a 'controversial' (i.e. sensible, mainstream establishment) opinion is immediately denigrated as a "troll" ?
Have you ever had to watch your work be stolen from under your very nose ? Seen your latest release which you sweated blood over be immediately 'cracked' and put up on warez sites all over the world before you have seen a single cent for your efforts ?
Perhaps if the largely teenage audience of slashdot had a bit more experience of the real world, they would not be so quick to judge.
I cannot be the only one who has trouble comparing processors these days. What with pipelines and prdictive branching, not to mention the various front and rear-side bus speeds, internal and external, it is harder and harder for me to look at the MHz rating to work out which is the best CPU.
Perhaps we should devise a new number, (call it the power rating) which would multiply all the numbers (bus speed, data path width, pipline parallelism, etc) together to come up with one easy to compare number that I can use when I buy my next PC.
Otherwise I have to know far more about computer architecture than I really want to. How about it CPU manufacturers ? A single number we can compare ?
I strongly doubt the veracity of this announcement. Does the idea of 3-bits seem wrong to anyone else here ? Computers usually work in powers of two (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512 etc), and not three. So I think either this is a lie, or someone has made a mistake somewhere.
What next ? a 49-bit processor ?:-)
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 1
Hmmm, indulgent is one way of putting it, psychotic would be another:-)
I am quite well travelled, and what I have learned is that in all countries, certain laws are prosecuted more than others. Also, when something is banned, it takes on a glamarous appeal far more than it would were it to be legal.
As an example, 'magic mushrooms' are completely legal in the UK. End result, nobody is interested in them. I say, tax all the recreational drugs according to how much damage they are likely to do. As a libertarian, I do not care whether you choose to kill yourself via tobacco, alcohol, ecstasy, cocaine, cannabis, crack, speed, lsd or whatever, Just don't expect me to pay for it.
The war on drugs is UNWINNABLE. Politicians love it because drugs are one of the new bogey-men that have come along to replace the Soviet Union as our new "enemy" (along with the much misunderstood Muslims in the middle east).
All I am asking for is a bit of consistancy. The message our government is putting across is mixed to say the least
We will take tax from alcohol and tobacco, but not from cannabis or ecstacy. Because the first two are "good" and the last two are "bad".
When will the USA wake up and elect some intelligent politicians ?
Its only going to get worse now GW is in control!!!
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 1
Sorry, when I said 'legalised' I meant decriminalized. Your chief of police in the UK is on the record as saying that prosecuting cannabis users is "not a priority". I.e. the police are not stupid, and will not waste time on recreational drug users. The article is here
Also, the mayor of London,England, Kenneth Livingston has also said he will legalise cannabis when he is inaugurated.
We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 3
Its funny, isn't it, that we Americans always insist our way is the best way, and yet even as we continue the war on drugs, other enligtned european countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium and the UK have legalised cannibis, and seen an attendant shortfall in hard drug abuse.
Did you know that mariujana is California's largest cash crop ?
What is going on here ? It seems a bit messed up to me.
Imagine if the checkout girl at the supermarket or the guy that changes your oil at jiffy-lube started to demand 'recognition' or 'kudos' in addition to a totally reasonable paycheck ?
They are not there to gain recognition, they are there to perform a job for which they are adequately compensated. I do not have the processing power in my brain to 'recognize' everyone however deserving.
My conclusion, pay them more, and pay them more again everything else is just so much hot air and to be blunt, bullsh*t.
So long as the user actually has to install the operating system by him or herself, it will be a problem for the less tech-savvy.
Linux is almost as easy to install as windows98, given someone with a reasonable level of technical knowledge, however many PC users are simply not that technical.
Whilst they may benefit from Linux and all its plethora of free (as in beer and speech) software, they still cannot be expected to install it themselves.
Its a chicken and egg situation, people use windows because its what came with their PC
You've hit the nail on the head there. The great claim of open source development is that the best solution survives while the weaker ones go to the wall.
This may be true when your user base is elite CS Grads at Berkerly, but you have to wonder if these days Linuxs user base is not as tech-savvy as it once was, back in the good old days of v1.119
Honestly, this might sound a bit dumb, but I don't see what is so difficult about using gzip, tar and gmake. I mean, if you cannot figure out a few simple commands, maybe you shouldn't be using Linux in the first place !!! Its not for joe average, its for people who like to get under the hood and tinker around.
After all, it is really not a Christian festival, rather it is a rehash of the pagan european festivals of saturnalia etc, which predate Christianity by 1000s of years.
While I don't want to spoil anyones fun, I think we would be better off celebrating things that really mean something to all Americans, such as the birth of our glorious constitution, or the Boston Tea party where we kicked those European asses back to Europe where they belong.
It does not matter what race you are, african-american , italian-american, jewish or Muslim. We should all celebrate what makes America great, which is the spirit of the individual. Not some ancient festival devised in a country which values neither freedom, or individuality.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think its offtopic though. And the link does go to freeside, not goatse.cx, so it cannot really be considered a troll.
You are thinking along the right lines with 1) and 2). Think a bit harder and you'll see that I am correct. Life is not "Star Trek" however much you might want it to be that way.
So think about it for more than one second. Who are you going to sue if your billing software breaks down ? This is not a pissing contest, livielihoods are at stake.
Finally, read my .sig, noone can accuse me of being against open source.
However, the area of 'billing' or making people pay for sometbing they use, is not one where I would trust open source developers to work.
How could you be sure they had not put a back door in ?
Think very carefully about what you are trying to achieve here (ie. make a profit) and about how well that might fit in with the motives of the open source movement.
How was that Danish dude arrested in Denmark for for a crime committed in Denmark ? DeCSS was against the laws of Denmark (and coincidentally as it happend, the USA).
We need to start taking copyright infringement a bit more seriously.
My favorite analagy is with drunken driving. In the 40s we all did it. In the 50s and 60s the message came across, its dumb to drink and drive. Now only a few sociopaths would dream of getting behind the wheel after drinking.
The same social effect will eventually extend to ripping mp3s, once the public is better informed about the damage it is doing.
However, when you have an opinion that differs from the 'slashdot party line' (e.g. pro-copyright for example) you will be marked as 'troll' by slashdot readers who are unable to distinguish a fake post from a genuine opinion. They even have a website with an faq, and for a while a hidden sid where they discussed their tactics.
Its a bit sad that a controverial opinion has become drowned by Andovers greedy page-hit-grabbing techniques.
Personally I think all space research should be canned until we have solved the problems of life here on Earth.That means no more NASA until we have eradicated poverty and hunger in the third world, put a stop to global warming, pollution, corporatism, and the myriad other environmental issue we face.
We do not have much time. The sea levels are rising even as I write this.
Look, take the disk speed, multiply it by the cache speed, the L2 cache speed, the fsb speed, the internal bus speed etc, and you will get a number. Then do the same for another cpu, you will get another number. The one with the biggest number is the fastest.
The imformation is out there, but there does not seem to be a will to make it available. Could it be that CPU manufacturers don't want us to compare perfomance ?
Its even difficult to compare CPUs from the same manufacturer (intel) because they don't make it easy for me.
Its unusual to see someone on slashdot who actually understands the base reality that programmers, (and artists, and musicians) need to EAT in order to go on doing what they love best. I know that the average slashdot reader is either very rich, or living off their parents/ student loan or whatever, but they must realise that by taking others intellectual property they are doing much the same thing as the loggers who deforest south america, or the pollutors who dump nuclear waste in the sea. It will have a LONG TER M effect far in excess of its immediate impact.
So think twice the next time you download that Metallica mp3, how would you like it if Dave Mustaine came round your house and stole your stereo ?
Have you ever had to watch your work be stolen from under your very nose ? Seen your latest release which you sweated blood over be immediately 'cracked' and put up on warez sites all over the world before you have seen a single cent for your efforts ?
Perhaps if the largely teenage audience of slashdot had a bit more experience of the real world, they would not be so quick to judge.
Perhaps we should devise a new number, (call it the power rating) which would multiply all the numbers (bus speed, data path width, pipline parallelism, etc) together to come up with one easy to compare number that I can use when I buy my next PC.
Otherwise I have to know far more about computer architecture than I really want to. How about it CPU manufacturers ? A single number we can compare ?
What next ? a 49-bit processor ? :-)
I am quite well travelled, and what I have learned is that in all countries, certain laws are prosecuted more than others. Also, when something is banned, it takes on a glamarous appeal far more than it would were it to be legal.
As an example, 'magic mushrooms' are completely legal in the UK. End result, nobody is interested in them. I say, tax all the recreational drugs according to how much damage they are likely to do. As a libertarian, I do not care whether you choose to kill yourself via tobacco, alcohol, ecstasy, cocaine, cannabis, crack, speed, lsd or whatever, Just don't expect me to pay for it.
The war on drugs is UNWINNABLE. Politicians love it because drugs are one of the new bogey-men that have come along to replace the Soviet Union as our new "enemy" (along with the much misunderstood Muslims in the middle east).
All I am asking for is a bit of consistancy. The message our government is putting across is mixed to say the least
We will take tax from alcohol and tobacco, but not from cannabis or ecstacy. Because the first two are "good" and the last two are "bad".
When will the USA wake up and elect some intelligent politicians ?
Its only going to get worse now GW is in control!!!
Also, the mayor of London,England, Kenneth Livingston has also said he will legalise cannabis when he is inaugurated.
Did you know that mariujana is California's largest cash crop ?
What is going on here ? It seems a bit messed up to me.
They are not there to gain recognition, they are there to perform a job for which they are adequately compensated. I do not have the processing power in my brain to 'recognize' everyone however deserving.
My conclusion, pay them more, and pay them more again everything else is just so much hot air and to be blunt, bullsh*t.
Linux is almost as easy to install as windows98, given someone with a reasonable level of technical knowledge, however many PC users are simply not that technical.
Whilst they may benefit from Linux and all its plethora of free (as in beer and speech) software, they still cannot be expected to install it themselves.
Its a chicken and egg situation, people use windows because its what came with their PC
BillG has the resellers sewn up.
Is that elapsed time, or did you take a break to go to the bathroom ?
Crack headed moderation rears its head once again.
This may be true when your user base is elite CS Grads at Berkerly, but you have to wonder if these days Linuxs user base is not as tech-savvy as it once was, back in the good old days of v1.119
Honestly, this might sound a bit dumb, but I don't see what is so difficult about using gzip, tar and gmake. I mean, if you cannot figure out a few simple commands, maybe you shouldn't be using Linux in the first place !!! Its not for joe average, its for people who like to get under the hood and tinker around.
While I don't want to spoil anyones fun, I think we would be better off celebrating things that really mean something to all Americans, such as the birth of our glorious constitution, or the Boston Tea party where we kicked those European asses back to Europe where they belong.
It does not matter what race you are, african-american , italian-american, jewish or Muslim. We should all celebrate what makes America great, which is the spirit of the individual. Not some ancient festival devised in a country which values neither freedom, or individuality.