Hey, extra compilers can't hurt too much... I wish they'd open source their old DOS C compiler (c. v10.x or so) 'cause i miss playing around with it, and for it's time it had the most ballz out optimizer...
I seem to remember they had a UNIX for dummies book. I got it from the library when i got my first real shell account so i could refresh myself to the level of being able to navigate around and all that good stuff.
I wonder how much the Linux one differes from the UNIX one...
Aha, now i know how they pulled the spiffy scrolling map off =:-) I've been wondering about that for years... Of course they have basicly a character generator (sorta like the old NES) to deal with the background and then a "motion object" (sprite generator) to deal with the foreground.... Cool =:-)
This is to be expected, infact from what i've read, the EFF and company were even counting on this. This sets the stage for a constitutional challenge, which will set precedent on a national level.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, nor do i play one on television =:-0
I have to say, although i don't particularly care for the SUSE distribution (to be fair, i haven't tried it in a year or two...), they do seem to do a lot of really good work on X, Porting, and several of those other really hairy areas where it really takes full time programmers to make a real dent in the problem.
Also, has anybody tried SUSE lately? When i last ran it, it used a very odd combination of library versions, so it was a pain to get and build about anything on it...
Also, does anybody know if SUSE is a profitable company?
They had better make it public. I wonder if the documents that the universities recieve will be part of the publicized review, or is that too much to ask of the FBI.
I am always wary of that sort of thing because universities are easily pushed around by the NSA and other similar bunches of spooks-in-suits... If they are easily pushed around on what cryptography research they can do and/or publish, why not deliver a fixed report after some smoke-filled-room discussions... Not to sound like a paranoid, but i'm usually skeptical of this sort of thing because we always find out 20 years later once things get declassified that the public was being lied to. It happened with the civil rights movement, where the army and the FBI were keeping lots of surveilance people busy watching potential rabble-rousers... It will happen again now with this, and we'll only find out after it's too late, and it'll happen yet again with tomorrow's technology so the powers that be can keep any free thinkers under thier thumbs...
The problem i see with the current support options for companies who don't have people in house (the office i work in is 100% computer geeks, so needless to say, we _are_ our own tech support), is that most support options are very platform/processor/distro dependant. Companies specialize in one or another thing, and are afraid to do anything else. Sometimes the best solution is a combination of solutions... At work we have 1 NT machine to run legacy apps, 1 BSD machine to run mySQL, 1 Linux machine to run a cluster head/job dispaching program, and several BSD machines running jobs for the cluster head, and then most of our generic networking/routing/filtering/serving sort of machines run Linux of one flavor or another.
The trick is that each job calls for it's own special configuration. What we really need is a company that hires a group of geeks with diverse experience, and who are willing to learn new stuff at customer request. Have the customer pay by the man hour above a certain yearly amount pre-included in their plan, and have all your geeks watch some central job dispach system and take jobs that they are interrested in, or that land in their area of knowledge. I think that this will take more effort than the average scheme, but i think in the end it's worth it because you don't have the problem of stubborn monolithic support companies who work down their problem tree and can't help you if your desired configuration isn't EXACTLY listed in their little book.
Now we just need to wait for the hardcore geeks to make small little color bitmaps to represent text characters in a smaller space by using pixel color to squeeze extra bits out of a smaller space, so people can have large "text" screens (at least 80x50) on a 320x240 display =:-) and then we're all doomed to turn into cyborgs =:-)
There is nothing worse than centralized informaiton. Most of the news stations/papers/magazines/websites/etc... are owned by one or two giant for-profit conglomerates... That is a large part of the reason the news is boring, and fails to pick up on many truely important things, instead focusing on non-issues.
The more centralized information is in your system, the more easily a government, company, or powerful individual can successfully censor data that reaches individuals.
For similar reasons, centralized computing is not always a good idea, because it takes away control from the individual, and it also creates a single point of failure, and some great opportunities for Big Brother to poke through your files/programs/core space/whatever...
When people create products that phone home, i start to worry. I believe that software should be like a book, in that once you buy a copy, you can use it, and the company who sold it to you HAS NO RIGHT to know or care where/when/how you are using it. Otherwise large companies who know they have a large enough installed base by the balls go and do evil stuff like charge per page for their PDF encoders, or other such sleazy things that do not benefit the users, but they can't switch because they are trapped on the upgrade treadmill...
Then there is the whole thing where the less control the user has over their computer/software/etc... the better. It creeps in from all sides. UI's with fewer and fewer "confusing options" (read FUNCTIONALITY), more crippleware (think of connection/processor limits for commercial OS's (mainly NT and Digital Unix spring to mind...)). Buncha bastards if you ask me.
I much prefered the software environment before the majority of computer users had internet access, because programs didn't require, try, or expect to be able to phone home. Goddamn it!... Sometimes the whole mess makes me want to go around kicking these sleazy people in the brains...
A side though though (not quite on topic, but close...). Is it just my imagination, or is telescope technology evolving as fast as computer technology these days? We now have ridiculously precise lenses (first hubble aside =:-), we've got telescopes in space to avoid athmospheric interference, we've got micromotor controlled mirror arrays to make adjustments to images, and we've got all sorts of automated systems to alert humans if it looks like anything cool is happening in the sky at any particular location.
All in all, how much longer do people think before we get to some barrier to further advances, i mean people have been making steadily better and better telescopes for hundreds of years... (possibly thousands, i'm really not sure...) It seems that at some point we'll max out the technology...
=:-) Seriously though, that happens to me too, and the best thing is to get a rest. What would be really nice is if i could get a job working on videogames rather than business software, i think that would make a bigger difference though. I learned to program so i could write games. I tinkered with that all through school (elementary-high school), then i had to go and get a job, and so now i write business software, and i'm to burned out at the end of a week to even consider firing up an editor and coding something for myself =:-(
Again, what is good for handhelds is often good for wearables =:-) This sort of research of getting the most out of a small screen, getting the most out of small memory, flash, etc... is all leading to more affordable, less battery intensive wearable systems. One thing that would be nice to see sometime soon is somebody who makes PDA/handheld sort of systems, but is open enough about their architecture that people can tweak them (like using eyepiece LCD's instead of panel ones, attatching some sort of serial keyboard/pointer and having it work as the native one would, etc...) then even joe schmoe can get the most out of his PDA by making it a wearable, and the core can have the FSCK optimized out of it for battery life because it'll be an integrated system. I think the cobbed-together-ness of most homebuilt wearables is the biggest battery drain, and most commercial wearables now are incredibly expensive, aminly due to ridiculous markup. If somebody would design a handheld open enough to tinker with, i think all these multitudinous birds would be killed with one stone =:-)
After his son left the witness chair, Per Johansen told a reporter in the courtroom hallway that his son had done "very well." He noted that Jon's grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. He said that he himself fought communism in Europe in the 1980s by working as a secret courier for Solidarity leaders in Poland, carrying money into the country and smuggling out documents.
"Jon is in an historical line," Per Johansen said proudly. "He is fighting for freedom."
Them's fightin' words. IT's good that his family stands behind him in this battle.
Yeah, i've been getting spammed by somebody who's got an address at hotmaiI.com and they are trying to do the same sort of thing. What they are doing is abusing the fact that a lot of GUI based users run their systems with all-but-unreadable proportional spaced slick fonts, and a capitol 'I' is often only one pixel different from a little 'l', and often their font anti-aliasing smoothes that out to a 25% tone difference on one pixel, and who'd be the wiser... I happened to notice this because i use a high contrast decent-sized courier font on my machine, and i run PINE in an KDE terminal window, so it stuck out like a sore thumb. As always the user is the weakest link in security...
Well, UNIX is still taking a while to catch up to making optimal use of late-binding libraries (ELF, etc...). I have been seeing on FreshMeat a quickly increasing number of nifty self contained libraries (components if you want to call them that) to do various useful things, like play MPEGS, etc... I think those will get used more and more, espescially the BSD and LGPL ones that can be linked into commercial programs. That being said, i think this trend is doing alright, and all is well. I think we should be very careful NOT to build a topheavy microsoft-esqe DCOM like system. We should also be careful to make sure that we don't tie the component model to any one desktop or UI. If you can't write a completely CONSOLE MODE application just as easily as a GUI using the component model, it's a FAILURE. If the X libraries need to be present to compile or use non-gui component based programs, it's a FAILURE. So to sum up, IMHO we need a UI independant model for the little bits and pieces of code that could really stand to be reused, and it has to be lightweight so we don't waste more memory reusing than we save...
A proposal:
how about making modules that are ELF libraries that all have a standard fuction call to identify themselves, their version, and respond to queries about functionality (this is vague, but it's just an idea and this isn't really my speciality...), and then they can be loaded at runtime, and so a program can consist of mainly code to load a bunch of component modules and connect them in some meaningful way (at least for a simple program...)
*sigh*
Okay, i'm eating my words...
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 1
Upon further consideration, broadcasting routes for somebody else's IPs should be punishable by death.
Any computer manufacturer who relies on, tries to obtain, or pushes for recognition on the basis of a novel looking CASE is in trouble. Do you know why? Because it's what's inside the case that matters. Now I don't mean to be an anti-apple biggot, i have a similar spanking to hand out to SGI over the O2 workstations (one of which i've been sort of stuck with as a desktop workstation at work). They concentrate so much on the sleek, modern, and powerful look that they somehow fail to make the actual hardware sleek, modern, or powerful. I have yet to find a way to get better than 60hz refresh out of that system, and it has the buggiest CDROM drive on earth. I have similar complaints with the Imac's because they are a lot of packaging hype, but i can't help but think they'd be more affordable and more servicable if they came in a standard gray box. Plus any computer that is round enough that you can't accumulate a pile of odds and ends on top of it is too whacked out for me =:-)
I think technology you mention would be a good step forward for immersive VR. Now that computers are starting to get the the point where a dynamic level of detail can be calculated for objects from their underlying geometric data, that would provide a nice boost to realism. Another neat thing that could be done with this is in a VR environment, one of the hardest things to deal with is the problem of how to model interation with a very limited sensory/motor bandwidth. If objects could have lists of actions the user could perform on/with them when a user looks at something, the system could pop up a translucent menu over it with a list of hotkeys to perform a list of logical actions =:-)
Hey, not only am I going to shut off my PC, i'm going to the great white north to drink beer and raise a ruckus at Spiderfest(/punkfest) in Onterio =:-)
Bison has already had to deal with this problem a long time ago. The trick is that Bison's source code is very hard to seperate, both conceptually and actually, from it's output, seeing as it's a parser that parses in input file which serves as a spec for a parser, which is generated by Bison (using a lot of recycled code...)
The intent was to give the Bison program the protection of the GPL, but to allow the output to be used howerer one pleased.
Unfortunately in my half asleep state i don't remember the details of how they pulled it off, so go and check it out before i put my foot in my mouth trying to explain it.
It sure seems like we are entering an early stage. I don't expect it to fully happen any time soon, but we're getting our feet wet. We now have several large companies kicking around (like microsoft) that make lots of money, but don't actually build any appreciable physical product, but rather push bits around into patterns that are considered useful, and make money doing so, by leasing out the right for people (using the assistance of a machine) to interperet those patterns of information. That is a big first step. The fact that databases full of information are considered so valuable is another.
Technology was supposed to free us from the particular set of shackles that were the affliction of the industrial age. Now that we are moving towards the post-industrial information economy and all that shit, we have a new set of shackles. People are really good at that, making up new ways to be stressed out. I think we'd get bored otherwise...
I was lurking in alt.scooter (a discussion group for the dweebs among us who own motorscooters (including me =:-) ) and somebody with really bad english asked how to overclock his 50cc scooter. People do that sort of stuff a lot. a 50cc scooter is actually quite happily capable (on flat terrain) of going 40mph, but by law to be sold as a Class B moped in new york state they are governed to 30, which sucks.
On the other hand my Vespa 90 goes 45 so i had to get a full motorcycle license to ride it. On the plus side, i can now legally ride my motorcycle too =:-)
It seemed that AMD was quite happy with overclockers when they were competing for headlines in the Mhz race, infact i seem to remember they quitle lavishly praised Cryotech for building a vastly overclocked highly cooled system... It seems that now that they have some solid market share and a succesful brand, they want to close that door. I personally have been buying exclusively AMD cpu's since midway through the 80486 days, and probably will continue to do so, and i haven't bothered much with overclocking, but i still think it's a little tricky to walk that line between protecting consumers and confining hobbiests...
Those with very pointy haired management can't always discuss something interernally, and sometimes those are the only jobs in the area. I've had friends that worked places that were poorly run, inefficient, and treated their employees like shit, but they needed to eat, and in a college town where you can find an underfed grad student to design a nuclear bomb for $8/hour, one's lucky to come up with any job at all. So as a result, he bitches because his boss is an autocrat with no actual wisdom to justify his position, only seniority. So what if he vents his frustrations... I think that companies that treat their workers like shit just because the swing of the pendulum is towards a buyer's market in labor at the moment are digging their own grave. Loyalty works both ways. If you abuse your employees because you know they are scared to talk, and they can't find a way out, you'd better damn well believe that when they do find a way out they'll take it, and when they found a way to speak their mind it's human nature. It's like the people who beat their dogs, no wonder they get bitten.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, extra compilers can't hurt too much... I wish they'd open source their old DOS C compiler (c. v10.x or so) 'cause i miss playing around with it, and for it's time it had the most ballz out optimizer...
I seem to remember they had a UNIX for dummies book. I got it from the library when i got my first real shell account so i could refresh myself to the level of being able to navigate around and all that good stuff.
I wonder how much the Linux one differes from the UNIX one...
Aha, now i know how they pulled the spiffy scrolling map off =:-) I've been wondering about that for years... Of course they have basicly a character generator (sorta like the old NES) to deal with the background and then a "motion object" (sprite generator) to deal with the foreground.... Cool =:-)
This is to be expected, infact from what i've read, the EFF and company were even counting on this. This sets the stage for a constitutional challenge, which will set precedent on a national level.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, nor do i play one on television =:-0
I have to say, although i don't particularly care for the SUSE distribution (to be fair, i haven't tried it in a year or two...), they do seem to do a lot of really good work on X, Porting, and several of those other really hairy areas where it really takes full time programmers to make a real dent in the problem.
Also, has anybody tried SUSE lately? When i last ran it, it used a very odd combination of library versions, so it was a pain to get and build about anything on it...
Also, does anybody know if SUSE is a profitable company?
They had better make it public. I wonder if the documents that the universities recieve will be part of the publicized review, or is that too much to ask of the FBI.
I am always wary of that sort of thing because universities are easily pushed around by the NSA and other similar bunches of spooks-in-suits... If they are easily pushed around on what cryptography research they can do and/or publish, why not deliver a fixed report after some smoke-filled-room discussions... Not to sound like a paranoid, but i'm usually skeptical of this sort of thing because we always find out 20 years later once things get declassified that the public was being lied to. It happened with the civil rights movement, where the army and the FBI were keeping lots of surveilance people busy watching potential rabble-rousers... It will happen again now with this, and we'll only find out after it's too late, and it'll happen yet again with tomorrow's technology so the powers that be can keep any free thinkers under thier thumbs...
The problem i see with the current support options for companies who don't have people in house (the office i work in is 100% computer geeks, so needless to say, we _are_ our own tech support), is that most support options are very platform/processor/distro dependant. Companies specialize in one or another thing, and are afraid to do anything else. Sometimes the best solution is a combination of solutions... At work we have 1 NT machine to run legacy apps, 1 BSD machine to run mySQL, 1 Linux machine to run a cluster head/job dispaching program, and several BSD machines running jobs for the cluster head, and then most of our generic networking/routing/filtering/serving sort of machines run Linux of one flavor or another.
The trick is that each job calls for it's own special configuration. What we really need is a company that hires a group of geeks with diverse experience, and who are willing to learn new stuff at customer request. Have the customer pay by the man hour above a certain yearly amount pre-included in their plan, and have all your geeks watch some central job dispach system and take jobs that they are interrested in, or that land in their area of knowledge. I think that this will take more effort than the average scheme, but i think in the end it's worth it because you don't have the problem of stubborn monolithic support companies who work down their problem tree and can't help you if your desired configuration isn't EXACTLY listed in their little book.
Now we just need to wait for the hardcore geeks to make small little color bitmaps to represent text characters in a smaller space by using pixel color to squeeze extra bits out of a smaller space, so people can have large "text" screens (at least 80x50) on a 320x240 display =:-) and then we're all doomed to turn into cyborgs =:-)
Warning: THis is a rant!
... Sometimes the whole mess makes me want to go around kicking these sleazy people in the brains...
There is nothing worse than centralized informaiton. Most of the news stations/papers/magazines/websites/etc... are owned by one or two giant for-profit conglomerates... That is a large part of the reason the news is boring, and fails to pick up on many truely important things, instead focusing on non-issues.
The more centralized information is in your system, the more easily a government, company, or powerful individual can successfully censor data that reaches individuals.
For similar reasons, centralized computing is not always a good idea, because it takes away control from the individual, and it also creates a single point of failure, and some great opportunities for Big Brother to poke through your files/programs/core space/whatever...
When people create products that phone home, i start to worry. I believe that software should be like a book, in that once you buy a copy, you can use it, and the company who sold it to you HAS NO RIGHT to know or care where/when/how you are using it. Otherwise large companies who know they have a large enough installed base by the balls go and do evil stuff like charge per page for their PDF encoders, or other such sleazy things that do not benefit the users, but they can't switch because they are trapped on the upgrade treadmill...
Then there is the whole thing where the less control the user has over their computer/software/etc... the better. It creeps in from all sides. UI's with fewer and fewer "confusing options" (read FUNCTIONALITY), more crippleware (think of connection/processor limits for commercial OS's (mainly NT and Digital Unix spring to mind...)). Buncha bastards if you ask me.
I much prefered the software environment before the majority of computer users had internet access, because programs didn't require, try, or expect to be able to phone home. Goddamn it!
The site is already slashdotted.. =:-(
A side though though (not quite on topic, but close...). Is it just my imagination, or is telescope technology evolving as fast as computer technology these days? We now have ridiculously precise lenses (first hubble aside =:-), we've got telescopes in space to avoid athmospheric interference, we've got micromotor controlled mirror arrays to make adjustments to images, and we've got all sorts of automated systems to alert humans if it looks like anything cool is happening in the sky at any particular location.
All in all, how much longer do people think before we get to some barrier to further advances, i mean people have been making steadily better and better telescopes for hundreds of years... (possibly thousands, i'm really not sure...) It seems that at some point we'll max out the technology...
=:-) Seriously though, that happens to me too, and the best thing is to get a rest. What would be really nice is if i could get a job working on videogames rather than business software, i think that would make a bigger difference though. I learned to program so i could write games. I tinkered with that all through school (elementary-high school), then i had to go and get a job, and so now i write business software, and i'm to burned out at the end of a week to even consider firing up an editor and coding something for myself =:-(
Again, what is good for handhelds is often good for wearables =:-) This sort of research of getting the most out of a small screen, getting the most out of small memory, flash, etc... is all leading to more affordable, less battery intensive wearable systems.
One thing that would be nice to see sometime soon is somebody who makes PDA/handheld sort of systems, but is open enough about their architecture that people can tweak them (like using eyepiece LCD's instead of panel ones, attatching some sort of serial keyboard/pointer and having it work as the native one would, etc...) then even joe schmoe can get the most out of his PDA by making it a wearable, and the core can have the FSCK optimized out of it for battery life because it'll be an integrated system. I think the cobbed-together-ness of most homebuilt wearables is the biggest battery drain, and most commercial wearables now are incredibly expensive, aminly due to ridiculous markup.
If somebody would design a handheld open enough to tinker with, i think all these multitudinous birds would be killed with one stone =:-)
From the NTY article:
After his son left the witness chair, Per Johansen told a reporter in the courtroom hallway that his son had done "very well." He noted that Jon's grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. He said that he himself fought communism in Europe in the 1980s by working as a secret courier for Solidarity leaders in Poland, carrying money into the country and smuggling out documents.
"Jon is in an historical line," Per Johansen said proudly. "He is fighting for freedom."
Them's fightin' words. IT's good that his family stands behind him in this battle.
Yeah, i've been getting spammed by somebody who's got an address at hotmaiI.com and they are trying to do the same sort of thing. What they are doing is abusing the fact that a lot of GUI based users run their systems with all-but-unreadable proportional spaced slick fonts, and a capitol 'I' is often only one pixel different from a little 'l', and often their font anti-aliasing smoothes that out to a 25% tone difference on one pixel, and who'd be the wiser...
I happened to notice this because i use a high contrast decent-sized courier font on my machine, and i run PINE in an KDE terminal window, so it stuck out like a sore thumb.
As always the user is the weakest link in security...
Well, UNIX is still taking a while to catch up to making optimal use of late-binding libraries (ELF, etc...). I have been seeing on FreshMeat a quickly increasing number of nifty self contained libraries (components if you want to call them that) to do various useful things, like play MPEGS, etc... I think those will get used more and more, espescially the BSD and LGPL ones that can be linked into commercial programs.
That being said, i think this trend is doing alright, and all is well. I think we should be very careful NOT to build a topheavy microsoft-esqe DCOM like system. We should also be careful to make sure that we don't tie the component model to any one desktop or UI. If you can't write a completely CONSOLE MODE application just as easily as a GUI using the component model, it's a FAILURE. If the X libraries need to be present to compile or use non-gui component based programs, it's a FAILURE.
So to sum up, IMHO we need a UI independant model for the little bits and pieces of code that could really stand to be reused, and it has to be lightweight so we don't waste more memory reusing than we save...
A proposal:
how about making modules that are ELF libraries that all have a standard fuction call to identify themselves, their version, and respond to queries about functionality (this is vague, but it's just an idea and this isn't really my speciality...), and then they can be loaded at runtime, and so a program can consist of mainly code to load a bunch of component modules and connect them in some meaningful way (at least for a simple program...)
*sigh*
Upon further consideration, broadcasting routes for somebody else's IPs should be punishable by death.
Any computer manufacturer who relies on, tries to obtain, or pushes for recognition on the basis of a novel looking CASE is in trouble. Do you know why? Because it's what's inside the case that matters.
Now I don't mean to be an anti-apple biggot, i have a similar spanking to hand out to SGI over the O2 workstations (one of which i've been sort of stuck with as a desktop workstation at work). They concentrate so much on the sleek, modern, and powerful look that they somehow fail to make the actual hardware sleek, modern, or powerful. I have yet to find a way to get better than 60hz refresh out of that system, and it has the buggiest CDROM drive on earth.
I have similar complaints with the Imac's because they are a lot of packaging hype, but i can't help but think they'd be more affordable and more servicable if they came in a standard gray box. Plus any computer that is round enough that you can't accumulate a pile of odds and ends on top of it is too whacked out for me =:-)
I think technology you mention would be a good step forward for immersive VR. Now that computers are starting to get the the point where a dynamic level of detail can be calculated for objects from their underlying geometric data, that would provide a nice boost to realism.
Another neat thing that could be done with this is in a VR environment, one of the hardest things to deal with is the problem of how to model interation with a very limited sensory/motor bandwidth. If objects could have lists of actions the user could perform on/with them when a user looks at something, the system could pop up a translucent menu over it with a list of hotkeys to perform a list of logical actions =:-)
Hey, not only am I going to shut off my PC, i'm going to the great white north to drink beer and raise a ruckus at Spiderfest(/punkfest) in Onterio =:-)
Bison has already had to deal with this problem a long time ago. The trick is that Bison's source code is very hard to seperate, both conceptually and actually, from it's output, seeing as it's a parser that parses in input file which serves as a spec for a parser, which is generated by Bison (using a lot of recycled code...)
The intent was to give the Bison program the protection of the GPL, but to allow the output to be used howerer one pleased.
Unfortunately in my half asleep state i don't remember the details of how they pulled it off, so go and check it out before i put my foot in my mouth trying to explain it.
It sure seems like we are entering an early stage. I don't expect it to fully happen any time soon, but we're getting our feet wet. We now have several large companies kicking around (like microsoft) that make lots of money, but don't actually build any appreciable physical product, but rather push bits around into patterns that are considered useful, and make money doing so, by leasing out the right for people (using the assistance of a machine) to interperet those patterns of information. That is a big first step. The fact that databases full of information are considered so valuable is another.
Technology was supposed to free us from the particular set of shackles that were the affliction of the industrial age. Now that we are moving towards the post-industrial information economy and all that shit, we have a new set of shackles. People are really good at that, making up new ways to be stressed out. I think we'd get bored otherwise...
I was lurking in alt.scooter (a discussion group for the dweebs among us who own motorscooters (including me =:-) ) and somebody with really bad english asked how to overclock his 50cc scooter. People do that sort of stuff a lot. a 50cc scooter is actually quite happily capable (on flat terrain) of going 40mph, but by law to be sold as a Class B moped in new york state they are governed to 30, which sucks.
On the other hand my Vespa 90 goes 45 so i had to get a full motorcycle license to ride it. On the plus side, i can now legally ride my motorcycle too =:-)
It seemed that AMD was quite happy with overclockers when they were competing for headlines in the Mhz race, infact i seem to remember they quitle lavishly praised Cryotech for building a vastly overclocked highly cooled system... It seems that now that they have some solid market share and a succesful brand, they want to close that door. I personally have been buying exclusively AMD cpu's since midway through the 80486 days, and probably will continue to do so, and i haven't bothered much with overclocking, but i still think it's a little tricky to walk that line between protecting consumers and confining hobbiests...
Those with very pointy haired management can't always discuss something interernally, and sometimes those are the only jobs in the area. I've had friends that worked places that were poorly run, inefficient, and treated their employees like shit, but they needed to eat, and in a college town where you can find an underfed grad student to design a nuclear bomb for $8/hour, one's lucky to come up with any job at all.
So as a result, he bitches because his boss is an autocrat with no actual wisdom to justify his position, only seniority. So what if he vents his frustrations... I think that companies that treat their workers like shit just because the swing of the pendulum is towards a buyer's market in labor at the moment are digging their own grave. Loyalty works both ways. If you abuse your employees because you know they are scared to talk, and they can't find a way out, you'd better damn well believe that when they do find a way out they'll take it, and when they found a way to speak their mind it's human nature. It's like the people who beat their dogs, no wonder they get bitten.