This still resides firmly in the wildly speculative realm of unfounded rumor but raises the question, should Google be required to notify a content creator when their IP has been deleted/removed?
Is there any requirement in the agreement between Google and the creator to so do? I highly doubt it. In the absence of such a requirement I don't see any reason to think that they have any such obligation. I searched their web-site and I see no indication that have made any representations to the contrary.
Now, if the current agreement between Blogger and the content creators is satisfactory, they can take their content elsewhere. Perhaps a competing blog service can offer more agreeable terms and attract more content creators, or perhaps content creators prefer Blogger's service, even with onerous TOS, over the competitor's service for whatever reason (after all, IP policies are the not the end-all here).
In short, I don't see any reason for people to become histrionic when a service provider doesn't deliver goods that they never promised.
Taking as gospel the non-technical* formulation of Moore's law: processing power doubles every 24 months, then delaying your product even a few weeks puts you behind the performance curve. A 2 week delay comes in at a manageable 1.3% but delay your product 8 weeks, and you are already 5.5% behind your competitor**. In a market with margins in the low single digits, that's the difference between profit and loss.
Economy or not, you've got to release the product when the engineers say its ready or else it decays.
* Please don't flame me about transistor densities at optimal cost -- I'm simplifying! ** Yes, processors come out in discrete updates, not continuous updates. I'm only right on average.
Every CPU cycle that the "OS" uses is stealing cycles from processes that could be doing productive work for me. So yes, OSes can be slimmer. Regardless of how much memory or CPU exists. The attitude of "eh, we've got 4 GB of RAM" is why we have such bloated OSes and applications to begin with.
Every CPU cycle that the "OS" uses on my machine is stealing cycles from my system idle process -- which eats up 80% of my overall cycles anyway (and this is with speedstep that clocks my 2.4G processor down to 1.8G whenever the ACPI gods think that's a good idea). The idea that my scheduler is somehow chock full of productive work that's being held up by lack of CPU cycles (or RAM) is just not the case. YMMV, of course, depending on workload, but I'm going to venture that my situation is most certainly the norm.
On the other hand, when I hit up my OS search feature for a recently created document and it's not there, I have to spend at least 10 seconds, possibly a minute, navigating to it in a file explorer. Whatever amount of time the search indexer has spent crawling my system, it's paid back in just one successful query that avoids breaking my workflow. Of course, the indexer is also set to run with low CPU priority and throttled IO, that's just common sense, but it's become an indispensable tool.
The bottleneck in productive use of computers is not hardware resources, it's human intelligence and attention. Hardware is cheap and unlimited, human beings are expensive and finite.
Nvidia is notorious for awful drivers, especially for dual display. The screensaver issue is also probably from bad Nvidia drivers.
I don't know what you are talking about, but Nvidia makes the only usable Linux drivers on the planet. Go to any linux computer that's not using the Nvidia drivers and run glxinfo (http://www.xfree86.org/4.4.0/glxinfo.1.html) and tell me if it supports framebuffer, pbuffers, GLSL or redirected direct rendering. In fact, if you press the MESA people hard enough, they will disclose that their full openGL compatibility comes with a software render engine.
At the bottom of all this, is the fact that the nvidia driver has a real unified memory manager -- something that I've tried to get with MESA on an Intel/ATI card at great length (I needed fast openGL for some projects). You can do it, but you have to get crazy experimental drivers and patch your kernel in a few dozen places. Oh, and ACPI doesn't work.
TL;DR version: nvidia is "notorious" for having the only working linux drivers in production status, nothing more.
We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
We're also not living in a free country when I cannot voluntarily enter into contracts of my own choosing with my neighbors. If everyone on my block enters into a contract not to install $X, then they don't have the right to install $X, end of story. All the terms are laid out ahead of time for you to read (or pay your lawyer $250 to write up a summary). The HOA cannot add additional terms or conditions without your consent after you've already signed the agreement.
Now, I personally would never buy a house in a community with a HOA because I, like you (judging from your short post), very much value my freedom to stick random doohickeys on my roof or in my yard, grow a garden out front and don't take very kindly to those restrictions. That's my personal choice but I'm not so arrogant to think that it's the only acceptable choice -- if another good fellow wants to submit to the terms of an HOA-covenant in exchange for the perceived benefits then that's his right.
The best part of living in a free country is that we can create space for different people to set up institutions that best reflect their particular combination of preferences without imposing it on others. I would hope that, in your desire to express your preferences you don't feel the need to impose those preferences on others without their consent.
I still cannot believe this gets modded insightful. Let's start with the basics:
First, you compare something with Nazism that doesn't even being to start to even pale in comparison. This either means you are truly incapable of understanding the difference (unlikely) or you are being dishonest but are trying to score rhetorical points (more likely). That goes for you and the Representatives that said the same thing.
If you want to try to define the various things that Operation Predator as "thoughtcrime", go right ahead but the vast majority of Americans think that individuals that take concrete steps to, say, have intercourse with a young child ought to be punished. IAAL and, in all instances that I'm aware of, no individual was convicted without having taken concrete steps towards committing a very serious crime. Please enlighten me if I am mistaken.
Finally, I have no idea where you got the idea that compulsory home-visits for anything are "inevitable" but I can tell you this: barring a dramatic shift in the way the fourth amendment is interpreted, that isn't going to happen. As it is now, you need not answer anyone at your door sans a warrant.
If anything, the internet reminds me how scarce quality work (of whatever sort) really is. Being able to readily comb through all of it only makes that truth even more apparent.
I was mistaken about some key facts. I apologize for the inconvenience (and for having been modded Insightful despite being incorrect).
I still have some strong misgivings about the Android software dev model (including the fact that you can't make a proper tethering application because the API doesn't expose the packet gubbins) but this appears to be OK.
For people that actually need to load unsigned 64-bit drivers (myself, for instance, to patch tcpip.sys so I can have lots of half-open connections at once), the procedure is actually pretty simple. You generate a cert, sign the driver yourself and then put the computer into "testing mode", which allows for self-signed drivers. The whole process can be automated (for instance, the tcpip.sys patch is now one click plus reboot) so that it's transparent to the end user.
IMO, this is the correct way to do it -- you can sign the driver yourself but you have to explicitly tell Windows to accept that signature. Seems like a perfectly reasonable balance between protecting newbies and not aggravating power-users too much.
PowerPC is freaking ancient and were supported for 7-8 years, which is all you can reasonably expect. That means that the Core Duos will be phased out sometime in 2012 when OSXI comes out (they are going to run out of minor version numbers pretty soon, which will be irritating because 10.11 10.5 under every conceivable mathematical grammar).
The last 32-bit only processors were sold about 2-3 years ago so I imagine that most OSes are going to continue to support regular x86 for a long time hence.
Most owners of the original macbooks (Intel Core Duo) would be pretty pissed if Snow Leopard didn't support them because their processors aren't x86-64 compatible.
Why are software defects any different that hardware defects?
If my microwave had a defective gear in the motor that spins the turny-thing (technical term) that broke after warranty, I wouldn't expect it to be fixed. Is a defective line of code somewhere really all that different?
Because a single, commercial company creates and maintains the product which the same single, commercial company is also liable for in terms of company image, damage to devices, even overflow of support calls causing penalties on their service contracts with subcontractors.
A single commercial company also maintains Windows Mobile. On a WinMo device, the user is given root access, full permissions to fuck with the filesystem/registry and install any application that she wants. Moreover, WinMo applications don't need to be approved by anyone, you just download the SDK (C++ or C#, your choice) and write the app and package it as a file. Send the file to anyone you want, host it free on the web, sell it for $1000000/copy, barter it for live chickens...
Compare this to Android, where the user doesn't have root access and is locked out the filesystem. The Android developer is similarly fucked -- she can't just package his application as a file and send it off to whoever but must submit it for approval and then, if the overlords deign to approve, can only distribute it through their app store.
It's ironic, in some sick and twisted sense, that an OS built on open source affords the user and developer so much less freedom than one built on closed source by the much-maligned Microsoft.
Seriously, if you provide a consumer service of any kind, and you expect the consumers to do anything more than just use the service, you are seriously deluded. People - including, I suspect, many techies - will never do anything more than chat/download/email/surf/whatever.
No, I expect customers to lose their data if they haven't backed it up. If they want to purchase a backup solution, I will sell it to them. Otherwise, it's quite logical that it will be lost.
In my experience running WinMo on Sprint, I can install any application I want, change the ROM, fiddle with the registry in an unlimited fashion. Compare this with the G1 that does not allow the user to run as root and the logic of slashdot is inverted.
After all, if we are going to have the sun blocked out by a huge cloud of dust, it would be fantastic to have as much heat trapped on earth as possible!
Well, you can't do exactly. That's why physicists do things to various approximations. For instance, you can approximate the roulette wheel and the balls as independently rotating objects, each subject to constant friction. That simple system of equations doesn't suffice to predict things exactly (and is also only good if the ball doesn't hop), but it's actually enough to predict the quadrant that the ball will land in. Of course, no one has studied it in detail because nobody gives a shit about the microscopics of large spinning random number generators.
A roulette ball is quite large enough (by many orders of magnitude) to treat as a purely classical particle.
You are right about one thing -- time to brush up on your Quantum. Start by calculating the de Broglie wavelength (the relevant QM length) of a roulette ball traveling at the maximum speed you might see at a casino and compare it to the radius of the ball itself.
Actually, I know quite a bit about (stochastic*) computational physics and the notion that "repeatable" means "can run the exact same simulation with the exact same seed and get the exact same result" is absolutely incorrect. What is meant by "repeatable" is that one can extract from the simulations some sort of macroscopic quantity (usually a thermodynamic quantity or a correlation function) whose average is consistent across many separate runs (known in the biz as the ensemble average). So, for instance, if I'm observing the coalescence of polymers into a hex-phase (as in [1]), I could measure the average number of aggregated copolymer blocks and compare those (as was done in that paper).
Let's make an extended gambling analogy. Suppose I have a new roulette table that I want to certify that it works like it should. One suggestion (akin to what you said), would be to put the entire table under the same initial conditions as a known-good table and see if it gives the same results. A more sophisticated approach would be to make a histogram of results for a large number of independent roles and see if it converges to the proper distribution (or, in case the distribution isn't known theoretically, compare it to the distribution from a different device, also tested a large number of times). I would argue that the second method is much more powerful than the first, because it probes a more relevant value. Nobody cares whether the roulette table gave 00 the first time and 23 the second time -- we are only concerned that, on average, it gives 00 with the same probability as 23.
In stochastic computational simulations, the same story applies. Nobody cares whether a particular simulation did X or Y or Z because that's not relevant. What is relevant is the (converged) probability that, given some starting condition, the systems ends up in X or Y or Z.
* None of these comments apply in any way to solving deterministic systems. You don't need random numbers for those anyway.
** Another commenter pointed out that exact repeatability is incredibly useful for debugging purposes. That is true but that has nothing to do with reproducibility in the scientific sense of the word.
I know some guys doing quantum Monte Carlo simulations. And yes, fast RNGs are crucial for their algorithms.
I will bet you at 100-1 odds that they are using some sort of pseudoRNG like Mersenne Twister. Nobody in computational physics uses real number generators because there's absolutely no reason to.
So MT may be good enough for computational physicists, but not for strong cryptography.
I never claimed otherwise. Cryptography has the need for a real RNG but computational physics only needs psuedoRNGs. That fact greatly undercuts the supposed need for this technology.
Slashdot Mirror
This still resides firmly in the wildly speculative realm of unfounded rumor but raises the question, should Google be required to notify a content creator when their IP has been deleted/removed?
Is there any requirement in the agreement between Google and the creator to so do? I highly doubt it. In the absence of such a requirement I don't see any reason to think that they have any such obligation. I searched their web-site and I see no indication that have made any representations to the contrary.
Now, if the current agreement between Blogger and the content creators is satisfactory, they can take their content elsewhere. Perhaps a competing blog service can offer more agreeable terms and attract more content creators, or perhaps content creators prefer Blogger's service, even with onerous TOS, over the competitor's service for whatever reason (after all, IP policies are the not the end-all here).
In short, I don't see any reason for people to become histrionic when a service provider doesn't deliver goods that they never promised.
Taking as gospel the non-technical* formulation of Moore's law: processing power doubles every 24 months, then delaying your product even a few weeks puts you behind the performance curve. A 2 week delay comes in at a manageable 1.3% but delay your product 8 weeks, and you are already 5.5% behind your competitor**. In a market with margins in the low single digits, that's the difference between profit and loss.
Economy or not, you've got to release the product when the engineers say its ready or else it decays.
* Please don't flame me about transistor densities at optimal cost -- I'm simplifying!
** Yes, processors come out in discrete updates, not continuous updates. I'm only right on average.
Every CPU cycle that the "OS" uses is stealing cycles from processes that could be doing productive work for me. So yes, OSes can be slimmer. Regardless of how much memory or CPU exists. The attitude of "eh, we've got 4 GB of RAM" is why we have such bloated OSes and applications to begin with.
Every CPU cycle that the "OS" uses on my machine is stealing cycles from my system idle process -- which eats up 80% of my overall cycles anyway (and this is with speedstep that clocks my 2.4G processor down to 1.8G whenever the ACPI gods think that's a good idea). The idea that my scheduler is somehow chock full of productive work that's being held up by lack of CPU cycles (or RAM) is just not the case. YMMV, of course, depending on workload, but I'm going to venture that my situation is most certainly the norm.
On the other hand, when I hit up my OS search feature for a recently created document and it's not there, I have to spend at least 10 seconds, possibly a minute, navigating to it in a file explorer. Whatever amount of time the search indexer has spent crawling my system, it's paid back in just one successful query that avoids breaking my workflow. Of course, the indexer is also set to run with low CPU priority and throttled IO, that's just common sense, but it's become an indispensable tool.
The bottleneck in productive use of computers is not hardware resources, it's human intelligence and attention. Hardware is cheap and unlimited, human beings are expensive and finite.
Nvidia is notorious for awful drivers, especially for dual display. The screensaver issue is also probably from bad Nvidia drivers.
I don't know what you are talking about, but Nvidia makes the only usable Linux drivers on the planet. Go to any linux computer that's not using the Nvidia drivers and run glxinfo (http://www.xfree86.org/4.4.0/glxinfo.1.html) and tell me if it supports framebuffer, pbuffers, GLSL or redirected direct rendering. In fact, if you press the MESA people hard enough, they will disclose that their full openGL compatibility comes with a software render engine.
At the bottom of all this, is the fact that the nvidia driver has a real unified memory manager -- something that I've tried to get with MESA on an Intel/ATI card at great length (I needed fast openGL for some projects). You can do it, but you have to get crazy experimental drivers and patch your kernel in a few dozen places. Oh, and ACPI doesn't work.
TL;DR version: nvidia is "notorious" for having the only working linux drivers in production status, nothing more.
We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
We're also not living in a free country when I cannot voluntarily enter into contracts of my own choosing with my neighbors. If everyone on my block enters into a contract not to install $X, then they don't have the right to install $X, end of story. All the terms are laid out ahead of time for you to read (or pay your lawyer $250 to write up a summary). The HOA cannot add additional terms or conditions without your consent after you've already signed the agreement.
Now, I personally would never buy a house in a community with a HOA because I, like you (judging from your short post), very much value my freedom to stick random doohickeys on my roof or in my yard, grow a garden out front and don't take very kindly to those restrictions. That's my personal choice but I'm not so arrogant to think that it's the only acceptable choice -- if another good fellow wants to submit to the terms of an HOA-covenant in exchange for the perceived benefits then that's his right.
The best part of living in a free country is that we can create space for different people to set up institutions that best reflect their particular combination of preferences without imposing it on others. I would hope that, in your desire to express your preferences you don't feel the need to impose those preferences on others without their consent.
I still cannot believe this gets modded insightful. Let's start with the basics:
First, you compare something with Nazism that doesn't even being to start to even pale in comparison. This either means you are truly incapable of understanding the difference (unlikely) or you are being dishonest but are trying to score rhetorical points (more likely). That goes for you and the Representatives that said the same thing.
If you want to try to define the various things that Operation Predator as "thoughtcrime", go right ahead but the vast majority of Americans think that individuals that take concrete steps to, say, have intercourse with a young child ought to be punished. IAAL and, in all instances that I'm aware of, no individual was convicted without having taken concrete steps towards committing a very serious crime. Please enlighten me if I am mistaken.
Finally, I have no idea where you got the idea that compulsory home-visits for anything are "inevitable" but I can tell you this: barring a dramatic shift in the way the fourth amendment is interpreted, that isn't going to happen. As it is now, you need not answer anyone at your door sans a warrant.
My default install of 8.10 allows me to do
user$ sudo su -
enter password: *******
root$
and have a root prompt.
If anything, the internet reminds me how scarce quality work (of whatever sort) really is. Being able to readily comb through all of it only makes that truth even more apparent.
I was mistaken about some key facts. I apologize for the inconvenience (and for having been modded Insightful despite being incorrect).
I still have some strong misgivings about the Android software dev model (including the fact that you can't make a proper tethering application because the API doesn't expose the packet gubbins) but this appears to be OK.
For people that actually need to load unsigned 64-bit drivers (myself, for instance, to patch tcpip.sys so I can have lots of half-open connections at once), the procedure is actually pretty simple. You generate a cert, sign the driver yourself and then put the computer into "testing mode", which allows for self-signed drivers. The whole process can be automated (for instance, the tcpip.sys patch is now one click plus reboot) so that it's transparent to the end user.
IMO, this is the correct way to do it -- you can sign the driver yourself but you have to explicitly tell Windows to accept that signature. Seems like a perfectly reasonable balance between protecting newbies and not aggravating power-users too much.
References
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/kmsigning.doc (DOC WARNING)>
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33920573
PowerPC is freaking ancient and were supported for 7-8 years, which is all you can reasonably expect. That means that the Core Duos will be phased out sometime in 2012 when OSXI comes out (they are going to run out of minor version numbers pretty soon, which will be irritating because 10.11 10.5 under every conceivable mathematical grammar).
The last 32-bit only processors were sold about 2-3 years ago so I imagine that most OSes are going to continue to support regular x86 for a long time hence.
Most owners of the original macbooks (Intel Core Duo) would be pretty pissed if Snow Leopard didn't support them because their processors aren't x86-64 compatible.
Why are software defects any different that hardware defects?
If my microwave had a defective gear in the motor that spins the turny-thing (technical term) that broke after warranty, I wouldn't expect it to be fixed. Is a defective line of code somewhere really all that different?
Because a single, commercial company creates and maintains the product which the same single, commercial company is also liable for in terms of company image, damage to devices, even overflow of support calls causing penalties on their service contracts with subcontractors.
A single commercial company also maintains Windows Mobile. On a WinMo device, the user is given root access, full permissions to fuck with the filesystem/registry and install any application that she wants. Moreover, WinMo applications don't need to be approved by anyone, you just download the SDK (C++ or C#, your choice) and write the app and package it as a file. Send the file to anyone you want, host it free on the web, sell it for $1000000/copy, barter it for live chickens...
Compare this to Android, where the user doesn't have root access and is locked out the filesystem. The Android developer is similarly fucked -- she can't just package his application as a file and send it off to whoever but must submit it for approval and then, if the overlords deign to approve, can only distribute it through their app store.
It's ironic, in some sick and twisted sense, that an OS built on open source affords the user and developer so much less freedom than one built on closed source by the much-maligned Microsoft.
This is totally OT, but i can't get my damn signature to work. This is a test.
surrealism? metarealism?
Seriously, if you provide a consumer service of any kind, and you expect the consumers to do anything more than just use the service, you are seriously deluded. People - including, I suspect, many techies - will never do anything more than chat/download/email/surf/whatever.
No, I expect customers to lose their data if they haven't backed it up. If they want to purchase a backup solution, I will sell it to them. Otherwise, it's quite logical that it will be lost.
Whether or not they read the agreement is irrelevant, they agreed to it, they are bound by the terms.
In my experience running WinMo on Sprint, I can install any application I want, change the ROM, fiddle with the registry in an unlimited fashion. Compare this with the G1 that does not allow the user to run as root and the logic of slashdot is inverted.
After all, if we are going to have the sun blocked out by a huge cloud of dust, it would be fantastic to have as much heat trapped on earth as possible!
Well, you can't do exactly. That's why physicists do things to various approximations. For instance, you can approximate the roulette wheel and the balls as independently rotating objects, each subject to constant friction. That simple system of equations doesn't suffice to predict things exactly (and is also only good if the ball doesn't hop), but it's actually enough to predict the quadrant that the ball will land in. Of course, no one has studied it in detail because nobody gives a shit about the microscopics of large spinning random number generators.
A roulette ball is quite large enough (by many orders of magnitude) to treat as a purely classical particle.
You are right about one thing -- time to brush up on your Quantum. Start by calculating the de Broglie wavelength (the relevant QM length) of a roulette ball traveling at the maximum speed you might see at a casino and compare it to the radius of the ball itself.
Actually, I know quite a bit about (stochastic*) computational physics and the notion that "repeatable" means "can run the exact same simulation with the exact same seed and get the exact same result" is absolutely incorrect. What is meant by "repeatable" is that one can extract from the simulations some sort of macroscopic quantity (usually a thermodynamic quantity or a correlation function) whose average is consistent across many separate runs (known in the biz as the ensemble average). So, for instance, if I'm observing the coalescence of polymers into a hex-phase (as in [1]), I could measure the average number of aggregated copolymer blocks and compare those (as was done in that paper).
Let's make an extended gambling analogy. Suppose I have a new roulette table that I want to certify that it works like it should. One suggestion (akin to what you said), would be to put the entire table under the same initial conditions as a known-good table and see if it gives the same results. A more sophisticated approach would be to make a histogram of results for a large number of independent roles and see if it converges to the proper distribution (or, in case the distribution isn't known theoretically, compare it to the distribution from a different device, also tested a large number of times). I would argue that the second method is much more powerful than the first, because it probes a more relevant value. Nobody cares whether the roulette table gave 00 the first time and 23 the second time -- we are only concerned that, on average, it gives 00 with the same probability as 23.
In stochastic computational simulations, the same story applies. Nobody cares whether a particular simulation did X or Y or Z because that's not relevant. What is relevant is the (converged) probability that, given some starting condition, the systems ends up in X or Y or Z.
* None of these comments apply in any way to solving deterministic systems. You don't need random numbers for those anyway.
** Another commenter pointed out that exact repeatability is incredibly useful for debugging purposes. That is true but that has nothing to do with reproducibility in the scientific sense of the word.
[1] http://link.aip.org/link/?JCPSA6/128/184906/1
I know some guys doing quantum Monte Carlo simulations. And yes, fast RNGs are crucial for their algorithms.
I will bet you at 100-1 odds that they are using some sort of pseudoRNG like Mersenne Twister. Nobody in computational physics uses real number generators because there's absolutely no reason to.
So MT may be good enough for computational physicists, but not for strong cryptography.
I never claimed otherwise. Cryptography has the need for a real RNG but computational physics only needs psuedoRNGs. That fact greatly undercuts the supposed need for this technology.