Are you trying to tell us that North Korea's government isn't evil? Or are you trying to tell us that they weren't evil until George Bush made them evil by being mean?
Of course Kim Jong-il isn't my favourite person. It was always unlikely he was going to attack the US with a nuclear weapon, but I reckon the likelyhood of him attempting to use a nuclear weapon against the US (or sell it to someone else to use against the US) went up when North Korea was declared an axis of evil.
For one thing iraq has been invaded. What if the US wants to invade another axis of evils - N Korea would be able to cause next to no damage with convential warfare so they may as well use a nuclear weapon, and certainly he will want to build a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against a US attack.
You don't get declared as part of the axis of evil because you are evil, or for supporting terrorism, or commiting mass genocide, or de-stabilising the middle east or breaching UN resolutions or violating international law. (All things i consider to be evil)
Otherwise the axis of evil would also include Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Israel and the United States!
Of course the governments/rulers of the "axis of evil" have done many things that I consider evil. But my list of top 10 evil-doers isn't in line with US foreign policy, for instance I think having troops in Darfur should be a priority over Iraq.
I also think that by picking out a list of evil countries with such obvious bias towards US foreign interests it has actually helped stir up anti-western feelings in many of those countries.
I hope flashblock gets more promotion as a feature of firefox possibly even put in the default install. That way like with popup blocking, microsoft will have to include it in IE to keep up.
If we can get to the point where flash is blocked by default unless the user allows it (like popups) then advertisers will lose interest in flash ads and actually be forced to just make the advert more relevant rather than more annoying.
Flash overlays are particularly annoying. I used to work in online advertisers and the push from clients is always for the most annoying ads they can make, the only correcting force is from browser vendors.
How on earth is it legit to tack a completely unrelated bill to another and pass them both under the same vote? Am I the only one who sees how unbelievably insane that is?
When do developers start to realize that users will not conform to what they should do, but what they want to do?
Unfortunately the underlying technology hasn't really kept up. What users appear to want in a lot of cases is application functionality deployed over the web. All we have as developers is the AJAX hacks on top of a language designed for sharing research papers and static page content.
Because some developers have started to make websites look more like desktop apps using a variety of ugly hacks, users expectations have changed and now we are all expected to use these hacks.
What being qualified to learn means in this context i'm not sure. Perhaps it means knowing exactly how far you push these horrid hacks without your servers falling over or some browser version crashing or having browser memory leaks or knowing when is best to break the standard browser functionality like forward, back, bookmark, etc,
But in this case DRM can be used as a legal hack to get around the intended restrictions of the GPLv2 license (to protect users rights to get access to and modify the source).
If you are happy relying on market forces rather than the software license to uphold users rights/freedoms then you don't need GPLv2 either, you just need a BSD license and to pray a lot.
Signatures were not normally verified/questioned at checkout plus the signature is on the back so pin numbers are more secure.
Anyway, the move to chip and pin has certainly caused a drop in the cost of fraud to VISA/Mastercard - during the switch they moved the liability for fraud onto retailers! This was clearly the main reason for the move to chip and pin - it had nothing to do with protecting consumers, they weren't liable for fraud under the old system anyway.
How about: "If you can't get the performance you need from PostgreSQL then you could try using MySQL after all they do now offer ACID features if you use the right table types"
I've always found the performance on Postgresql to be excellent (once you have done the neccessary optimisations) but looking at it this way round I get a rock solid ACID compliant database that runs easily fast enough.
It just seems sensible to start with something rock solid and only compromise that reliability and feature set for better performance as a last resort.
Almost certainly at some point online video advertising is going to become a major money spinner and large companies will pay through the nose for running video brand advertising and video based viral marketing services.
In my opinion YouTube is almost certainly in land grab mode. That's not to say that YouTube will be massively profitable, it may get sued out of existence first.:) However, the potential for generating advertising revenue from the site is massive.
I feel I am repeating myself somewhat here, but anyway...
The performance of a single thread on single core/CPU system can sometimes be poor due to IO wait, this includes threads used for batch jobs and for applications with no interative GUI. Frequently for example a thread will be blocking on Disk or Network IO. Relatively few tasks have no IO and normally the IO operations are slow compared to the CPU speed. Therefore, as the original comment stated the performance of some applications can be improved by making the application multithreaded even on single core/CPU.
Of course threads are often used in GUI code to improve responsiveness too.
That's just one way of defining performance and it's not particularly useful for most real world applications.
When most people i know (developers and customers) talk about performance they are not referring to how many 8x8 DCT blocks the CPU can inverse-transform in a second. A lot of real world tasks involve IO operations and in some cases using multiple threads on a single CPU/Core can result in completing the task faster or improve the number of tasks per second that can be completed.
Because threads (with a shared memory model) is a very poor way to deal with parallelism. It's incredibly easy for even experienced programmers to make mistakes and sometimes the deadlock/livelock situation can only occur very infrequently makeing debugging difficult. Sometimes the bugs never occur when the debugger is running due to the difference in speed. In most OO languages threads are orthogonal to the object model rather than integrated into it so you may not even be aware when working on a large system what the threading implications are.
There are other more reliable ways to write code that runs in parallel such as using a message passing system (Communicating Sequential Processes) but no major language supports this natively (that i am aware of) and you still end up having to interface with built in librarys that use the threading model.
Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine.
If performance is a measure of how much work you can get done in a time period and a program is bottlenecking on anything other than CPU usage then multithreading can vastly improve performance on a single core machine.
My understanding is that you are able to modify a GPL'd application and profit from it without sharing your changes if you don't distribute it. And running a modified version of a GPL application on a server would probably not count as distribution in most cases.
This allows companies such as Google to modify and profit from GPL applications without offering their changes to the community. (I'm not saying they do, but it allows them to)
Are they planning to try and stop this with GPL v3?
I find when i talk to developers that this is actually the biggest misunderstanding of the current GPL, developers often seem to think that if you modify some GPL software and integrate it into a web application the web application has to be GPL'd whereas to the best of my understanding that is only true if you distribute the webapplication - which most companies do not.
Countries like India and China can think a bit more about the long term. If I was them I wouldn't want to be paying Microsoft/UnitedStates for software forever.
Yeah, plus Microsoft have cash reserves the size of a medium sized country and have a record of throwing it at new markets for years if neccessary. Dell is not that kind of business.
They killed netscape because they thought it could become the new platform. They killed desktop java because they thought it could become the new platform.
They will pump money into killing any number of products if they think it endangers their windows/office monopoly.
If they haven't killed firefox it's because they don't think firefox is currently a threat to their windows platform - not because they lack the technical skills to clone firefox features in IE.
I assumed everyone knows that without ANY license you are more restricted, i was comparing it to licenses that have less retrictions such as BSD/MIT but that don't protect "freedoms" as well as the GPL.
Putting in an anti-military clause could be another GPL style restriction that helps protect your rights, your right to breath for example.
I should have specifically said I was comparing the GPL to other open source licenses with less restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Close :)
http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/portability.php
"You can't edit this comment using wiki markup because it's been edited in WYSIWYG mode"
Are you trying to tell us that North Korea's government isn't evil? Or are you trying to tell us that they weren't evil until George Bush made them evil by being mean?
Of course Kim Jong-il isn't my favourite person. It was always unlikely he was going to attack the US with a nuclear weapon, but I reckon the likelyhood of him attempting to use a nuclear weapon against the US (or sell it to someone else to use against the US) went up when North Korea was declared an axis of evil.
For one thing iraq has been invaded. What if the US wants to invade another axis of evils - N Korea would be able to cause next to no damage with convential warfare so they may as well use a nuclear weapon, and certainly he will want to build a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against a US attack.
You don't get declared as part of the axis of evil because you are evil, or for supporting terrorism, or commiting mass genocide, or de-stabilising the middle east or breaching UN resolutions or violating international law. (All things i consider to be evil)
Otherwise the axis of evil would also include Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Israel and the United States!
Of course the governments/rulers of the "axis of evil" have done many things that I consider evil. But my list of top 10 evil-doers isn't in line with US foreign policy, for instance I think having troops in Darfur should be a priority over Iraq.
I also think that by picking out a list of evil countries with such obvious bias towards US foreign interests it has actually helped stir up anti-western feelings in many of those countries.
Is being "morally right" a good defense against nuclear attack?
Is the behaviour of the US likely to increase or decrease the number of nukes held by the "axis of evil"?
Would you be more likely or less likely to launch nukes at america if you were deemed to be an "axis of evil"?
I hope flashblock gets more promotion as a feature of firefox possibly even put in the default install. That way like with popup blocking, microsoft will have to include it in IE to keep up.
If we can get to the point where flash is blocked by default unless the user allows it (like popups) then advertisers will lose interest in flash ads and actually be forced to just make the advert more relevant rather than more annoying.
Flash overlays are particularly annoying. I used to work in online advertisers and the push from clients is always for the most annoying ads they can make, the only correcting force is from browser vendors.
How on earth is it legit to tack a completely unrelated bill to another and pass them both under the same vote? Am I the only one who sees how unbelievably insane that is?
It's called negotiation.
When do developers start to realize that users will not conform to what they should do, but what they want to do?
Unfortunately the underlying technology hasn't really kept up. What users appear to want in a lot of cases is application functionality deployed over the web. All we have as developers is the AJAX hacks on top of a language designed for sharing research papers and static page content.
Because some developers have started to make websites look more like desktop apps using a variety of ugly hacks, users expectations have changed and now we are all expected to use these hacks.
What being qualified to learn means in this context i'm not sure. Perhaps it means knowing exactly how far you push these horrid hacks without your servers falling over or some browser version crashing or having browser memory leaks or knowing when is best to break the standard browser functionality like forward, back, bookmark, etc,
ha ha, funny and so original.
Anyway, I'm going to buy stronger card protectors just in case.
"That man has a point" he says whilst carefully taking his nokia-phone/ebay-battery out of his pocket and further away from his valuable parts.
But in this case DRM can be used as a legal hack to get around the intended restrictions of the GPLv2 license (to protect users rights to get access to and modify the source).
If you are happy relying on market forces rather than the software license to uphold users rights/freedoms then you don't need GPLv2 either, you just need a BSD license and to pray a lot.
Matt.
Signatures were not normally verified/questioned at checkout plus the signature is on the back so pin numbers are more secure.
Anyway, the move to chip and pin has certainly caused a drop in the cost of fraud to VISA/Mastercard - during the switch they moved the liability for fraud onto retailers!
This was clearly the main reason for the move to chip and pin - it had nothing to do with protecting consumers, they weren't liable for fraud under the old system anyway.
How about: "If you can't get the performance you need from PostgreSQL then you could try using MySQL after all they do now offer ACID features if you use the right table types"
I've always found the performance on Postgresql to be excellent (once you have done the neccessary optimisations) but looking at it this way round I get a rock solid ACID compliant database that runs easily fast enough.
It just seems sensible to start with something rock solid and only compromise that reliability and feature set for better performance as a last resort.
Or go ahead use MYSQL, it amounts to pretty much the same thing ;)
Almost certainly at some point online video advertising is going to become a major money spinner and large companies will pay through the nose for running video brand advertising and video based viral marketing services.
:) However, the potential for generating advertising revenue from the site is massive.
In my opinion YouTube is almost certainly in land grab mode. That's not to say that YouTube will be massively profitable, it may get sued out of existence first.
I feel I am repeating myself somewhat here, but anyway...
The performance of a single thread on single core/CPU system can sometimes be poor due to IO wait, this includes threads used for batch jobs and for applications with no interative GUI. Frequently for example a thread will be blocking on Disk or Network IO. Relatively few tasks have no IO and normally the IO operations are slow compared to the CPU speed. Therefore, as the original comment stated the performance of some applications can be improved by making the application multithreaded even on single core/CPU.
Of course threads are often used in GUI code to improve responsiveness too.
That's just one way of defining performance and it's not particularly useful for most real world applications.
When most people i know (developers and customers) talk about performance they are not referring to how many 8x8 DCT blocks the CPU can inverse-transform in a second. A lot of real world tasks involve IO operations and in some cases using multiple threads on a single CPU/Core can result in completing the task faster or improve the number of tasks per second that can be completed.
Because threads (with a shared memory model) is a very poor way to deal with parallelism. It's incredibly easy for even experienced programmers to make mistakes and sometimes the deadlock/livelock situation can only occur very infrequently makeing debugging difficult. Sometimes the bugs never occur when the debugger is running due to the difference in speed.
In most OO languages threads are orthogonal to the object model rather than integrated into it so you may not even be aware when working on a large system what the threading implications are.
There are other more reliable ways to write code that runs in parallel such as using a message passing system (Communicating Sequential Processes) but no major language supports this natively (that i am aware of) and you still end up having to interface with built in librarys that use the threading model.
Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine.
If performance is a measure of how much work you can get done in a time period and a program is bottlenecking on anything other than CPU usage then multithreading can vastly improve performance on a single core machine.
Oh, I'm gonna get modded down...
Yeah, by all the women on slashdot.
My understanding is that you are able to modify a GPL'd application and profit from it without sharing your changes if you don't distribute it. And running a modified version of a GPL application on a server would probably not count as distribution in most cases.
This allows companies such as Google to modify and profit from GPL applications without offering their changes to the community. (I'm not saying they do, but it allows them to)
Are they planning to try and stop this with GPL v3?
I find when i talk to developers that this is actually the biggest misunderstanding of the current GPL, developers often seem to think that if you modify some GPL software and integrate it into a web application the web application has to be GPL'd whereas to the best of my understanding that is only true if you distribute the webapplication - which most companies do not.
Only if you take the short term view.
Countries like India and China can think a bit more about the long term. If I was them I wouldn't want to be paying Microsoft/UnitedStates for software forever.
Yeah, plus Microsoft have cash reserves the size of a medium sized country and have a record of throwing it at new markets for years if neccessary.
Dell is not that kind of business.
They killed netscape because they thought it could become the new platform.
They killed desktop java because they thought it could become the new platform.
They will pump money into killing any number of products if they think it endangers their windows/office monopoly.
If they haven't killed firefox it's because they don't think firefox is currently a threat to their windows platform - not because they lack the technical skills to clone firefox features in IE.
I assumed everyone knows that without ANY license you are more restricted, i was comparing it to licenses that have less retrictions such as BSD/MIT but that don't protect "freedoms" as well as the GPL.
Putting in an anti-military clause could be another GPL style restriction that helps protect your rights, your right to breath for example.
I should have specifically said I was comparing the GPL to other open source licenses with less restrictions.