I only deal with paper when I need to sign something - which usually means that I receive a PDF by email, print it out, sign the paper, scan it, and email the scan back. If we could only get a widely accepted system for digital signatures I wouldn't need to keep doing this ridiculous ritual, or deal with paper at all.
On the other hand, my handwriting looks like I'm a ten-year old, as I don't write anything by hand more than once or twice a month, and then it's just short notes. I'm going back to school next year, and the prospect of writing long texts by hand for exams etc. is really worrying me - the lack of efficient editing facilities and the slow pace of my writing is quite certain to have an adverse effect on the quality of my work.
Yes, but the chance of contracting HIV from unprotected sex with an infected partner is between 1:1000 and 1:2000, so the chance of a) the condom breaking, b) your partner having HIV, and c) you getting infected, all happening at the same time is pretty remote. Though, given a large enough population, it will of course happen to someone. But then again, people do get struck by lightning too.
Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby
...said egrinake, the God that Decides Which Language that Rocks More.
I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but at least syntax-wise (and the syntax is basically the language) I'd say it is. I think you'd have a hard arguing that Python has noisier syntax than PHP at least (don't have alot of Ruby experience, but Python code seems easier to read).
How about using Python and Django? Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby, and Django makes it a joy to build web-sites.
I've been lead developer of a large enterprise system written in PHP for the last few years, and grown increasingly frustrated with just how ugly PHP is. Object-orientation has been tacked on as an after-thought (almost all of the API is procedural, without using exceptions for error-handling), the API is messy and inconsistent, it's somewhat inefficient (has to parse all the code for each request, unless you use an opcode cache), and the syntax is just plain ugly when compared to Python.
Never tried Ruby on Rails, but you should at least give Django a spin before deciding.
The OpenCVS project seems kind of pointless to me. I can't imagine any new projects would use CVS, with so many better options out there (Subversion, Bazaar, etc), and if existing projects are worried about the security of CVS they would probably be better off converting to one of these other systems as well.
The OpenCVS developers are of course free to do whatever they want, but I'd think their talents would be better spent on something more useful than a CVS rewrite (or fork, or whatever).
I remember hearing about plans to use the LHC to produce and study miniature black holes. These are supposed to evaporate nearly instantanously due to Hawking radiation, but such radiation is only a theory without any experimental verification, and apparantly quite a few scientists are concerned it will just go ahead and gobble up the earth.
Back in the old days, none of this nonsense was needed. You always got the best the browser had to offer. If you were neat and tidy about things, you'd add the <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> markers. If you didn't feel pedantic, you just jumped right in.
Which is how we got into this mess in the first place. See, the problem with this approach is that the code becomes too ambiguous. And as web-pages grew more complex, different browsers would interpret the pages in different ways, trying to figure out how the author actually wanted the page to look, and what the browser developers felt was the most natural behavior.
The result was the ubiquous "best viewed in" signs, and a fragmented web in which users were sometimes treated as second-class citizens based on their browser preference. W3C then stepped in and released the XHTML and CSS standards, which imposed much stricter rules on how documents should be formatted, in order to make them as unambiguous as possible. As long as browsers followed these rules, they should all render the pages in the same way, or at least in a sane way if the user had special requirements (mobile phones, blind people, etc).
And I think this pretty much explains why IE is such a crappy browser, and why Firefox and Opera are so much better. IE is very much a browser of the old school, using inconsistent guesswork and arbitrary rendering decisions to try to make sense of the horrible tag-soup HTML that made up the web of the 90s (and, unfortunately, still has a large share). Firefox and Opera, on the other hand, are new-school browsers which primarily attempt to follow the strict and consistent rules of the w3c, and then add workarounds to deal with badly written HTML.
IE doesn't need bugfixes, it needs a completely rewritten rendering engine.
The Reichstag fire is widely believed to have been started by the Nazis themselves, as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency, reducing civil rights and starting an anti-communist campaign. From Wikipedia:
At Nuremberg, General Franz Halder claimed Göring had confessed to setting the fire: "At a luncheon on the birthday of Hitler in 1942, the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building [fire] and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Göring interrupted the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand."
Some people believe (rightly or wrongly) that the US government were somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks - either by direct action or by lack of action - precisely to have a pretext for 1) reduction of civil rights, and 2) launching a large-scale military campaign in the middle east. I'm not saying this is correct, but it sounds a bit less far-fetched when knowing that stuff like this has happened severaltimesbefore.
First they came for the communists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out.
Democracy is mainly, both in political science and in the general population, thought of as a value system more than simply an electoral system. For a country to be considered democratic, it is not enough that all citizens have voting rights in elections or that laws are passed by vote - they are also expected to share certain values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
If the mentioned part of the bill has now been passed, this means that the US government has just broken the principle of equality before the law, in addition to already having abolished habeas corpus in some cases (Guantanamo Bay being the most notable example). These are fundamental juridical rights of the democratic value system, and were created precisely to stop kings and governments from abusing their power.
This means that the US no longer meets the strict definition of a democracy (as a value system), and although this doesn't mean that it automatically becomes a fascist police-state, those who believe in the democratic ideals surely must see this as a negative development.
But, from what I understand, this functionality is beyond most (all?) current window managers for X.
As I understand it (and I may be wrong here), the problem is not with the window manager. The problem is that this cannot be solved by a window manager at all, it must be solved in the GUI toolkit (ie GTK+). This means that GTK+ must implement its own internal window manager - which will lead to:
Major duplication of work
Inconsistency (the X wm and GTK wm would have different appearance and behaviour)
Bloat
I think this is a huge price to pay for an interface which, some say, have major usability issues in the first place.
How do you know the money still don't go to a US company? I can buy my chips of the norwegian Maarud brand, but that won't help since they're owned by Kraft Foods. How do you know who owns the company that manufactures your soda? Your soap? Your pizza, sweater, backpack or shaving-machine?
And also, it's not sufficient that you yourself do it, or even if you get all your friends to do it. You're going to need something like 10% of the population to do it.
A boycott might be possible if it's of a single company, as a result of sufficiently bad media coverage. Boycotting an entire country, and especially the US, can't be done at the consumer level - you would need state-imposed trade barriers and some kind of profit taxation or something.
"The most effective (actually the only) way to do this is by a worldwide boycott of all American products and brands."
Sorry, but this is never going to happen. Almost all national brands are somehow owned by a US company now, so making sure your money doesn't somehow end up in the US will take alot of time and energy - which most people aren't going to bother with. I mean, even the leftist norwegian newspaper I read (Dagsavisen) is owned by fscking ClearChannel, for crying out loud.
Well, even though the ps2 and pc-based systems had similar performance, I still think that the ps2 architecture was a step in the right direction. Even though you are able to do alot of cool stuff with a pc-architecture, I'd much rather see further development on media-tailored systems than trying to teach an old dog new tricks. Current PCs are trying to be alot of different things at the same time, and I think it's pretty obvious that specialized systems will be much better in the long run.
But then again, I'm not an expert on any of this, I'm basically just parroting information I've read elsewhere. I don't know anything about the xbox 2, so I can't comment on their relative merits, but the Cell seems like it at least should be able to do a much better job at media-processing than current PC-style architectures.
There seems to be alot of confusion surrounding the Cell chip. This is not "just another processor", and it certainly has little to do with clock frequencies - the Cell is a whole new architecture, which might just be a glimpse into the future of computing.
What made the ps2 so awesome was that it was custom-built specifically for multimedia-processing, which requires completely different processing environments than general-purpose computing. Normal PCs are made for computing where you have a large number of instructions working on a small data-set (such as a spreadsheet) - this requires large data-caches close to the CPU, while instructions are streamed continually from RAM. Media-processing is the other way around; you have "simple" operations (like doing the calculations for a single pixel), which are run on a large set of data - so you wouldn't really need any data-caches. The ps2 did exactly this; it removed almost all the caches (only a few tiny ones were left), but it had a totally insane bus bandwidth. To borrow an analogy from the mentioned Ars Technica article:
"Here's a goofy example to help you visualize what I'm talking about: imagine a series of large buckets, connected by pipes to a main tank, with a cow lapping water out of each bucket. Since cows don't drink too fast, the pipes don't have to be too large to keep the buckets full and the cows happy. Now imagine that same setup, except with elephants on the other end instead of cows. The elephants are sucking water out so fast that you've got to do something drastic to keep them happy. One option would be to enlarge the pipes just a little (*cough* AGP *cough*), and stick insanely large buckets on the ends of them (*cough* 64MB GeForce *cough*). You then fill the buckets up to the top every morning, leave the water on all day, and pray to God that the elephants don't get too thirsty. This only works to a certain extent though, because a really thirsty elephant would still end up draining the bucket faster than you can fill it. And what happens when the elephants have kids, and the kids are even thirstier? You're only delaying the inevitable with this solution, because the problem isn't with the buckets, it's with the pipes (assuming an infinite supply of water). A better approach would be to just ditch the buckets altogether and make the pipes really, really large. You'd also want to stick some pans on the ends of the pipes as a place to collect the water before it gets consumed, but the pans don't have to be that big because the water isn't staying in them very long."
So, what does this have to do with the Cell? The Cell takes this concept even further. Cell systems are made up of multiple processors, called APUs (Attached Processing Units), which are connected using an insanely fast data bus. Each APU can be programmed to handle one specific task, and then pass the data on to the next APU for a different task. By doing this, you can just put in more processors to increase the throughput of the system. This works especially good for multimedia processing, which can be pipelined like this pretty easily. Here are a couple of snippets from the Wikipedia entry:
"While the Cell chip can have a number of different configurations, the workstation and PlayStation 3 version of Cell consists of one "Processing Element" ("PE"), and eight "Attached Processing Units" ("APU"). The PE is based on the POWER Architecture, basis of their existing POWER line and related to the PowerPC used by Apple
Alot of comments here seem to suggest that since Bush cannot be re-elected, he is now free to do anything he wants without regard for the public opinion. These comments miss a few very important points.
The Bush administration has a large interest in keeping public approval. Not so much Bush himself, but the neocons arounds him - ie Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer and Lewis Libby to name a few.
The neocons have had key positions in every republican administration since the mid-70s, including under Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bush senior and now Bush junior. They are an ideological group based in part on the philosophy of Leo Strauss, whose stated goals are to spread democracy around the world, by force, preserving Pax Americana and expanding the american economic and cultural empire.
To acheieve this goal, an organization named The Project for a New American Century was founded by William Kristol in 1997. Its members include all of the neocons listed above, and its basic principles are, according to its website:
American leadership is good both for America and for the world
such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle
too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership
The neoconservatives have had complete control of the US foreign policy in the Bush administration. The Bush doctrine is based on a document written by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992, called the Defense Planning Guidance. At the time, under Bush senior, the document was regarded as too radical and key propositions in it was rejected (including unilateralism and the use of preemtive strikes). These radical propositions now form the core of US foreign policy.
In addition, the PNAC released a report in 2000 called Rebuilding Americas Defenses (PDF download here), which outlines the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and installation of a US base in Iraq to secure the oil for geostrategic purposes after peak-oil (just consider the control it would give them over China, when they can control a large portion of their energy supplies), and to attempt to spread democracy in the region. According to the document, this would only be possible after, and I quote, a "catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor".
Now, this little project of theirs is quite ambitious, and will take a long time, so the neocons have great interest in keeping a republican presidency (puppet or not), so they stay in control of foreign policy. They attempted to persuade Clinton to attack Iraq, but without any success, so now that they are in power they won't give it up easily. Luckily for them, the american public seems more than happy to go along.
Well, democracy usually implies that you have more choices than just the two branches of the business party (ahem, excuse my sarcasm).
Anyway - here in Norway (and it's the same in pretty much any other democratic country) we have about 8 main political parties, and quite a few smaller ones, ranging from communist to ultra-rightwing. In the pre-election TV-debates even parties which only have about 0.5-1 percent in polls are represented - in total around 10-12 people.
Now, I've been following the US presidential debates on TV with great interest, and I believe the norwegian debates are vastly better than the US ones, for obvious reasons. To pick a few; there are usually more than two solutions to a problem, there are more people likely to contest false statements, and you get shades of gray in moral and political dimensions.
Of course, you always have to exclude someone from these large events, but in a democracy it is vital that multiple opinions be heard, and both the media and the political system has a responsibility for making this happen.
Hm, I can't say I share your interpretation of that quote.
First of all, you need to look at the context. This speech is quite
obviously an attempt to smooth over the tense international situation with
recycled, fluffy rhethoric, with very little credibility to back it up. I'm
not going to do a complete dissection of the speech, but just to pull
out a couple of random examples:
"The American people respect the idealism that gave life to this
organization. And we respect the men and women of the U.N., who stand
for peace and human rights in every part of the world."
The US may find it convenient to use UN resolutions as a
justification for their actions when it suits them. But when the General
Assembly and Security Council votes against US interests, often overwhelmingly so
(ie only the US, sometimes with Israeli support, opposed), the US vetoes
the vote and dismisses the UN as
irrelevant.
The US doesn't seem to have anything but contempt for "the idealism
that gave birth to [the UN]".
"Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom."
The current US administration often uses freedom and democracy as a
justification for their actions. However, history shows that the one and
only criteria for how "good" a country is is how well they serve
US interests - freedom and democracy is never part of the assessment,
as the US relationship with Saudi Arabia clearly demonstrates (as well
as the links i posted earlier).
So Bush's words are rather meaningless once you investigate the
actions of the US, instead of simply listening to the rhethoric. Now,
to the actual quote:
"For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused,
oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became
common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach."
I must say that there is a huge difference between "tolerating oppression"
and overthrowing a democratically-elected governmment and installing a
brutal dictator (which arguably led to the Iranian revolution in 1979).
And the stability Bush mentions surely must be stability for US interests rather
than stability of the region (the illegal US support
for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war most certainly was not in the name
of stability).
Now, the US definitely isn't the only country with blood on it's hands, Europe's
history is even more brutal, and Stalin's Soviet Union surely was no picnic either.
However, in recent times US has had unprecedented power, and it is vital that the
US uses it's power in accordance with and support of international law and humanitarian
principles, rather than undermining them.
Well, I've rambled on far too long already. If you are interested in a
critical analysis of US foreign policy I'd recommend reading
Noam Chomsky - you may
not agree with everything he says, but the facts he presents are quite
illuminating.
To repeat the old mantra; Security is a process, not a product. Implicitly, you can't buy security, but you can hire competent sysadmins.
Sadly, the suits rarely know a good sysadmin from a mediocre one, and actually believe that SecuriSoft BrickWall 5000 Professional will solve all their problems.
You're right, I should've picked my words more carefully. Notice the quotes, though:) It was the best word I came up with there and then, but the literal meaning obviously doesn't apply.
Yeah, I do agree with you - not all companies are in it strictly for profit. But not all nazists were soulless sadists either, but that doesn't mean that nazism wasn't a bad thing. (I'm not saying that capitalists are nazis, it's just to prove a point)
The core of capitalism is to generate profit, there should be no doubt about this. In fact, a corporation is required by US law to *always* put shareholder profit as their main priority. If this means giving customers good service, they'll do that - if it means dumping toxic waste in rivers, they'll do that. But this overwhelmingly has more negative consequences than positive ones - so even though not all businesses are "evil", the corporation (and by extension, capitalism) as an institution is.
That's not to say I oppose trade - trade is a vital and positive part of any healthy society. But the capitalist ideology is just not a sustainable form of trade.
The fundamental principle in capitalism is to minimize costs and maximize profits, you learn this the first day of business school. And consumers are pretty much only concerned with getting the cheapest products (which is also a fundamental principle of capitalism), so what happens is that the market actually *encourages* immoral behaviour. Media coverage of immoral behaviour rarely has any impact, and this is especially true for multi-national corporations where you would need massive, global media coverage.
A good example is food production - treating animals good is costly, the most effective way is to have large "factories" where animals barely have any room to live, are drugged with all sorts of weird growth hormones, and are slaugthered as soon as possible. And since consumers want the cheapest food, they most often buy these products, and thereby promote this animal abuse.
"[B]usinessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible[...]"
"[T]he corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money. The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct "social responsiblity," rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it."
"[T]he doctrine of "social responsibility" involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses."
"I have called [the doctrine of "social responsibility"] a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky; just that communist countries *called* themselves socialist doesn't actually mean they were. Just as some eastern European communist countries called themselves democratic republics, when they obviously were not.
In fact, the first thing that Lenin did after the communist revolution in Russia was to dimantle the workers organizations and centralize power, in conflict with the socialist ideals. Communism (the russian version) was a perversion of socialism, just like the spanish inquisition was a perversion of christianity.
What we call capitalism today isn't true free-market capitalism either, even though everyone seems to say it is. In fact, the current capitalist system is highly protectionist (just look at what goes on at the WTO), and western society as it's currently organized would collapse pretty fast if the state stopped intervening in the economic system.
Slashdot Mirror
I only deal with paper when I need to sign something - which usually means that I receive a PDF by email, print it out, sign the paper, scan it, and email the scan back. If we could only get a widely accepted system for digital signatures I wouldn't need to keep doing this ridiculous ritual, or deal with paper at all.
On the other hand, my handwriting looks like I'm a ten-year old, as I don't write anything by hand more than once or twice a month, and then it's just short notes. I'm going back to school next year, and the prospect of writing long texts by hand for exams etc. is really worrying me - the lack of efficient editing facilities and the slow pace of my writing is quite certain to have an adverse effect on the quality of my work.
Yes, but the chance of contracting HIV from unprotected sex with an infected partner is between 1:1000 and 1:2000, so the chance of a) the condom breaking, b) your partner having HIV, and c) you getting infected, all happening at the same time is pretty remote. Though, given a large enough population, it will of course happen to someone. But then again, people do get struck by lightning too.
I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but at least syntax-wise (and the syntax is basically the language) I'd say it is. I think you'd have a hard arguing that Python has noisier syntax than PHP at least (don't have alot of Ruby experience, but Python code seems easier to read).
How about using Python and Django? Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby, and Django makes it a joy to build web-sites.
I've been lead developer of a large enterprise system written in PHP for the last few years, and grown increasingly frustrated with just how ugly PHP is. Object-orientation has been tacked on as an after-thought (almost all of the API is procedural, without using exceptions for error-handling), the API is messy and inconsistent, it's somewhat inefficient (has to parse all the code for each request, unless you use an opcode cache), and the syntax is just plain ugly when compared to Python.
Never tried Ruby on Rails, but you should at least give Django a spin before deciding.
The OpenCVS project seems kind of pointless to me. I can't imagine any new projects would use CVS, with so many better options out there (Subversion, Bazaar, etc), and if existing projects are worried about the security of CVS they would probably be better off converting to one of these other systems as well.
The OpenCVS developers are of course free to do whatever they want, but I'd think their talents would be better spent on something more useful than a CVS rewrite (or fork, or whatever).
I remember hearing about plans to use the LHC to produce and study miniature black holes. These are supposed to evaporate nearly instantanously due to Hawking radiation, but such radiation is only a theory without any experimental verification, and apparantly quite a few scientists are concerned it will just go ahead and gobble up the earth.
At least it will be quick :)
Which is how we got into this mess in the first place. See, the problem with this approach is that the code becomes too ambiguous. And as web-pages grew more complex, different browsers would interpret the pages in different ways, trying to figure out how the author actually wanted the page to look, and what the browser developers felt was the most natural behavior.
The result was the ubiquous "best viewed in" signs, and a fragmented web in which users were sometimes treated as second-class citizens based on their browser preference. W3C then stepped in and released the XHTML and CSS standards, which imposed much stricter rules on how documents should be formatted, in order to make them as unambiguous as possible. As long as browsers followed these rules, they should all render the pages in the same way, or at least in a sane way if the user had special requirements (mobile phones, blind people, etc).
And I think this pretty much explains why IE is such a crappy browser, and why Firefox and Opera are so much better. IE is very much a browser of the old school, using inconsistent guesswork and arbitrary rendering decisions to try to make sense of the horrible tag-soup HTML that made up the web of the 90s (and, unfortunately, still has a large share). Firefox and Opera, on the other hand, are new-school browsers which primarily attempt to follow the strict and consistent rules of the w3c, and then add workarounds to deal with badly written HTML.
IE doesn't need bugfixes, it needs a completely rewritten rendering engine.
The Reichstag fire is widely believed to have been started by the Nazis themselves, as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency, reducing civil rights and starting an anti-communist campaign. From Wikipedia:
At Nuremberg, General Franz Halder claimed Göring had confessed to setting the fire: "At a luncheon on the birthday of Hitler in 1942, the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building [fire] and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Göring interrupted the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand."
Some people believe (rightly or wrongly) that the US government were somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks - either by direct action or by lack of action - precisely to have a pretext for 1) reduction of civil rights, and 2) launching a large-scale military campaign in the middle east. I'm not saying this is correct, but it sounds a bit less far-fetched when knowing that stuff like this has happened several times before.
First they came for the communists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out.
-- Martin Niemöller
Democracy is mainly, both in political science and in the general population, thought of as a value system more than simply an electoral system. For a country to be considered democratic, it is not enough that all citizens have voting rights in elections or that laws are passed by vote - they are also expected to share certain values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
If the mentioned part of the bill has now been passed, this means that the US government has just broken the principle of equality before the law, in addition to already having abolished habeas corpus in some cases (Guantanamo Bay being the most notable example). These are fundamental juridical rights of the democratic value system, and were created precisely to stop kings and governments from abusing their power.
This means that the US no longer meets the strict definition of a democracy (as a value system), and although this doesn't mean that it automatically becomes a fascist police-state, those who believe in the democratic ideals surely must see this as a negative development.
But, from what I understand, this functionality is beyond most (all?) current window managers for X.
As I understand it (and I may be wrong here), the problem is not with the window manager. The problem is that this cannot be solved by a window manager at all, it must be solved in the GUI toolkit (ie GTK+). This means that GTK+ must implement its own internal window manager - which will lead to:
I think this is a huge price to pay for an interface which, some say, have major usability issues in the first place.
How do you know the money still don't go to a US company? I can buy my chips of the norwegian Maarud brand, but that won't help since they're owned by Kraft Foods. How do you know who owns the company that manufactures your soda? Your soap? Your pizza, sweater, backpack or shaving-machine?
And also, it's not sufficient that you yourself do it, or even if you get all your friends to do it. You're going to need something like 10% of the population to do it.
A boycott might be possible if it's of a single company, as a result of sufficiently bad media coverage. Boycotting an entire country, and especially the US, can't be done at the consumer level - you would need state-imposed trade barriers and some kind of profit taxation or something.
"The most effective (actually the only) way to do this is by a worldwide boycott of all American products and brands."
Sorry, but this is never going to happen. Almost all national brands are somehow owned by a US company now, so making sure your money doesn't somehow end up in the US will take alot of time and energy - which most people aren't going to bother with. I mean, even the leftist norwegian newspaper I read (Dagsavisen) is owned by fscking ClearChannel, for crying out loud.
Well, even though the ps2 and pc-based systems had similar performance, I still think that the ps2 architecture was a step in the right direction. Even though you are able to do alot of cool stuff with a pc-architecture, I'd much rather see further development on media-tailored systems than trying to teach an old dog new tricks. Current PCs are trying to be alot of different things at the same time, and I think it's pretty obvious that specialized systems will be much better in the long run.
But then again, I'm not an expert on any of this, I'm basically just parroting information I've read elsewhere. I don't know anything about the xbox 2, so I can't comment on their relative merits, but the Cell seems like it at least should be able to do a much better job at media-processing than current PC-style architectures.
There seems to be alot of confusion surrounding the Cell chip. This is not "just another processor", and it certainly has little to do with clock frequencies - the Cell is a whole new architecture, which might just be a glimpse into the future of computing.
To begin with, it might be useful with some background on the ps2 architecture - there are a couple of really great in-depth articles at Ars Technica; Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine and The PlayStation2 vs. the PC: a system-level comparison of two 3D platforms.
What made the ps2 so awesome was that it was custom-built specifically for multimedia-processing, which requires completely different processing environments than general-purpose computing. Normal PCs are made for computing where you have a large number of instructions working on a small data-set (such as a spreadsheet) - this requires large data-caches close to the CPU, while instructions are streamed continually from RAM. Media-processing is the other way around; you have "simple" operations (like doing the calculations for a single pixel), which are run on a large set of data - so you wouldn't really need any data-caches. The ps2 did exactly this; it removed almost all the caches (only a few tiny ones were left), but it had a totally insane bus bandwidth. To borrow an analogy from the mentioned Ars Technica article:
"Here's a goofy example to help you visualize what I'm talking about: imagine a series of large buckets, connected by pipes to a main tank, with a cow lapping water out of each bucket. Since cows don't drink too fast, the pipes don't have to be too large to keep the buckets full and the cows happy. Now imagine that same setup, except with elephants on the other end instead of cows. The elephants are sucking water out so fast that you've got to do something drastic to keep them happy. One option would be to enlarge the pipes just a little (*cough* AGP *cough*), and stick insanely large buckets on the ends of them (*cough* 64MB GeForce *cough*). You then fill the buckets up to the top every morning, leave the water on all day, and pray to God that the elephants don't get too thirsty. This only works to a certain extent though, because a really thirsty elephant would still end up draining the bucket faster than you can fill it. And what happens when the elephants have kids, and the kids are even thirstier? You're only delaying the inevitable with this solution, because the problem isn't with the buckets, it's with the pipes (assuming an infinite supply of water). A better approach would be to just ditch the buckets altogether and make the pipes really, really large. You'd also want to stick some pans on the ends of the pipes as a place to collect the water before it gets consumed, but the pans don't have to be that big because the water isn't staying in them very long."
So, what does this have to do with the Cell? The Cell takes this concept even further. Cell systems are made up of multiple processors, called APUs (Attached Processing Units), which are connected using an insanely fast data bus. Each APU can be programmed to handle one specific task, and then pass the data on to the next APU for a different task. By doing this, you can just put in more processors to increase the throughput of the system. This works especially good for multimedia processing, which can be pipelined like this pretty easily. Here are a couple of snippets from the Wikipedia entry:
"While the Cell chip can have a number of different configurations, the workstation and PlayStation 3 version of Cell consists of one "Processing Element" ("PE"), and eight "Attached Processing Units" ("APU"). The PE is based on the POWER Architecture, basis of their existing POWER line and related to the PowerPC used by Apple
Alot of comments here seem to suggest that since Bush cannot be re-elected, he is now free to do anything he wants without regard for the public opinion. These comments miss a few very important points.
The Bush administration has a large interest in keeping public approval. Not so much Bush himself, but the neocons arounds him - ie Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer and Lewis Libby to name a few.
The neocons have had key positions in every republican administration since the mid-70s, including under Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bush senior and now Bush junior. They are an ideological group based in part on the philosophy of Leo Strauss, whose stated goals are to spread democracy around the world, by force, preserving Pax Americana and expanding the american economic and cultural empire.
To acheieve this goal, an organization named The Project for a New American Century was founded by William Kristol in 1997. Its members include all of the neocons listed above, and its basic principles are, according to its website:
The neoconservatives have had complete control of the US foreign policy in the Bush administration. The Bush doctrine is based on a document written by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992, called the Defense Planning Guidance. At the time, under Bush senior, the document was regarded as too radical and key propositions in it was rejected (including unilateralism and the use of preemtive strikes). These radical propositions now form the core of US foreign policy.
In addition, the PNAC released a report in 2000 called Rebuilding Americas Defenses (PDF download here), which outlines the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and installation of a US base in Iraq to secure the oil for geostrategic purposes after peak-oil (just consider the control it would give them over China, when they can control a large portion of their energy supplies), and to attempt to spread democracy in the region. According to the document, this would only be possible after, and I quote, a "catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor".
Now, this little project of theirs is quite ambitious, and will take a long time, so the neocons have great interest in keeping a republican presidency (puppet or not), so they stay in control of foreign policy. They attempted to persuade Clinton to attack Iraq, but without any success, so now that they are in power they won't give it up easily. Luckily for them, the american public seems more than happy to go along.
Well, democracy usually implies that you have more choices than just the two branches of the business party (ahem, excuse my sarcasm).
Anyway - here in Norway (and it's the same in pretty much any other democratic country) we have about 8 main political parties, and quite a few smaller ones, ranging from communist to ultra-rightwing. In the pre-election TV-debates even parties which only have about 0.5-1 percent in polls are represented - in total around 10-12 people.
Now, I've been following the US presidential debates on TV with great interest, and I believe the norwegian debates are vastly better than the US ones, for obvious reasons. To pick a few; there are usually more than two solutions to a problem, there are more people likely to contest false statements, and you get shades of gray in moral and political dimensions.
Of course, you always have to exclude someone from these large events, but in a democracy it is vital that multiple opinions be heard, and both the media and the political system has a responsibility for making this happen.
Hm, I can't say I share your interpretation of that quote.
First of all, you need to look at the context. This speech is quite obviously an attempt to smooth over the tense international situation with recycled, fluffy rhethoric, with very little credibility to back it up. I'm not going to do a complete dissection of the speech, but just to pull out a couple of random examples:
"The American people respect the idealism that gave life to this organization. And we respect the men and women of the U.N., who stand for peace and human rights in every part of the world."
The US may find it convenient to use UN resolutions as a justification for their actions when it suits them. But when the General Assembly and Security Council votes against US interests, often overwhelmingly so (ie only the US, sometimes with Israeli support, opposed), the US vetoes the vote and dismisses the UN as irrelevant. The US doesn't seem to have anything but contempt for "the idealism that gave birth to [the UN]".
"Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom."
The current US administration often uses freedom and democracy as a justification for their actions. However, history shows that the one and only criteria for how "good" a country is is how well they serve US interests - freedom and democracy is never part of the assessment, as the US relationship with Saudi Arabia clearly demonstrates (as well as the links i posted earlier).
So Bush's words are rather meaningless once you investigate the actions of the US, instead of simply listening to the rhethoric. Now, to the actual quote:
"For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach."
I must say that there is a huge difference between "tolerating oppression" and overthrowing a democratically-elected governmment and installing a brutal dictator (which arguably led to the Iranian revolution in 1979). And the stability Bush mentions surely must be stability for US interests rather than stability of the region (the illegal US support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war most certainly was not in the name of stability).
Now, the US definitely isn't the only country with blood on it's hands, Europe's history is even more brutal, and Stalin's Soviet Union surely was no picnic either. However, in recent times US has had unprecedented power, and it is vital that the US uses it's power in accordance with and support of international law and humanitarian principles, rather than undermining them.
Well, I've rambled on far too long already. If you are interested in a critical analysis of US foreign policy I'd recommend reading Noam Chomsky - you may not agree with everything he says, but the facts he presents are quite illuminating.
We don't dictate who should become President of [...]
Yes, you doTo repeat the old mantra; Security is a process, not a product. Implicitly, you can't buy security, but you can hire competent sysadmins.
Sadly, the suits rarely know a good sysadmin from a mediocre one, and actually believe that SecuriSoft BrickWall 5000 Professional will solve all their problems.
You're right, I should've picked my words more carefully. Notice the quotes, though :) It was the best word I came up with there and then, but the literal meaning obviously doesn't apply.
Yeah, I do agree with you - not all companies are in it strictly for profit. But not all nazists were soulless sadists either, but that doesn't mean that nazism wasn't a bad thing. (I'm not saying that capitalists are nazis, it's just to prove a point)
The core of capitalism is to generate profit, there should be no doubt about this. In fact, a corporation is required by US law to *always* put shareholder profit as their main priority. If this means giving customers good service, they'll do that - if it means dumping toxic waste in rivers, they'll do that. But this overwhelmingly has more negative consequences than positive ones - so even though not all businesses are "evil", the corporation (and by extension, capitalism) as an institution is.
That's not to say I oppose trade - trade is a vital and positive part of any healthy society. But the capitalist ideology is just not a sustainable form of trade.
Of course he's nuts - the only problem is that he, and others like him, are the ones who are influencing the direction of the capitalist system.
Hence the current upsurge in anti-capitalist sentiment in the global population.
The fundamental principle in capitalism is to minimize costs and maximize profits, you learn this the first day of business school. And consumers are pretty much only concerned with getting the cheapest products (which is also a fundamental principle of capitalism), so what happens is that the market actually *encourages* immoral behaviour. Media coverage of immoral behaviour rarely has any impact, and this is especially true for multi-national corporations where you would need massive, global media coverage.
A good example is food production - treating animals good is costly, the most effective way is to have large "factories" where animals barely have any room to live, are drugged with all sorts of weird growth hormones, and are slaugthered as soon as possible. And since consumers want the cheapest food, they most often buy these products, and thereby promote this animal abuse.
I think Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize winning economist, said it best in his essay "The Social Responsibilty of Business is to Increase Its Profits". Let me give you a few quotes:
"[B]usinessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible[...]"
"[T]he corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money. The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct "social responsiblity," rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it."
"[T]he doctrine of "social responsibility" involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses."
"I have called [the doctrine of "social responsibility"] a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky; just that communist countries *called* themselves socialist doesn't actually mean they were. Just as some eastern European communist countries called themselves democratic republics, when they obviously were not.
In fact, the first thing that Lenin did after the communist revolution in Russia was to dimantle the workers organizations and centralize power, in conflict with the socialist ideals. Communism (the russian version) was a perversion of socialism, just like the spanish inquisition was a perversion of christianity.
What we call capitalism today isn't true free-market capitalism either, even though everyone seems to say it is. In fact, the current capitalist system is highly protectionist (just look at what goes on at the WTO), and western society as it's currently organized would collapse pretty fast if the state stopped intervening in the economic system.