Exactly how is this civil copyright infringement? As far as I can tell from USC Title 17 Chapter 5 Section 506a:
-- a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1)
for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or -- blah blah -- shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. --
Sounds to me like a clearcut case of criminal copyright violation. Call the friendly neighborhood cops and file a complaint. I dont believe you need deep pockets to notify the police about a crime. Yet.
Willful copyright infringement for commercial advantage or private financial gain is always criminal infringment, punishable by up to five years inprisonment if the retail value is no less than $2500.
License violations may fall into civil court, since they may or may not be actual copyright violations. Copyright violations for profit fall into criminal court.
Actually, my experience of Tru64's TruCluster is that it violates the good old engineering principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it shows. In a failure situation it hasnt been rare that the entire cluster locks up, rather than one machine crashing and the rest taking over the load.
Compared to the incredibly simplistic solution with MC/ServiceGuard, the differences in total uptime shows. ServiceGuard doesnt have near the features that TruCluster does, but it does (eventually) get the applications up and running again on another node.
Which is sortof the point of HA solutions.
Clustering filesystems are not stable yet. They may be in a few years, but for now, ignore them unless you like working weekends. I can think of very very few problems they solve well enough to be worth the screaming mindsearing _pain_ they cause. Stick with the mindbogglingly annoying solution of using NFS instead, if you have to have multiple mounts of a filesystem.
Nope, the BSD-without-advertizing license is compatible with the GPL. SELinux extensions could be clearly marked as BSD licensed, and anyone could lift those extensions out of the GPL codebase.
You can combine BSD code with GPL code any way you want. Only as long as you distribute them together do you have to (to distribute the GPL part), apply the GPL license to the work as a whole. Separate the GPL code from the BSD code and you have two separate works again, for which only the applicable license is valid.
Of course, such code might be so heavily integrated into the GPL code that separation might be pointless since you'd just get a bunch of unusable (altho BSD licensed) code.
Actually, Windows 98 isnt very flaky at all. If you use it correctly.
The problem is that a lot of people believe that Windows 98 is a multi-application operating system. Its isnt. It's a single application operating environment. That means, you make a clean install of Windows 98, and then install the application or game you wish to use. If you wish to use a second application you must first reinstall Windows 98, then install the other application you wish to use. Or, get another computer to run your second application.
The same applies to hardware, of course. You never ever change hardware in a Windows 98 system. You install the new hardware and then reinstall the operating environment from scratch.
This trick works fairly well because now you're matching a configuration that everyone's testing against. And using it that way you can get weeks and months of crashfree computing with Windows 98.
And of course, this makes Windows 98 useful for certain categories of users. Linux users who keep it around for a few games, and the ones who use their computer as a dust-collecting surf-once-per-week terminal. For those categories the new offerings from MS have nothing to offer.
Of course, the 'power users' who want to install more than one application can get rather frustrated by something like that and should probably upgrade (altho I doubt XP will prove resistant to the usual bitrot that tends to happen to MS OS's once you install a few too many drivers and apps). And, of course, they would probably be better off 'power using' Linux anyway:).
Actually, I'd recommend a combination between a nasty spam filter that kills off close to anything that might conceivably be spam and white-lists of senders who are automatically cleared. Your friends mails can get through, but woe betide the remote aquaintance or casual relation who mails you anything about sex... on the other hand you might be better off without that anyway.
Linus wasnt criticising Itanium, nor siding with Hammer against Itanium. The whole topic was x86-32 vs x86-64. IA-64 didnt figure into it.
IA-64 wont get into consumer level equipment for a long long time yet. Intel isnt marketing it that way; they're pushing it as a replacement for Sparc and Alpha, probably wanting to create a new high-margin segment in the industry.
AMD's aspirations appear to be more consumer level with the x86-64, and as a fast way to get 64-bit it might be an alternative. It sure as hell beats extending memory in other ways on a 32 bit architecture.
You miss the point. The competition will wipe the floor with you because they are giving it away for free. They'll 'cut off your airsupply', so to speak. You cant compete with people who dont have to make a profit, wether or not you have realistic revenue sources. Not with a fairly simple application like spam filtering. And there already are several methods of spam filtering at the server level.
Of course, he's wrong. If nobody would be a janitor, the payrate for janitors would start climbing so high that automation would be necessary, after which human janitors would become obsolete.
Of course, not funding a nice technical solution to spam is still a terribly good idea, wether five years ago or now.
A nice technical solution to spam has the exact same qualifications as most of the dot-com bombs; it sounds advanced but in reality it's something any 12 year old kid could hack up in his basement.
How exactly are you going to profit enough to pay your investors when the level of competition ensures that you will never ever be able to charge a cent for your idea? That was the main problem with the whole dot-com bubble.
(Oh, and if you want a nice technical solution to spam, either start using the blacklists to cut down on it a whole lot, or start using opt-in only mail (only accept mail from pre-approved adresses)).
Tape backups from twenty years can be read if you a) still have a working unit capable of reading the tape type, b) they've been kept in controlled storage, c) if you still have software that can read the backups and d) if you're lucky.
Tapes break down. Frequently. Our tape silos spit out tapes with media errors at rates you wouldnt believe.
From a pure reliability standpoint I'd rate optical media as best, followed by harddisks and with tapes as the worst. That is if you're storing them (including the disks) offline in a controlled environment of course.
Yeah, that seems to be the main problem. It's not so much 'dead and rotted' vs 'miniscule chance of revival sometime in the future' as it is 'dead and rotted' vs 'dead, rotted and frozen'. The freezing will ensure the structure is destroyed beyond any hope of recovery.
If they could solve that problem tho, I'd sign up in a second.:)
Everyone's using SMS? Not anyone I know... except in situations where SMS is the only possible solution. That is, in a bar with too much noise to talk, kids in school where the teacher would throw them out for talking on the phone, to notify someone who isnt answering their phone or for computer generated alerts. It's mainly used as a last resort, when you have no other more practical option. If you have email, some IM client or a practically usable phone SMS isnt the preferred method of communication for many people.
Things will get used if they fills a practical purpose and serves people for a reasonable price. WAP was a total failure because it didnt make things easier. The Internet was a total success because it sped up and simplified things immensly. The jury is still out on 3G. Nobody has managed to make video telephony popular for the last several decades despite the technical capacity available. Maybe sending sucky-quality pictures will get popular for some situations, but the price had better be right.
The interesting ones would be those that almost produced a match for a known object when passed through a neural network trained for object recognition but failed when analyzed for consistency with geometric rules for 2d projection. If you want a definition likely to produce something like Eschers objects.
Of course, Eschers drawings themselves have further been passed through another sieve. While similar drawings have probably been generated since the invention of the crayon by countless of children failing to portrait a cube or a stair accurately, the Escher drawings pass through the sieve of popularization. The children or other artists producing similar things havent gotten popularized, which gives the appearance again of something original and insightful. Still, despite appearance, it remains brute-force randomization passed through filters for meaning, rather than sudden insight.
Anyway, on the topic of chess I pretty much agree with you. I dont really find it very interesting either.
Well, the original claim wasnt mine. Random input is coming from all around. Everything from random firing of neurons based on our inherent imbalances in the chemical setup in the brain to every sense affected by random input from the world.
The basics of the channeling we can emulate in the form of neural networks. The human mind is a bit more complicated than a database, processor and searching algorithm, so it would depend on how wide definitions you allow for those concepts. Neural networks can fall into a searching algorithm definition, and teaching them isnt that complicated.
Well, Eschers works arent really paradoxes, the ones I surmise you are thinking about are the failure of a 2d medium to correctly reflect 3d. The basic concepts are easy to come by; random doodling is likely to produce the original effects. An easy algorithm to produce the original interesting concepts would be to take a number of lines, connect them in random ways, discard uninteresting ones and keep the ones that show interesting effects. Evolve the interesting ones and combine with other objects.
Random generation of hypothesis and discarding of faulty ones is easily mistaken for 'original insightful thought', especially since the discarded flawed ideas will likely never be talked about, making it seem as if the conclusion was arrived at from out of the blue.
Further, there isnt anything inherently unrandomizable about paradoxes. Paradoxes are merely an indication of a failure to discard faulty random data or a failure to generate an inclusive explanation for the data.
'On the second day of January, Microsoft had sucked more money out of their customers than the Linux community will for the entire year'.
Is an alternate way of looking at it. Which the customers appreciate.
Seriously tho, RedHat and company knows that they will never ever make anywhere close to what Microsoft has made selling software. But the idea is to make computing cheaper and freer, not to suck customers dry and invent new exciting buisness 'methods'.
Well, OLD computers didnt have a problem booting from disk when they were NEW computers. However, in a few years todays NEW computers will be OLD computers too, which means they wont have support for booting off anything you can buy in a store at that time anymore.
Of course, you cant run Windows on a machine when the BIOS wont find the disk because it's too large, but you can still run linux if you boot off a floppy.
So, the AMD architecture is a piece of shit, compared to doing 64bit stuff on 32bit x86?
Because, if you actually read the mail, rather than the ummm... 'challanged' intro, neither IA64 nor any other 64bit platform is mentioned. This is about IA32 vs AMD x86-64, not about IA64 vs AMD x86-64. So, yes, you and a whole lot of other people are missing something here.
Of course, that doesnt make as sensationalist a story.
Yeah, but from what I got out of the mail thread the bitching is mainly about 64bit support on 32bit architectures. Something bound to always really really suck. You end up doing bugprone and annoying workarounds with memory segments and other crap.
32bit on 32bit is fine, 64bit on 64bit is fine, 64bit on 32bit sucks, 32bit on 16bit sucks, etc.
Well, 4.7% max increase. On one single benchmark at a low resolution and the rest of the benchmarks showed between close to no performance improvement to worse performance. I wonder who paid that reviewer to be even close to lukewarm because he sure as hell had no data to say anything but 'total junk with this generation gfx cards, dont spend a dime on it unless you plan on buying a $1k graphics card in the near future because by the time it'll make a difference at consumer gfx card levels it's gonna be time for a new motherboard anyway'.
Since the only noted difference is at lower resolutions it means the gfx core is the slowdown at any higher resolution which means the gfx core has to get a lot faster before the AGP bandwidth becomes the actual bottleneck. Which means one or two gfx core generations until you'll need faster AGP.
So, dont worry, there'll be no requirement for AGP 8x for any game that wants to sell more than a dozen copies in the next three years at least.
Actually, sometimes it can be good for a 'good' programmers productivity too. If the programmer in question has motivational problems and has trouble getting started or finishing stuff, then pair programming can solve that. Not when the difference between the two programmers is too large, since holding programming 101 will kill productivity, but when there's a reasonable gap and a potential to inspire and discuss.
Of course, you could always threaten to fire their ass, but if it's fair programmers we're talking about, that threat might not be motivational after all, and could be quite counterproductive.
Oh, but you see, it's _not_ for 'free' viewing. It's for viewing with commercials, no fast-forward (or bathroom visits) allowed. If you record it you're likely one of those who want to skip commercials, and not watching commercials is THEFT (well, at least according to certain broadcasters).
Watch out for the new DRM Shackle (tm) soon to be delivered with your HDTV. Insert foot, and stay locked in front of the TV until the show is over, or no go. Oh, and dont even try to read a book or turn the TV down during commercials; there _will_ be a quiz (with accompanying shocks delivered through the DRM Shackle (tm), if you get it wrong).
Actually, the Athlons do have a thermal diode, just like the Intel chips. It's only that older motherboards dont use the cpu thermal diode, but use their own external one instead. And that one cant react fast enough to a heatsink removal. It will react to fan failure tho.
If you get a motherboard that does use the internal one you dont have a problem.
Of course... I cant say I find it likely that a heatsink would fall off. You'd have to drop the box from a pretty fair height to manage that.
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Exactly how is this civil copyright infringement? As far as I can tell from USC Title 17 Chapter 5 Section 506a:
--
a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1)
for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
--
blah blah
--
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code.
--
Sounds to me like a clearcut case of criminal copyright violation. Call the friendly neighborhood cops and file a complaint. I dont believe you need deep pockets to notify the police about a crime. Yet.
Of course, IANAL.
Willful copyright infringement for commercial advantage or private financial gain is always criminal infringment, punishable by up to five years inprisonment if the retail value is no less than $2500.
License violations may fall into civil court, since they may or may not be actual copyright violations. Copyright violations for profit fall into criminal court.
Actually, my experience of Tru64's TruCluster is that it violates the good old engineering principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it shows. In a failure situation it hasnt been rare that the entire cluster locks up, rather than one machine crashing and the rest taking over the load.
Compared to the incredibly simplistic solution with MC/ServiceGuard, the differences in total uptime shows. ServiceGuard doesnt have near the features that TruCluster does, but it does (eventually) get the applications up and running again on another node.
Which is sortof the point of HA solutions.
Clustering filesystems are not stable yet. They may be in a few years, but for now, ignore them unless you like working weekends. I can think of very very few problems they solve well enough to be worth the screaming mindsearing _pain_ they cause. Stick with the mindbogglingly annoying solution of using NFS instead, if you have to have multiple mounts of a filesystem.
Nope, the BSD-without-advertizing license is compatible with the GPL. SELinux extensions could be clearly marked as BSD licensed, and anyone could lift those extensions out of the GPL codebase.
You can combine BSD code with GPL code any way you want. Only as long as you distribute them together do you have to (to distribute the GPL part), apply the GPL license to the work as a whole. Separate the GPL code from the BSD code and you have two separate works again, for which only the applicable license is valid.
Of course, such code might be so heavily integrated into the GPL code that separation might be pointless since you'd just get a bunch of unusable (altho BSD licensed) code.
Actually, Windows 98 isnt very flaky at all. If you use it correctly.
:).
The problem is that a lot of people believe that Windows 98 is a multi-application operating system. Its isnt. It's a single application operating environment. That means, you make a clean install of Windows 98, and then install the application or game you wish to use. If you wish to use a second application you must first reinstall Windows 98, then install the other application you wish to use. Or, get another computer to run your second application.
The same applies to hardware, of course. You never ever change hardware in a Windows 98 system. You install the new hardware and then reinstall the operating environment from scratch.
This trick works fairly well because now you're matching a configuration that everyone's testing against. And using it that way you can get weeks and months of crashfree computing with Windows 98.
And of course, this makes Windows 98 useful for certain categories of users. Linux users who keep it around for a few games, and the ones who use their computer as a dust-collecting surf-once-per-week terminal. For those categories the new offerings from MS have nothing to offer.
Of course, the 'power users' who want to install more than one application can get rather frustrated by something like that and should probably upgrade (altho I doubt XP will prove resistant to the usual bitrot that tends to happen to MS OS's once you install a few too many drivers and apps). And, of course, they would probably be better off 'power using' Linux anyway
Actually, I'd recommend a combination between a nasty spam filter that kills off close to anything that might conceivably be spam and white-lists of senders who are automatically cleared. Your friends mails can get through, but woe betide the remote aquaintance or casual relation who mails you anything about sex... on the other hand you might be better off without that anyway.
Linus wasnt criticising Itanium, nor siding with Hammer against Itanium. The whole topic was x86-32 vs x86-64. IA-64 didnt figure into it.
IA-64 wont get into consumer level equipment for a long long time yet. Intel isnt marketing it that way; they're pushing it as a replacement for Sparc and Alpha, probably wanting to create a new high-margin segment in the industry.
AMD's aspirations appear to be more consumer level with the x86-64, and as a fast way to get 64-bit it might be an alternative. It sure as hell beats extending memory in other ways on a 32 bit architecture.
Itanium has nothing to do with it. The problem is 32bit platforms. Itanium is 64bit. This is Hammer vs. 32bit X86, not Hammer vs Itanium.
You miss the point. The competition will wipe the floor with you because they are giving it away for free. They'll 'cut off your airsupply', so to speak. You cant compete with people who dont have to make a profit, wether or not you have realistic revenue sources. Not with a fairly simple application like spam filtering. And there already are several methods of spam filtering at the server level.
Good luck tho. I'd love to see it succeed.
Of course, he's wrong. If nobody would be a janitor, the payrate for janitors would start climbing so high that automation would be necessary, after which human janitors would become obsolete.
Of course, not funding a nice technical solution to spam is still a terribly good idea, wether five years ago or now.
A nice technical solution to spam has the exact same qualifications as most of the dot-com bombs; it sounds advanced but in reality it's something any 12 year old kid could hack up in his basement.
How exactly are you going to profit enough to pay your investors when the level of competition ensures that you will never ever be able to charge a cent for your idea? That was the main problem with the whole dot-com bubble.
(Oh, and if you want a nice technical solution to spam, either start using the blacklists to cut down on it a whole lot, or start using opt-in only mail (only accept mail from pre-approved adresses)).
Tape backups from twenty years can be read if you a) still have a working unit capable of reading the tape type, b) they've been kept in controlled storage, c) if you still have software that can read the backups and d) if you're lucky.
Tapes break down. Frequently. Our tape silos spit out tapes with media errors at rates you wouldnt believe.
From a pure reliability standpoint I'd rate optical media as best, followed by harddisks and with tapes as the worst. That is if you're storing them (including the disks) offline in a controlled environment of course.
Yeah, that seems to be the main problem. It's not so much 'dead and rotted' vs 'miniscule chance of revival sometime in the future' as it is 'dead and rotted' vs 'dead, rotted and frozen'. The freezing will ensure the structure is destroyed beyond any hope of recovery.
:)
If they could solve that problem tho, I'd sign up in a second.
Everyone's using SMS? Not anyone I know... except in situations where SMS is the only possible solution. That is, in a bar with too much noise to talk, kids in school where the teacher would throw them out for talking on the phone, to notify someone who isnt answering their phone or for computer generated alerts. It's mainly used as a last resort, when you have no other more practical option. If you have email, some IM client or a practically usable phone SMS isnt the preferred method of communication for many people.
Things will get used if they fills a practical purpose and serves people for a reasonable price. WAP was a total failure because it didnt make things easier. The Internet was a total success because it sped up and simplified things immensly. The jury is still out on 3G. Nobody has managed to make video telephony popular for the last several decades despite the technical capacity available. Maybe sending sucky-quality pictures will get popular for some situations, but the price had better be right.
The interesting ones would be those that almost produced a match for a known object when passed through a neural network trained for object recognition but failed when analyzed for consistency with geometric rules for 2d projection. If you want a definition likely to produce something like Eschers objects.
Of course, Eschers drawings themselves have further been passed through another sieve. While similar drawings have probably been generated since the invention of the crayon by countless of children failing to portrait a cube or a stair accurately, the Escher drawings pass through the sieve of popularization. The children or other artists producing similar things havent gotten popularized, which gives the appearance again of something original and insightful. Still, despite appearance, it remains brute-force randomization passed through filters for meaning, rather than sudden insight.
Anyway, on the topic of chess I pretty much agree with you. I dont really find it very interesting either.
Well, the original claim wasnt mine. Random input is coming from all around. Everything from random firing of neurons based on our inherent imbalances in the chemical setup in the brain to every sense affected by random input from the world.
The basics of the channeling we can emulate in the form of neural networks. The human mind is a bit more complicated than a database, processor and searching algorithm, so it would depend on how wide definitions you allow for those concepts. Neural networks can fall into a searching algorithm definition, and teaching them isnt that complicated.
Well, Eschers works arent really paradoxes, the ones I surmise you are thinking about are the failure of a 2d medium to correctly reflect 3d. The basic concepts are easy to come by; random doodling is likely to produce the original effects. An easy algorithm to produce the original interesting concepts would be to take a number of lines, connect them in random ways, discard uninteresting ones and keep the ones that show interesting effects. Evolve the interesting ones and combine with other objects.
Random generation of hypothesis and discarding of faulty ones is easily mistaken for 'original insightful thought', especially since the discarded flawed ideas will likely never be talked about, making it seem as if the conclusion was arrived at from out of the blue.
Further, there isnt anything inherently unrandomizable about paradoxes. Paradoxes are merely an indication of a failure to discard faulty random data or a failure to generate an inclusive explanation for the data.
'On the second day of January, Microsoft had sucked more money out of their customers than the Linux community will for the entire year'.
Is an alternate way of looking at it. Which the customers appreciate.
Seriously tho, RedHat and company knows that they will never ever make anywhere close to what Microsoft has made selling software. But the idea is to make computing cheaper and freer, not to suck customers dry and invent new exciting buisness 'methods'.
Well, OLD computers didnt have a problem booting from disk when they were NEW computers. However, in a few years todays NEW computers will be OLD computers too, which means they wont have support for booting off anything you can buy in a store at that time anymore.
Of course, you cant run Windows on a machine when the BIOS wont find the disk because it's too large, but you can still run linux if you boot off a floppy.
So, the AMD architecture is a piece of shit, compared to doing 64bit stuff on 32bit x86?
Because, if you actually read the mail, rather than the ummm... 'challanged' intro, neither IA64 nor any other 64bit platform is mentioned. This is about IA32 vs AMD x86-64, not about IA64 vs AMD x86-64. So, yes, you and a whole lot of other people are missing something here.
Of course, that doesnt make as sensationalist a story.
Yeah, but from what I got out of the mail thread the bitching is mainly about 64bit support on 32bit architectures. Something bound to always really really suck. You end up doing bugprone and annoying workarounds with memory segments and other crap.
32bit on 32bit is fine, 64bit on 64bit is fine, 64bit on 32bit sucks, 32bit on 16bit sucks, etc.
Well, 4.7% max increase. On one single benchmark at a low resolution and the rest of the benchmarks showed between close to no performance improvement to worse performance. I wonder who paid that reviewer to be even close to lukewarm because he sure as hell had no data to say anything but 'total junk with this generation gfx cards, dont spend a dime on it unless you plan on buying a $1k graphics card in the near future because by the time it'll make a difference at consumer gfx card levels it's gonna be time for a new motherboard anyway'.
Since the only noted difference is at lower resolutions it means the gfx core is the slowdown at any higher resolution which means the gfx core has to get a lot faster before the AGP bandwidth becomes the actual bottleneck. Which means one or two gfx core generations until you'll need faster AGP.
So, dont worry, there'll be no requirement for AGP 8x for any game that wants to sell more than a dozen copies in the next three years at least.
Actually, sometimes it can be good for a 'good' programmers productivity too. If the programmer in question has motivational problems and has trouble getting started or finishing stuff, then pair programming can solve that. Not when the difference between the two programmers is too large, since holding programming 101 will kill productivity, but when there's a reasonable gap and a potential to inspire and discuss.
Of course, you could always threaten to fire their ass, but if it's fair programmers we're talking about, that threat might not be motivational after all, and could be quite counterproductive.
Oh, but you see, it's _not_ for 'free' viewing. It's for viewing with commercials, no fast-forward (or bathroom visits) allowed. If you record it you're likely one of those who want to skip commercials, and not watching commercials is THEFT (well, at least according to certain broadcasters).
Watch out for the new DRM Shackle (tm) soon to be delivered with your HDTV. Insert foot, and stay locked in front of the TV until the show is over, or no go. Oh, and dont even try to read a book or turn the TV down during commercials; there _will_ be a quiz (with accompanying shocks delivered through the DRM Shackle (tm), if you get it wrong).
Actually, the Athlons do have a thermal diode, just like the Intel chips. It's only that older motherboards dont use the cpu thermal diode, but use their own external one instead. And that one cant react fast enough to a heatsink removal. It will react to fan failure tho.
If you get a motherboard that does use the internal one you dont have a problem.
Of course... I cant say I find it likely that a heatsink would fall off. You'd have to drop the box from a pretty fair height to manage that.