What gives your private business the right to a profit if it can't even do better than the government? You know, the infamously inefficient bureaucracy with the customer service department staffed by bona fide Vogons?
Well, we have that sort of thing here in Denton, TX, and I can get you a deal on a truly wonderful house for less than a million dollars. If you're a liberal, don't fret -- our precinct was almost a tie between Gore and Nader in 2000. And if you're a conservative there's churches all over the place.
I'm certainly wondering about the prospects for an Intel PowerPC chip. Maybe the CPU geeks out there can tell me how possible it would be for Intel to develop a microcode (or other relatively simple modification) that would allow for a version of the Pentium-M that ran a PowerPC instruction set. Possibly this could be the chip for the next Powerbook, if indeed the G5 turns out to be too big and too hot to make it into a portable, like, ever. A PowerPentium, as unholy as it sounds, could be a great notebook chip.
Actually, I will come out and argue that Pfizer and Microsoft both rode on the coat-tails of federal grants.
A company like Microsoft cannot come into existence in a vacuum. There is a huge list of technologies that must exist before some kid can make out like a bandit on a lucky deal involving a bare-bones OS. Many of these technologies were mere curiosities when discovered, often in labs which received government funding. The foundations of Microsoft, like the foundations of the Internet, were laid in the 50s and 60s, and largely by the government.
The same is true of drug companies. Beyond the technology, before you can start an enterprise like Pfizer you need a nation with tremendous infrastructure and a supply of world-class scientists. These things, also, are a function of the government.
You might be surprised to learn that invention of a new space-age drug is not done from the ground up, as it were. There is a huge body of research that is drawn upon to make something like Procrit, or Vioxx, or Claritin. A private drug company performs only the last step -- engineering the research into a product.
Further, only that last step is patentable. Any corporation that sets out to do really basic research knows that it is doing so as a public service, and that competitors will be able to use most of the knowledge gained in their own products (Xerox PARC, anyone?) For this reason it makes sense for society to put together a pool of resources, from which this basic research can be funded for the benefit of all the private corporations. That basic research is what creates an industry; it simply doesn't work the other way around.
So I've been here a while, and I don't remember this "site where intelligent people shared ideas". I'm trying to figure out when Slashdot was supposedly like that, since when I started reading people were already complaining about how it had deteriorated into a cesspool of nonstop idiocy.
Will anyone older than me testify that Slashdot was once a hallowed institution of platonic debate?
You control with the existing treatment, as I said. You don't always get to do a perfect study. Medical ethics override scientific considerations.
Seriously, I'm in a medical study. There's no placebo group. It wouldn't make much sense anyway... "what happened to the placebo group?" "Oh, they all died, duh." Not the way it works, despite what Slashdotters seem to think.
That's only for studies where either no effective treatment currently exists or the condition being treated is minor (headache or something). For a life-threatening condition medical ethics forbids what would be an "ideal" study.
You're not on a placebo, that's nonsense. New treatments are compared for effectiveness to existing treatments, not to placebo. The only people who take a placebo are healthy volunteers who are controlling for side effects.
The difference between the experiment and control groups in an effectiveness study is that the control group is given the "old" treatment, which (presumably) works, but not as well as we would like. The expiremental group gets a new treatment, one that probably will work to some extent, but may or may not work better than the "old" treatment.
All the drives Maxtor sold HP for that model of desktop were defective. I'm pretty sure it's not even a mechanical issue, it's some sort of logic issue. Some of these drives even forget what their model number is.
Your failure rate will exceed 10% by quite a bit, I'd expect. Keep backups. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class-action lawsuit over this one. HP has stopped using that drive, though, so your warranty replacements will be Seagate.
Regular desktop apps tend to have lots of threads, but the issue is not how many threads exist but rather how many of them attempt to use CPU at the same time.
For instance, your web browser might spawn a thread to do a DNS lookup, since you wouldn't want the GUI to block during DNS. That thread hardly uses any CPU though. When your Web browser does real work, like rendering, it will usually be confined to a single thread.
But passing regular legislation doesn't require a 2/3 vote according to the Constitution, and can still be blocked by filibuster as per Senate rules. Notice also that a vote for cloture does not require a 2/3 majority but rather 3/5.
In any case the idea that the Senate is required to act on judicial nominees is an invented one, not stated in the Constitution. The Constitution does not even specify that a vote of the Senate is required to approve a nominee. It merely says the consent of the Senate must be obtained, and that the Senate gets to make its own rules. Things like filibusters, committees, and so forth are a matter of Senate rules.
It's quite possible that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for judicial nominations to be held up in endless Senate debate, but they did not write that into the document. Note that other parts of the Constitution specify time limits for certain activities. For instance, the President has an explicit amount of time in which to veto or sign a bill. Most probably, if you traveled back in time to the Constitutional Convention and pointed out that the Senate ought to have a limited amount of time to debate judicial nominees, we would not be debating the issue today. Without a time machine or an amendment, though, the law says what it says, not what it ought to say.
Why does yield seem like a poor argument to you? Yield has always been a major factor in the cost of integrated circuits, since it drops exponentially as size increases. When you start making what is in essence a single microchip with an area of over a square foot that contains over five million transistors, defective units are going to hit your manufacturing costs pretty hard.
The Constitution is fairly silent on this issue, saying only "[The President], by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint [Ambassadors, etc,] Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.
The Constitution says "Advice and Consent of the Senate", but doesn't say anything about how the "Consent of the Senate" is to be determined. Traditionally, this has been done according to Senate rules. Some have suggested that this is incorrect, and that the Senate is required to have a floor vote. Nobody I know of has seriously suggested that the Constitution prohibits filibuster while allowing for a committee killing. The word "committee" does not appear in the Constitution at all.
The only other aspect of the Constitution which would seem applicable is clause 2 of section 5, which reads "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member." This would seem to suggest that the Senate is allowed to determine what the rules are for obtaining the "consent of the Senate". Under this interpretation the judicial filibuster and committee killing are both entirely constitutional.
As someone who gets mod points often I have to say that complaints about moderation are almost always offtopic on the face of it. The moderation system is usually not the topic.
Personally I never use "overrated" at all, and it's pretty much obviously wrong to use such a mod on a post that is not at least a 2. I don't believe in offtopic on meta-slashdot threads like Slashback or polls.
People complain about moderation all the time, and those of us who have been around for a while were tired of it about a week after the system was introduced. As I write, the comment that your parent was complaining about is a 5, so both the parent and your post look a little out of place. Often mods that seem unfair are for some subtle reason actually fair (an old troll for instance) and often mods that really are unfair are corrected after a while.
I'm not claiming that moderation is rational -- often I feel that comments I write which are interesting and insightful are ignored or worse, while tripe that I come up with on a whim shoots up to 5. But the moderation system has been wildly successful in doing what it was intended to do: turn down the volume on the noise and turn up the signal, without imposing totalitarianism. The fact that some signal is lost is essentially inevitable, I'm afraid.
I have mod points at the moment, but I'll bite at your flamebait anyway. Some time ago a remote root hole was discovered in the default install of OpenBSD, which has a very good overall security record. Do you consider that conclusive proof that, if OpenBSD were as popular as Windows, it would be rooted just as much?
That of course is a rhetorical question, which proves nothing. To actually defeat your argument: the existence of a theoretical vulnerability is not enough to get a system mass-rooted. The vulnerability has to be discovered first, and it will be easier to find one if the system has 100 exploitable vulnerabilities versus 10. It is likely that all complete network operating systems have some number; the question is how many and how easy they are to find. It is true that an attacker does not need more than one, but systems with fewer holes are still more secure for this reason.
Also, note that a security researcher does not need to come up with an actual working exploit, merely a theoretical description of how one could be written. Depending on the extent and nature of the vulnerability, it might be harder or easier to exploit than others.
The truth is that there is not currently an ideal mathematical way to evaluate the real, overall security of a computer system. Until we do the best real-world statistic we have is the actual security record, which is biased against Windows. However, the lack of a good measurement of security does not mean that all systems are equally secure.
To an end-user, it does not really matter what the reason is that Windows is more likely to be hacked. It remains one of the major problems of the platform, and a problem that is not nearly as pervasive on OS X.
You know, this is a really stupid comment, and only possible to make if you have never read the GPL or LGPL.
If they did "all that is legally required and nothing more", it would be like this. A KHTML developer could call Apple and ask for the code, but they would tell him to go fly a kite. If Apple sent someone their derivative work (Safari), it wouldn't come with the code either. All the law requires Apple to do is to make their source available to those who have received Safari from Apple.
And they certainly don't have to use CVS -- they could send it out in the mail on a CD, and they could charge a small fee for the trouble.
Apple may not be an active member of the KHTML team, and lots of people would like them to, but they do a lot more than the license requires.
And what annoys the KHTML developers is not what Apple does per se, but what clueless Slashdotters spout about how great it is that the projects are working together.
Isn't the infamous "worst case" to live in Japan, work in China, have a British wife, and eat American food? Sounds like you're at least halfway there.
Indeed, this is a new tactic, but the reversal is still interesting in a historical context. It's interesting to wonder -- if Xerox had patented the ideas at PARC, and the stock Apple paid Xerox had been for a patent license, and Apple had also patented their own ideas that were involved in the Mac, would Microsoft have lost?
As far as I know nobody has tried to enforce a GUI patent yet. Obviously Microsoft is considering that route. Will they sue Linux developers who build similar interfaces? Will they sue Apple?
From a business point of view probably the most damning problem with the current patent system is that it's not predictable. Nobody knows what would happen if somebody started throwing around GUI patents.
It's an almost bizarre one-liner in Thurrott's blog entry, so it's hard to say what to make of it. The Mac rumor sites sure haven't picked up on it yet.
Obviously Darwin for x86 has been around for a long time, and people speculate that Apple might maintain a complete build of OSX on x86 so that they're not dependant on IBM. If this is so it would certainly be interesting to see Apple systems with something like AMD64. Though of course third-party developers might be annoyed about such a move.
I would be skeptical of whether that would mean a release that would run on commodity PC systems, though. It would seem more likely that OSX would continue to run on Apple systems only, probably by some kind of enforcement mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
What gives your private business the right to a profit if it can't even do better than the government? You know, the infamously inefficient bureaucracy with the customer service department staffed by bona fide Vogons?
Well, we have that sort of thing here in Denton, TX, and I can get you a deal on a truly wonderful house for less than a million dollars. If you're a liberal, don't fret -- our precinct was almost a tie between Gore and Nader in 2000. And if you're a conservative there's churches all over the place.
Personally, I'm opposed to IP addresses for the dead.
If you really believed this, you would throw your monitor in the dumpster. If it's a nice one I'll give you five bucks for it.
Looks like a new form of crapflooding, but yeah, someone's certainly decided to be an ass.
I'm certainly wondering about the prospects for an Intel PowerPC chip. Maybe the CPU geeks out there can tell me how possible it would be for Intel to develop a microcode (or other relatively simple modification) that would allow for a version of the Pentium-M that ran a PowerPC instruction set. Possibly this could be the chip for the next Powerbook, if indeed the G5 turns out to be too big and too hot to make it into a portable, like, ever. A PowerPentium, as unholy as it sounds, could be a great notebook chip.
Actually, I will come out and argue that Pfizer and Microsoft both rode on the coat-tails of federal grants.
A company like Microsoft cannot come into existence in a vacuum. There is a huge list of technologies that must exist before some kid can make out like a bandit on a lucky deal involving a bare-bones OS. Many of these technologies were mere curiosities when discovered, often in labs which received government funding. The foundations of Microsoft, like the foundations of the Internet, were laid in the 50s and 60s, and largely by the government.
The same is true of drug companies. Beyond the technology, before you can start an enterprise like Pfizer you need a nation with tremendous infrastructure and a supply of world-class scientists. These things, also, are a function of the government.
You might be surprised to learn that invention of a new space-age drug is not done from the ground up, as it were. There is a huge body of research that is drawn upon to make something like Procrit, or Vioxx, or Claritin. A private drug company performs only the last step -- engineering the research into a product.
Further, only that last step is patentable. Any corporation that sets out to do really basic research knows that it is doing so as a public service, and that competitors will be able to use most of the knowledge gained in their own products (Xerox PARC, anyone?) For this reason it makes sense for society to put together a pool of resources, from which this basic research can be funded for the benefit of all the private corporations. That basic research is what creates an industry; it simply doesn't work the other way around.
So I've been here a while, and I don't remember this "site where intelligent people shared ideas". I'm trying to figure out when Slashdot was supposedly like that, since when I started reading people were already complaining about how it had deteriorated into a cesspool of nonstop idiocy.
Will anyone older than me testify that Slashdot was once a hallowed institution of platonic debate?
You control with the existing treatment, as I said. You don't always get to do a perfect study. Medical ethics override scientific considerations.
Seriously, I'm in a medical study. There's no placebo group. It wouldn't make much sense anyway... "what happened to the placebo group?" "Oh, they all died, duh." Not the way it works, despite what Slashdotters seem to think.
That's only for studies where either no effective treatment currently exists or the condition being treated is minor (headache or something). For a life-threatening condition medical ethics forbids what would be an "ideal" study.
You're not on a placebo, that's nonsense. New treatments are compared for effectiveness to existing treatments, not to placebo. The only people who take a placebo are healthy volunteers who are controlling for side effects.
The difference between the experiment and control groups in an effectiveness study is that the control group is given the "old" treatment, which (presumably) works, but not as well as we would like. The expiremental group gets a new treatment, one that probably will work to some extent, but may or may not work better than the "old" treatment.
All the drives Maxtor sold HP for that model of desktop were defective. I'm pretty sure it's not even a mechanical issue, it's some sort of logic issue. Some of these drives even forget what their model number is.
Your failure rate will exceed 10% by quite a bit, I'd expect. Keep backups. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class-action lawsuit over this one. HP has stopped using that drive, though, so your warranty replacements will be Seagate.
Regular desktop apps tend to have lots of threads, but the issue is not how many threads exist but rather how many of them attempt to use CPU at the same time.
For instance, your web browser might spawn a thread to do a DNS lookup, since you wouldn't want the GUI to block during DNS. That thread hardly uses any CPU though. When your Web browser does real work, like rendering, it will usually be confined to a single thread.
Sure he's rich, but I think he's an idiot anyway. Is that the reason why I have more money than you do?
But passing regular legislation doesn't require a 2/3 vote according to the Constitution, and can still be blocked by filibuster as per Senate rules. Notice also that a vote for cloture does not require a 2/3 majority but rather 3/5.
In any case the idea that the Senate is required to act on judicial nominees is an invented one, not stated in the Constitution. The Constitution does not even specify that a vote of the Senate is required to approve a nominee. It merely says the consent of the Senate must be obtained, and that the Senate gets to make its own rules. Things like filibusters, committees, and so forth are a matter of Senate rules.
It's quite possible that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for judicial nominations to be held up in endless Senate debate, but they did not write that into the document. Note that other parts of the Constitution specify time limits for certain activities. For instance, the President has an explicit amount of time in which to veto or sign a bill. Most probably, if you traveled back in time to the Constitutional Convention and pointed out that the Senate ought to have a limited amount of time to debate judicial nominees, we would not be debating the issue today. Without a time machine or an amendment, though, the law says what it says, not what it ought to say.
Why does yield seem like a poor argument to you? Yield has always been a major factor in the cost of integrated circuits, since it drops exponentially as size increases. When you start making what is in essence a single microchip with an area of over a square foot that contains over five million transistors, defective units are going to hit your manufacturing costs pretty hard.
That's an extremely strange argument.
The Constitution is fairly silent on this issue, saying only "[The President], by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint [Ambassadors, etc,] Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.
The Constitution says "Advice and Consent of the Senate", but doesn't say anything about how the "Consent of the Senate" is to be determined. Traditionally, this has been done according to Senate rules. Some have suggested that this is incorrect, and that the Senate is required to have a floor vote. Nobody I know of has seriously suggested that the Constitution prohibits filibuster while allowing for a committee killing. The word "committee" does not appear in the Constitution at all.
The only other aspect of the Constitution which would seem applicable is clause 2 of section 5, which reads "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member." This would seem to suggest that the Senate is allowed to determine what the rules are for obtaining the "consent of the Senate". Under this interpretation the judicial filibuster and committee killing are both entirely constitutional.
As someone who gets mod points often I have to say that complaints about moderation are almost always offtopic on the face of it. The moderation system is usually not the topic.
Personally I never use "overrated" at all, and it's pretty much obviously wrong to use such a mod on a post that is not at least a 2. I don't believe in offtopic on meta-slashdot threads like Slashback or polls.
People complain about moderation all the time, and those of us who have been around for a while were tired of it about a week after the system was introduced. As I write, the comment that your parent was complaining about is a 5, so both the parent and your post look a little out of place. Often mods that seem unfair are for some subtle reason actually fair (an old troll for instance) and often mods that really are unfair are corrected after a while.
I'm not claiming that moderation is rational -- often I feel that comments I write which are interesting and insightful are ignored or worse, while tripe that I come up with on a whim shoots up to 5. But the moderation system has been wildly successful in doing what it was intended to do: turn down the volume on the noise and turn up the signal, without imposing totalitarianism. The fact that some signal is lost is essentially inevitable, I'm afraid.
I have mod points at the moment, but I'll bite at your flamebait anyway. Some time ago a remote root hole was discovered in the default install of OpenBSD, which has a very good overall security record. Do you consider that conclusive proof that, if OpenBSD were as popular as Windows, it would be rooted just as much?
That of course is a rhetorical question, which proves nothing. To actually defeat your argument: the existence of a theoretical vulnerability is not enough to get a system mass-rooted. The vulnerability has to be discovered first, and it will be easier to find one if the system has 100 exploitable vulnerabilities versus 10. It is likely that all complete network operating systems have some number; the question is how many and how easy they are to find. It is true that an attacker does not need more than one, but systems with fewer holes are still more secure for this reason.
Also, note that a security researcher does not need to come up with an actual working exploit, merely a theoretical description of how one could be written. Depending on the extent and nature of the vulnerability, it might be harder or easier to exploit than others.
The truth is that there is not currently an ideal mathematical way to evaluate the real, overall security of a computer system. Until we do the best real-world statistic we have is the actual security record, which is biased against Windows. However, the lack of a good measurement of security does not mean that all systems are equally secure.
To an end-user, it does not really matter what the reason is that Windows is more likely to be hacked. It remains one of the major problems of the platform, and a problem that is not nearly as pervasive on OS X.
check out KBounce, if you have KDE. Don't know of one for the Mac though.
You know, this is a really stupid comment, and only possible to make if you have never read the GPL or LGPL.
If they did "all that is legally required and nothing more", it would be like this. A KHTML developer could call Apple and ask for the code, but they would tell him to go fly a kite. If Apple sent someone their derivative work (Safari), it wouldn't come with the code either. All the law requires Apple to do is to make their source available to those who have received Safari from Apple.
And they certainly don't have to use CVS -- they could send it out in the mail on a CD, and they could charge a small fee for the trouble.
Apple may not be an active member of the KHTML team, and lots of people would like them to, but they do a lot more than the license requires.
And what annoys the KHTML developers is not what Apple does per se, but what clueless Slashdotters spout about how great it is that the projects are working together.
Isn't the infamous "worst case" to live in Japan, work in China, have a British wife, and eat American food? Sounds like you're at least halfway there.
Indeed, this is a new tactic, but the reversal is still interesting in a historical context. It's interesting to wonder -- if Xerox had patented the ideas at PARC, and the stock Apple paid Xerox had been for a patent license, and Apple had also patented their own ideas that were involved in the Mac, would Microsoft have lost?
As far as I know nobody has tried to enforce a GUI patent yet. Obviously Microsoft is considering that route. Will they sue Linux developers who build similar interfaces? Will they sue Apple?
From a business point of view probably the most damning problem with the current patent system is that it's not predictable. Nobody knows what would happen if somebody started throwing around GUI patents.
IP protection on a GUI? Haven't we been down this road before... like in Apple v. Microsoft?
It's an almost bizarre one-liner in Thurrott's blog entry, so it's hard to say what to make of it. The Mac rumor sites sure haven't picked up on it yet.
Obviously Darwin for x86 has been around for a long time, and people speculate that Apple might maintain a complete build of OSX on x86 so that they're not dependant on IBM. If this is so it would certainly be interesting to see Apple systems with something like AMD64. Though of course third-party developers might be annoyed about such a move.
I would be skeptical of whether that would mean a release that would run on commodity PC systems, though. It would seem more likely that OSX would continue to run on Apple systems only, probably by some kind of enforcement mechanism.