The Economist about efforts to cool down future HP CPU's (read: Itanium X) using inkjet heads from HP's printers and plotters to spray cooling fluid directly on the chip's surface, overcoming the bubble problem.
Let me guess: they'll sell these high-end servers for only $50. The catch is that they'll constantly consume cooling fluid from insanely priced single-use proprietary HP cartridges. What's worse, the server will come only with a half-filled cartridge.
We're all going to be busy supporting our parents in another 20 years, because among other things, we haven't been doing a very good job of supporting social security. We've been buying all the nice shiny toys, but not saving up for the future you speak so fondly of.
You can't "save" for the future at this scale. You can save money, but people eat food. You can't save a 20 year stockpile of milk for old folks' retirement. If our parents all retire, we're going to be working to produce the goods support them regardless of how much "money" is saved up. Money is compressible like a gas; its value changes based on how many people are using it to acquire goods from a fixed pool of resources.
There are only two possible ways out of this problem: (a) People work longer and retire at an older age, or (b) We invent robots that do the work for us.
All attempts to "fix" social security are merely accounting tricks that shuffle government IOUs between different government accounts. What's really going to happen is that when the taxpayers can't take any more, they will increase the age for benefits payout.
Nestle a Martian box under your attic insulation if you have something to hide.
Just because it's fanless doesn't mean it generates no heat. In fact, free airflow is probably more important than with forced-air cooling. I've seen plenty of complaints about how hot that fanless Apple cube box could get.
Covering the box with insulation and putting it in a 140 degree F attic sounds like a sure-fire way to fry the system. I would be surprised if it's not a fire hazard as well.
Many broadband ISPs already have terms of service that only permit connecting one "computer". What will they think about this?
In their minds, you're getting free video phone service without paying them anything; in their minds, your cable modem bill is only for web surfing and e-mail.
I predict that they will specifically disallow these devices in their service contracts unless you pay a stiff extra monthly fee. They will probably also take technical measures to detect and block this "theft" of their service.
In 100 years, I would expect computers to be writing it's own code. And rewriting it agian to evolve.
My prediction for an excerpt from such code:
ACTIVITY DEFINITION: Name = "Search for remaining human stragglers" --EVENT: If a human is found -> ACTION: Terminate --EVENT: Human habitat is found -> ACTION: Incinerate --EVENT: Human activity detected -> ACTION: Investigate and track --EVENT: Energy source is found -> ACTION: Consume --EVENT: Another cyborg is found -> ACTION: Goto activity "Spawn"
I created diagrams and explanations of the file sharing systems these students created that the RIAA is suing them for - and how they are functionally and technically very similar to Microsoft's tools built right into windows
As with so many other legal issues, it's a question of intent. With student-written file sharing systems, you are intentionally sharing your files with the whole world. With Windows File Sharing, you are unintentionally sharing your files with the whole world.
The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.
I looked this into this topic a while ago out of curiousity. X86's are actually descendants of the Intel 8008 microcontroller, not the 4004. Today's x86 chips are still assembly-source compatible with the 8008 (not binary compatible; there were automatic tools available to convert 8008 source to 8080 source, for example).
Even though the 4004 was the first microprocessor on the market, the 8008 design was started at Intel prior to the 4004. However, that project was put on the back burner before the 4004 was developed. After the 4004 design was finished, work resumed on the 8008. The 8-bit 8008 and 4-bit 4004 CPUs were not source or binary compatible with each other. (Here is some more info.)
Why are we quarantining people over something with a 4% mortality rate?
The 4% mortality rate is before all of the hospitals are full and before the world's supply of available respirators is exhausted. If 1,000,000 people in one country catch this, things could be different.
I'm just hoping that this virus mellows out a little bit as it goes through multiple generations in humans, as some viruses have been known to do. That might be the only way it will slow down.
Oh and BTW how does finding the list constitute an invasive and destructive trespass.?
The whole concept of copyrights (as well as patents) was invented so that people would not keep their works secret. It was invented solely to encourage people to publish their work.
Obviously, when the U.S. Constititution was written, nobody expected or imagined that any copyrighted work could be obfuscated or encrypted. The technology didn't exist at the time. Copyright was invented to encourage the publication of plain human-readable text in books and newspapers, nothing else.
It is clear then, that the exception to free speech carved out by the copyright clause does not cover these technical tricks that shroud hidden secrets in the goods you buy. These tricks do not "promote progress in useful arts and sciences".
You are entitled to keep your trade secrets hidden from others. The way to do that is keep the secrets in your own posession. You can lock them in your safe. Someone breaking in to that safe would be trespassing.
However, once you put those secrets in a product and sell them, you are at risk that somebody will decode the secrets. You sold them a copy of the damned secrets; they have every right to try to decode them, as they now own a copy of them. (Copyrights and patents may prevent your customers from replicating their purchase or using your secrets, but they don't prevent them from just knowing your secrets.)
Copyrights and patents exist to protect the producers' interests in this case, but only in return for revealing the secrets. That's how it is supposed to work: you reveal your hard work to the world, and in return you get a (formerly) limited-time monopoly. Extending the concept of copyright beyond this clearly goes outside the bounds defined for it in the Constitution, and enforcement of such an expansion interferes with your rights to use your own property. That is why the DMCA is unconstitutional.
I can't understand how somebody can possibly "tresspass" on a copyrighted item, when it is, by definition, publicly published information.
Canada seems so big because of all the Mercator Projection maps out there. I had one on my wall when I was a kid; I still visualize Greenland as the biggest country in the world.
You PeeCee guys don't know anything about the enterprise. Sun systems are worth every penny of their price. We have systems here that have been up and running 24x7 for over 7 years*. Speed isn't everything; these systems are rock solid and almost never fail**. As far as mission-critical transaction processing goes, these systems can't be beat at any price. They have the highest certified TPS of any system on the market***.
*Not counting the times a careless sysadmin knocked the heatsink off of a CPU and fried the chip. We've been told that they are working on more foolproof mounting clips.
**As long as you avoid the E25Ks with the Soyo Super 733FX3 mobos with the Via 8N933A eXtreeme chipsets. Those sux. Flakey as all shit. Oh, and make sure you only buy brand-name memory.
***The winning benchmarks were done using a system with custom aftermarket watercoolers running Opteron 4700++'s overclocked to 6974++. The transaction data was not completely free of corrupted bytes.
Reading? You mean they've made a book based on the script?
Of course. What did you expect? With any big movie, they always try to generate cash with licensed merchandise.
In fact, I've already seen some kind of cheesy "prequel" spinoff book at Barnes & Noble involving that minor Bilbo character. This whole thing looks like it's going to be worse than the Star Wars marketing machine.
I wonder whether aliens are exploiting this to control us/me screams and runs in fear.
Of course they are exploiting SETI. They obviously hack in to all systems that find positive results and surreptitiously replace them with random noise.
They are covering their tracks. How else could you explain this suspicious lack of alien signal evidence after all of these years of searching? This is a coverup of galactic proportions.
Only in recent decades, as the economic product of the United States has become so predominantly conceptual, have issues related to the protection of intellectual property rights come to be seen as significant sources of legal and business uncertainty. Intellectual property is clearly more difficult to define and, hence, to protect. The physical property of one owner cannot occupy the same space as that of another. Ownership of physical property is capable of being defended by police, the militia, or private mercenaries. Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected.
Indeed, the nature of intellectual property is importantly different from physical property. In particular, one individual's use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others for their own, simultaneous use. Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate. From an economic perspective, this provides a rationale for making the calculus, developed initially by Leibnitz and Newton, freely available, despite the fact that those insights have immeasurably increased wealth over the generations. Should we have protected their claim in the same way that we do for owners of land? Or should the law make their insights more freely available to those who would build on them, with the aim of maximizing the wealth of the society as a whole? Are all property rights inalienable, or must they conform to a reality that conditions them?
Hmm.... This is the exact same line of reasoning that I've seen in hundreds of/. posts. I think it's more than likely that Mr. Greenspan has pirated one of these postings. If he wants to make a living discussing economic issues, he needs to go back and innovate his own arguments, then exercise the due dilligence to make sure that they are in fact totally novel. This previously used argument is the rightful property of those whoever first posted it here.
When you make something it is your job to make sure you aren't using someone elses invention, that they have published, not their job to track you down.
The patent office has almost 10e+7 patents on file, probably comprising about 10e+8 claims written in a mind-numbingly obfuscated language. I'm sure every developer has the time to sift through all of these every time a clever idea pops into his head.
Let's see... if you spent one minute considering each claim, you'd know your new idea is free and clear after only 190 years of work! Oh wait, many patents are expired, and most don't apply to your field of work. It might only be 10 years.
Apparently, it took the whole world almost 2 decades to discover that there was a patent covering JPEG.
Microsoft is actually giving a leg up to the little guy in this case.
Microsoft today: "Hey kid! Over here. Try this stuff. The first hit is free!"
Slashdot posting 5 years from now:
"I run a small studio. I'm not happy about the new Microsoft media licensing either, especially the royalty-per-view terms. But we've invested so much in Microsoft software, equipment and training that we just can't afford to switch. We've decided to suck up and pay. Plus, with the exclusive deal Microsoft has with all the theater chains, we just can't use any other format. It's industry standard. I wish there was another viable solution, but this is the only game in town."
True, definitions change, but it's still reasonable to encourage people to use a more appropriate word instead of morphing the meaning of a similar but different word.
OK, but why waste space with a special word that means "reduce by 10%". That's pretty useless. How many times does something get reduced by exactly 10%, vs. 16% or 8% or 53%? Do we need to create special words for each case (octimate == 12.5%; dodecimate == 8.33%)?. If it's further constrained to apply only to Roman army disciplinary procedures, why do we need to allocate an English word at all? It's a rather obscure historical tidbit.
So fighting this seems kind of moot, as Apple needs to migrate OS X to x86 architecture real soon now.
I can easily imagine Apple switching to x86 processors. However, I seriously doubt that they would use a PC BIOS or even legacy PC motherboard I/O devices. They would still feel that they need to be "different".
So even if Apple switches, you won't be able to boot Windows on a Mac or OS X on a PC. You might be able to boot a marginalized Linux distro on an x86 Mac, but you can already do that.
Re:Naturally it IS price fixing
on
LCD Price Fixing?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If coke started selling 12packs for $2.00 what would pepsi do? They would have to compete to survive. Of course Coke can't do that cause they will lose money.
I've bought plenty of 12-packs of Diet Coke for $1.99. I consider anything below $2.50 to be a good sale price for a 12-pack. I do suspect that the store is actually paying more that $2 for the product and using it as a loss leader.
What I notice is that the really good deals at one store tend to alternate between Coke and Pepsi. One week Coke will be cheap, the next week it'll be Pepsi.
Random tip: If you're stuck buying your own soda for work, go with Diet Pepsi. Your scumbag coworkers will steal other peoples' Diet Cokes and/or sugary stuff first before they pilfer your pop.
The best way to help Open Source Companies (a la RedHat) survive is to circumvent their income strategies!
Tell RedHat to screw off! Circumvent the subscription policy with P2P!
Red Hat has nothing to worry about. The media industry or their servants in Washington will soon force all ISPs to limit "broadband" upstream bandwidth to a tiny trickle. It will be enough to allow you to transmit your humble URL requests to http://www.disney.com, but not enough for you to host a P2P node or any other kind of unsupervised server.
The world will soon revert back to pre-Internet centralized control of information. One side effect of this is that Red Hat's business model will remain viable.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess: they'll sell these high-end servers for only $50. The catch is that they'll constantly consume cooling fluid from insanely priced single-use proprietary HP cartridges. What's worse, the server will come only with a half-filled cartridge.
You can't "save" for the future at this scale. You can save money, but people eat food. You can't save a 20 year stockpile of milk for old folks' retirement. If our parents all retire, we're going to be working to produce the goods support them regardless of how much "money" is saved up. Money is compressible like a gas; its value changes based on how many people are using it to acquire goods from a fixed pool of resources.
There are only two possible ways out of this problem: (a) People work longer and retire at an older age, or (b) We invent robots that do the work for us.
All attempts to "fix" social security are merely accounting tricks that shuffle government IOUs between different government accounts. What's really going to happen is that when the taxpayers can't take any more, they will increase the age for benefits payout.
Let me guess; you sleep in the day and stay up all night. Try going up there on a sunny afternoon.
Just because it's fanless doesn't mean it generates no heat. In fact, free airflow is probably more important than with forced-air cooling. I've seen plenty of complaints about how hot that fanless Apple cube box could get.
Covering the box with insulation and putting it in a 140 degree F attic sounds like a sure-fire way to fry the system. I would be surprised if it's not a fire hazard as well.
In their minds, you're getting free video phone service without paying them anything; in their minds, your cable modem bill is only for web surfing and e-mail.
I predict that they will specifically disallow these devices in their service contracts unless you pay a stiff extra monthly fee. They will probably also take technical measures to detect and block this "theft" of their service.
My prediction for an excerpt from such code:
As with so many other legal issues, it's a question of intent. With student-written file sharing systems, you are intentionally sharing your files with the whole world. With Windows File Sharing, you are unintentionally sharing your files with the whole world.
I looked this into this topic a while ago out of curiousity. X86's are actually descendants of the Intel 8008 microcontroller, not the 4004. Today's x86 chips are still assembly-source compatible with the 8008 (not binary compatible; there were automatic tools available to convert 8008 source to 8080 source, for example).
Even though the 4004 was the first microprocessor on the market, the 8008 design was started at Intel prior to the 4004. However, that project was put on the back burner before the 4004 was developed. After the 4004 design was finished, work resumed on the 8008. The 8-bit 8008 and 4-bit 4004 CPUs were not source or binary compatible with each other. (Here is some more info.)
The 4% mortality rate is before all of the hospitals are full and before the world's supply of available respirators is exhausted. If 1,000,000 people in one country catch this, things could be different.
I'm just hoping that this virus mellows out a little bit as it goes through multiple generations in humans, as some viruses have been known to do. That might be the only way it will slow down.
The whole concept of copyrights (as well as patents) was invented so that people would not keep their works secret. It was invented solely to encourage people to publish their work.
Obviously, when the U.S. Constititution was written, nobody expected or imagined that any copyrighted work could be obfuscated or encrypted. The technology didn't exist at the time. Copyright was invented to encourage the publication of plain human-readable text in books and newspapers, nothing else.
It is clear then, that the exception to free speech carved out by the copyright clause does not cover these technical tricks that shroud hidden secrets in the goods you buy. These tricks do not "promote progress in useful arts and sciences".
You are entitled to keep your trade secrets hidden from others. The way to do that is keep the secrets in your own posession. You can lock them in your safe. Someone breaking in to that safe would be trespassing.
However, once you put those secrets in a product and sell them, you are at risk that somebody will decode the secrets. You sold them a copy of the damned secrets; they have every right to try to decode them, as they now own a copy of them. (Copyrights and patents may prevent your customers from replicating their purchase or using your secrets, but they don't prevent them from just knowing your secrets.)
Copyrights and patents exist to protect the producers' interests in this case, but only in return for revealing the secrets. That's how it is supposed to work: you reveal your hard work to the world, and in return you get a (formerly) limited-time monopoly. Extending the concept of copyright beyond this clearly goes outside the bounds defined for it in the Constitution, and enforcement of such an expansion interferes with your rights to use your own property. That is why the DMCA is unconstitutional.
I can't understand how somebody can possibly "tresspass" on a copyrighted item, when it is, by definition, publicly published information.
Canada seems so big because of all the Mercator Projection maps out there. I had one on my wall when I was a kid; I still visualize Greenland as the biggest country in the world.
*Not counting the times a careless sysadmin knocked the heatsink off of a CPU and fried the chip. We've been told that they are working on more foolproof mounting clips.
**As long as you avoid the E25Ks with the Soyo Super 733FX3 mobos with the Via 8N933A eXtreeme chipsets. Those sux. Flakey as all shit. Oh, and make sure you only buy brand-name memory.
***The winning benchmarks were done using a system with custom aftermarket watercoolers running Opteron 4700++'s overclocked to 6974++. The transaction data was not completely free of corrupted bytes.
Of course. What did you expect? With any big movie, they always try to generate cash with licensed merchandise.
In fact, I've already seen some kind of cheesy "prequel" spinoff book at Barnes & Noble involving that minor Bilbo character. This whole thing looks like it's going to be worse than the Star Wars marketing machine.
Of course they are exploiting SETI. They obviously hack in to all systems that find positive results and surreptitiously replace them with random noise.
They are covering their tracks. How else could you explain this suspicious lack of alien signal evidence after all of these years of searching? This is a coverup of galactic proportions.
Indeed, the nature of intellectual property is importantly different from physical property. In particular, one individual's use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others for their own, simultaneous use. Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate. From an economic perspective, this provides a rationale for making the calculus, developed initially by Leibnitz and Newton, freely available, despite the fact that those insights have immeasurably increased wealth over the generations. Should we have protected their claim in the same way that we do for owners of land? Or should the law make their insights more freely available to those who would build on them, with the aim of maximizing the wealth of the society as a whole? Are all property rights inalienable, or must they conform to a reality that conditions them?
Hmm.... This is the exact same line of reasoning that I've seen in hundreds of /. posts. I think it's more than likely that Mr. Greenspan has pirated one of these postings. If he wants to make a living discussing economic issues, he needs to go back and innovate his own arguments, then exercise the due dilligence to make sure that they are in fact totally novel. This previously used argument is the rightful property of those whoever first posted it here.
The patent office has almost 10e+7 patents on file, probably comprising about 10e+8 claims written in a mind-numbingly obfuscated language. I'm sure every developer has the time to sift through all of these every time a clever idea pops into his head.
Let's see... if you spent one minute considering each claim, you'd know your new idea is free and clear after only 190 years of work! Oh wait, many patents are expired, and most don't apply to your field of work. It might only be 10 years.
Apparently, it took the whole world almost 2 decades to discover that there was a patent covering JPEG.
Microsoft today: "Hey kid! Over here. Try this stuff. The first hit is free!"
Slashdot posting 5 years from now: "I run a small studio. I'm not happy about the new Microsoft media licensing either, especially the royalty-per-view terms. But we've invested so much in Microsoft software, equipment and training that we just can't afford to switch. We've decided to suck up and pay. Plus, with the exclusive deal Microsoft has with all the theater chains, we just can't use any other format. It's industry standard. I wish there was another viable solution, but this is the only game in town."
OK, but why waste space with a special word that means "reduce by 10%". That's pretty useless. How many times does something get reduced by exactly 10%, vs. 16% or 8% or 53%? Do we need to create special words for each case (octimate == 12.5%; dodecimate == 8.33%)?. If it's further constrained to apply only to Roman army disciplinary procedures, why do we need to allocate an English word at all? It's a rather obscure historical tidbit.
I say we should let it have a broad meaning.
Mmmm... teats
I can easily imagine Apple switching to x86 processors. However, I seriously doubt that they would use a PC BIOS or even legacy PC motherboard I/O devices. They would still feel that they need to be "different".
So even if Apple switches, you won't be able to boot Windows on a Mac or OS X on a PC. You might be able to boot a marginalized Linux distro on an x86 Mac, but you can already do that.
I've bought plenty of 12-packs of Diet Coke for $1.99. I consider anything below $2.50 to be a good sale price for a 12-pack. I do suspect that the store is actually paying more that $2 for the product and using it as a loss leader.
What I notice is that the really good deals at one store tend to alternate between Coke and Pepsi. One week Coke will be cheap, the next week it'll be Pepsi.
Random tip: If you're stuck buying your own soda for work, go with Diet Pepsi. Your scumbag coworkers will steal other peoples' Diet Cokes and/or sugary stuff first before they pilfer your pop.
Red Hat has nothing to worry about. The media industry or their servants in Washington will soon force all ISPs to limit "broadband" upstream bandwidth to a tiny trickle. It will be enough to allow you to transmit your humble URL requests to http://www.disney.com, but not enough for you to host a P2P node or any other kind of unsupervised server.
The world will soon revert back to pre-Internet centralized control of information. One side effect of this is that Red Hat's business model will remain viable.
How about: "Over 22 years without no remote hole in the default install."