That lawyers can seed the internet with their email addresses, take the spammers to court and collect their fees for defending themselves. I like it:-)
The K7 is supposed to be a full generation ahead of the PIII.
The bus speed is doubled, the cache is better, and yet it only gains 9% improvement in Integer performance.
It's dissapointing.
This is a comparison of an ASUS motherboard over a year old, and a chip which you can get now to an AMD "reference" board, and a chip which I know you couldn't buy unless you tried really hard or paid a heck of a lot of money for. According to AMD "Consumer systems based on the AMD Athlon processor are planned to be available in Q3 1999." -- I don't think Intel has any big plans for September, but they're not going to stand idly by.
I want AMD to kick some butt as much as the next guy, but abyssmal FP didn't sink AMD in the past, and stellar FP isn't going to make them big in the future.
But you're right, the FP performance is definately strong. If this chip is produced in decent volume and cheap enough, it will be serious competition for Intel. I just don't think AMD's production track record is all that great, and I can't think of any reason why a 200MHz SlotA motherboard made in lower volumes than a Slot1 board is going to be cheap.
Their stock roughly triples whenever they get a good chip out which seems like it is going to beat Intel's. When I say better, I mean like the time when the fastest chip you could buy was AMD's, and it was cheaper than Intel's. The only thing Intel had going for it then was reputation... then the math bug became a hot issue...
Personally, I think the pattern is broken. The K7 with motherboard isn't going to significantly outperform or undercut the Intel chips. If I thought it would, I would look into the precise correlation of the stocks to the particular chips.
Yahoo has some good charts. Check the long range here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMD&d=my
I think some of the peaks are the AMD386DX40, the AMD486DX4-120, and the tallest one is the K6... those sad little peaks on the end are probably speculation and hype from the II and III.
Whomever is watching AMD closer, feel free to tear this analysis to bits. I don't know squat about stocks. I do know a lot of people lost money quickly when their stock went from $27 to $17 earlier this year. All the while AMD just pretended that their production issues were solved. How did that silly class-action lawsuit go anyways?
Only put the money into them if you can afford to lose it. I do agree with the "supporting a good competitor" argument. I just don't think AMD has much of a chance anymore. Corel could be fun though.
The K7 doesn't have a huge edge despite requiring a more sophisicated motherboard. Even if they make their volumes and already had the same reputation as Intel, it would still be a tight run for the money.
But AMD and Intel aren't on equal footing. Intel has enough cash in their pocket to be very competitive with their chips. For some reason, they also have a better reputation.
I'll buy one of these guys if I see one, but unfortunately, I think I'll see AMD go bankrupt before they get enough volume out the door to put a K7 in front of me at prices near the MSRP. I'm still waiting to see a K6-III for less than the price of a Celeron with motherboard.
I'm beginning to think it is a good thing that I didn't buy stock in the company.
Similar experiences here... but if there is no BSOD, and the machine just freezes, although it should be hardware, and is generally solved by changing hardware components, why does Linux behave fine on the same systems?
Maybe NT is pushing the hardware more, maybe NT is more succeptable to being affected by certain types of hardware failures, but in my experience Linux is more stable than NT.
I've been toying with the idea that maybe linux kernel mode processes are statistically a "smaller target" than NT kernel mode processes. That failures in Linux are far more likely to occur in userspace... and leave the system perfectly functional. This is going way beyond the area of my expertise, it sounds positively nutty, but it's a working theory.
System lockups are almost certianly hardware related, but the same hardware failures just don't seem to happen on Linux. I can get a rock-solid linux box from almost any cruddy hardware. I just can't do that with NT.
Here's an experiment... Let's get a rock-solid computer, and generate a kernel-mode process which will randomly shuffle a bit somewhere on the system, simulating a botched memory cell or a hardware glitch of some form. Just for fun, and to make the idea clear, let's have this process available over the network. Let's call this thing "Splork".
On the left we have Linux, on the right, we have NT. Both NT and Linux are outfitted with user-mode processes which will trigger "Splork" on the opposing machine... lets's call this process "Bang".
Bang fires off Splork, if the target machine is still alive, Splork calls Bang and hits the the other machine... Eventually, one machine will stop shooting back.
Equip a third machine with a couple reset switches, and some monitoring software....
Let this run long enough to generate some good sample data... and see which machine is more tolerant of being Splorked by bad hardware.
Hey, it is no more strange than watching a machine lock up for no good reason... Don't rip this idea apart unless you really see a flaw in the logic.
Wasn't this thing supposed to run some kind of Linux utilities or something? I find it highly unlikely that they modified the linux kernel to run BeOS or BeOS components... besides being illegal if undistributed, that level of integration would be a waste of time. It probably just runs Be and some ported Linux apps.
I don't think it is racism, I think it has more to do with people who's only view of Africa is the Sahara desert, rainforests, slash-and burn agriculture, famine, AIDS statistics, South African politics and all the other stuff we pick up from CNN and CCF ads.
As for the "Pearls to the pigs" analogy... I'm just going to assume that it was just a very poor choice of words.
I think people are a bit shocked that money is being poured into communications infrastructure when people in North America are being innundated with ads to sponsor African children for food and vaccines. I think they expect to see money poured into food, water and electricity. I'm also pretty ignorant of the economics of Africa... but at least I'm keeping my mouth shut on concerning whether or not Africa needs the upgrade.
I don't think that kind of code would legally constitute source code. The company would still be holding its own original copy with full documentation... a version which could not be released without running it through this "shrouding" utility.
Shrouding sounds like an intermediate step, kind of like compiling without linking. Just because it has to be compiled to be useful, it does not mean that it is source.
It's an interesting point though... I wonder if the wording of the GPL accounts for this...
Just imagine the company trying to defend themselves in court. "If this is the source code, why is H23F476 calling B343256 on line 320 of X353423.c?"
This doesn't strike me as all that interesting. For $199, you could buy a 486 and the appropriate preipherals for surfing the web.
As a tech, I could do it without a second thought, but I suppose if you don't know anything about computers, this would be easier to work with.
Does this use a TV set? Do you need a monitor? Monitors are too expensive and TVs are too lousy. This thing might make it if they kick in a DVD player, and digital TV tuner. But I wonder what a device like that would cost...
You know, Windows'98 reboots faster now. It might be a "more stable" operating system for you.
I can't say I agree with your logic.
I know there must be something in operating system theory to stop process starvation for critical system proceses when the system is under heavy load. This is something I never liked about modern OSes, there needs to be a CPU time quota or something. I suppose the overhead of monitoring CPU usage is a greater evil than keeping an eye out for runaway processes... at least if it is done in a way which cannot be intentionally circumvented....
It has nothing to do with antialiasing. I'm using Windows, I have to support it in a technical support environment, and I can tell you that I hate antialiasing. It just makes everything soft, blurry and kills all the contrast. Windows' rendering of TT fonts is, for the mostpart pixel-perfect. There must be a trick to get this stuff right in the rendering engine or something. It is as though someone manually mapped each pixel in the character cells. Right down to little dips in the Roman letter 'c' to 45 degree angles in the letters 'k' and 'x'. I think there is more intellgence in the engine than an automatically scaled and generated character can provide.
Eventually, Xwindow will have to provide similar clear, sharp, efficient fonts. I find X difficult to use simply because either the fonts are too big and surrounded by copious whitespace, or the fonts are so crushed and small that the letter 'e' looks like a reversed apostrophe or a smudged 'c', and the letters k, d or p look like a chunk of burnt meat on a stick.
I really would like Xwindow to be more pleasant. but antialiasing is a cheap hack. Given the choice, I'll take meat on a stick over fuzzy meat on a stick any day.
It could be sooo much better... and I know there must be a way to fix it, but it shouldn't ship this ugly and unusable.
Some day I might be able to do better and contribute. Alas, this is off topic... Just ignore me.
Am I the only one who smells MS setting up a migration path?
4) PerlScript performance
Caching and cloning of compiled scripts will significantly boost the performance of PerlScript running under IIS/ASP.
Personally, a better Perl on NT is fantastic. It increases the value of Perl as a programming language... Now I have no reservations about spending the time to learn it. On the otherhand, it bugs me that Microsoft seems to be making a good move, and integrating one of my favorite features of Unix into NT. Not necesarily Perl, just a good scripting language.
What if a body were to certify the software's EULA?
A stamp of approval would only appear on packages which do not contain false advertising, have decent return policies, and are gauranteed to work.
If an end-user buys a game with ridiculously low system requirements, finds it unplayable, calls the company and is told "Sorry sir, you've opened the cellophane.", the End-user could call up the certificaiton body and tell them that they have been stiffed by a member.
Sort of a BBB for software.
I could imagine heaps of cash wasted on stupid people returning software because they can't read a manual, but that's the norm these days.
It's not at all practical for use in the city, and it's a silly design, but if you have the money this little guy would mean that your trip to the cottage doesn't have to be three to six hours in bumper to bumper traffic, but a short drive to the airport or some new kind of helipad... and poof, in an hour, you're further into cottage country than most roads can take you.
It could also open up a whole new realm of commuting for people who need to commute between distant cities... Some people already buy small aircraft for this purpose.
I think that's how cars started out around the turn of the century... the wealthy started moving to the suburbs. In twenty years they might be living anywhere they feel like. Be it telecommuting or hopping into your personal aircraft.
IMHO, I think it would be better to get rid of roads, cars and any notions of personal aircraft, and replace them with thick public transportation and work at home network access. If all the roads were ripped out of my city, and the buildings pushed together I could walk to work. A two-day workweek would be nice, with the pay of a five day week... hmm... then I could work three jobs and buy an aircraft to commute to cottage country:-)
Yeah, I guess you're right, every server needs a web browser to view a man page or helpfile. I'll throw out 'less' once Netscape 5 comes out.
It's thin... for a webbrowser. But who needs five or ten megs of code soaking up another ten megs of ram just to view a helpfile? Even if it is only two megs of ram, it is still two completely wasted megs of ram.
It's neat, but I hope it comes with an off switch.
Nobody can judge anybody else's personal pain. We are products of the societies we are raised in. It's the flipside of this pyramid. Sometimes the people being beaten the most at school, who have the most quiet voices are feeling the least pain. They've grown accustomed to the abuse.
Who hurts more? The popular kid who's rejected by their peers, or the unpopular kid who's rejected by their peers?
Is the unpopular kid deserving of a "reality check?" Should we throw him into a greater hell simply because he isn't in enough pain where he is? Should we call him selfish if he cries?
It's a damn shame he doesn't want to be beaten up every day. He should take it with pride and tell himself that as long as the Ethiopians are starving, he has no right to complain. His agressors are good kids -- They're not crying 'What about ME.'
It's a little more complicated being selfish or "keeping up with the Jones'."
It would be nice to have the option of which bloated HTML/XML engine to use for displaying your help files.
I opt for 'less'. I'll save a few megabytes of ram and just parse it all in my head.
I love the idea regardless, I just fear that this may push the system requirements up for very simple applications... I guess it's the way of the future though.
In my dayjob, I provide nuclear arms to Pakistan, at night, I harass Austrailian nationals.
I've thought about this stuff... (No, not providing arms to Pakistan!, this whole big superintelligence X-Files conspiracy thing)... no matter what they do, the algorithms probably aren't smart enough to pick up on fine details of conversation, and the authors of them are probably well aware of the fact that anybody in their right mind would use keywords or encryption in an important conversation.
What if this computer picks up on interesting things like... hmmm this number keeps calling Pakistan/Pakistan embassy, or there are a good number of calls coming from city Z to one particular number in Pakistan, the odd thing about these calls is that they can not be trivially deciphered, and they do not fit the patterns of human voice... I'm going to start tracking some of these and put up some flags.
My point is, they don't have to listen to everything, they only have to listen to the unusual... like the phones of all top exectives of all multinational corporations, all embassies, all unusual encrypted international transmissions... especially ones coming from hotels or payphones.
I think the best way to handle this is to call up every foriegn embassy in your city from the same payphone and have a very slow and serious conversation about watermelons. Lots of detail about when their arriving, and what they will cost.
Be sure to send them heavily encrypted copies of AOL CDs too.
(P.S. No disrespect intended towards Pakistan, only Austrailian nationals:-))
The industry evolves fast. MS already has their active server pages, and some IE-only sites.
Is it infeasible that MS would suddenly start putting warning messages up like:
The site you are viewing is not an Active server Page. Microsoft does not gaurantee that the site will render correctly.
Do you want to be warned of this in the future?
How is this different than what they did with DR Dos? If Mozilla fails, IE will be the browser... what's to stop them from leverageing IIS as the standard?
Microsoft isn't a software company, it's a monopoly company. It doesn't develop its product to survive, it survives by attacking the competition's immune system.
This is not to say that their products are without merit. Their products are of minimal merit. Just barely stable enough (99.9% uptime), barely secure enough (C2 Security), barely open enough (Currently investigating open source) and standards complant enough (Posix, OS/2) to squeak past the IT managers.
I wonder if MS will attack Linux with FUD, attempt to sabotage the codebase, or engineer incompatabilities into their OS. For instance extending SMB further to intentionally make it legally or technically difficult to emulate. Make IE not render pages generated by Apache, or perhaps a warning that perfomance is not gauranteed with Apache servers... kind of like what they did to DR DOS.
I don't like this one bit. Don't doubt the capabilites of MS, the history is quite clear, they fight dirty.
The popularity of linux is all that seems to concern MS. Orignially, Linux did not depend on popularity to continue. I hope that is still the case.
I always thought DRAM uses a simple feedback circuit to store bits. How could you possibly create a capacitor small enough, maintain any reasonable charge at all and squash millions of them into a few sware milimeters?
FUD implies an intention to mislead people. I suppose technically one could argue that any argument made without a clear understanding of the facts could potentially cause FUD, but that's just blurring the lines a bit much.
The people afraid of TT being bought out by MS were bringing up a legitimate concern. It just happens that this concern was already being addressed in the licencing.
FUD implies to me that these people were intentionally bringing up points which were not legitimate, or that they were misleading people in order to bolster support for their favorite competing product. I really don't think this is the case.
There were a good number of people arguing on both sides of the TT licencing issues who were guilty of not being clearly informed. By arguing that people who reject KDE based on the TT license are guilty of spreading FUD, you could just as easily say that if a magical hole in the licencing is found and everything falls to hell, that the people arguing on the part of KDE are suddenly guilty of creating pro MS FUD? Why not? They were arguing that Gnome was inferior to KDE and that KDE's licencing issues weren't an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
That lawyers can seed the internet with their email addresses, take the spammers to court and collect their fees for defending themselves. I like it :-)
PII 450 18.5
PIII 450 18.7
PIII 500 20.6
PIII 550 22.3
http://www.intel.com/procs/perf/Celeron/productivi ty/specint95.htm
Celeron
300A 12.0
333 13.1
366 14.1
400 15.1
433 16.1
466 17.0
The K7 is supposed to be a full generation ahead of the PIII.
The bus speed is doubled, the cache is better, and yet it only gains 9% improvement in Integer performance.
It's dissapointing.
This is a comparison of an ASUS motherboard over a year old, and a chip which you can get now to an AMD "reference" board, and a chip which I know you couldn't buy unless you tried really hard or paid a heck of a lot of money for. According to AMD "Consumer systems based on the AMD Athlon processor are planned to be available in Q3 1999." -- I don't think Intel has any big plans for September, but they're not going to stand idly by.
I want AMD to kick some butt as much as the next guy, but abyssmal FP didn't sink AMD in the past, and stellar FP isn't going to make them big in the future.
But you're right, the FP performance is definately strong. If this chip is produced in decent volume and cheap enough, it will be serious competition for Intel. I just don't think AMD's production track record is all that great, and I can't think of any reason why a 200MHz SlotA motherboard made in lower volumes than a Slot1 board is going to be cheap.
Their stock roughly triples whenever they get a good chip out which seems like it is going to beat Intel's. When I say better, I mean like the time when the fastest chip you could buy was AMD's, and it was cheaper than Intel's. The only thing Intel had going for it then was reputation... then the math bug became a hot issue...
Personally, I think the pattern is broken. The K7 with motherboard isn't going to significantly outperform or undercut the Intel chips. If I thought it would, I would look into the precise correlation of the stocks to the particular chips.
Yahoo has some good charts. Check the long range here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMD&d=my
I think some of the peaks are the AMD386DX40, the AMD486DX4-120, and the tallest one is the K6... those sad little peaks on the end are probably speculation and hype from the II and III.
Whomever is watching AMD closer, feel free to tear this analysis to bits. I don't know squat about stocks. I do know a lot of people lost money quickly when their stock went from $27 to $17 earlier this year. All the while AMD just pretended that their production issues were solved. How did that silly class-action lawsuit go anyways?
Only put the money into them if you can afford to lose it. I do agree with the "supporting a good competitor" argument. I just don't think AMD has much of a chance anymore. Corel could be fun though.
The K7 doesn't have a huge edge despite requiring a more sophisicated motherboard. Even if they make their volumes and already had the same reputation as Intel, it would still be a tight run for the money.
But AMD and Intel aren't on equal footing. Intel has enough cash in their pocket to be very competitive with their chips. For some reason, they also have a better reputation.
I'll buy one of these guys if I see one, but unfortunately, I think I'll see AMD go bankrupt before they get enough volume out the door to put a K7 in front of me at prices near the MSRP. I'm still waiting to see a K6-III for less than the price of a Celeron with motherboard.
I'm beginning to think it is a good thing that I didn't buy stock in the company.
Similar experiences here... but if there is no BSOD, and the machine just freezes, although it should be hardware, and is generally solved by changing hardware components, why does Linux behave fine on the same systems?
Maybe NT is pushing the hardware more, maybe NT is more succeptable to being affected by certain types of hardware failures, but in my experience Linux is more stable than NT.
I've been toying with the idea that maybe linux kernel mode processes are statistically a "smaller target" than NT kernel mode processes. That failures in Linux are far more likely to occur in userspace... and leave the system perfectly functional. This is going way beyond the area of my expertise, it sounds positively nutty, but it's a working theory.
System lockups are almost certianly hardware related, but the same hardware failures just don't seem to happen on Linux. I can get a rock-solid linux box from almost any cruddy hardware. I just can't do that with NT.
Here's an experiment... Let's get a rock-solid computer, and generate a kernel-mode process which will randomly shuffle a bit somewhere on the system, simulating a botched memory cell or a hardware glitch of some form. Just for fun, and to make the idea clear, let's have this process available over the network. Let's call this thing "Splork".
On the left we have Linux, on the right, we have NT. Both NT and Linux are outfitted with user-mode processes which will trigger "Splork" on the opposing machine... lets's call this process "Bang".
Bang fires off Splork, if the target machine is still alive, Splork calls Bang and hits the the other machine... Eventually, one machine will stop shooting back.
Equip a third machine with a couple reset switches, and some monitoring software....
Let this run long enough to generate some good sample data... and see which machine is more tolerant of being Splorked by bad hardware.
Hey, it is no more strange than watching a machine lock up for no good reason... Don't rip this idea apart unless you really see a flaw in the logic.
Yes, evil Redhat! Luring open source developers away from their open source projects in order to work on RedHat's own twisted open source agenda!
We're living in a world where a talented developer just can't starve anymore!
Wasn't this thing supposed to run some kind of Linux utilities or something? I find it highly unlikely that they modified the linux kernel to run BeOS or BeOS components... besides being illegal if undistributed, that level of integration would be a waste of time. It probably just runs Be and some ported Linux apps.
All this is just idle speculation though.
I don't think it is racism, I think it has more to do with people who's only view of Africa is the Sahara desert, rainforests, slash-and burn agriculture, famine, AIDS statistics, South African politics and all the other stuff we pick up from CNN and CCF ads.
As for the "Pearls to the pigs" analogy... I'm just going to assume that it was just a very poor choice of words.
I think people are a bit shocked that money is being poured into communications infrastructure when people in North America are being innundated with ads to sponsor African children for food and vaccines. I think they expect to see money poured into food, water and electricity. I'm also pretty ignorant of the economics of Africa... but at least I'm keeping my mouth shut on concerning whether or not Africa needs the upgrade.
I don't think that kind of code would legally constitute source code. The company would still be holding its own original copy with full documentation... a version which could not be released without running it through this "shrouding" utility.
Shrouding sounds like an intermediate step, kind of like compiling without linking. Just because it has to be compiled to be useful, it does not mean that it is source.
It's an interesting point though... I wonder if the wording of the GPL accounts for this...
Just imagine the company trying to defend themselves in court. "If this is the source code, why is H23F476 calling B343256 on line 320 of X353423.c?"
This doesn't strike me as all that interesting. For $199, you could buy a 486 and the appropriate preipherals for surfing the web.
As a tech, I could do it without a second thought, but I suppose if you don't know anything about computers, this would be easier to work with.
Does this use a TV set? Do you need a monitor? Monitors are too expensive and TVs are too lousy. This thing might make it if they kick in a DVD player, and digital TV tuner. But I wonder what a device like that would cost...
You know, Windows'98 reboots faster now. It might be a "more stable" operating system for you.
I can't say I agree with your logic.
I know there must be something in operating system theory to stop process starvation for critical system proceses when the system is under heavy load. This is something I never liked about modern OSes, there needs to be a CPU time quota or something. I suppose the overhead of monitoring CPU usage is a greater evil than keeping an eye out for runaway processes... at least if it is done in a way which cannot be intentionally circumvented....
It has nothing to do with antialiasing. I'm using Windows, I have to support it in a technical support environment, and I can tell you that I hate antialiasing. It just makes everything soft, blurry and kills all the contrast. Windows' rendering of TT fonts is, for the mostpart pixel-perfect. There must be a trick to get this stuff right in the rendering engine or something. It is as though someone manually mapped each pixel in the character cells. Right down to little dips in the Roman letter 'c' to 45 degree angles in the letters 'k' and 'x'. I think there is more intellgence in the engine than an automatically scaled and generated character can provide.
Eventually, Xwindow will have to provide similar clear, sharp, efficient fonts. I find X difficult to use simply because either the fonts are too big and surrounded by copious whitespace, or the fonts are so crushed and small that the letter 'e' looks like a reversed apostrophe or a smudged 'c', and the letters k, d or p look like a chunk of burnt meat on a stick.
I really would like Xwindow to be more pleasant. but antialiasing is a cheap hack. Given the choice, I'll take meat on a stick over fuzzy meat on a stick any day.
It could be sooo much better... and I know there must be a way to fix it, but it shouldn't ship this ugly and unusable.
Some day I might be able to do better and contribute. Alas, this is off topic... Just ignore me.
Am I the only one who smells MS setting up a migration path?
Personally, a better Perl on NT is fantastic. It increases the value of Perl as a programming language... Now I have no reservations about spending the time to learn it. On the otherhand, it bugs me that Microsoft seems to be making a good move, and integrating one of my favorite features of Unix into NT. Not necesarily Perl, just a good scripting language.
The less I have to deal with NT the better.
What if a body were to certify the software's EULA?
A stamp of approval would only appear on packages which do not contain false advertising, have decent return policies, and are gauranteed to work.
If an end-user buys a game with ridiculously low system requirements, finds it unplayable, calls the company and is told "Sorry sir, you've opened the cellophane.", the End-user could call up the certificaiton body and tell them that they have been stiffed by a member.
Sort of a BBB for software.
I could imagine heaps of cash wasted on stupid people returning software because they can't read a manual, but that's the norm these days.
Just a thought.
It's not at all practical for use in the city, and it's a silly design, but if you have the money this little guy would mean that your trip to the cottage doesn't have to be three to six hours in bumper to bumper traffic, but a short drive to the airport or some new kind of helipad... and poof, in an hour, you're further into cottage country than most roads can take you.
It could also open up a whole new realm of commuting for people who need to commute between distant cities... Some people already buy small aircraft for this purpose.
I think that's how cars started out around the turn of the century... the wealthy started moving to the suburbs. In twenty years they might be living anywhere they feel like. Be it telecommuting or hopping into your personal aircraft.
IMHO, I think it would be better to get rid of roads, cars and any notions of personal aircraft, and replace them with thick public transportation and work at home network access. If all the roads were ripped out of my city, and the buildings pushed together I could walk to work. A two-day workweek would be nice, with the pay of a five day week... hmm... then I could work three jobs and buy an aircraft to commute to cottage country :-)
OK, knock me down a point.. I'm off topic.
Yeah, I guess you're right, every server needs a web browser to view a man page or helpfile. I'll throw out 'less' once Netscape 5 comes out.
It's thin... for a webbrowser. But who needs five or ten megs of code soaking up another ten megs of ram just to view a helpfile? Even if it is only two megs of ram, it is still two completely wasted megs of ram.
It's neat, but I hope it comes with an off switch.
Nobody can judge anybody else's personal pain. We are products of the societies we are raised in. It's the flipside of this pyramid. Sometimes the people being beaten the most at school, who have the most quiet voices are feeling the least pain. They've grown accustomed to the abuse.
Who hurts more? The popular kid who's rejected by their peers, or the unpopular kid who's rejected by their peers?
Is the unpopular kid deserving of a "reality check?" Should we throw him into a greater hell simply because he isn't in enough pain where he is? Should we call him selfish if he cries?
It's a damn shame he doesn't want to be beaten up every day. He should take it with pride and tell himself that as long as the Ethiopians are starving, he has no right to complain. His agressors are good kids -- They're not crying 'What about ME.'
It's a little more complicated being selfish or "keeping up with the Jones'."
It would be nice to have the option of which bloated HTML/XML engine to use for displaying your help files.
I opt for 'less'. I'll save a few megabytes of ram and just parse it all in my head.
I love the idea regardless, I just fear that this may push the system requirements up for very simple applications... I guess it's the way of the future though.
What an insult.
Being home... alone... unharassed... on any night whatsoever was paradise.
I think they completely missed the point.
In my dayjob, I provide nuclear arms to Pakistan, at night, I harass Austrailian nationals.
I've thought about this stuff... (No, not providing arms to Pakistan!, this whole big superintelligence X-Files conspiracy thing)... no matter what they do, the algorithms probably aren't smart enough to pick up on fine details of conversation, and the authors of them are probably well aware of the fact that anybody in their right mind would use keywords or encryption in an important conversation.
What if this computer picks up on interesting things like... hmmm this number keeps calling Pakistan/Pakistan embassy, or there are a good number of calls coming from city Z to one particular number in Pakistan, the odd thing about these calls is that they can not be trivially deciphered, and they do not fit the patterns of human voice... I'm going to start tracking some of these and put up some flags.
My point is, they don't have to listen to everything, they only have to listen to the unusual... like the phones of all top exectives of all multinational corporations, all embassies, all unusual encrypted international transmissions... especially ones coming from hotels or payphones.
I think the best way to handle this is to call up every foriegn embassy in your city from the same payphone and have a very slow and serious conversation about watermelons. Lots of detail about when their arriving, and what they will cost.
Be sure to send them heavily encrypted copies of AOL CDs too.
(P.S. No disrespect intended towards Pakistan, only Austrailian nationals :-))
The industry evolves fast. MS already has their active server pages, and some IE-only sites.
Is it infeasible that MS would suddenly start putting warning messages up like:
The site you are viewing is not an Active server Page. Microsoft does not gaurantee that the site will render correctly.
Do you want to be warned of this in the future?
How is this different than what they did with DR Dos? If Mozilla fails, IE will be the browser... what's to stop them from leverageing IIS as the standard?
Microsoft isn't a software company, it's a monopoly company. It doesn't develop its product to survive, it survives by attacking the competition's immune system.
This is not to say that their products are without merit. Their products are of minimal merit. Just barely stable enough (99.9% uptime), barely secure enough (C2 Security), barely open enough (Currently investigating open source) and standards complant enough (Posix, OS/2) to squeak past the IT managers.
I wonder if MS will attack Linux with FUD, attempt to sabotage the codebase, or engineer incompatabilities into their OS. For instance extending SMB further to intentionally make it legally or technically difficult to emulate. Make IE not render pages generated by Apache, or perhaps a warning that perfomance is not gauranteed with Apache servers... kind of like what they did to DR DOS.
I don't like this one bit. Don't doubt the capabilites of MS, the history is quite clear, they fight dirty.
The popularity of linux is all that seems to concern MS. Orignially, Linux did not depend on popularity to continue. I hope that is still the case.
I always thought DRAM uses a simple feedback circuit to store bits. How could you possibly create a capacitor small enough, maintain any reasonable charge at all and squash millions of them into a few sware milimeters?
What were those capacitance laws again?
FUD implies an intention to mislead people. I suppose technically one could argue that any argument made without a clear understanding of the facts could potentially cause FUD, but that's just blurring the lines a bit much.
The people afraid of TT being bought out by MS were bringing up a legitimate concern. It just happens that this concern was already being addressed in the licencing.
FUD implies to me that these people were intentionally bringing up points which were not legitimate, or that they were misleading people in order to bolster support for their favorite competing product. I really don't think this is the case.
There were a good number of people arguing on both sides of the TT licencing issues who were guilty of not being clearly informed. By arguing that people who reject KDE based on the TT license are guilty of spreading FUD, you could just as easily say that if a magical hole in the licencing is found and everything falls to hell, that the people arguing on the part of KDE are suddenly guilty of creating pro MS FUD? Why not? They were arguing that Gnome was inferior to KDE and that KDE's licencing issues weren't an issue.
And this post is not FUD! It's an opinion.