"I think you need to learn what 'monoculture' actually means. You are merely describing crop rotation - of monoculture crops. That's still monoculture! To avoid a mopnoculture, you would need to grow several complimentary crops together, simultaneously - not individual crops serially."
Correct. I think you just mis-read what I wrote. You and I are in violent agreement.
"Hardiness traits tend to unnecessary/irrevelant if you raise crops that are seasonal more enviromentally appropiate. Local varieties would be a better fit for the conditions and tend not to freeze/die/wilt as often as exotic and introduced crops....
Eliminating the shipping of crops for huge distances, and eating food grown more locally would mean that adding shipping resistant traits would be less neccessary."
Ah, but then you're telling the third world to, "grow your own food." That doesn't tend to work out so well, and you get people like the OP claiming that "there's no lack of food," when in fact there IS a lack of food, because you simply cannot ship it to where it's needed without ballooning the price to the point that it cannot possibly sell.
"You can ship things that are dry and easy to ship. Rice/Grains/Cereals are very shippable and don't need additional modifications."
Even grains are tough to ship very long distances. You have pest problems if you ship by sea. By air, you get fewer pests, but you also increase the cost massively. By rail you get some pests, and the cost is moderate, but there's often no decent land-bridge (e.g. to ship from Russia to Africa means going through the middle-east... and that means heavy losses every time someone decides to bomb you tracks to make a point).
I see your points, but I hope that you see mine. GM foods are neither a cure-all, nor the great satan. It's simply a new way of managing our food supply. More to come, I'm sure....
Ep5 was great because LK worked some heavy magic over it, and it was still something fairly new.
Ep6 was the warning bell that Lucas had begun to believe that he could do anything and it would still be great. There were moments (Vader looking at his hand; the death of Yoda; etc.), but they were just that: moments. All you have to do is say, "Ewoks," and everyone seems to snap back and remember how disapointed they were. Keep in mind also that Ep6 had LK working his magic again, but more from behind the scenes (script work only) this time.
Ep1 was an amazing exploration of CG... and a mildly interesting introduction to the prequel trilogy, but again all you have to do is say, "Jar Jar," and people recall the horror...
Ep2 was a botched love story on top of what was actually not a half-bad action flick, introducing the clone wars. I liked Ep2, but you have to admit that it wasn't worth Ep6 & Ep1.
Clone Wars was a wonderful bit of work, especially season 3. It just kept getting better, just like Samuari Jack... and THAT is because it was GT doing it, not GL!
So... in answer to your question, we're being negative because we cannot imagine that Lucas is going to spin off a show worth watching. It's really that simple.
Now, if he got Joss Whedon to run the show with a few of the writers from Battlestar Galactica, then I could see it working, but not with Lucas in control.
>Introducing natural pesticides that eliminate or >reduce the use of man-made chemicals that injure >both the environment and the health of the people >consuming the food while lowering the cost of the >food
No, there's one of my points.
Inducing natural pesticides into foods encourages those pests to gain immunity to those pesticides.
Replace the beginning of that sentence with "using", and it's still true. Of course, this is a known problem with ANY pesticide, but that does not change the fact that having plants produce small amounts of natural pesticides is FAR more beneficial than hosing down your entire field repeatedly.
Yes, of course monocultures are going to get you into a problematic state. Please do not assume that this is news to anyone. This is why you would rotate through several straints with different properties.
That seems to be your only beef with the points I made, so I guess that's all we need to cover.
"I don't want a standard RAW format; I want the camera to give its data unmodified."
That is essentially what you get with DNG, which is an extension of the TIFF 6.0 spec, to allow for the most common camera features and an extension mechanism (TIFF provides one, so there's nothing new here) for camera-specific data. Cameras can choose how to handle masked pixels, byte order, and a host of other parameters without having to craft their own metadata, and thus the vast majority of images will be readable by existing software as soon as a new camera comes out. Some cameras may actually have some unique feature that's worth crafting an extension to DNG, and they can do that.
It's like Adobe's saying "you must store all of your images in 24-bit pixels inside an XML document," here. They're kind of used to this image-manipulation thing, and odds are they got this one right.
"The real danger of genetically engineered ANYTHING is that you risk creating a monoculture, which could make an entire food crop or species vulnerable to rapid extinction under adverse conditions."
That's quite true... with or without GM foods. Plant cloning has been used in seed production for quite some time now, so don't expect massive genetic diversity in your crops.
GM foods don't really change much in that respect.
It shocks me that you even have to ask this question, but Ok, here's some of the items off the top of my head:
Introducing natural pesticides that eliminate or reduce the use of man-made chemicals that injure both the environment and the health of the people consuming the food while lowering the cost of the food
Making crops more hardy, avoiding massive price spikes (and thus dietary swings for the poor), when weather or disease wipe out a crop.
Eliminating the need to selectively breed for survivability in cold storage, thus putting the selective breeding weight back on things like taste (tomatoes are a great example of the damage that such breeding has done... remember when they used to TASTE LIKE TOMATOES?)
Increasing shelf-life, and therefore the range at which food can be reasonably delivered (this directly impacts the price of food in the third world, as getting food in place before it rots is a huge cost).
Providing nutrients (e.g. iodine) which people in certain parts of the world tend to suffer from the lack of.
The list goes on, and is actually quite huge. There are ethical, legislative, and technical hurdles involved, but let's not try to pretend that this is in any way being done "just because", or for purely selfish reasons. This is potentially one of the most important steps man will take since the initial cultivation of crops.
US Copyright law requires Google to defend their copyright or lose it. There is nothing evil about doing what you are required to do in order to defend your brand name.
For those unaware, here's the timeline:
2000
the domain, Froogles.com was purchased
2002
Froogles.com goes live, followed by Google bringing up Froogle.com, seemingly in response, and filing for trademark protection for Froogle.com
2003
Froogles.com files for trademark protection and attempts to block Google's trademark on Froogle.com
2004
Froogle.com trademark is granted to Google.
As you can see, this was an escalation between the two companies, but the fact of the matter is that running a search engine called/^[a-z]oogles?.com$/ is pretty much guaranteed to make an adversary of Google. Oh the shock!;-)
Evil, in my book, would be applying for and enforcing trivial software patents; forcing lesser companies to accept monopolistic strings attached to routine business dealings; or forcing users to accept ads that render useful content difficult or impossible to use (especially for the disabled). Asking companies to be creative and come up with their own names is about as far from evil as you can get.
"Aha, I see now. So it is up to distro makers to give extensive testing for each kernel release. Hmmm... I wonder how a middleman distro would work out."
Well, that's kind of what Fedora and Debian are. You can participate in the QA/release process for either one, and that feeds up-stream into the distributions (like RHEL and Ubuntu), which are based on them.
"The Redhat article admits that there is fragmentation on EXT2 and admits that no well established utility exists for fixing this"
Ok, time for a little tutorial, since you're clearly unaware of what fragmentation means for moderm filesystems (I really wish someone had dumped FAT into the Sun in 1990 so that we could have reasonable discussions about filesystems today).
There are two problems with fragmentation:
Permanent loss of storage space -- This is simply not a problem in modern filesystems, but old filesystems like FAT or dawn-of-time Unix filesystems would run into this problem.
Performance hits resulting from files which exist across different areas of the disk (thus, requiring head motion).
This latter problem is what Linux is not immune to, and the best way to demonstrate the problem is to fill your disk, free a little bit, fill the disk again, repeat.
The problem with this way of looking at fragmentation is that in practice, you don't really care about just the one file that got written when the disk was full, and that one file fits just fine in filesystem cache. Good caching strategies mitigate most of this problem.
The statement that there are no good defragmenters is misleading, though. When you talk about fragmentation of a modern filesystem, you're talking about fragmentation that occurs when the disk is full. Simple solution: don't fill the disk. Unix accomplishes this by allowing you to specify a percentage of space that only root can fill per filesystem. Read the documentation for mke2fs and look at the -m option. If you do this, then ext2 is effectively a self-defragmenting OS. It will allocate your files efficiently in the first place, and recover freed space strategically.
If you still want a defragmenter, it's pretty easy to write. Just crate a RAMDISK:
mke2fs -m 0/dev/ram0 mount/dev/ram0/media/ram
and then loop over every file in your filesystem that is over 8k in size and less than the size of your RAMDISK (and does not end in ".so", just to be safe), moving it to the RAMDISK and moving it back to the filesystem. As long as you initialized your ext2 partitions with -m 10 or more and root has not filled the filesystem, this will work just fine, and might save you a bit of overhead. Then again, it probably won't because your filesystem is almost certainly just fine already.
If you're interested in doing this without all the headache, I've written a tool that generates passwords for you, according to a pattern (that you can compose yourself, or pick from a fairly extensive list).
Yeah well, I'm assuming you don't care so much about that one, given that the rest of it has been part of Linux for the last... well, forever.
You see, "RTFM" means, "it just works". What exactly do you think the Windows folks are going to tell you when you ask how to defrag Longhorn...? That's right, RTFM!
It's different in the Linux world, for the reasons that you pointed out before.
The kernel team tests and releases in one pass, which is roughly akin to unit testing in a large project that has several sub-projects.
Then distributions pick up the changes (it's really not that clean a separation, but let's say it is for sake of simplicity), and incorporate it into their OSes. Each distribution has its own unique QA/release process, so let's look at Red Hat as an example. They take some internal things, some external things, the "official kernel" and start testing it with their system. They make some changes, give some feedback/fix bugs/etc. and eventually they come up with a collection of patches that they feel brings the kernel to the point they want it (they repeat this for hundreds of packages, some larger, most smaller than the kernel).
The original source+patches is packaged in two forms: an SRPM, which contains all of the discreate pieces and an RPM which contains the result of unpacking the SRPM, applying the patches inside it to the base code inside it, building and installing along with any pre- or post-install steps that are required.
That's all shunted into Red Hat's final release process which I know almost nothing about, but I presume it involves test farms which they use to stress the new OS in various ways. This might, of course, result in bugs discovered, and further iterations of the process.
"Moore's Law Law postulates that magazine issues referencing Moore's Law double in value every 18 months."
No it doesn't, and I'm getting sick and tired of this showing up on Slashdot.
All Moore's Law predicts is that the amount of money Intel has to spend on stupid things like this will double every 18 months. The fact that it HAPPENS to correspond to an increase in Intel's offered reward has been true for some time, but there's no guarantee that the two will continue to scale at the same rate!
The point is that they don't come "remotely close", and there's the fact that these things do not scale linearly. In order to support 12 platforms as shipped, you have to do far more than 2x the work of supporting 6 platforms. Why? Because those first 6 are the ones that are most alike, and used by the largest intersection of developers. The other six are used by niche develpers and tend to be less like the first six.
This, of course, ignores the work that goes into special subsystems for popular platforms, special hardware, obsolete hardware, new protocols and standards, etc.
But again, this does not mean that FreeBSD is bad or poorly organized or useless. It's a fine OS that I recommend to people all the time. It's just that there's a different audience.
"Currently there are ~100 developers [paid] fulltime just to work on the kernel (at various organizations)."
I would be shocked if the number is that small.
"There are none in FreeBSD. There are perhaps a dozen devs whose employers let them work on FreeBSD part-time, or there are various works that are sponsored by companies (pair network comes to mind) from time-to-time."
That's a shame, but ok...
"[FreeBSD is released] with 1/50 of the resource[s of] Linux [...]"
Right, and so the fact that FreeBSD works well is quite impressive. The fact that it doesn't work at all on certain high-end platforms, obsolete platforms, lots of embeded platforms, etc., is also not shocking nor does it make it a poor platform.
FreeBSD does what it can with the resources it has, and that's a good thing. Let's not try to compare them to Linux. Linux is Linux and BSD is BSD. They are excellent tools for different jobs.
"The situations you are refering too are all covered in current harassment laws. Why do homosexuals feel they deserve preferential treatment just because they are gay?"
They don't.
The examples cited in the GP are not all covered by existing laws (though some are). Harassment is just that: harassment. It's quite possbile to discriminate without harassing.
What's more, a law that prevents discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation protects you just as much as it does a homosexual. There's nothing special or intolerant about wanting a certain criteria taken off the table when it comes to making business descisions.
"It doesn't matter what Cerf says regarding Al Gore's advocacy/enthusiasm/promotion"
Again, this misses the point. He didn't avocate it, he PAID FOR IT.
By way of analogy: When your kid is playing around in the garage and invents a new computer, so you give him a million dollars and get all of the zoning considerations worked out so that he can start selling them from your house, you have just as much a right to call yourself a founder of the computer company as he does.
The "IP network on which the Internet is built" was not Al Gore's baby, but the network we use and rely upon today is here because he "took the initiative in creating" it just as much so as the people who put technical expertise into it. He deserves full credit for that.
This is not politics, this is just assigning credit where it is due, and I was saying this long before I even knew what Gore's politics WERE (he was just some Congress-critter as far as I was concerned in the 80s).
"Absolutely not. Gore entered Congress in 1977, well after any point that could reasonably be construed as the "creation" of the ARPAnet/Internet."
The technology was there at that time, but it was in the early to mid 80s that it became widely available, and that required funding. You have to realize that at the time, you didn't just go to your telco and say, "Hi, I'd like a T3 for data, please." It was a special and very expensive thing to get a circut installed that could be used for such purposes.
The federal government was very divided on this point, and it was because of the funding that was pushed by Gore that the Internet happened when it did. Would it have happened anyway? Almost certainly, but I doubt that it would have happened as WELL. The U.S. military research community was the ideal place for the Internet to start, and had it required business to get it off the ground in those early days, we might be facing a very different beast today.
Sigh.... again the Al Gore thing, and again it's modded as funny. It's not. It's a failure of our media to shoot down bad politics.
To quote a site that bothers to keep the quote around for Google's sake:
Gore never claimed that he "invented" the Internet, which implies that he engineered the technology. The invention occurred in the seventies and allowed scientists in the Defense Department to communicate with each other. In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
And he did take initiative in creating the Internet. In fact, he pushed funding for it through a congress that was convinced that anything attached to the military (and keep in mind that NSF and DARPA *are* connected to the military) was "the enemy". I heard Gore speak back then, and he was passionate about the creation of a national research network and how important it was.
The Internet is here with us today as much because of the funding as because of the science, and Gore was the money man.
Persoanlly, I find some of his politics a bit extreme, but like or hate liberal politics, you have to admit that the media dropped the ball by not calling Bush on this.
The section on patent poaching alone should make frequent readers of Slashdot want this move. To quote, "Ideally, this reform proposal would put an end to litigation by patent owners who exit the software market, wait many years, and then sue the leading innovators."
Can you think of a company that would try such an underhanded tactic as dropping out of the software market only to then sue those who lead that market...?
"I'm sorry but I really feel that Congress should be spending time protecting flesh and blood people rather than paper created "persons"."
I respectfully disagree. Congress should be spending its time boning up on new weapons, threats to the world, trade issues, technologies, and generally just learning what's going on around them.
There is a sense that I've gotten from a great deal of feedback like yours in the last 5-10 years, that Congress should be doing different things, but can you imagine how much better off as a nation we (sorry, intl. readers) would be if congress would just do fewer, more informed things?
Now, if you were back in your amature days, and starting to select bodies and lenses and you heard about thsi move on Nikon's part, how do you think that might affect your selections and your eventual portfolio of lenses?
There's a systematic difference. If data, which can be replaced easily, is required to be secret for the system to be secure, then that's [not] referred to as "security through obscurity"
A classic STO example which many people use these days: port randomization.
There's data: port number
There's process/algorithm: port randomization.
The only reason that we refer to this as STO and passwords as "security" is the fact that the process in question is very thin and easily defeated (port scanning), but as I've pointed out elsewhere, you can layer this STO approach with active filtering to gain new levels of security (by detecting port scans and blocking the scanning host(s)), which of course has countermeasures, which have countermeasures, etc. (insert kaizen sidebar here).
Slashdot Mirror
"I think you need to learn what 'monoculture' actually means. You are merely describing crop rotation - of monoculture crops. That's still monoculture! To avoid a mopnoculture, you would need to grow several complimentary crops together, simultaneously - not individual crops serially."
Correct. I think you just mis-read what I wrote. You and I are in violent agreement.
"Hardiness traits tend to unnecessary/irrevelant if you raise crops that are seasonal more enviromentally appropiate. Local varieties would be a better fit for the conditions and tend not to freeze/die/wilt as often as exotic and introduced crops. ...
Eliminating the shipping of crops for huge distances, and eating food grown more locally would mean that adding shipping resistant traits would be less neccessary."
Ah, but then you're telling the third world to, "grow your own food." That doesn't tend to work out so well, and you get people like the OP claiming that "there's no lack of food," when in fact there IS a lack of food, because you simply cannot ship it to where it's needed without ballooning the price to the point that it cannot possibly sell.
"You can ship things that are dry and easy to ship. Rice/Grains/Cereals are very shippable and don't need additional modifications."
Even grains are tough to ship very long distances. You have pest problems if you ship by sea. By air, you get fewer pests, but you also increase the cost massively. By rail you get some pests, and the cost is moderate, but there's often no decent land-bridge (e.g. to ship from Russia to Africa means going through the middle-east... and that means heavy losses every time someone decides to bomb you tracks to make a point).
I see your points, but I hope that you see mine. GM foods are neither a cure-all, nor the great satan. It's simply a new way of managing our food supply. More to come, I'm sure....
Why all the negativity?
Ep4 was great because it was something new.
Ep5 was great because LK worked some heavy magic over it, and it was still something fairly new.
Ep6 was the warning bell that Lucas had begun to believe that he could do anything and it would still be great. There were moments (Vader looking at his hand; the death of Yoda; etc.), but they were just that: moments. All you have to do is say, "Ewoks," and everyone seems to snap back and remember how disapointed they were. Keep in mind also that Ep6 had LK working his magic again, but more from behind the scenes (script work only) this time.
Ep1 was an amazing exploration of CG... and a mildly interesting introduction to the prequel trilogy, but again all you have to do is say, "Jar Jar," and people recall the horror...
Ep2 was a botched love story on top of what was actually not a half-bad action flick, introducing the clone wars. I liked Ep2, but you have to admit that it wasn't worth Ep6 & Ep1.
Clone Wars was a wonderful bit of work, especially season 3. It just kept getting better, just like Samuari Jack... and THAT is because it was GT doing it, not GL!
So... in answer to your question, we're being negative because we cannot imagine that Lucas is going to spin off a show worth watching. It's really that simple.
Now, if he got Joss Whedon to run the show with a few of the writers from Battlestar Galactica, then I could see it working, but not with Lucas in control.
Yes, of course monocultures are going to get you into a problematic state. Please do not assume that this is news to anyone. This is why you would rotate through several straints with different properties.
That seems to be your only beef with the points I made, so I guess that's all we need to cover.
"I don't want a standard RAW format; I want the camera to give its data unmodified."
That is essentially what you get with DNG, which is an extension of the TIFF 6.0 spec, to allow for the most common camera features and an extension mechanism (TIFF provides one, so there's nothing new here) for camera-specific data. Cameras can choose how to handle masked pixels, byte order, and a host of other parameters without having to craft their own metadata, and thus the vast majority of images will be readable by existing software as soon as a new camera comes out. Some cameras may actually have some unique feature that's worth crafting an extension to DNG, and they can do that.
It's like Adobe's saying "you must store all of your images in 24-bit pixels inside an XML document," here. They're kind of used to this image-manipulation thing, and odds are they got this one right.
"The real danger of genetically engineered ANYTHING is that you risk creating a monoculture, which could make an entire food crop or species vulnerable to rapid extinction under adverse conditions."
That's quite true... with or without GM foods. Plant cloning has been used in seed production for quite some time now, so don't expect massive genetic diversity in your crops.
GM foods don't really change much in that respect.
It shocks me that you even have to ask this question, but Ok, here's some of the items off the top of my head:
The list goes on, and is actually quite huge. There are ethical, legislative, and technical hurdles involved, but let's not try to pretend that this is in any way being done "just because", or for purely selfish reasons. This is potentially one of the most important steps man will take since the initial cultivation of crops.
US Copyright law requires Google to defend their copyright or lose it. There is nothing evil about doing what you are required to do in order to defend your brand name.
For those unaware, here's the timeline:
2000 the domain, Froogles.com was purchased 2002 Froogles.com goes live, followed by Google bringing up Froogle.com, seemingly in response, and filing for trademark protection for Froogle.com 2003 Froogles.com files for trademark protection and attempts to block Google's trademark on Froogle.com 2004 Froogle.com trademark is granted to Google.As you can see, this was an escalation between the two companies, but the fact of the matter is that running a search engine called /^[a-z]oogles?.com$/ is pretty much guaranteed to make an adversary of Google. Oh the shock! ;-)
Evil, in my book, would be applying for and enforcing trivial software patents; forcing lesser companies to accept monopolistic strings attached to routine business dealings; or forcing users to accept ads that render useful content difficult or impossible to use (especially for the disabled). Asking companies to be creative and come up with their own names is about as far from evil as you can get.
"Aha, I see now. So it is up to distro makers to give extensive testing for each kernel release. Hmmm... I wonder how a middleman distro would work out."
Well, that's kind of what Fedora and Debian are. You can participate in the QA/release process for either one, and that feeds up-stream into the distributions (like RHEL and Ubuntu), which are based on them.
Ok, time for a little tutorial, since you're clearly unaware of what fragmentation means for moderm filesystems (I really wish someone had dumped FAT into the Sun in 1990 so that we could have reasonable discussions about filesystems today).
There are two problems with fragmentation:
- Permanent loss of storage space -- This is simply not a problem in modern filesystems, but old filesystems like FAT or dawn-of-time Unix filesystems would run into this problem.
- Performance hits resulting from files which exist across different areas of the disk (thus, requiring head motion).
This latter problem is what Linux is not immune to, and the best way to demonstrate the problem is to fill your disk, free a little bit, fill the disk again, repeat.The problem with this way of looking at fragmentation is that in practice, you don't really care about just the one file that got written when the disk was full, and that one file fits just fine in filesystem cache. Good caching strategies mitigate most of this problem.
The statement that there are no good defragmenters is misleading, though. When you talk about fragmentation of a modern filesystem, you're talking about fragmentation that occurs when the disk is full. Simple solution: don't fill the disk. Unix accomplishes this by allowing you to specify a percentage of space that only root can fill per filesystem. Read the documentation for mke2fs and look at the -m option. If you do this, then ext2 is effectively a self-defragmenting OS. It will allocate your files efficiently in the first place, and recover freed space strategically.
If you still want a defragmenter, it's pretty easy to write. Just crate a RAMDISK:and then loop over every file in your filesystem that is over 8k in size and less than the size of your RAMDISK (and does not end in ".so", just to be safe), moving it to the RAMDISK and moving it back to the filesystem. As long as you initialized your ext2 partitions with -m 10 or more and root has not filled the filesystem, this will work just fine, and might save you a bit of overhead. Then again, it probably won't because your filesystem is almost certainly just fine already.
Try
a step up from the Linux mantra: "RTFM noob"
Well, let's have a look at those planned improvements:
"Jim Allchin details various planned Longhorn features to meet this goal, such as auto-defragmenting in the background"
RTFM
"the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously"
RTFM
"and the new ad campaign"
Yeah well, I'm assuming you don't care so much about that one, given that the rest of it has been part of Linux for the last... well, forever.
You see, "RTFM" means, "it just works". What exactly do you think the Windows folks are going to tell you when you ask how to defrag Longhorn...? That's right, RTFM!
It's different in the Linux world, for the reasons that you pointed out before.
The kernel team tests and releases in one pass, which is roughly akin to unit testing in a large project that has several sub-projects.
Then distributions pick up the changes (it's really not that clean a separation, but let's say it is for sake of simplicity), and incorporate it into their OSes. Each distribution has its own unique QA/release process, so let's look at Red Hat as an example. They take some internal things, some external things, the "official kernel" and start testing it with their system. They make some changes, give some feedback/fix bugs/etc. and eventually they come up with a collection of patches that they feel brings the kernel to the point they want it (they repeat this for hundreds of packages, some larger, most smaller than the kernel).
The original source+patches is packaged in two forms: an SRPM, which contains all of the discreate pieces and an RPM which contains the result of unpacking the SRPM, applying the patches inside it to the base code inside it, building and installing along with any pre- or post-install steps that are required.
That's all shunted into Red Hat's final release process which I know almost nothing about, but I presume it involves test farms which they use to stress the new OS in various ways. This might, of course, result in bugs discovered, and further iterations of the process.
"Moore's Law Law postulates that magazine issues referencing Moore's Law double in value every 18 months."
No it doesn't, and I'm getting sick and tired of this showing up on Slashdot.
All Moore's Law predicts is that the amount of money Intel has to spend on stupid things like this will double every 18 months. The fact that it HAPPENS to correspond to an increase in Intel's offered reward has been true for some time, but there's no guarantee that the two will continue to scale at the same rate!
The point is that they don't come "remotely close", and there's the fact that these things do not scale linearly. In order to support 12 platforms as shipped, you have to do far more than 2x the work of supporting 6 platforms. Why? Because those first 6 are the ones that are most alike, and used by the largest intersection of developers. The other six are used by niche develpers and tend to be less like the first six.
This, of course, ignores the work that goes into special subsystems for popular platforms, special hardware, obsolete hardware, new protocols and standards, etc.
But again, this does not mean that FreeBSD is bad or poorly organized or useless. It's a fine OS that I recommend to people all the time. It's just that there's a different audience.
"Currently there are ~100 developers [paid] fulltime just to work on the kernel (at various organizations)."
I would be shocked if the number is that small.
"There are none in FreeBSD. There are perhaps a dozen devs whose employers let them work on FreeBSD part-time, or there are various works that are sponsored by companies (pair network comes to mind) from time-to-time."
That's a shame, but ok...
"[FreeBSD is released] with 1/50 of the resource[s of] Linux [...]"
Right, and so the fact that FreeBSD works well is quite impressive. The fact that it doesn't work at all on certain high-end platforms, obsolete platforms, lots of embeded platforms, etc., is also not shocking nor does it make it a poor platform.
FreeBSD does what it can with the resources it has, and that's a good thing. Let's not try to compare them to Linux. Linux is Linux and BSD is BSD. They are excellent tools for different jobs.
"The situations you are refering too are all covered in current harassment laws. Why do homosexuals feel they deserve preferential treatment just because they are gay?"
They don't.
The examples cited in the GP are not all covered by existing laws (though some are). Harassment is just that: harassment. It's quite possbile to discriminate without harassing.
What's more, a law that prevents discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation protects you just as much as it does a homosexual. There's nothing special or intolerant about wanting a certain criteria taken off the table when it comes to making business descisions.
"It doesn't matter what Cerf says regarding Al Gore's advocacy/enthusiasm/promotion"
Again, this misses the point. He didn't avocate it, he PAID FOR IT.
By way of analogy: When your kid is playing around in the garage and invents a new computer, so you give him a million dollars and get all of the zoning considerations worked out so that he can start selling them from your house, you have just as much a right to call yourself a founder of the computer company as he does.
The "IP network on which the Internet is built" was not Al Gore's baby, but the network we use and rely upon today is here because he "took the initiative in creating" it just as much so as the people who put technical expertise into it. He deserves full credit for that.
This is not politics, this is just assigning credit where it is due, and I was saying this long before I even knew what Gore's politics WERE (he was just some Congress-critter as far as I was concerned in the 80s).
"Absolutely not. Gore entered Congress in 1977, well after any point that could reasonably be construed as the "creation" of the ARPAnet/Internet."
The technology was there at that time, but it was in the early to mid 80s that it became widely available, and that required funding. You have to realize that at the time, you didn't just go to your telco and say, "Hi, I'd like a T3 for data, please." It was a special and very expensive thing to get a circut installed that could be used for such purposes.
The federal government was very divided on this point, and it was because of the funding that was pushed by Gore that the Internet happened when it did. Would it have happened anyway? Almost certainly, but I doubt that it would have happened as WELL. The U.S. military research community was the ideal place for the Internet to start, and had it required business to get it off the ground in those early days, we might be facing a very different beast today.
To quote a site that bothers to keep the quote around for Google's sake:And he did take initiative in creating the Internet. In fact, he pushed funding for it through a congress that was convinced that anything attached to the military (and keep in mind that NSF and DARPA *are* connected to the military) was "the enemy". I heard Gore speak back then, and he was passionate about the creation of a national research network and how important it was.
The Internet is here with us today as much because of the funding as because of the science, and Gore was the money man.
Persoanlly, I find some of his politics a bit extreme, but like or hate liberal politics, you have to admit that the media dropped the ball by not calling Bush on this.
Good, we've made progress. So you would apply a set of criteria including this precident by Nikon in order to begin your selection.
That's all anyone was saying. For some it may make the difference. For others, not.
The section on patent poaching alone should make frequent readers of Slashdot want this move. To quote, "Ideally, this reform proposal would put an end to litigation by patent owners who exit the software market, wait many years, and then sue the leading innovators."
Can you think of a company that would try such an underhanded tactic as dropping out of the software market only to then sue those who lead that market...?
"I'm sorry but I really feel that Congress should be spending time protecting flesh and blood people rather than paper created "persons"."
I respectfully disagree. Congress should be spending its time boning up on new weapons, threats to the world, trade issues, technologies, and generally just learning what's going on around them.
There is a sense that I've gotten from a great deal of feedback like yours in the last 5-10 years, that Congress should be doing different things, but can you imagine how much better off as a nation we (sorry, intl. readers) would be if congress would just do fewer, more informed things?
EXACTLY!
Now, if you were back in your amature days, and starting to select bodies and lenses and you heard about thsi move on Nikon's part, how do you think that might affect your selections and your eventual portfolio of lenses?
There's a systematic difference. If data, which can be replaced easily, is required to be secret for the system to be secure, then that's [not] referred to as "security through obscurity"
A classic STO example which many people use these days: port randomization.
There's data: port number
There's process/algorithm: port randomization.
The only reason that we refer to this as STO and passwords as "security" is the fact that the process in question is very thin and easily defeated (port scanning), but as I've pointed out elsewhere, you can layer this STO approach with active filtering to gain new levels of security (by detecting port scans and blocking the scanning host(s)), which of course has countermeasures, which have countermeasures, etc. (insert kaizen sidebar here).