I don't think a theory suggesting the extinction of males just because the y chromosome is small is sufficiently prevalent to require debunking. If so the state of science is far worse than I had imagined...
Except this has totally deviated from the point. OpenCL/CUDA/et al have precisely zero to do with people wanting to run KWin. KWin's complaints are about OpenGL, and while we can complain that AMD had plenty of time to get it right, if they support OpenCL this may have nothing to do with the problems KWin complains about.
That said, nVidia has secured *massive* mindshare with CUDA, and AMD is not taken seriously...
It depends on the license and the copyright holder.
If GPL and the project does not have copyright assigned to the vendor, then they must release the source to anyone they provide the binary and grant them rights to redistribute with modifications. They cannot do patches to the binary, but they can do things like isolate the GPL code into a different application and keep proprietary content indpendent of the code.
If a BSD-like license, they can generally ship without source code. Attribution is usually the main requirement.
If the project is comprised entirely of content written by the vendor or with copyright assigned to the vendor, they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want. They can't reneg on distributed BSD or GPL content so a variant of the project may always be open, but they can close the source or change the licensing terms of new copies all they want.
The web is governed by standards-based protocols which don't require that you install "a special application"
Well, yes and no. Admittedly looking at Gatekeeper it indeed isn't about allowing/disallowing 'gmail' like webapps (yet). The article I read implied webapps, but other more informed articles present a much more concrete picture. However, to your point that webapps can't be blocked by apple because you could install Firefox, you cannot install Firefox onto an iOS device. Only browsers that Apple blesses are allowed to run. Apple's hubris could easily lead to them echoing this entire ecosystem on the desktop. So the point about just any old browser being able to run is not going to fly in the current iOS and very possibly the not-too-distant OSX future. Don't begin to tell me that jailbreaking is a cure for all this, it is a bad practice to encourage people to pay money just to immediately enter an antagonistic relationship with the manufacturer.
The web is not some magical unstoppable force, it can be distilled into concrete technologies that can be restricted. If Apple decides Safari is the only browser allowed in OSX/iOS, they can largely acheive that reality. From there, if Safari disables certain Javascript features or something like HTML5 storage unless the site has paid apple to whitelist their specific TLS certificate, that is well within Apple's power over their own platforme.
I would ask that you refrain from the ad hominem in the future. It's just annoying and detracts from the validity of your argument.
"In a sense, Gatekeeper is an attempt to extend the company's infamous (but secure) App Store vetting process to the entire web, creating a way to identify and block unsafe applications regardless of where they came from."
Hello Mountain Lion, welcome to your walled garden web...
This isn't some grand scheme for Apple to control all access to everything.
Actually, that's precisely what it is. Malware is the most comfortable justification, but benign apps are rejected all the damn time for not fitting with Apple's vision or being construed as a competitor to something they either do now or hope to be doing in the near future. Apple may play the 'malware' card in explaining their policy on not accepting language interpreters, but how in the world can that make sense in a heavily sandboxed emulator?
1. Generally databases are backed up to a plain text file. The database being natively in binary isn't just for fun you know, there is good reason.
2. I've never seen this to be the case. Maybe if your spreadsheet is on a local drive and your database is over the internet, but that's not fair, you can have local databases and you can have spreadsheets on slow network shares. Given equivalent situations, I've seen database do a lot better. Incidentally, this is pretty much the *whole point* of the binary format that can't be read in a trivial text editor, performance pretty well requires it.
3. I really wonder what sort of database interface you are using if this is the case. Databases are much much more capable of having quickly defined views of pertinent data. Spreadsheets tend to get awkward with many sheets in a book with lots of columns and very very difficult to pull the data coherently at that point. Of course CSV is even worse, you don't have that extra dimension that 'workbooks' give you to play in.
4. Again, something is wrong if you consider database use to necessitate pasting into a spreadsheet.
Some of the advantages of a DB: -Performance -Better facility for multi-user access and edit (far less tempting for someone to 'save off their own copy' to work on and try to merge in later) -Better programmatic manipulation of data and reports -Better representation and use of complex data relationships. -Far more competent facilities for searching (you even admit this one but dismiss it as pointless) Incidentally, the syntax isn't that arcane even in SQL terms, but consider that you perform these searches on a daily basis as you got to arbitrary internet sites and type strings in boxes or select from a drop down.
You have to understand why the tendency for some groups to use/abuse spreadsheets is very very bad. For example, one business demanded I write them a webapp and use an ODBC driver so that the database format was in XLS format so their hr people could do whatever they wanted to the 'database'. When against all my recommendations they implemented it, they suffered greatly and I was the one left with trying to fix or talk people out of bad behavior when things went pretty much exactly as I warned them it would.
Windows 9 will take things one steep further - probably a compatibility mode or VM for traditional applications - or perhaps eliminate traditional 'windowed' apps all together. Windows 8 is a transitional product release for Microsoft.
Other possiblities include the two environments continuing into perpetuity, MS somehow finding a unified experience that handles both sets of use cases better, or MS giving up entirely on Metro-UI on the desktop. I would treat their Windows 8 ARM play as risking their desktop market to try to force open the phone and tablet markets for them. This isn't too severe a risk, as they hedged their bets on x86 by having the 'traditional' environment and they know from experience that the worst thing that happens is that customers stick with something like Windows 7. I personally think the Metro-UI will fail utterly across all markets even with the 'unified experience' message. In the MS echo chamber they've convinced themselves its inherently superior to everything else even as the market has been pretty cool to their current offerings. They currently cling to the excuse that it's just because it isn't a unified experience with the desktop. After Windows 8 comes out and if Metro fails, I think even MS will run out of excuses and recognize reality.
Consider Silverlight. All indications point toward an endeavor that got no where and did not acheive the death of flash in favor of an MS controlled technology. Did MS continue pushing it beyond all reason in the face of a market that would not accept it? Not really, they've de-emphasized it and moving onto other things in the hopes *something* will stick in a market where more and more computer use is done through a tablet or phone. I would say they should be content with their desktop/laptop market, but I realize they are probably concerned that even if the desktop market doesn't go away, users will learn they don't need an MS platform to do what they want and carry that lesson into the desktop space.
AMD's problem as Apple switched over was that while they were able to best NetBurst and even Core in terms of performance at insignificant difference in the space of desktop-class TDP, AMD had never done a good job of mobile TDP. Keep in mind Apple was just coming off PPC with a particular sore spot driving that move being IBM's inability to deliver a satisfactory low-power product. Intel showing them that they were giving up NetBurst and their Core offering would return to sanity was a good start, but probably insufficient to offset the fact that Apple was giving up 64-bit for a while. However, as Apple looked at the laptop scene, I'd imagine they were swayed by Intel's more coherent mobile strategy.
As much as Apple fans like thinking of their favorite company being the turning point, by volume Apple's choice mattered little and I don't believe it even was of much value in terms of marketing. I don't think AMD really felt their fortunes diminish until Core 2 released, and even then things were reasonably healthy for them as they still some market segments thanks to their Hyper Transport and integrated memory controllers. Nehalem's arrival with QPI and integrated memory controllers with more channels than AMD's offerings caused a pretty precipitous drop as there wasn't much technical reason to go with AMD over Intel any more.
If not for the delays and one other little problem they probably would have succeeded in replacing x86 with Itanium
No way was that going to happen. Intel for some crazy reason forgot that one of their *biggest* draws in x86 land was backwards compatibility. Consider the fact that even this very day most applications ship as 32-bit x86 applications. Over 10 years after Itanium's launch and 9 years after the initial availablitily of x86_64 day to day life is still largely based around x86 compatibility. PAE is a servicable workaround still for 99% of applications out there. While it sucks, we'd probably still be on a 32-bit architecture with PAE as Intel continued and failed to get mass-market acceptance of Itanium if not for AMD forcing x86_64 to happen.
Itanium also doesn't get sole blame, Intel was still 'advancing' their x86 technology and did NetBurst at the same time. It is interesting how two of Intel's largest mistakes in the history of their company happened about the same time. While people are talking about how well AMD did, it's actually a pretty big failure that they didn't do *even better* since Intel essentially handed AMD the world on a plate and a multi-year headstart. Even as Intel offerings were stinking up the world, suggesting new case designs to cope with the hopelessly inefficient architecture, AMD *still* was considered by less knowledgeable people as a sort of 'cheap knock-off' brand.
AMD had a wonderful technical position, Intel bet the farm on Itanium and NetBurst. AMD countered with an x86 architecture that was much much more efficient than NetBurst, a 64-bit implementation that didn't break backwards compatibility, and to further embarass Intel an affordable NUMA architecture with on-package memory controllers. For all this, 'Intel Inside' *still* carried some marketing weight despite the horrible tech behind it at the time. AMD failed in two ways: -They failed in marketing execution to erode the value of 'Intel Inside'. -When they did succeed, they didn't really come up with any *new* game changing plays. Intel's QPI was catch up to hyper transport, but since then Intel has continued with superior fab technology, advancing performance per clock, more memory channels per package, and incorporating features for particular sore spots like AES and h264 encode/decode. AMD's biggest advantage at the moment is that Intel GPUs are relatively poor and the Fusion line can quite thoroughly embarrass intel at gaming. The problem being the gaming market is very comfortable with discrete GPUs and this difference matters for a relatively small slice of the market.
Of course, that was a problem for AMD, even as in the desktop and server they were eating Intel's lunch, on the laptop front the AMD offerings were kind of uninteresting. Intel mostly spared their mobile offerings from the disaster that was Netburst and AMDs biggest benefit was going head to head with NetBurst.
their processors are still popular in some supercomputers,
You'll see AMD pretty much only in Cray offerings where they have a proprietary interconnect currently married to hyper transport. One big thing Cray talks about nowadays is how they are moving to a more processor agnostic interconnect so that they'll soon be selling Intel based systems.
In everything built since Nehalem came out without such considerations, pretty much all of them went Intel because that was the point where Intel began stomping AMD on both work done per clock *and* memory performance. Before Nehalem some workloads still indicated AMD because their memory performance was better, even if the Core2 architecture was besting them on performance per clock.
The first-tier vendors that carry AMD now largely do so because AMD hasn't demanded a socket change in a while and the vendors can get away with supporting new AMD products in 'old' designs with little incremental investment. This along with AMD aggressive pricing translates to pretty inexpensive pricing being possible for them. At very large scale, however, the additional operational expense associated with more servers sucking down more power and HVAC to get the same work done is a problem that becomes difficult to ignore.
The problem with/dev/random is that it frequently is not feasible. The amount of usable entropy in/dev/random is rather low considering some needs. OpenSSL project itself defaults to urandom in fact. Frequently seeding/dev/urandom with/dev/random is a compromise.
I've seen a *lot* of people take shortcuts like feeding in a well-known arbitrary piece of data as an entropy source in a script invoking SSL utilities. They will complain that '/dev/random is too slow (implicitly not realizing the urandom option)' or 'I wanted a script that would work exactly the same in all platforms and this happened to work'. Out of a plethora of better ways to do it they happen to pick the worst because they simply fail to understand the significance of the random source.
Because the photographer or in the case of self-taken shots someone soliciting the person is abusing the child. I'm not saying this is the case for all 'questionable' content, but there is least some content where imagery does suggest abuse but does not fall under the umbrella of child porn per se and is insufficient for anyone to take action on behalf of the subject. Note that I specifically referred to the people taking the pictures and not consumers of the pictures. People looking at the pictures may be extraordinarily creepy, but I see all sorts of room for problems trying to regulate that and think it really doesn't help too much (in fact I think it harms as it pushes the circles that consume these into secrecy and evidence of child abuse that might otherwise easily be discovered by police is hidden out of their view as much as possible).
Actually, I would say the vast majority either do not know him or vaguely know him as the father of the GPL and nothing else. Every last tech person I talk to who has gone into more depth than those facts into his stance has deemed him a nutjob. Though some comments in his defense put fourth the theory that there is an underlying valid point but that point is lost in poor communication choices.
He did also state that next of kin could make the call absent of an explicit statement one way or another. I would at least remove this possibility, though I could imagine the sort of awkward conversation to request permission to have sex with a dead relative....
Clinical pedohplia can never talk about 17 year girls, or even most 14-year old girls. So yes, mutually voluntary pedophilic relations in a reasonable mindset doesn't exist. Though most 'jailbait' centent does not fall into that category anyway and child porn/statutary rape laws have pedophilic activity as a mere subset and the problem described is real, just technically pedophilia is not the correct term. However, I do think most places have windows to allow for some 17-18 year old situations, but 20 and 17 year old relationships are generally out of luck).
He provided a link, don't know how much more you want. With Stallman you never know if he is just being his usual fanatic self or if he was making a 'modest proposal' type jest. In that quote, the CP/Pedo part might have even been incidental, since he only explicitly speaks to incest, prostitution, and necrophilia. His point on prostitution seem practical enough even if intended in jest, though his incest example is highly impractical and the notion that next of kin can decide necrophilia in absence of a will one way or another is pretty insane.
In general, Stallman is not an infallible bastion of rightousness. One of his many zealous ideas was Libre software, but he can still be all sorts of crazy. Hell, even in his philosophy of Free software some things go so far as to be very impractical for the real world.
I don't think that's so simple. I never did medical school, but I sure hope my kid's pediatrician had an education that included anatomical texts with nude underage people. I'm also pretty sure there exist nudist colonies where children are allowed. Also who doesn't have parents with embarassing childhood pictures that include nudity? 14 may be a bit old for the childhood pictures bit, but the other two scenarios seem likely enough.
Other than that, I agree. The only exception is how people pining for 17-year olds are horrible people but people pining for 18-year olds are not. Any delineation must unfortunately be arbitrary, but some people embrace that delineation with an inappropriate degree of zeal without recognition of the situation as a continuum rather than a step function, with immature people over 18 and mature people just shy of 18.
He did explicitly call out the subset of anatomically mature 'girls' and you explicitly called out the subset of prepubescent children. It may be creepy if he is in his 50s and looking at 17-year-olds, but shouldn't be any more creepy than looking at 19-year-old girls. If there is no anatomical or emotional way to tell and you have to bust out a birth cirtificate to be sure, it seems kind of arbitrary. I'm pretty sure 19-year olds are rarely ever substantially more ready to deal with these circumstances than 17-year olds. No one was claiming that there was anything particularly normal or acceptable about preteen material.
Reddit admins' bizarre six-year acceptance of child porn on its site
Now I don't go on reddit, but I am pretty confident this is exaggerating reality.
For website policies, this is a fairly safe thing to restrict that falls well within the site operators rights. What concerns me is when laws start getting passed that make everything a minefield.
Often it seems pretty blatant, but at other times the difference between an innocent and sexualized image is arbitrary and subjective. The more abitrary and subjective stuff codified into law, the more frightening it is to be a citizen. You are a doctor who pissed off someone important, can they classify some contents of anatomical texts as child pornography? On the other hand, you have someone enticing a minor into an extremely sexually suggestive pose, but leave the bikini on and magically it is ok? However remove the arbitrary 'nude/non-nude' criteria that is often applied to catch the binkini workaround, and then you have a new problem. if there are certain fetishist circles that ascribe a particularly sexual connotation to a scenario, if both photographer and subject are completely unaware of that and portray that scenario, should the photographer be in trouble if that picture starts making the rounds in that fetishist community?
This is a tough societal problem with a lot of room for gray areas. People who should get criminal charges who don't because they avoided overt nudity in images they took or was able to defend their content as art even though intent in some 'artistic nudes' is likely sexual. There may or may not be significant cases of undeserved criminal charges, but I'll at least wager that some custody battles have been lost over innocent pictures taken the wrong way.
You start dishing out the cash for E7 processor based systems and particularly signififcant FusionIO capacity you are getting pretty high into the stratosphere of cost (at some point 'industry standard' becomes a stretch...). I'm not so sure that would be appreciably cheaper than a system z of comparable capabilities. But that is a more competitive sort of strategy in raw performance. Often I hear people talking about inexpensive 2 socket servers with dirt cheap 7200 rpm high-capacity drives as the 'answer' to mainframes, with very very few of the critics even knowing what the word 'infiniband' means. It might also be why so many mainframe shops 'fail' in their x86 performance evaluation, they might not go high enough up the product line thinking that 'x86 is x86', and maybe that's unfair.
I was getting the impression you were saying all applications should auto-update themselves without user interaction. With the 'yum update' scenario, user picks when they might have a disruption. If your browser stops working because it replaced itself mid-execution, that's worse than expecting something may go wrong.
If you are saying that each application should prompt the users individually and each induce a UAC escalation, that's the very madness the parent poster was bemoaning in windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think a theory suggesting the extinction of males just because the y chromosome is small is sufficiently prevalent to require debunking. If so the state of science is far worse than I had imagined...
By the same standard, you can still load an old Linux distro that is still tons newer than XP.
Even assuming old PC with brand spanking new distro, KWin is far from a hard requirement...
Except this has totally deviated from the point. OpenCL/CUDA/et al have precisely zero to do with people wanting to run KWin. KWin's complaints are about OpenGL, and while we can complain that AMD had plenty of time to get it right, if they support OpenCL this may have nothing to do with the problems KWin complains about.
That said, nVidia has secured *massive* mindshare with CUDA, and AMD is not taken seriously...
It depends on the license and the copyright holder.
If GPL and the project does not have copyright assigned to the vendor, then they must release the source to anyone they provide the binary and grant them rights to redistribute with modifications. They cannot do patches to the binary, but they can do things like isolate the GPL code into a different application and keep proprietary content indpendent of the code.
If a BSD-like license, they can generally ship without source code. Attribution is usually the main requirement.
If the project is comprised entirely of content written by the vendor or with copyright assigned to the vendor, they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want. They can't reneg on distributed BSD or GPL content so a variant of the project may always be open, but they can close the source or change the licensing terms of new copies all they want.
The web is governed by standards-based protocols which don't require that you install "a special application"
Well, yes and no. Admittedly looking at Gatekeeper it indeed isn't about allowing/disallowing 'gmail' like webapps (yet). The article I read implied webapps, but other more informed articles present a much more concrete picture. However, to your point that webapps can't be blocked by apple because you could install Firefox, you cannot install Firefox onto an iOS device. Only browsers that Apple blesses are allowed to run. Apple's hubris could easily lead to them echoing this entire ecosystem on the desktop. So the point about just any old browser being able to run is not going to fly in the current iOS and very possibly the not-too-distant OSX future. Don't begin to tell me that jailbreaking is a cure for all this, it is a bad practice to encourage people to pay money just to immediately enter an antagonistic relationship with the manufacturer.
The web is not some magical unstoppable force, it can be distilled into concrete technologies that can be restricted. If Apple decides Safari is the only browser allowed in OSX/iOS, they can largely acheive that reality. From there, if Safari disables certain Javascript features or something like HTML5 storage unless the site has paid apple to whitelist their specific TLS certificate, that is well within Apple's power over their own platforme.
I would ask that you refrain from the ad hominem in the future. It's just annoying and detracts from the validity of your argument.
"In a sense, Gatekeeper is an attempt to extend the company's infamous (but secure) App Store vetting process to the entire web, creating a way to identify and block unsafe applications regardless of where they came from."
Hello Mountain Lion, welcome to your walled garden web...
This isn't some grand scheme for Apple to control all access to everything.
Actually, that's precisely what it is. Malware is the most comfortable justification, but benign apps are rejected all the damn time for not fitting with Apple's vision or being construed as a competitor to something they either do now or hope to be doing in the near future. Apple may play the 'malware' card in explaining their policy on not accepting language interpreters, but how in the world can that make sense in a heavily sandboxed emulator?
1. Generally databases are backed up to a plain text file. The database being natively in binary isn't just for fun you know, there is good reason.
2. I've never seen this to be the case. Maybe if your spreadsheet is on a local drive and your database is over the internet, but that's not fair, you can have local databases and you can have spreadsheets on slow network shares. Given equivalent situations, I've seen database do a lot better. Incidentally, this is pretty much the *whole point* of the binary format that can't be read in a trivial text editor, performance pretty well requires it.
3. I really wonder what sort of database interface you are using if this is the case. Databases are much much more capable of having quickly defined views of pertinent data. Spreadsheets tend to get awkward with many sheets in a book with lots of columns and very very difficult to pull the data coherently at that point. Of course CSV is even worse, you don't have that extra dimension that 'workbooks' give you to play in.
4. Again, something is wrong if you consider database use to necessitate pasting into a spreadsheet.
Some of the advantages of a DB:
-Performance
-Better facility for multi-user access and edit (far less tempting for someone to 'save off their own copy' to work on and try to merge in later)
-Better programmatic manipulation of data and reports
-Better representation and use of complex data relationships.
-Far more competent facilities for searching (you even admit this one but dismiss it as pointless) Incidentally, the syntax isn't that arcane even in SQL terms, but consider that you perform these searches on a daily basis as you got to arbitrary internet sites and type strings in boxes or select from a drop down.
You have to understand why the tendency for some groups to use/abuse spreadsheets is very very bad. For example, one business demanded I write them a webapp and use an ODBC driver so that the database format was in XLS format so their hr people could do whatever they wanted to the 'database'. When against all my recommendations they implemented it, they suffered greatly and I was the one left with trying to fix or talk people out of bad behavior when things went pretty much exactly as I warned them it would.
Windows 9 will take things one steep further - probably a compatibility mode or VM for traditional applications - or perhaps eliminate traditional 'windowed' apps all together. Windows 8 is a transitional product release for Microsoft.
Other possiblities include the two environments continuing into perpetuity, MS somehow finding a unified experience that handles both sets of use cases better, or MS giving up entirely on Metro-UI on the desktop. I would treat their Windows 8 ARM play as risking their desktop market to try to force open the phone and tablet markets for them. This isn't too severe a risk, as they hedged their bets on x86 by having the 'traditional' environment and they know from experience that the worst thing that happens is that customers stick with something like Windows 7. I personally think the Metro-UI will fail utterly across all markets even with the 'unified experience' message. In the MS echo chamber they've convinced themselves its inherently superior to everything else even as the market has been pretty cool to their current offerings. They currently cling to the excuse that it's just because it isn't a unified experience with the desktop. After Windows 8 comes out and if Metro fails, I think even MS will run out of excuses and recognize reality.
Consider Silverlight. All indications point toward an endeavor that got no where and did not acheive the death of flash in favor of an MS controlled technology. Did MS continue pushing it beyond all reason in the face of a market that would not accept it? Not really, they've de-emphasized it and moving onto other things in the hopes *something* will stick in a market where more and more computer use is done through a tablet or phone. I would say they should be content with their desktop/laptop market, but I realize they are probably concerned that even if the desktop market doesn't go away, users will learn they don't need an MS platform to do what they want and carry that lesson into the desktop space.
AMD's problem as Apple switched over was that while they were able to best NetBurst and even Core in terms of performance at insignificant difference in the space of desktop-class TDP, AMD had never done a good job of mobile TDP. Keep in mind Apple was just coming off PPC with a particular sore spot driving that move being IBM's inability to deliver a satisfactory low-power product. Intel showing them that they were giving up NetBurst and their Core offering would return to sanity was a good start, but probably insufficient to offset the fact that Apple was giving up 64-bit for a while. However, as Apple looked at the laptop scene, I'd imagine they were swayed by Intel's more coherent mobile strategy.
As much as Apple fans like thinking of their favorite company being the turning point, by volume Apple's choice mattered little and I don't believe it even was of much value in terms of marketing. I don't think AMD really felt their fortunes diminish until Core 2 released, and even then things were reasonably healthy for them as they still some market segments thanks to their Hyper Transport and integrated memory controllers. Nehalem's arrival with QPI and integrated memory controllers with more channels than AMD's offerings caused a pretty precipitous drop as there wasn't much technical reason to go with AMD over Intel any more.
If not for the delays and one other little problem they probably would have succeeded in replacing x86 with Itanium
No way was that going to happen. Intel for some crazy reason forgot that one of their *biggest* draws in x86 land was backwards compatibility. Consider the fact that even this very day most applications ship as 32-bit x86 applications. Over 10 years after Itanium's launch and 9 years after the initial availablitily of x86_64 day to day life is still largely based around x86 compatibility. PAE is a servicable workaround still for 99% of applications out there. While it sucks, we'd probably still be on a 32-bit architecture with PAE as Intel continued and failed to get mass-market acceptance of Itanium if not for AMD forcing x86_64 to happen.
Itanium also doesn't get sole blame, Intel was still 'advancing' their x86 technology and did NetBurst at the same time. It is interesting how two of Intel's largest mistakes in the history of their company happened about the same time. While people are talking about how well AMD did, it's actually a pretty big failure that they didn't do *even better* since Intel essentially handed AMD the world on a plate and a multi-year headstart. Even as Intel offerings were stinking up the world, suggesting new case designs to cope with the hopelessly inefficient architecture, AMD *still* was considered by less knowledgeable people as a sort of 'cheap knock-off' brand.
AMD had a wonderful technical position, Intel bet the farm on Itanium and NetBurst. AMD countered with an x86 architecture that was much much more efficient than NetBurst, a 64-bit implementation that didn't break backwards compatibility, and to further embarass Intel an affordable NUMA architecture with on-package memory controllers. For all this, 'Intel Inside' *still* carried some marketing weight despite the horrible tech behind it at the time. AMD failed in two ways:
-They failed in marketing execution to erode the value of 'Intel Inside'.
-When they did succeed, they didn't really come up with any *new* game changing plays. Intel's QPI was catch up to hyper transport, but since then Intel has continued with superior fab technology, advancing performance per clock, more memory channels per package, and incorporating features for particular sore spots like AES and h264 encode/decode. AMD's biggest advantage at the moment is that Intel GPUs are relatively poor and the Fusion line can quite thoroughly embarrass intel at gaming. The problem being the gaming market is very comfortable with discrete GPUs and this difference matters for a relatively small slice of the market.
Of course, that was a problem for AMD, even as in the desktop and server they were eating Intel's lunch, on the laptop front the AMD offerings were kind of uninteresting. Intel mostly spared their mobile offerings from the disaster that was Netburst and AMDs biggest benefit was going head to head with NetBurst.
their processors are still popular in some supercomputers,
You'll see AMD pretty much only in Cray offerings where they have a proprietary interconnect currently married to hyper transport. One big thing Cray talks about nowadays is how they are moving to a more processor agnostic interconnect so that they'll soon be selling Intel based systems.
In everything built since Nehalem came out without such considerations, pretty much all of them went Intel because that was the point where Intel began stomping AMD on both work done per clock *and* memory performance. Before Nehalem some workloads still indicated AMD because their memory performance was better, even if the Core2 architecture was besting them on performance per clock.
The first-tier vendors that carry AMD now largely do so because AMD hasn't demanded a socket change in a while and the vendors can get away with supporting new AMD products in 'old' designs with little incremental investment. This along with AMD aggressive pricing translates to pretty inexpensive pricing being possible for them. At very large scale, however, the additional operational expense associated with more servers sucking down more power and HVAC to get the same work done is a problem that becomes difficult to ignore.
The problem with /dev/random is that it frequently is not feasible. The amount of usable entropy in /dev/random is rather low considering some needs. OpenSSL project itself defaults to urandom in fact. Frequently seeding /dev/urandom with /dev/random is a compromise.
I've seen a *lot* of people take shortcuts like feeding in a well-known arbitrary piece of data as an entropy source in a script invoking SSL utilities. They will complain that '/dev/random is too slow (implicitly not realizing the urandom option)' or 'I wanted a script that would work exactly the same in all platforms and this happened to work'. Out of a plethora of better ways to do it they happen to pick the worst because they simply fail to understand the significance of the random source.
Because the photographer or in the case of self-taken shots someone soliciting the person is abusing the child. I'm not saying this is the case for all 'questionable' content, but there is least some content where imagery does suggest abuse but does not fall under the umbrella of child porn per se and is insufficient for anyone to take action on behalf of the subject. Note that I specifically referred to the people taking the pictures and not consumers of the pictures. People looking at the pictures may be extraordinarily creepy, but I see all sorts of room for problems trying to regulate that and think it really doesn't help too much (in fact I think it harms as it pushes the circles that consume these into secrecy and evidence of child abuse that might otherwise easily be discovered by police is hidden out of their view as much as possible).
As such, many of us, in fact, agree with him.
Actually, I would say the vast majority either do not know him or vaguely know him as the father of the GPL and nothing else. Every last tech person I talk to who has gone into more depth than those facts into his stance has deemed him a nutjob. Though some comments in his defense put fourth the theory that there is an underlying valid point but that point is lost in poor communication choices.
deceased actually gave permission
He did also state that next of kin could make the call absent of an explicit statement one way or another. I would at least remove this possibility, though I could imagine the sort of awkward conversation to request permission to have sex with a dead relative....
Clinical pedohplia can never talk about 17 year girls, or even most 14-year old girls. So yes, mutually voluntary pedophilic relations in a reasonable mindset doesn't exist. Though most 'jailbait' centent does not fall into that category anyway and child porn/statutary rape laws have pedophilic activity as a mere subset and the problem described is real, just technically pedophilia is not the correct term. However, I do think most places have windows to allow for some 17-18 year old situations, but 20 and 17 year old relationships are generally out of luck).
He provided a link, don't know how much more you want. With Stallman you never know if he is just being his usual fanatic self or if he was making a 'modest proposal' type jest. In that quote, the CP/Pedo part might have even been incidental, since he only explicitly speaks to incest, prostitution, and necrophilia. His point on prostitution seem practical enough even if intended in jest, though his incest example is highly impractical and the notion that next of kin can decide necrophilia in absence of a will one way or another is pretty insane.
In general, Stallman is not an infallible bastion of rightousness. One of his many zealous ideas was Libre software, but he can still be all sorts of crazy. Hell, even in his philosophy of Free software some things go so far as to be very impractical for the real world.
Naked pictures of a 14 year old girl are illegal.
I don't think that's so simple. I never did medical school, but I sure hope my kid's pediatrician had an education that included anatomical texts with nude underage people. I'm also pretty sure there exist nudist colonies where children are allowed. Also who doesn't have parents with embarassing childhood pictures that include nudity? 14 may be a bit old for the childhood pictures bit, but the other two scenarios seem likely enough.
Other than that, I agree. The only exception is how people pining for 17-year olds are horrible people but people pining for 18-year olds are not. Any delineation must unfortunately be arbitrary, but some people embrace that delineation with an inappropriate degree of zeal without recognition of the situation as a continuum rather than a step function, with immature people over 18 and mature people just shy of 18.
He did explicitly call out the subset of anatomically mature 'girls' and you explicitly called out the subset of prepubescent children. It may be creepy if he is in his 50s and looking at 17-year-olds, but shouldn't be any more creepy than looking at 19-year-old girls. If there is no anatomical or emotional way to tell and you have to bust out a birth cirtificate to be sure, it seems kind of arbitrary. I'm pretty sure 19-year olds are rarely ever substantially more ready to deal with these circumstances than 17-year olds. No one was claiming that there was anything particularly normal or acceptable about preteen material.
Reddit admins' bizarre six-year acceptance of child porn on its site
Now I don't go on reddit, but I am pretty confident this is exaggerating reality.
For website policies, this is a fairly safe thing to restrict that falls well within the site operators rights. What concerns me is when laws start getting passed that make everything a minefield.
Often it seems pretty blatant, but at other times the difference between an innocent and sexualized image is arbitrary and subjective. The more abitrary and subjective stuff codified into law, the more frightening it is to be a citizen. You are a doctor who pissed off someone important, can they classify some contents of anatomical texts as child pornography? On the other hand, you have someone enticing a minor into an extremely sexually suggestive pose, but leave the bikini on and magically it is ok? However remove the arbitrary 'nude/non-nude' criteria that is often applied to catch the binkini workaround, and then you have a new problem. if there are certain fetishist circles that ascribe a particularly sexual connotation to a scenario, if both photographer and subject are completely unaware of that and portray that scenario, should the photographer be in trouble if that picture starts making the rounds in that fetishist community?
This is a tough societal problem with a lot of room for gray areas. People who should get criminal charges who don't because they avoided overt nudity in images they took or was able to defend their content as art even though intent in some 'artistic nudes' is likely sexual. There may or may not be significant cases of undeserved criminal charges, but I'll at least wager that some custody battles have been lost over innocent pictures taken the wrong way.
You start dishing out the cash for E7 processor based systems and particularly signififcant FusionIO capacity you are getting pretty high into the stratosphere of cost (at some point 'industry standard' becomes a stretch...). I'm not so sure that would be appreciably cheaper than a system z of comparable capabilities. But that is a more competitive sort of strategy in raw performance. Often I hear people talking about inexpensive 2 socket servers with dirt cheap 7200 rpm high-capacity drives as the 'answer' to mainframes, with very very few of the critics even knowing what the word 'infiniband' means. It might also be why so many mainframe shops 'fail' in their x86 performance evaluation, they might not go high enough up the product line thinking that 'x86 is x86', and maybe that's unfair.
I was getting the impression you were saying all applications should auto-update themselves without user interaction. With the 'yum update' scenario, user picks when they might have a disruption. If your browser stops working because it replaced itself mid-execution, that's worse than expecting something may go wrong.
If you are saying that each application should prompt the users individually and each induce a UAC escalation, that's the very madness the parent poster was bemoaning in windows.