Whether or not there's a reason for the he on the moon isn't necessarily interesting in ecological terms. What is important is the notion of removing a million tons of mass from the moon. Given that the moon has a well-documented role in regulating the Earth's ecosystem as a result of pulling a chunk of that mass away.
Of course, that's a simple problem compared to the whole business of safe fusion power.
Last I checked, "collecting rocks" from another planet was a pretty useful accomplishment, scientifically speaking. ISTR landing on the moon changed a bunch of our assumptions about it.
Not to mention the challenges in space travel that were resolved by the mission.
Sure, it was a cold ware race, and that's one reason they sent humans and not drones. But it was also an uplifting moment for anyone who cared to share in it. Obviously you don't, and that's a shame. You're missing out.
Leaving aside my misreading of the article summary, I suspect any policy on editing submitters' text would generate as much heat as leaving it untouched, maybe more.
The bug is in Gateway systems, not AMD processors per se. That's hardly AMD turning to custard. Or a "desperate AMD" ignoring their QA teams.
The commentary by timothy reads like an astroturf advertisment for Intel. It's bad enough when luser posters don't bother reading an article and go off half-cocked. It's inexcusable when the editors do it.
Sadly, they seem to have taken the next Amiga label too far, since the curent time at Be lloks a lot like Commodore circa the CD-TV - they've got some fantastic stuff, but marketing, user base, and available apps are all going poorly.
Which is plenty of reason to criticise it. Stealth marketing an OS under the Amiga name has obvious attractions from a getting sheep to buy it perspective, but it's more than a trifle misleading to people who might want something with an API and suchlike that bears a vague resemblence to the classic AmigaOS.
Hardly paranoia - in fact, speaking as someone who used to work in big media (part of the Murdoch empire), it sounds pretty plausible.
Real world example? Well, there's the real and intimate connection between a local tech rag's advertising income and editorial inches. Or the way that the TV listings for local papers show plenty of detail on the pay TV channels owned by the publisher of the paper, but little on free-to-air ones outside his empire. All fair game in the modern newsroom, of course, but it's worth paying attention to these things when assessing the creditbility of what you see.
More problematic is what you never get to see. Reportage on the CIA role in the murderous coup in Chile in 1973 isn't too big in the USA, I understand. So people in.us don't even know what questions to ask on that score. And I doubt the local current affairs progamme sponsored by an arm of GM would give too much covereage to any corporate malfeasance in that company.
The win AMD have scored, though, is that unlike the Merced (or whatever they call it this week), MicroSoft's apps don't need to be native to work well. Merced requires that, in order to get parity with systems depolyed now, you reengineer your software (and it's more than just a recompile). So anything not taking advantage of AMD64 will win, anything that doesn't won't be a loss.
More importantly, AMD are explicitly aiming at the desktop, while Intel are explicitly aiming at the server market. If I'm a desktop software vendor - Microsoft's Office division, or Adobe, or whoever, AMD64 looks a lok more attractive that ia64 right away, because it's easier to rebuild for, and because my target market are, according to the manufacturers, likely to be using the AMD chips. Ditto games, ditto everything except server apps. And if AMD64 builds enough *desktop* momentum, it will start moving inexorably into the server space based on their desktop success, just like Intel have.
This could be AMD's master stroke against Intel - if AMD can get application developers like Adobe supporting their 64 bit extensions, Intel will be in big, big trouble. Especially since AMD are promising 64 bit loving on the desktop, while Intel are still pushing the line that 64 bit is server technology.
It's interesting that Intel are being outmanoevered at their own game; for years, manufacturers would throw up technologically superior chips (680x0 in its heyday, the original ARM 2 line, the Alpha, PPC, etc) with better performance, but they would be unable to get much market penetration, since the market valued x86 compatability in 90% of cases. Now Intel is offerring (well, vapouring) a 64 bit architecture that offers second-rate ia32 compatibility and has a competitor claiming all the goodness of a fast 64 bit system with little or no loss for ia32 apps.
It will also be interesting to see how this affects the free software world. For example, free databases like Postgres could look more attractive with cheap, abundant 64 bit hardware to run them on. And, more than that, if there is a schism in the i32 world, with some people going the ia64 route, and some going the Sledgehammer, the ability to recompile open source apps to the arch that best suits one's own needs, rather than have purchasing dictated by a split applications market, could be a win.
My understanding of the Google model is that they sell you a customised view on their database, rather than selling you a software package. Although if Yahoo pay them enough, perhaps they'll change that.
That's all right then. As long as you're not defaming my favourite search engine 8).
(Well, given that Yahoo is offering a service that professes to return useful information, among other things, it really isn't that OK at all. But it doesn't appear to bug the people who use Yahoo.
If the people who have contributed to free systems had wanted to spend their time writing proprietary operating systems, they would have been doing that already.
1. You don't have to bribe them to get in, but to get anywhere before the thousandth returned url or so, you have to pay some $$$.
Are you talking about Yahoo or Google? I've never used Yahoo, but I doubt you have to pay to get into Google. For one thing, I didn't, and searches on my real name return me. Searching for ntop and gtml's home pages got me them in the top three. In fact, I've probably only had to move to any kind of refined search a handful of times with Google. Whereas Altavista, my old search engine of choice, required more thinking to get results.
And now it's covered in ads. Who'd a thunk they could make cable seem so slow?
Depends on how tightly the wheel patent is nailed down. And which one they use - there's over 60,000 patents in the IBM patent database that relate to wheels in some way.
This is, of course, factually incorrect on the part of the gentleman from Intel. Clean room reimplementations of a technology are a great way of evading copyright and trade secret laws, but they do nothing for patents - reinventing patented technology will still see you paying the patent owner, even if you can prove that you'd never heard of the patent or consulted it during the invention phase.
The only way around a patent is to design a different mechanism that has the same outcome; not so much reinventing the wheel as discarding the wheel in favour of the catipillar track. The problem with this is that in the modern era of loosely written patents, it's almost impossible, since patents usually cover enough ground to prevent alternate mechanisms, or patent the outcome itself.
Moreover, you'd probably end up with a technology different enough it wouldn't be business competitive - requiring different motherboards, etc.
You're missing a point here: Rambus are considered an American company; most of the companies they are targetting are Asian ones. In trade matters, the history of te US Congress is to blindly attack foriegn companies, even if it ulitimately hurts the US economy and US citizens.
IMO, the most effective course of action is to contact BT and ask about licensing options. If BT are swamped with requests and comments, they may realise what a poor idea this is. I've popped up contact details for BT, along with my thoughts on the silliness.
Allow me to reiterate: the best thing to do is write them a letter not email them. Dealing with letters is a lot harder than junking email.
It's most likely taken so long because official support costs money - you have to have a bunch of people able to deal with questions. Presumable IBM have only just reached the point where they feel the cost of offerring Linux as a supported OS is worth it.
The claim, however, bears a great deal more resemblence to fact than, say, Steve Jobs' claim he invented the GUI, or Microsoft's mny claimed "innovations".
I think you're right to an extent about the graphics - although MK 3D, sorry, Quake III has some nice environmental detail - but the big differenece for me between the early FPS games that I remember fondly (Doom II, Marathon) and the later games is sound.
Everyone at games companies seems so obsessed with flashier graphics, sound seems to have taken a back seat, but the noises in a game of Doom give more atmosphere than any number of polygons can give the Quake series.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not there's a reason for the he on the moon isn't necessarily interesting in ecological terms. What is important is the notion of removing a million tons of mass from the moon. Given that the moon has a well-documented role in regulating the Earth's ecosystem as a result of pulling a chunk of that mass away.
Of course, that's a simple problem compared to the whole business of safe fusion power.
Last I checked, "collecting rocks" from another planet was a pretty useful accomplishment, scientifically speaking. ISTR landing on the moon changed a bunch of our assumptions about it.
Not to mention the challenges in space travel that were resolved by the mission.
Sure, it was a cold ware race, and that's one reason they sent humans and not drones. But it was also an uplifting moment for anyone who cared to share in it. Obviously you don't, and that's a shame. You're missing out.
Leaving aside my misreading of the article summary, I suspect any policy on editing submitters' text would generate as much heat as leaving it untouched, maybe more.
The words "pot, kettle,black" are ringing in my ears. My bad - sorry timothy.
The bug is in Gateway systems, not AMD processors per se. That's hardly AMD turning to custard. Or a "desperate AMD" ignoring their QA teams.
The commentary by timothy reads like an astroturf advertisment for Intel. It's bad enough when luser posters don't bother reading an article and go off half-cocked. It's inexcusable when the editors do it.
Sadly, they seem to have taken the next Amiga label too far, since the curent time at Be lloks a lot like Commodore circa the CD-TV - they've got some fantastic stuff, but marketing, user base, and available apps are all going poorly.
Which is plenty of reason to criticise it. Stealth marketing an OS under the Amiga name has obvious attractions from a getting sheep to buy it perspective, but it's more than a trifle misleading to people who might want something with an API and suchlike that bears a vague resemblence to the classic AmigaOS.
Hardly paranoia - in fact, speaking as someone who used to work in big media (part of the Murdoch empire), it sounds pretty plausible.
Real world example? Well, there's the real and intimate connection between a local tech rag's advertising income and editorial inches. Or the way that the TV listings for local papers show plenty of detail on the pay TV channels owned by the publisher of the paper, but little on free-to-air ones outside his empire. All fair game in the modern newsroom, of course, but it's worth paying attention to these things when assessing the creditbility of what you see.
More problematic is what you never get to see. Reportage on the CIA role in the murderous coup in Chile in 1973 isn't too big in the USA, I understand. So people in .us don't even know what questions to ask on that score. And I doubt the local current affairs progamme sponsored by an arm of GM would give too much covereage to any corporate malfeasance in that company.
The win AMD have scored, though, is that unlike the Merced (or whatever they call it this week), MicroSoft's apps don't need to be native to work well. Merced requires that, in order to get parity with systems depolyed now, you reengineer your software (and it's more than just a recompile). So anything not taking advantage of AMD64 will win, anything that doesn't won't be a loss.
More importantly, AMD are explicitly aiming at the desktop, while Intel are explicitly aiming at the server market. If I'm a desktop software vendor - Microsoft's Office division, or Adobe, or whoever, AMD64 looks a lok more attractive that ia64 right away, because it's easier to rebuild for, and because my target market are, according to the manufacturers, likely to be using the AMD chips. Ditto games, ditto everything except server apps. And if AMD64 builds enough *desktop* momentum, it will start moving inexorably into the server space based on their desktop success, just like Intel have.
This could be AMD's master stroke against Intel - if AMD can get application developers like Adobe supporting their 64 bit extensions, Intel will be in big, big trouble. Especially since AMD are promising 64 bit loving on the desktop, while Intel are still pushing the line that 64 bit is server technology.
It's interesting that Intel are being outmanoevered at their own game; for years, manufacturers would throw up technologically superior chips (680x0 in its heyday, the original ARM 2 line, the Alpha, PPC, etc) with better performance, but they would be unable to get much market penetration, since the market valued x86 compatability in 90% of cases. Now Intel is offerring (well, vapouring) a 64 bit architecture that offers second-rate ia32 compatibility and has a competitor claiming all the goodness of a fast 64 bit system with little or no loss for ia32 apps.
It will also be interesting to see how this affects the free software world. For example, free databases like Postgres could look more attractive with cheap, abundant 64 bit hardware to run them on. And, more than that, if there is a schism in the i32 world, with some people going the ia64 route, and some going the Sledgehammer, the ability to recompile open source apps to the arch that best suits one's own needs, rather than have purchasing dictated by a split applications market, could be a win.
My understanding of the Google model is that they sell you a customised view on their database, rather than selling you a software package. Although if Yahoo pay them enough, perhaps they'll change that.
That's all right then. As long as you're not defaming my favourite search engine 8).
(Well, given that Yahoo is offering a service that professes to return useful information, among other things, it really isn't that OK at all. But it doesn't appear to bug the people who use Yahoo.
If the people who have contributed to free systems had wanted to spend their time writing proprietary operating systems, they would have been doing that already.
They may be, but anyone browsing linux-kernel will know that the Google boys are using Linux for their heavy lifting (the DB servers).
1. You don't have to bribe them to get in, but to get anywhere before the thousandth returned url or so, you have to pay some $$$.
Are you talking about Yahoo or Google? I've never used Yahoo, but I doubt you have to pay to get into Google. For one thing, I didn't, and searches on my real name return me. Searching for ntop and gtml's home pages got me them in the top three. In fact, I've probably only had to move to any kind of refined search a handful of times with Google. Whereas Altavista, my old search engine of choice, required more thinking to get results.
And now it's covered in ads. Who'd a thunk they could make cable seem so slow?
Yahoo: FreeBSD web servers, and now, search technology supplied by Linux. (Google being a vast farm of Linux boxes)
Depends on how tightly the wheel patent is nailed down. And which one they use - there's over 60,000 patents in the IBM patent database that relate to wheels in some way.
This is, of course, factually incorrect on the part of the gentleman from Intel. Clean room reimplementations of a technology are a great way of evading copyright and trade secret laws, but they do nothing for patents - reinventing patented technology will still see you paying the patent owner, even if you can prove that you'd never heard of the patent or consulted it during the invention phase.
The only way around a patent is to design a different mechanism that has the same outcome; not so much reinventing the wheel as discarding the wheel in favour of the catipillar track. The problem with this is that in the modern era of loosely written patents, it's almost impossible, since patents usually cover enough ground to prevent alternate mechanisms, or patent the outcome itself.
Moreover, you'd probably end up with a technology different enough it wouldn't be business competitive - requiring different motherboards, etc.
You're missing a point here: Rambus are considered an American company; most of the companies they are targetting are Asian ones. In trade matters, the history of te US Congress is to blindly attack foriegn companies, even if it ulitimately hurts the US economy and US citizens.
IMO, the most effective course of action is to contact BT and ask about licensing options. If BT are swamped with requests and comments, they may realise what a poor idea this is. I've popped up contact details for BT, along with my thoughts on the silliness.
Allow me to reiterate: the best thing to do is write them a letter not email them. Dealing with letters is a lot harder than junking email.
Communicator is not violating the GPL by linking against non-GPL libraries. And that's the difference. Including Communicator doen't undermin the GPL.
Yeah. And they'll be real happy when the GPL is undermined and invalidated thanks to the KDE project, won't they?
It's most likely taken so long because official support costs money - you have to have a bunch of people able to deal with questions. Presumable IBM have only just reached the point where they feel the cost of offerring Linux as a supported OS is worth it.
The claim, however, bears a great deal more resemblence to fact than, say, Steve Jobs' claim he invented the GUI, or Microsoft's mny claimed "innovations".
I think you're right to an extent about the graphics - although MK 3D, sorry, Quake III has some nice environmental detail - but the big differenece for me between the early FPS games that I remember fondly (Doom II, Marathon) and the later games is sound.
Everyone at games companies seems so obsessed with flashier graphics, sound seems to have taken a back seat, but the noises in a game of Doom give more atmosphere than any number of polygons can give the Quake series.