Again, why does the enemy, with its intransigence, get to decide the rules? Surrender and we'll let everyone go.
Who cares about "the enemy"? Who cares about "international law"?
We are Americans. As Americans, there are certain principles that define our country. If we don't uphold those principles, what's left? We're just another economic superpower, like the USSR or China. It's definitely not worth hurting anyone to defend that, not even terrorists. If we as a country don't keep our principles, we're left with nothing of real value at all.
Simply saying "its a war" does not excuse the United States government from upholding the basic principles that define our country. In a real war, declared by Congress, against another country, the concept of Prisoners of War makes some sense. Those people still have rights, and they are released when the war is over. Even the largest wars only last for a limited amount of time; World War II lasted six years.
Reasoning in terms of "a war against al-Quada" is absurd, based simply on the obvious results of such reasoning. It would give us an excuse to hold people indefinitely without trial. That would be sacrificing one of the basic principles that makes our country worth defending, so we can immediately eliminate it as an option. Bringing up terrorist atomic bombs is absurd, but even if it wasn't - it wouldn't matter. If we don't respect the ideals of freedom, the United States has sacrificed the only value it ever had.
With enough money and proper coordination, a lawsuit might be the right idea. A sufficiently large legal LART could prevent municipal ISPs from implementing global filtering at all. In this case though, I doubt anyone's in the position to do that correctly.
It's not about boing-boing, it's about filtering on a public network. If the government is providing a public network, it must be open and unfiltered - because the existence of a free public network drives away alternative commercial providers - it may become the only network, or it may be the only network available to some users.
Inadvertent censorship needs to be treated the same as intentional censorship - there's no way to differentiate the two, and trying to just allows the former to be used as an excuse to defend the latter.
The fact that the United States is playing international law games in order to facilitate the holding of prisoners indefinitely without trial is something that no US citizen should consider even slightly acceptable. The United States was founded on the ideal of freedom, and the founders thought that the issue of imprisonment without trial was so important that they dedicated an item to it in the Bill of Rights.
If other countries want to torture their prisoners that's bad. But for the United States to hold prisoners indefinitely in the name of defending the country - that makes a mockery of the very values that make the country worth defending at all.
That depends if you consider "We deny everything", "No comment", and "I don't recall" to be dishonesty or some sort of "standard response form" that means nothing and therefore is neither honest or dishonest.
Stallman isn't supporting Castro, he's just shitting on Bush more. The fact that Cuba isn't the bastion of human rights doesn't reduce the severity of the United States - the most powerful single country in the world - having questionable human rights practices.
Stallman is always very careful about what he says in cases like this. Don't put words in his mouth, find out what he's actually said and respond to that.
Move back to one single socket for all CPUs. And one only.
I see this complaint a lot, and it's a severe misunderstanding of the situation. AMD processors have onboard memory controllers - that means that a Socket AM2 processor (with a DDR2 memory controller) could never drop into a Socket 939 system (DDR memory) anyway - it wouldn't know what to do with the RAM.
Now that DDR2 RAM is pretty standard, AMD only has 2 different sockets: AM2 and 1207 - one is for consumer level systems, and one is for multi-socket systems that need NUMA support like servers. For the moment (the next year or so), these sockets will be pretty stable. Actually, Intel is talking about bringing the graphics controller on die at about the same time that AMD will move to DDR3/FBDIMM next year, so they'll be changing sockets too.
Back in the real world, this doesn't matter enough to effect the market. Most people don't upgrade computers, they replace them. Even for those few people who do upgrade computer components, it'd be time for a new motherboard now if you had an AMD processor old enough to use an old socket - PCI Express and DDR2 are pretty good stuff compared to AGP and DDR.
It always amuses me when people who work on a computer for a living think that their exempt from knowing about computers because they have some other job title. Computers are complex, and they're directly relevant to most desk jobs - you're not more exempt from knowing about computers because there are "computer people" than you are exempt from knowing about reading & writing because there are "english people".
The encoding, since it takes a while and doesn't need any input from me, would be better done on a central server.
Given the price tradeoff between a powerful server and just having powerful clients, it makes a lot of sense to use all the desktops in the office as a render farm.
One core that can perform two billion operations per second will always be better than two cores that can each perform one billion ops/sec. Well, unless each core has its own memory controller and there's NUMA trickery going on.
The reason we're seeing multi-core processors is that Moore's Law is continuing, but it's not possible to turn a doubling in transistors into a doubling of single-core performance. You get tradeoffs like "add a second core OR add some cache and increase speed by a factor of four on divide operations only". Adding a second core almost doubles performance if the programmers aren't lazy - so that's what's happening.
Personally, I want to see more NUMA trickery. That could result in significant performance gains if it was exploited properly by programmers. Unfortunately, AMD's QuadFX stuff is the only desktop area where it exists, so no game / desktop app developers will use it because it's so small a chunk of the market.
There are many millions of people who have a PS2 and still want more games for it. The "hardware" claim is possible, but the "software" claim seems ridiculous unless you have a solid reference.
I'm not saying the situation isn't bad, but I'd prefer this situation any day to the one of Nazi Germany in its prime.
Stuff like this is much more dangerous in the long term than Nazi Germany was. Sure, the Nazis killed millions of people for their religion, but that sort of thing gets resolved pretty quickly with a strong cultural reaction in the other direction. Insidious restrictions on free communication, if allowed to flourish, can actually self-reinforce.
If they rose prices too high, a competitor could undercut them.
There are only two companies that legally *can* compete with Intel in the x86 processor market: AMD and VIA. Intel has a shitload of patents on implementing x86, and it's only through sheer luck that those two companies have licenses for the patents. If AMD goes under, VIA becomes our only hope for competition - and if the C7 is any indicator, Intel would be able to set their price for high end gaming processors for a very long time before VIA even had a chance of catching up.
Yea, and the market is for the most part ignoring the Wii and clamoring to get a PS2.
The Wii is interesting in that it was introduced at a price in-line with consoles that have been on the market for a while. It was quite a while before the PS2 or the XBox got down to that price level. It'll be the same with the PS3 and the Xbox360 - the early adopters buy them in the first year or two, and then there are price drops and everyone else joins the current generation. Then a couple years after that new systems will come out that only the early adopters will buy.
You're probably fine just having a single Ubuntu system. Canonical will probably back you against any patent claim. If you want to be more sure, you'd probably be ok installing just one RHEL system.
You still have two huge advantages against the BSA:
First, you have no legal relationship with any of their clients. That means they have no good excuse to knock on your door at all.
Second, you have a Linux distributor who will have to help defend you - if you can be targeted by patent crap, then any of their users can be targeted, and that's not good for their business. This doesn't apply if you're using an unknown/completely non-commercial distro - but even for Ubuntu there's Canonical to help you.
Overpriced based on what? What a PS2 or Original XBox costs now? What they cost when they were first released, ignoring inflation?
Consoles have always been expensive when they first came out. These two consoles (PS3 and Xbox360) happen to be the first generation of consoles that supports HDTV resolutions - that's a giant jump from supporting SDTV in terms of computing power. If you consider what a decent TV that takes advantage of that power costs, a couple hundred bucks of console price really doesn't seem like that big a deal.
If you're not interested in high def gaming, fine. Don't buy the currently-high-end consoles. That does mean that you won't be able to get some of the new games - but that's the choice you've made, sorry. Those people who do want to play games with nice graphics on their nice TVs aren't going to stop having an awesome time gaming to feel sorry for you.
The sales pitch is that it lets you play modern video games with decent graphics!
That's exactly the same as the sales pitch for the XBox 360. Yes, it costs 25% more than the XBox. On the other hand, it has some technical advantages over the Xbox and has different exclusive games. Remember that the blueray disks aren't just for movies - they also allow game developers to have something like five times as much game data as an XBox 360 game can have.
Disclaimer: I don't own a PS3, and I won't buy one until there is an official patch from Sony (not some hack) that allows the graphics system to be accessed by 3rd party operating systems. The platform has amazing potential, but I'm not going to start buying hardware that prevents me from using it for Sony.
This is an interesting problem, which you've underlined very well.
The Official name of the product is "Ubuntu 7.04" and it's released and supported by a company called Canonical. "Beryl" has nothing to do with it, and "Feisty Fawn" is just a developer codename. The fact that there is no coherent marketing effort that is more powerful than random word of mouth legitimately does lead to confusion. The only way this will get better is as Canonical gets more support contracts and is able to dedicate a significant budget to Marketing / Public Relations. Being optimistic, we can expect that to happen in the near future.
"Ordinary user" logic dictates that upload speed doesn't matter if you're not uploading.. but with BitTorrent it does;-)
Even for applications other than bittorrent, upload speed can matter. At a certain point, you even run into problems for a pure download: Every TCP packet you receive requires you to send an "ack" packet back to the source - for really extreme asymmetric connections, or if you're straining your upload capacity for some other reason, this can result in your poor upload speed severely hurting your download speed (and latency).
As a general rule, I would suggest trying to avoid a download:upload ratio higher than 4:1 even if you don't expect to do any uploading at all. For Bittorrent, 1:1 is optimal.
My home "desktop" machine is both a workstation and a server, and I don't find any clues that tell me which edition I should be running.
But I still suspect that there's only a 50% chance that I guessed right.
Yea, you probably picked wrong. =P
The normal (i.e. Desktop) version of Ubuntu is for machines that will be installed using a GUI. The Server version of Ubuntu is for machines that will be installed and used without a GUI. My understanding is that the Server edition is exactly the Desktop edition, with the GUI left out.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about "the enemy"? Who cares about "international law"?
We are Americans. As Americans, there are certain principles that define our country. If we don't uphold those principles, what's left? We're just another economic superpower, like the USSR or China. It's definitely not worth hurting anyone to defend that, not even terrorists. If we as a country don't keep our principles, we're left with nothing of real value at all.
Simply saying "its a war" does not excuse the United States government from upholding the basic principles that define our country. In a real war, declared by Congress, against another country, the concept of Prisoners of War makes some sense. Those people still have rights, and they are released when the war is over. Even the largest wars only last for a limited amount of time; World War II lasted six years.
Reasoning in terms of "a war against al-Quada" is absurd, based simply on the obvious results of such reasoning. It would give us an excuse to hold people indefinitely without trial. That would be sacrificing one of the basic principles that makes our country worth defending, so we can immediately eliminate it as an option. Bringing up terrorist atomic bombs is absurd, but even if it wasn't - it wouldn't matter. If we don't respect the ideals of freedom, the United States has sacrificed the only value it ever had.
With enough money and proper coordination, a lawsuit might be the right idea. A sufficiently large legal LART could prevent municipal ISPs from implementing global filtering at all. In this case though, I doubt anyone's in the position to do that correctly.
It's not about boing-boing, it's about filtering on a public network. If the government is providing a public network, it must be open and unfiltered - because the existence of a free public network drives away alternative commercial providers - it may become the only network, or it may be the only network available to some users.
Inadvertent censorship needs to be treated the same as intentional censorship - there's no way to differentiate the two, and trying to just allows the former to be used as an excuse to defend the latter.
The fact that the United States is playing international law games in order to facilitate the holding of prisoners indefinitely without trial is something that no US citizen should consider even slightly acceptable. The United States was founded on the ideal of freedom, and the founders thought that the issue of imprisonment without trial was so important that they dedicated an item to it in the Bill of Rights.
If other countries want to torture their prisoners that's bad. But for the United States to hold prisoners indefinitely in the name of defending the country - that makes a mockery of the very values that make the country worth defending at all.
Compared to US government officials?
That depends if you consider "We deny everything", "No comment", and "I don't recall" to be dishonesty or some sort of "standard response form" that means nothing and therefore is neither honest or dishonest.
Stallman isn't supporting Castro, he's just shitting on Bush more. The fact that Cuba isn't the bastion of human rights doesn't reduce the severity of the United States - the most powerful single country in the world - having questionable human rights practices.
Stallman is always very careful about what he says in cases like this. Don't put words in his mouth, find out what he's actually said and respond to that.
I see this complaint a lot, and it's a severe misunderstanding of the situation. AMD processors have onboard memory controllers - that means that a Socket AM2 processor (with a DDR2 memory controller) could never drop into a Socket 939 system (DDR memory) anyway - it wouldn't know what to do with the RAM.
Now that DDR2 RAM is pretty standard, AMD only has 2 different sockets: AM2 and 1207 - one is for consumer level systems, and one is for multi-socket systems that need NUMA support like servers. For the moment (the next year or so), these sockets will be pretty stable. Actually, Intel is talking about bringing the graphics controller on die at about the same time that AMD will move to DDR3/FBDIMM next year, so they'll be changing sockets too.
Back in the real world, this doesn't matter enough to effect the market. Most people don't upgrade computers, they replace them. Even for those few people who do upgrade computer components, it'd be time for a new motherboard now if you had an AMD processor old enough to use an old socket - PCI Express and DDR2 are pretty good stuff compared to AGP and DDR.
You design things on a computer, right?
It always amuses me when people who work on a computer for a living think that their exempt from knowing about computers because they have some other job title. Computers are complex, and they're directly relevant to most desk jobs - you're not more exempt from knowing about computers because there are "computer people" than you are exempt from knowing about reading & writing because there are "english people".
Given the price tradeoff between a powerful server and just having powerful clients, it makes a lot of sense to use all the desktops in the office as a render farm.
One core that can perform two billion operations per second will always be better than two cores that can each perform one billion ops/sec. Well, unless each core has its own memory controller and there's NUMA trickery going on.
The reason we're seeing multi-core processors is that Moore's Law is continuing, but it's not possible to turn a doubling in transistors into a doubling of single-core performance. You get tradeoffs like "add a second core OR add some cache and increase speed by a factor of four on divide operations only". Adding a second core almost doubles performance if the programmers aren't lazy - so that's what's happening.
Personally, I want to see more NUMA trickery. That could result in significant performance gains if it was exploited properly by programmers. Unfortunately, AMD's QuadFX stuff is the only desktop area where it exists, so no game / desktop app developers will use it because it's so small a chunk of the market.
Reference?
There are many millions of people who have a PS2 and still want more games for it. The "hardware" claim is possible, but the "software" claim seems ridiculous unless you have a solid reference.
Stuff like this is much more dangerous in the long term than Nazi Germany was. Sure, the Nazis killed millions of people for their religion, but that sort of thing gets resolved pretty quickly with a strong cultural reaction in the other direction. Insidious restrictions on free communication, if allowed to flourish, can actually self-reinforce.
There are only two companies that legally *can* compete with Intel in the x86 processor market: AMD and VIA. Intel has a shitload of patents on implementing x86, and it's only through sheer luck that those two companies have licenses for the patents. If AMD goes under, VIA becomes our only hope for competition - and if the C7 is any indicator, Intel would be able to set their price for high end gaming processors for a very long time before VIA even had a chance of catching up.
Yea, and the market is for the most part ignoring the Wii and clamoring to get a PS2.
The Wii is interesting in that it was introduced at a price in-line with consoles that have been on the market for a while. It was quite a while before the PS2 or the XBox got down to that price level. It'll be the same with the PS3 and the Xbox360 - the early adopters buy them in the first year or two, and then there are price drops and everyone else joins the current generation. Then a couple years after that new systems will come out that only the early adopters will buy.
You're probably fine just having a single Ubuntu system. Canonical will probably back you against any patent claim. If you want to be more sure, you'd probably be ok installing just one RHEL system.
You still have two huge advantages against the BSA:
First, you have no legal relationship with any of their clients. That means they have no good excuse to knock on your door at all.
Second, you have a Linux distributor who will have to help defend you - if you can be targeted by patent crap, then any of their users can be targeted, and that's not good for their business. This doesn't apply if you're using an unknown/completely non-commercial distro - but even for Ubuntu there's Canonical to help you.
Overpriced based on what? What a PS2 or Original XBox costs now? What they cost when they were first released, ignoring inflation?
Consoles have always been expensive when they first came out. These two consoles (PS3 and Xbox360) happen to be the first generation of consoles that supports HDTV resolutions - that's a giant jump from supporting SDTV in terms of computing power. If you consider what a decent TV that takes advantage of that power costs, a couple hundred bucks of console price really doesn't seem like that big a deal.
If you're not interested in high def gaming, fine. Don't buy the currently-high-end consoles. That does mean that you won't be able to get some of the new games - but that's the choice you've made, sorry. Those people who do want to play games with nice graphics on their nice TVs aren't going to stop having an awesome time gaming to feel sorry for you.
The sales pitch is that it lets you play modern video games with decent graphics!
That's exactly the same as the sales pitch for the XBox 360. Yes, it costs 25% more than the XBox. On the other hand, it has some technical advantages over the Xbox and has different exclusive games. Remember that the blueray disks aren't just for movies - they also allow game developers to have something like five times as much game data as an XBox 360 game can have.
Disclaimer: I don't own a PS3, and I won't buy one until there is an official patch from Sony (not some hack) that allows the graphics system to be accessed by 3rd party operating systems. The platform has amazing potential, but I'm not going to start buying hardware that prevents me from using it for Sony.
It isn't needed in Feisty. It isn't even useful in Feisty, except for DVD support (and there are easy instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormat s to install that the "Official" way).
This is an interesting problem, which you've underlined very well.
The Official name of the product is "Ubuntu 7.04" and it's released and supported by a company called Canonical. "Beryl" has nothing to do with it, and "Feisty Fawn" is just a developer codename. The fact that there is no coherent marketing effort that is more powerful than random word of mouth legitimately does lead to confusion. The only way this will get better is as Canonical gets more support contracts and is able to dedicate a significant budget to Marketing / Public Relations. Being optimistic, we can expect that to happen in the near future.
Even for applications other than bittorrent, upload speed can matter. At a certain point, you even run into problems for a pure download: Every TCP packet you receive requires you to send an "ack" packet back to the source - for really extreme asymmetric connections, or if you're straining your upload capacity for some other reason, this can result in your poor upload speed severely hurting your download speed (and latency).
As a general rule, I would suggest trying to avoid a download:upload ratio higher than 4:1 even if you don't expect to do any uploading at all. For Bittorrent, 1:1 is optimal.
Is that Verizon "15 meg down / 2 up" FiOS? If so, have fun trying to do anything interesting with it.
Yea, you probably picked wrong. =P
The normal (i.e. Desktop) version of Ubuntu is for machines that will be installed using a GUI. The Server version of Ubuntu is for machines that will be installed and used without a GUI. My understanding is that the Server edition is exactly the Desktop edition, with the GUI left out.