(1) He obviously can't tell the difference between pure and applied mathematics and
That conclusion is not obvious. Given that the real world introduces complications that can be ignored in the world of pure mathematics, his (presumed) premise that "if applied is hard, the weaker might better stick with pure" makes logical sense.
(2) How come all the loser mathematicians who can't hack it end up becoming programmers?.
Both of your premises of "loser" and "can't hack it" are just some sort of pejorative that mean nothing in practice if you're trying to make a logical argument, and the "end up becoming programmers" is patently false. So the statement is just plain empty of value.
I've never had much respect for Dijkstra. I have even less now.
Well, as a personal statement of your dislike for someone, it requires no rational justification and hence cannot be faulted. Whether others will feel a consequent lack of respect for your own self as a result is hard to say, but it's pretty safe to assume that they won't be impressed by your ability to reason.
Companies suring their lawyers over bad advice?
on
USL vs BSDI Documents
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· Score: 1, Interesting
There is so much of this rubbish going on these days that I can't help but wonder whether any company has sued its lawyers after being driven in a particularly unfortunate direction by their legal advice.
Sure, lawyers will always claim the defense that they merely offer advice and that the company directors bear the full responsibility for having accepted it. But that's fundamentally dishonest for a professional. It's like saying that an engineer or architect can design a bridge or a building and that it's the responsibility of the builders to ensure that it was a safe design. No, people rarely have expertise in multiple professions, and that is why they hire professionals to do what they would do only poorly by themselves. And with the authority and control that this gives the professional must come also some consequent responsibility. You cannot expect the hirer to bear that responsibility, he doesn't have the competence in the domain for which he has hired the professional, by definition.
So, all these hundreds or thousands of lawyer types that are advising (presumably) their company directors to perform legal-type actions despite the bad consequences that outsiders like ourselves can easily see forthcoming, are they ever suffering the consequences of their bad advice?
There is a conflict of interest issue here as well, since any litigation plays into the hands and pockets of the legal profession, but that's a more complex subject and it's not the one I'm referring to above.
No doubt there are various reasons for the doldrums.
One of them is pretty likely to be the ever-increasing threat of patent claims that looms over developers these days, with patent-squatting companies everywhere and the most idiotic and trivial of basic software and business methods being at their mercy. This must be having a cooling effect on development of new ideas.
Copyright never caused that kind of problem, as you could plan ahead and clean room any new development. In contrast, the small developers that tend to create the new ideas in software and for online commerce simply have no means of creating anything new without opening themselves to patent claims in the future.
If the party is over, the end is surely of our own making, and disincentives for recovery like the patent nightmare suggest that the next party may be a long time in coming.
I can't understand why the anti-RMS brigade feel somehow hurt by RMS's statement that "Linux [the kernel] itself is no longer essential". It is simply a 100% accurate statement of fact, without any advocacy or preferences to taint it, in view of the undeniable evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of *BSD users and systems spread across the world and doing very nicely thank you, all with their own non-Linux kernels.
It's about as precise a statement as you can make. Those *BSD users are not figments of our imagination, and indeed they might even claim that they run the best kernel. However, that would be advocacy, and others might deny it. The undeniable claim though is the one that RMS made. One should not try to find hidden criticism in an utterly precise and unadorned statement of fact.
I'm completely dependent on the Linux kernel myself so any problems it might suffer could hurt me. But I can't argue with RMS's clear point.
To say that the GPL and RIAA policy are so closely linked (because they both rely on copyright) that you can't accept one without the other is like saying that the Constitution and a ransom note are morally equivalent because they were both written on paper, or that a surgeon and a murderer are no different because they both slice human tissue.
You're confusing vehicle with intent.
Sure, they both ride on copyright law, but you can use any instrument for good or for bad, and just because one accepts the work of surgeons as good doesn't mean that one has to support the rights of murderers to cut up people.
The RIAA is using copyright law as an excuse for denying the natural outcome of the new technology for distribution of digital content and hence continuing the torrent of cash into their coffers, and they are doing that very largely at the expense of the actual authors of that music. The GPL in contrast really just creates a symbol or meme for publicly-minded developers to follow, and while its legal basis is of course copyright, just ask anyone (apart from a lawyer) how relevant that really is. To the people that matter to (and that's most definitely not the lawyers, despite one or two of them being nice people), it is utterly irrelevant. It's just a necessary vehicle in a silly world where some people think that these things matter, so bend with the wind and put that clause in to keep them happy. That is seriously the full extent of it.
But really we trade only in symbols. And the symbol that the RIAA so proudly wears is most definitely not one that is even remotely related to that of the GPL.
And both the 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra have much smaller fans than the attrocious 5800 Ultra that gave the FX series such a bad start, and they don't take up the ridiculous 2 slots that the 5800 Ultra did either, nor cost such a fortune as they've dropped the DDRII memory.
But going back to your inappropriate comment... the non-Ultra 5200 doesn't sounds like a leafblower, since it doesn't sound at all. It's a great card for the high-volume, medium performance but still leading edge, DX9 market.
At the end of the day, nVidia have added optimizations to their drivers, which is what all driver manufacturers do all day long everywhere.
Whenever a special case that might be accelerated can be identified, they add an optimization for it. If that speeds up a benchmark, great, and if it speeds up ONLY a benchmark then that benchmark must be utterly unrepresentative of real apps and hence totally useless.
So what are you saying, that the benchmark was totally useless? If not, then nVidia's optimizations will have sped up some apps as well, which is the whole point of benchmarks and the whole point of optimizations.
Claims of fraud make no sense at all unless the benchmarker acknowledges that his benchmark is worthless so that the optimizations help no real apps.
Doesn't matter, it's more than long enough
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 4, Interesting
the light frequency is altered for only a short time
The "short time" doesn't really matter, and furthermore looking at a "light beam" as an end-to-end continuous sine wave that you stretch and compress doesn't really help here...
Photons last forever (well, until absorbed etc). Once one has escaped from the reflection zone between shockwave fronts, it doesn't wither and die, it's permanently changed to do our beckoning. The fact that its "home of origin" has since moved on isn't really of any further concern. (And notice the difference in velocities between light and shock wavefronts, ie. hare and tortoise, so from the photon's point of view the generator is pretty static.)
Complaining that the shockwave fronts are transitory is like complaining that the metastable states in lasers are, er... metastable.:-) It doesn't matter, the point is that the wavefronts are recreated continuously, and with sound that doesn't seem all that hard.
While you're right about the tons of FUD, that won't stop SCO from winning verdicts in court.
Remember that the US legal system from the lowest lawyers to the highest judges is basically corrupt, in the sense that court cases are massively influenced by money, actual justice plays a secondary role, and fairness doesn't even get a look in. Furthermore, the lawyer wallet-lining is self-sustaining through the leapfrog mechanism of loss and appeal as cases rise up the legal chain.
I don't think even the most naive of observers harbors the illusion that SCO's claim will be chucked out on first judgement and never be seen again.
This is the US. Lawyers need that 3rd SUV, and judges need high-profile cases as part of their career progression.
It seems a bit odd that the advocates for each type of design never seem interested in combining their approaches for a more effective hybrid.
Using a host aircraft to take your otherwise single-stage-to-orbit flyer part of the way up may be unsexy, but it provides a significant gain in various launcher design parameters and the safety of a tried and tested technique. (Safer for crew too, not just for the accountants.)
It would be damn nice to see fewer purity advocates and more genuine engineers in this area.
"Keeping files together" all over the place :-)
on
If I Had My Own Distro...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I found this thread hilarious. Some parts of the proposal are very iffy, but some parts of the criticisms are even iffier.
Just to highlight a totally nonsensical (but very funny) comment of yours...
In particular, spreading configuration files all around with their owners is a great mistake.
Hahahaha. Those files started out all in one place, together with their owner package, and it's you that says that the right thing to do is to spread them out all over the system.:-)
Just to tease you a little more on this, the traditional Unix approach is centralized.... very much like the horrendous MS registry, although admittedly Unix retains some degree of sanity by keeping those centralized files separate and plain.:-)
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think that any reasonable person would have to admit that. Unfortunately, we're not seeing much in the way of a reasoned meeting of minds at all on this topic.
There is a danger here. While Windoze is still primitive compared to even a 15-year old Unix except in surface aesthetics, it will mature eventually, and if attempts to make even small and fairly reasonable improvements to Unix continue to be thwarted by barely-substantiated resistance to change then the future will not be rosey.
This (excellent) paper alludes to the usual situation that cheaper machines tend not to use ECC in memory modules and in other parts of their architecture in order to save on manufacturing costs.
Note however that this common perception is not strictly speaking entirely accurate or necessary, because if a system is designed to meet a given level of reliability then a machine with ECC may end up being cheaper than one without ECC, because the error detection and correction can make up for reduced reliability in the rest of the hardware.
As an example, some components may be run closer to their operating limits, possibly partially overclocked, or power supplies may be less well regulated and hence electronic noise margins may be slightly compromised, or the system may be designed with substandard cooling, and so on. ECC could help mitigate some of the effects of such presumably cheaper designs, while still maintaining the reliability of better implementions.
So, there's slightly more to the "ECC only found in better systems" argument than at first meets the eye. As usual, caveat emptor.:-)
People are going to buy EQ2, go "ooh, ahh", log in, appreciate New Freeport's amenities, walk outside and fight a couple of rats, and go back to their level 65 guys in EQ. Why would they want to level up on rats again in a game with 1/10 the content of EQ?
I agree, but oh, it's much, much worse than that. From what we hear, Sony will not migrate EQ1 characters to EQ2 *and* will shut down EQ1 after a period to free themselves of the immense costs of running two COMPETING systems in parallel.
And at that point, when they abandon people who have invested years in developing their EQ1 characters, they will suddenly find that they themselves have been abandoned, and have lost a huge proportion of their regular monthly income. When you kick a person in a place that matters they tend to remember it, and by the time people's characters are in their 50's and 60's, they matter to them. EQ2 could be the prettiest place in existence, yet it will be perceived as fatally flawed if it bars one's own EQ1 characters from entry. People are their characters.
Talking to fellow guildies about the likely effect of this, I have not yet found a single one that would be willing to start from scratch again. We'll have to see how this plays out, but it rather looks like those business managers who decided on the non-migration policy from EQ1 to EQ2 have taken business stupidity to a new level of magnificence.
GeForce FX taught nVidia a good lesson
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ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, nVidia fans (like myself too) may be severely disappointed that the GeForce FX turned out to be an almost total turkey because of noise, power consumption, and barely adequate basic performance, but it's actually pretty healthy that ATI is now back in the lead.
Hopefully nVidia will recognize that it made a dreadful mistake way back at design and specification time on the FX, and learn from it. If it doesn't then it's commercially dead, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Within the company, this probably requires booting out some managers and pressing some engineers' noses onto red-hot heatsinks.
I agree, there's no need to bash the reviewers. Everyone knows that they try to butter up the hardware suppliers, but they still deliver fairly objective reviews, so there's no real problem.
I'm uncertain what kind of entity the US Army actually is in this context, for instance, is it a single legal corporate entity?
Judging by these replies however, there is complete unanimity that the freedoms "guaranteed" (in a sense) by the GPL do not apply to individuals when they are part of a legal entity like a corporation or an institution or agency. That in itself is interesting... you'd think that the GPL would not want to restrict anyone's freedoms to access the source code, inside or outside of an organization.
Does this mean then that a company can avoid infringing the letter of the GPL but still willfully sidestep its intent by requiring users to accept (say in a EULA or click-through license) that for the purpose of using their software the end user and the supplier constitute a contractual entity? It would seem that no, this would clearly be in breach of the GPL, yet the same questionable curtailment of freedom is present if the user and supplier are already part of an entity in the first place. These two scenarios really don't sit very happily together.
The GPL aspects of this should be interesting, since it will give the system's end users the right to request source code of any parts that were modified, all the way down to the lowly grunt.
I guess asking for secret source code would land the people concerned in the brig or worse and so would never happen, but it's an interesting issue nevertheless.
No, aggregate bandwidth increases with # nodes
on
Wireless Mesh Networks
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· Score: 4, Informative
you would find it very difficult to have a big network as all of the network chatter takes up an increasing amount of spectrum
This is not so, although the articles doesn't really make that clear --- the aggregate bandwidth of these networks grows as the number of nodes increases in density and in geographical extent.
The reason why this is so is that in a wireless mesh network, RF coverage is purposely restricted by turning down the power automatically and/or by dynamic channelization using frequency, time, or code (spread spectrum) multiplexing. This in effect gives you a dynamic cellular type of architecture, with channel reuse in non-adjacent cells.
And that of course is why it's called a mesh network --- it's not a fully connected network of nodes (which would be non-scalable and bandwidth-limited), but a mesh in which locality is strong so that nodes only hear and connect to their nearest neighbours, so each new locale contributes bandwidth to the overall aggregate capacity instead of eating up yet another slice of a dwindling pie.
Some of the articles in this thread referred to copyright in the digital audio processed by instruments. This sparked in me a little question regarding music that is partially or entirely MIDI-encoded at source (and in some genres, that's practically all music).
Which is the original work in these cases from the point of view of copyright, the MIDI or the version published/released on CD? Are they both copyrighted? Clearly the released version carries a copyright, but does the MIDI original as well, or is copyright inherited between representations so that there is just a single copyright, or what?
Does anyone know how copyright works with respect to MIDI sources?
The primary reason for such discrimination (which does happen, as a freelance contracter I've seen it repeatedly in many places, from both sides of the compiled/scripted fence) usually has very little to do with the view that one type of language system is a professional tool and that the other is amateurish.
In my experience, the main reasons tend to be simple departmental strategy and politics (the last two are inseparable), internal empire building and associated defensive stances, and management concern that lone or paired scripters are harder for them to control than the typically more cumbersome compiled development team which usually requires a management presence to even work.
There is alas also a secondary issue at work, namely that because scripting is "easy" (largely an illusion on non-trivial projects, but nevertheless also partly true), every Tom, Dick and Harry dabbles in it, and as a result there are an awful lot of pretty incompetent scripters around, in an engineering sense. And that is a valid consideration: when a scripter hasn't even heard of regression or unit testing let alone doesn't do any (as an example), you can see how questions can be raised regarding what else is lacking in his or her CompSci education.
Ultimately, there are no good or bad scripters or C, C++, or Java coders, there are just good and bad software engineers in the broadest sense of the term, and a good professional always uses the best tool for the job in hand. The trouble is, you can't become a software professional overnight, even if you are the world's most insightful Perl guru, because there is an awful lot more to creating solid systems than knowing a language inside out. It takes a solid background first, and it takes a lot of hard-earned experience as well. The coding is just the easy bit in the middle, and unfortunately the amount of non-language experience you get from sitting at home working on your own apps is minimal.
In summary, yes, the discrimination exists, and a lot of it stems from some pretty nasty internal politics in a lot of places. However, a little of it may be justified, as the average level of competence among scriptors seems to be a little lower than among compiled language programmers, probably owing to very few of the latter being self-taught.
For goodness sake folks, you're suppposed to be techies, don't you understand that all TV programming is "spammed" in the sense that it's broadcast to everybody??? That makes it fairly silly to accuse the BBC of spamming. Yeah, the BBC and all TV stations have been spamming us for half a century, it's what they do.
All TVs, VCRs, and TiVos in the appropriate reception areas received the broadcast, if they were switched on and tuned to the right channel. I've never heard of anyone switching on the telly and shouting in horror, "I'm being spammed!". The TiVos also stored what they were receiving, as that's what they were designed to do with this special content. That really does make this a non-story.
Please reserve the word "spam" for individually addressed delivery systems delivering the same item to multiple recipients. Applying it to broadcast systems makes no sense at all.
I pigeonhole spicy food into five personal categories, with examples: mild (Korma), hot (Madras), hiccups (the hotter types of Indonesian Tom Yam), painfully fiery (Vindaloo), and too hot for me (Tindaloo and hotter).
I'm prepared to accept the possibility of ancestry shared with fish, but I've never heard of fish eating curries...:-)
Intrinsically safe space vehicles
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Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While nobody yet knows what caused the disaster, and while numerous alternative scenarios have been suggested to explain it, absolutely everybody agrees that current space vehicle technology is extremely fragile. Not fragile per se, as the shuttle is designed to survive a whole range of minor problems and has done so repeatedly. However, it is effectively very fragile in the context of the extremely harsh conditions of space and the huge forces of launch and reentry. Nobody disputes that the risks of manned space exploration are currently very very high in the face of things "going wrong".
I wonder then, what would be needed to reverse this situation? If we knew what was required, we'd have some idea of how far away from such a future we currently are. It is after all not an impossible dream --- for example, as one part of a transport system, you could hypothesize that a seamless body built out of (say) 1000-times as strong self-sealing materials comprising millions of layers of ablative and structural thin film, with a passive self-righting shape, might not have any problem at all in dealing with reentry conditions. (This is not a proposal --- I'm just suggesting that you can always come up with a less fragile basis for a space vehicle by extrapolating current-day technological developments.)
So, given the (futuristic) possibility of eventually having vehicle technology that is inherently less fragile than the current one, what would we need to develop towards such a future? We all know that there are pretty amazing developments in materials technology heading our way already, within human timespans, but there is more to it than just materials.
For a start, is there a completely stable, self-righting shape that would be a clear candidate for a design that eliminated the risk of guidance electronics failure by not requiring any stabilizing controls once the reentry trajectory was established outside of the atmosphere?
If so, transformation from that to a gliding shape is only one of many possibilities for handling the landing, ranging from on-end-landing propulsion to catching the darn thing to good ol' parachutes and many other approaches.
This is funny, since I actually agreed with you in part, namely that there can be a lot of work involved in publishing. However, you missed entirely (or ignored willfully) the point being made, that without content you have nothing.
Then you point out even more heatedly just how much extra work is performed by the publisher... while missing the insight that it's largely makework, either not essential or in very many cases capable of being done by the author. Furthermore, your contribution is undoubtedly the key reason why the end price is so high (the costs of an organization are always much higher than those of the author), as others have pointed out.
Finally, you point out that in some cases the publishing house actually creates the work, perhaps through doing the research, bringing together articles or authors, and so on. This is excellent... you have become the AUTHOR. But don't confuse that situation with the normal one, where you are primarily a middleman dealing in presentation and marketing, no more. That can be a useful function function, in some cases, but extending its importance beyond that is flawed.
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book.
While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
Furthermore, the "no idea how much work is needed" response is often used to justify the continued existence of the middleman even when he is no longer necessary. If technology respected such words of caution, we'd have no desktop publishing, no home video and graphics production, and no home music studios. And of course, the individual artist would always be just a tiny cog in an immense machine.
The middleman does need to be put in his rightful place --- not necessarily extinction, but certainly in a limited niche.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) He obviously can't tell the difference between pure and applied mathematics and
That conclusion is not obvious. Given that the real world introduces complications that can be ignored in the world of pure mathematics, his (presumed) premise that "if applied is hard, the weaker might better stick with pure" makes logical sense.
(2) How come all the loser mathematicians who can't hack it end up becoming programmers?.
Both of your premises of "loser" and "can't hack it" are just some sort of pejorative that mean nothing in practice if you're trying to make a logical argument, and the "end up becoming programmers" is patently false. So the statement is just plain empty of value.
I've never had much respect for Dijkstra. I have even less now.
Well, as a personal statement of your dislike for someone, it requires no rational justification and hence cannot be faulted. Whether others will feel a consequent lack of respect for your own self as a result is hard to say, but it's pretty safe to assume that they won't be impressed by your ability to reason.
There is so much of this rubbish going on these days that I can't help but wonder whether any company has sued its lawyers after being driven in a particularly unfortunate direction by their legal advice.
Sure, lawyers will always claim the defense that they merely offer advice and that the company directors bear the full responsibility for having accepted it. But that's fundamentally dishonest for a professional. It's like saying that an engineer or architect can design a bridge or a building and that it's the responsibility of the builders to ensure that it was a safe design. No, people rarely have expertise in multiple professions, and that is why they hire professionals to do what they would do only poorly by themselves. And with the authority and control that this gives the professional must come also some consequent responsibility. You cannot expect the hirer to bear that responsibility, he doesn't have the competence in the domain for which he has hired the professional, by definition.
So, all these hundreds or thousands of lawyer types that are advising (presumably) their company directors to perform legal-type actions despite the bad consequences that outsiders like ourselves can easily see forthcoming, are they ever suffering the consequences of their bad advice?
There is a conflict of interest issue here as well, since any litigation plays into the hands and pockets of the legal profession, but that's a more complex subject and it's not the one I'm referring to above.
No doubt there are various reasons for the doldrums.
One of them is pretty likely to be the ever-increasing threat of patent claims that looms over developers these days, with patent-squatting companies everywhere and the most idiotic and trivial of basic software and business methods being at their mercy. This must be having a cooling effect on development of new ideas.
Copyright never caused that kind of problem, as you could plan ahead and clean room any new development. In contrast, the small developers that tend to create the new ideas in software and for online commerce simply have no means of creating anything new without opening themselves to patent claims in the future.
If the party is over, the end is surely of our own making, and disincentives for recovery like the patent nightmare suggest that the next party may be a long time in coming.
I can't understand why the anti-RMS brigade feel somehow hurt by RMS's statement that "Linux [the kernel] itself is no longer essential". It is simply a 100% accurate statement of fact, without any advocacy or preferences to taint it, in view of the undeniable evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of *BSD users and systems spread across the world and doing very nicely thank you, all with their own non-Linux kernels.
It's about as precise a statement as you can make. Those *BSD users are not figments of our imagination, and indeed they might even claim that they run the best kernel. However, that would be advocacy, and others might deny it. The undeniable claim though is the one that RMS made. One should not try to find hidden criticism in an utterly precise and unadorned statement of fact.
I'm completely dependent on the Linux kernel myself so any problems it might suffer could hurt me. But I can't argue with RMS's clear point.
To say that the GPL and RIAA policy are so closely linked (because they both rely on copyright) that you can't accept one without the other is like saying that the Constitution and a ransom note are morally equivalent because they were both written on paper, or that a surgeon and a murderer are no different because they both slice human tissue.
You're confusing vehicle with intent.
Sure, they both ride on copyright law, but you can use any instrument for good or for bad, and just because one accepts the work of surgeons as good doesn't mean that one has to support the rights of murderers to cut up people.
The RIAA is using copyright law as an excuse for denying the natural outcome of the new technology for distribution of digital content and hence continuing the torrent of cash into their coffers, and they are doing that very largely at the expense of the actual authors of that music. The GPL in contrast really just creates a symbol or meme for publicly-minded developers to follow, and while its legal basis is of course copyright, just ask anyone (apart from a lawyer) how relevant that really is. To the people that matter to (and that's most definitely not the lawyers, despite one or two of them being nice people), it is utterly irrelevant. It's just a necessary vehicle in a silly world where some people think that these things matter, so bend with the wind and put that clause in to keep them happy. That is seriously the full extent of it.
But really we trade only in symbols. And the symbol that the RIAA so proudly wears is most definitely not one that is even remotely related to that of the GPL.
And both the 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra have much smaller fans than the attrocious 5800 Ultra that gave the FX series such a bad start, and they don't take up the ridiculous 2 slots that the 5800 Ultra did either, nor cost such a fortune as they've dropped the DDRII memory.
... the non-Ultra 5200 doesn't sounds like a leafblower, since it doesn't sound at all. It's a great card for the high-volume, medium performance but still leading edge, DX9 market.
But going back to your inappropriate comment
At the end of the day, nVidia have added optimizations to their drivers, which is what all driver manufacturers do all day long everywhere.
Whenever a special case that might be accelerated can be identified, they add an optimization for it. If that speeds up a benchmark, great, and if it speeds up ONLY a benchmark then that benchmark must be utterly unrepresentative of real apps and hence totally useless.
So what are you saying, that the benchmark was totally useless? If not, then nVidia's optimizations will have sped up some apps as well, which is the whole point of benchmarks and the whole point of optimizations.
Claims of fraud make no sense at all unless the benchmarker acknowledges that his benchmark is worthless so that the optimizations help no real apps.
the light frequency is altered for only a short time
...
... metastable. :-) It doesn't matter, the point is that the wavefronts are recreated continuously, and with sound that doesn't seem all that hard.
The "short time" doesn't really matter, and furthermore looking at a "light beam" as an end-to-end continuous sine wave that you stretch and compress doesn't really help here
Photons last forever (well, until absorbed etc). Once one has escaped from the reflection zone between shockwave fronts, it doesn't wither and die, it's permanently changed to do our beckoning. The fact that its "home of origin" has since moved on isn't really of any further concern. (And notice the difference in velocities between light and shock wavefronts, ie. hare and tortoise, so from the photon's point of view the generator is pretty static.)
Complaining that the shockwave fronts are transitory is like complaining that the metastable states in lasers are, er
While you're right about the tons of FUD, that won't stop SCO from winning verdicts in court.
Remember that the US legal system from the lowest lawyers to the highest judges is basically corrupt, in the sense that court cases are massively influenced by money, actual justice plays a secondary role, and fairness doesn't even get a look in. Furthermore, the lawyer wallet-lining is self-sustaining through the leapfrog mechanism of loss and appeal as cases rise up the legal chain.
I don't think even the most naive of observers harbors the illusion that SCO's claim will be chucked out on first judgement and never be seen again.
This is the US. Lawyers need that 3rd SUV, and judges need high-profile cases as part of their career progression.
It seems a bit odd that the advocates for each type of design never seem interested in combining their approaches for a more effective hybrid.
Using a host aircraft to take your otherwise single-stage-to-orbit flyer part of the way up may be unsexy, but it provides a significant gain in various launcher design parameters and the safety of a tried and tested technique. (Safer for crew too, not just for the accountants.)
It would be damn nice to see fewer purity advocates and more genuine engineers in this area.
I found this thread hilarious. Some parts of the proposal are very iffy, but some parts of the criticisms are even iffier.
...
:-)
.... very much like the horrendous MS registry, although admittedly Unix retains some degree of sanity by keeping those centralized files separate and plain. :-)
Just to highlight a totally nonsensical (but very funny) comment of yours
In particular, spreading configuration files all around with their owners is a great mistake.
Hahahaha. Those files started out all in one place, together with their owner package, and it's you that says that the right thing to do is to spread them out all over the system.
Just to tease you a little more on this, the traditional Unix approach is centralized
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think that any reasonable person would have to admit that. Unfortunately, we're not seeing much in the way of a reasoned meeting of minds at all on this topic.
There is a danger here. While Windoze is still primitive compared to even a 15-year old Unix except in surface aesthetics, it will mature eventually, and if attempts to make even small and fairly reasonable improvements to Unix continue to be thwarted by barely-substantiated resistance to change then the future will not be rosey.
This (excellent) paper alludes to the usual situation that cheaper machines tend not to use ECC in memory modules and in other parts of their architecture in order to save on manufacturing costs.
:-)
Note however that this common perception is not strictly speaking entirely accurate or necessary, because if a system is designed to meet a given level of reliability then a machine with ECC may end up being cheaper than one without ECC, because the error detection and correction can make up for reduced reliability in the rest of the hardware.
As an example, some components may be run closer to their operating limits, possibly partially overclocked, or power supplies may be less well regulated and hence electronic noise margins may be slightly compromised, or the system may be designed with substandard cooling, and so on. ECC could help mitigate some of the effects of such presumably cheaper designs, while still maintaining the reliability of better implementions.
So, there's slightly more to the "ECC only found in better systems" argument than at first meets the eye. As usual, caveat emptor.
People are going to buy EQ2, go "ooh, ahh", log in, appreciate New Freeport's amenities, walk outside and fight a couple of rats, and go back to their level 65 guys in EQ. Why would they want to level up on rats again in a game with 1/10 the content of EQ?
I agree, but oh, it's much, much worse than that. From what we hear, Sony will not migrate EQ1 characters to EQ2 *and* will shut down EQ1 after a period to free themselves of the immense costs of running two COMPETING systems in parallel.
And at that point, when they abandon people who have invested years in developing their EQ1 characters, they will suddenly find that they themselves have been abandoned, and have lost a huge proportion of their regular monthly income. When you kick a person in a place that matters they tend to remember it, and by the time people's characters are in their 50's and 60's, they matter to them. EQ2 could be the prettiest place in existence, yet it will be perceived as fatally flawed if it bars one's own EQ1 characters from entry. People are their characters.
Talking to fellow guildies about the likely effect of this, I have not yet found a single one that would be willing to start from scratch again. We'll have to see how this plays out, but it rather looks like those business managers who decided on the non-migration policy from EQ1 to EQ2 have taken business stupidity to a new level of magnificence.
Well, nVidia fans (like myself too) may be severely disappointed that the GeForce FX turned out to be an almost total turkey because of noise, power consumption, and barely adequate basic performance, but it's actually pretty healthy that ATI is now back in the lead.
Hopefully nVidia will recognize that it made a dreadful mistake way back at design and specification time on the FX, and learn from it. If it doesn't then it's commercially dead, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Within the company, this probably requires booting out some managers and pressing some engineers' noses onto red-hot heatsinks.
I agree, there's no need to bash the reviewers. Everyone knows that they try to butter up the hardware suppliers, but they still deliver fairly objective reviews, so there's no real problem.
I'm uncertain what kind of entity the US Army actually is in this context, for instance, is it a single legal corporate entity?
... you'd think that the GPL would not want to restrict anyone's freedoms to access the source code, inside or outside of an organization.
Judging by these replies however, there is complete unanimity that the freedoms "guaranteed" (in a sense) by the GPL do not apply to individuals when they are part of a legal entity like a corporation or an institution or agency. That in itself is interesting
Does this mean then that a company can avoid infringing the letter of the GPL but still willfully sidestep its intent by requiring users to accept (say in a EULA or click-through license) that for the purpose of using their software the end user and the supplier constitute a contractual entity? It would seem that no, this would clearly be in breach of the GPL, yet the same questionable curtailment of freedom is present if the user and supplier are already part of an entity in the first place. These two scenarios really don't sit very happily together.
The GPL aspects of this should be interesting, since it will give the system's end users the right to request source code of any parts that were modified, all the way down to the lowly grunt.
I guess asking for secret source code would land the people concerned in the brig or worse and so would never happen, but it's an interesting issue nevertheless.
you would find it very difficult to have a big network as all of the network chatter takes up an increasing amount of spectrum
This is not so, although the articles doesn't really make that clear --- the aggregate bandwidth of these networks grows as the number of nodes increases in density and in geographical extent.
The reason why this is so is that in a wireless mesh network, RF coverage is purposely restricted by turning down the power automatically and/or by dynamic channelization using frequency, time, or code (spread spectrum) multiplexing. This in effect gives you a dynamic cellular type of architecture, with channel reuse in non-adjacent cells.
And that of course is why it's called a mesh network --- it's not a fully connected network of nodes (which would be non-scalable and bandwidth-limited), but a mesh in which locality is strong so that nodes only hear and connect to their nearest neighbours, so each new locale contributes bandwidth to the overall aggregate capacity instead of eating up yet another slice of a dwindling pie.
Some of the articles in this thread referred to copyright in the digital audio processed by instruments. This sparked in me a little question regarding music that is partially or entirely MIDI-encoded at source (and in some genres, that's practically all music).
Which is the original work in these cases from the point of view of copyright, the MIDI or the version published/released on CD? Are they both copyrighted? Clearly the released version carries a copyright, but does the MIDI original as well, or is copyright inherited between representations so that there is just a single copyright, or what?
Does anyone know how copyright works with respect to MIDI sources?
The primary reason for such discrimination (which does happen, as a freelance contracter I've seen it repeatedly in many places, from both sides of the compiled/scripted fence) usually has very little to do with the view that one type of language system is a professional tool and that the other is amateurish.
In my experience, the main reasons tend to be simple departmental strategy and politics (the last two are inseparable), internal empire building and associated defensive stances, and management concern that lone or paired scripters are harder for them to control than the typically more cumbersome compiled development team which usually requires a management presence to even work.
There is alas also a secondary issue at work, namely that because scripting is "easy" (largely an illusion on non-trivial projects, but nevertheless also partly true), every Tom, Dick and Harry dabbles in it, and as a result there are an awful lot of pretty incompetent scripters around, in an engineering sense. And that is a valid consideration: when a scripter hasn't even heard of regression or unit testing let alone doesn't do any (as an example), you can see how questions can be raised regarding what else is lacking in his or her CompSci education.
Ultimately, there are no good or bad scripters or C, C++, or Java coders, there are just good and bad software engineers in the broadest sense of the term, and a good professional always uses the best tool for the job in hand. The trouble is, you can't become a software professional overnight, even if you are the world's most insightful Perl guru, because there is an awful lot more to creating solid systems than knowing a language inside out. It takes a solid background first, and it takes a lot of hard-earned experience as well. The coding is just the easy bit in the middle, and unfortunately the amount of non-language experience you get from sitting at home working on your own apps is minimal.
In summary, yes, the discrimination exists, and a lot of it stems from some pretty nasty internal politics in a lot of places. However, a little of it may be justified, as the average level of competence among scriptors seems to be a little lower than among compiled language programmers, probably owing to very few of the latter being self-taught.
I wish I hadn't spent my mod points.
The fact that the law and government and big business don't want it to work that way is perhaps a good pointer to the fact that such a view is just.
For goodness sake folks, you're suppposed to be techies, don't you understand that all TV programming is "spammed" in the sense that it's broadcast to everybody??? That makes it fairly silly to accuse the BBC of spamming. Yeah, the BBC and all TV stations have been spamming us for half a century, it's what they do.
All TVs, VCRs, and TiVos in the appropriate reception areas received the broadcast, if they were switched on and tuned to the right channel. I've never heard of anyone switching on the telly and shouting in horror, "I'm being spammed!". The TiVos also stored what they were receiving, as that's what they were designed to do with this special content. That really does make this a non-story.
Please reserve the word "spam" for individually addressed delivery systems delivering the same item to multiple recipients. Applying it to broadcast systems makes no sense at all.
I pigeonhole spicy food into five personal categories, with examples: mild (Korma), hot (Madras), hiccups (the hotter types of Indonesian Tom Yam), painfully fiery (Vindaloo), and too hot for me (Tindaloo and hotter).
... :-)
I'm prepared to accept the possibility of ancestry shared with fish, but I've never heard of fish eating curries
While nobody yet knows what caused the disaster, and while numerous alternative scenarios have been suggested to explain it, absolutely everybody agrees that current space vehicle technology is extremely fragile. Not fragile per se, as the shuttle is designed to survive a whole range of minor problems and has done so repeatedly. However, it is effectively very fragile in the context of the extremely harsh conditions of space and the huge forces of launch and reentry. Nobody disputes that the risks of manned space exploration are currently very very high in the face of things "going wrong".
I wonder then, what would be needed to reverse this situation? If we knew what was required, we'd have some idea of how far away from such a future we currently are. It is after all not an impossible dream --- for example, as one part of a transport system, you could hypothesize that a seamless body built out of (say) 1000-times as strong self-sealing materials comprising millions of layers of ablative and structural thin film, with a passive self-righting shape, might not have any problem at all in dealing with reentry conditions. (This is not a proposal --- I'm just suggesting that you can always come up with a less fragile basis for a space vehicle by extrapolating current-day technological developments.)
So, given the (futuristic) possibility of eventually having vehicle technology that is inherently less fragile than the current one, what would we need to develop towards such a future? We all know that there are pretty amazing developments in materials technology heading our way already, within human timespans, but there is more to it than just materials.
For a start, is there a completely stable, self-righting shape that would be a clear candidate for a design that eliminated the risk of guidance electronics failure by not requiring any stabilizing controls once the reentry trajectory was established outside of the atmosphere?
If so, transformation from that to a gliding shape is only one of many possibilities for handling the landing, ranging from on-end-landing propulsion to catching the darn thing to good ol' parachutes and many other approaches.
This is funny, since I actually agreed with you in part, namely that there can be a lot of work involved in publishing. However, you missed entirely (or ignored willfully) the point being made, that without content you have nothing.
... while missing the insight that it's largely makework, either not essential or in very many cases capable of being done by the author. Furthermore, your contribution is undoubtedly the key reason why the end price is so high (the costs of an organization are always much higher than those of the author), as others have pointed out.
... you have become the AUTHOR. But don't confuse that situation with the normal one, where you are primarily a middleman dealing in presentation and marketing, no more. That can be a useful function function, in some cases, but extending its importance beyond that is flawed.
Then you point out even more heatedly just how much extra work is performed by the publisher
Finally, you point out that in some cases the publishing house actually creates the work, perhaps through doing the research, bringing together articles or authors, and so on. This is excellent
Having experience at a small publishing company, I can say that a large number of authors have no idea how much work is needed to produce a book.
While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
Furthermore, the "no idea how much work is needed" response is often used to justify the continued existence of the middleman even when he is no longer necessary. If technology respected such words of caution, we'd have no desktop publishing, no home video and graphics production, and no home music studios. And of course, the individual artist would always be just a tiny cog in an immense machine.
The middleman does need to be put in his rightful place --- not necessarily extinction, but certainly in a limited niche.