The problem isn't the mistakes so much as the accountability.
If you add [say, cuz I'm not a biologist] sodium to a sample and you add 1mg too much, you don't specifically invalidate the results but you have to account for it in the final outcome...
The problem with this case is that the box that does the testing cannot be scrutinized which means there is no accountability.
And really, suppose the box was flawless, the company making them shouldn't hide the specs then. Hiding them just illuminates the potential rights violations they're unleashing on society.
First off, how do you know he was DUI? Because some blackbox that you can't question said so? NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Second, you really ought to be angry at the state for buying equipment they can't prove works in court. Agreeing with justice when it favours the wicked isn't always a bad thing.
But of course you feel this way because you have yet to be on the wrong end of a miscariage of justice...
Oh look I've used my new guilt-o-meter and it says you committed 9 murders... Don't ask me how it works [and in turn determine if it actually works...] for that's proprietary.
Who knows, maybe he really wasn't drunk [or that drunk] and the device is buggy or mis-calibrated? That's why we have a DEFENSE in the first place.
If you're just going to trust whatever "magic happens here" box the police are using without actually investigating whether it works... then you might as well have summary convictions without appeal [or defense]. Then we could just walk up and down the street and write people up because our "guilt-o-meter" went off.
For every "asshole who got through a loophole" there are others who "got wrongly convicted" of an offense.
Maybe next time the cops purchase equipment they'll make sure they can be independently audited. It's not the defendents fault the cops are using [effective] defective equipment.
Yeah, just like Dell... so where I can I order a non-intel Dell box?
Again, if people did things for engineering principles [even with a modicum of marketting principles] we wouldn't have the P4 as we know it to begin with...
The reason for picking Intel over AMD is most likely nowhere close to being related to a technical issue.
Maybe the wife of the CEO of Intel gives better head, who knows...
The fact that the K8 owns the current Intel designs where it matters most [e.g. clocks per cycle per watt] is just a minor thing. You know, cuz apple isn't CURRENTLY GETTING BURNED on the whole "we can't stick the G5 in anything but full size desktop towers with built in windtunnels"....
I hope that they're not just thinking of slapping a P4 in there but planning on actually implementing a core worth something. But chances are given the deadline they're not [making a cpu from scratch takes more than a year...]
If my AMD64 can get me 30fps in ut2k4, compile the kernel in under a minute or two and render porn at acceptable jerk rates...
WTF DO I CARE!
Its doing all this while taking a quarter the power of the G5. All I know is my AMD64 doesn't have a windtunnel in the case to keep from melting through the board.
Efficiency people, not raw numbers.
If you can do X amount of work with Y less power in a comprable amount of time... that's a good thing as Y increases.
That argument is not sufficient. Does your Dad know not to run every email attachment he gets? Does he know not to download random binaries? Does he know not to use "SuperDad" as a password?
Last I checked MacOS addresses none of those problems.
I hate this sort of reply. You don't need a mac, hell you don't even need Linux/bsd/whatever.
You just have to be "not a moron". Granted security is easier if you
a) Know what you're doing and b) Use the right tools...
That said you can secure a windows box so that not every little worm that gets loose can have a feast on your computing resources....
This "oh buy a Mac they're secure" bullshit is really annoying. Yes they're cool, but I'd rather have a Venice AMD64 based system anyday. They're cooler, faster and cheaper [and you can stick a nice free OS like Gentoo Linux on it]
"'probably cut corners'? And where do you get this from?"
I get that from a live demonstration in which Gates essentially looked like the ass he is.
Had they tested [at least the fucking demonstration] sufficiently they wouldn't have that mishap.
Now think about this, if they can't test out a 15 minute presentation sufficiently before going live in front of the WHOLE FRIGGIN PLANET... what type of thinking goes into the OS that they bundle with everything, and you have to pay for before you bring it home and realize how craptacular it is?
Again, self-fulfilling prophecy. The sooner you tell your users "use firefox or safari or opera or any number of others" the better off you and they'll be.
I mean, here I am posting on slashdot, reading usenet and gmail, while checking up on my banking and reading web comics... I haven't booted a win32 box in over a year...
You're likely to say "good for you tom, smartass, bahhumbug" or something like that. The point is, I'm not unique here. There are many more people in my camp [e.g. using OSS] and it's only going to grow.
Companies which don't embrace newer [and often better though note I make the distinction] technology are going to just get left by the wayside.
The only way IE can be improved [other than reliability issues] is through standards compliance. So design your websites to use W3C standards and if your users complain point them to Firefox and say "they take your security remotely serious."
not being a web-o-phile I dunno what this means. All I know is Google can make nice dynamic interactive pages that work with IE and Firefox.
So maybe these "DHTML" developers are just narrowminded?
I mean I'm sure there are many Win32GDI applications that don't work in X11... but... if you're living in 2005 [as I am] you're aware of... OTHER PLATFORMS.
Why would you limit yourself to just one platform when others exist [which often have more merit anyways].
same here. Firefox user for the last year or so [mozilla before that] on my Gentoo only boxes.
Despite what the "leading authorities" [of premium quality bunk] think you can happily browse the net with just about anything other than IE.
This whole "I gotta write for IE because people use IE" is not only depressing and self-fulfilling but a complete fucking lie. I know many windows users who use Firefox in place of IE on a regular basis.
The problem is these "authorities" are uneducated webpage slingers [I'm old enough to be into computers when putting a web page up wasn't a career but just something you did as part of another job...] who grab hold of a single tool, learn it to a certain degree than call themselves experts. Right up there with "Java is the best tool in the world!!!!" types...
Sad as it is to say my College experience was at least productive in the aims of countering this tendency. In my web development class [as part of my comp.sci program] we developed pages and back ends [perl CGI] that had to work for both MS IE [5.5/6.0 at the time I think] and Netscape.
I dunno what the huge fuss is about, I guess my phone is special but I got this iTap thingy [or whatever] which will suggest autocompletes for partial words. So often I only have to enter half a word and make a couple of suggestion changes.
I can enter whole sentence replies [which is all about what you're gonna send] in 20 seconds or so [not 160 chars like in the story... we're talking ~25-30 chars] which isn't that bad.
The problem is that they represent Microsoft. Even if they are "out sourced" they represent the type of security minded people that MSFT is hiring.
In other words, if they were more concerned about security and not "the bottom line" they would have hired a firm with a better track record to run the website.
As usual they probably cut corners to get "to the market" as soon as possible. Almost like [new rant] Nintendo and Sony did with their new handhelds [both of which I bought, both of which had scores of dead pixels].
Quality is just something no company seems to give a shit about even in light of people demanding it still.
I don't think you understand current... It's a 900mAh battery. Assuming linear drain it takes ~128mAh to run the full device. 7 weeks would require 21504mA of capacity. That's 21 amps. That's with a linear drain which is not how they work anyways. I'm not an EE but I imagine the actual required voltage/capacity is much higher.
First off... that's a shitload of current. Second it's hazardous I'd say. Short that sucker out and it's got a lot of potential energy. Third, assuming a quadratic growth, that means my ~50g battery [guessing] would weigh 62 pounds [28.5Kg] or so.
128mAh is not that much current drain to run the device. By comparison... my laptop takes ~1050mAh to run with the screen dimmed, cpu at low speed, etc. The average flourescent lightbulb takes about 18Wh which is 163mAh on 110v circuits, etc....
In fact I can't point to anything in my house that runs off less than 128mAh. Perhaps my cell phone [which by rough estimate takes ~100mAh when in standby].
However, that's not a fair comparison since my PDA had the screen light on the whole time. I imagine if I turned it off I could get >11 hours of runtime.
I also think you're just not comparing things from "the past". It used to be a Palm3 with a 20Mhz DragonBall processor [68000] with a black and white non-lit LCD would last a few hours per charge. In my case this is an iPaq with a 300Mhz [obviously clocked down but there] ARM processor with a 16-bit colour backlit display, SD card slot, wifi and bluetooth transceivers and way more memory, etc...
Dunno bout you but I get 12 hours with my iPaq rx3100 with the light on and 7 with wifi on [in powersave mode]. 7 hours ain't that bad...
Though I agree with the sentiment. No reason why my laptop idles at 530Mhz when 0Hz would work fine;-) [though you have a constant amount of leak even at DC]
Because they're not as hand-designed as processors are. For the most part GPUs are written in higher level ASIC tools [e.g. verilog/vhdl] which then filter through the tool chains [automatic...] with some human intervention along the way.
The benefit is that they can produce a graphics card in half the time [hint: the last significant AMD change in terms of logic was from the K6 to the K7...] as a typical CPU like an x86 but the downside is they're less efficient.
Processors are written with high level tools but there is much more human intervention before it goes to tapeout.
The software analogy would be comparing someone who goes from C to binary to someone who goes from C to assembly, tweaks it and then to binary.
"It is nice to see Intel finally catching up with AMD...."
Now if they could only do this on a instructions per watt basis...
The Athlons take less power per unit of wall clock of time as a P4 and they routine excute a higher instruction count per second. This means not only do you get a task [say compiling] done quicker, but you take less power while doing it.
So you may say "wow that dual core dual HT 3.8Ghz sure is fast" but when you realize it takes 300W of power to run [as opposed to the 40W the new AMD Venice core takes]... the comparison looks really shameful.
The utter failings of windows for serious work [re: software development] has led me to seek alternative sources [re: OSS] and eventually to GNU/Linux and GNU toolchains.
Thanks Microsoft! Your ineptitude led me to where I am now!
I don't get your position. We're not talking about freedom of speech [which is freedom from the government by the way, I can tell you to shut up all I want] we're talking about property rights.
By having a studio change a film we're not embarking on "1984" or "changing history" [sic] yet instead just a new product.
This is like saying Diet coke is "1984" because coke came in regular first... The simple matter of fact is it's not your property and what the owners do with it is their business.
As to the business of whether it's a good idea or not I don't have a position. I'm not that emotionally attached to cartoons from 75 years ago. Hell I'm not that attached to cartoons from 20 years ago.
If I were to spend a lot of time and energy on this though I'd be more sadden by the utter downward spiral of creativity in the current mainstream cartoons. Pokemon, Digimon, Stupidmon, teletubbies, etc...
We're having a generation of kids who grow up with nothing more than gibberish cartoons aimed directly at the lowest forms of entertainment as their "babysitter". Even things like Seaseme street are following suit. Which is sad because there was a time when you could contrast the two and really show how stupid things like teletubbies are.
As corny [sp?] as it sounds cartoons like Care Bears and teddy ruxpin taught kids about things like patience, sharing and caring with/for others, etc.
Before you dismiss this last idea consider looking into a school [of any age] and look at the attitude the kids have. I'm not talking about the usual youthful defiance but the complete lack of consideration for others.
When I was in school [in the latter years] we had a few students who were disruptive but by and large the other students didn't approve of their actions. We weren't all goody-two-shoes but we had some level of decency. We listened to the teacher when they spoke, we didn't disrupt class, we didn't steal from other and generally we respected other peoples property [yes, with the odd exception].
The grade nines of my high school [when I was in OAC, ontario's grade 13] actually made experienced teachers cry because the students would use personal character attacks to control the situation. I'd show up to something like an English class in the afternoon with the teacher all quiet and upset only to find out that they spent an hour having punk 14 yr olds swear at them...
Anyways, nuff ranting. The point is there is more to worry about in terms of distributed media then a simple line going missing in a 75 year old cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't the mistakes so much as the accountability.
If you add [say, cuz I'm not a biologist] sodium to a sample and you add 1mg too much, you don't specifically invalidate the results but you have to account for it in the final outcome...
The problem with this case is that the box that does the testing cannot be scrutinized which means there is no accountability.
And really, suppose the box was flawless, the company making them shouldn't hide the specs then. Hiding them just illuminates the potential rights violations they're unleashing on society.
Tom
Great. The problem is your anger is misplaced.
First off, how do you know he was DUI? Because some blackbox that you can't question said so? NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Second, you really ought to be angry at the state for buying equipment they can't prove works in court. Agreeing with justice when it favours the wicked isn't always a bad thing.
But of course you feel this way because you have yet to be on the wrong end of a miscariage of justice...
Tom
Perhaps that's true.
Oh look I've used my new guilt-o-meter and it says you committed 9 murders... Don't ask me how it works [and in turn determine if it actually works...] for that's proprietary.
Who knows, maybe he really wasn't drunk [or that drunk] and the device is buggy or mis-calibrated? That's why we have a DEFENSE in the first place.
If you're just going to trust whatever "magic happens here" box the police are using without actually investigating whether it works... then you might as well have summary convictions without appeal [or defense]. Then we could just walk up and down the street and write people up because our "guilt-o-meter" went off.
For every "asshole who got through a loophole" there are others who "got wrongly convicted" of an offense.
Maybe next time the cops purchase equipment they'll make sure they can be independently audited. It's not the defendents fault the cops are using [effective] defective equipment.
Tom
Yeah, they just make the money on the 400$ useless product service plans which they hardly properly honour.
I mean future shop is great when your inside the 30 days. Outside of that they just don't care it seems.
Tom
Something about expensive inefficient processors that irks me...
It's not enough to "take little power". I mean a modern implementation of an 8051 could probably be made to take VERY little power.
The processor has to also be efficient enough todo something meaningful with the little amount of power it requires...
Add to the fact that processor is not the only significant power drain in laptop...
Tom
the cpu can only go within some ranges. Like mine can go from 1.5v @ 2.2Ghz down to 1.1v @ 1Ghz ... what if you want to run at 0.9v at say 500Mhz? ...
... just buy via box or something.
But at that point if you have to reboot to go into "powersave" mode
Tom
Yeah, just like Dell... so where I can I order a non-intel Dell box?
Again, if people did things for engineering principles [even with a modicum of marketting principles] we wouldn't have the P4 as we know it to begin with...
Tom
The reason for picking Intel over AMD is most likely nowhere close to being related to a technical issue.
Maybe the wife of the CEO of Intel gives better head, who knows...
The fact that the K8 owns the current Intel designs where it matters most [e.g. clocks per cycle per watt] is just a minor thing. You know, cuz apple isn't CURRENTLY GETTING BURNED on the whole "we can't stick the G5 in anything but full size desktop towers with built in windtunnels"....
I hope that they're not just thinking of slapping a P4 in there but planning on actually implementing a core worth something. But chances are given the deadline they're not [making a cpu from scratch takes more than a year...]
Tom
but chances are "energy waste" didn't come up...
If my AMD64 can get me 30fps in ut2k4, compile the kernel in under a minute or two and render porn at acceptable jerk rates...
WTF DO I CARE!
Its doing all this while taking a quarter the power of the G5. All I know is my AMD64 doesn't have a windtunnel in the case to keep from melting through the board.
Efficiency people, not raw numbers.
If you can do X amount of work with Y less power in a comprable amount of time... that's a good thing as Y increases.
Tom
That argument is not sufficient. Does your Dad know not to run every email attachment he gets? Does he know not to download random binaries? Does he know not to use "SuperDad" as a password?
Last I checked MacOS addresses none of those problems.
Tom
I hate this sort of reply. You don't need a mac, hell you don't even need Linux/bsd/whatever.
You just have to be "not a moron". Granted security is easier if you
a) Know what you're doing
and
b) Use the right tools...
That said you can secure a windows box so that not every little worm that gets loose can have a feast on your computing resources....
This "oh buy a Mac they're secure" bullshit is really annoying. Yes they're cool, but I'd rather have a Venice AMD64 based system anyday. They're cooler, faster and cheaper [and you can stick a nice free OS like Gentoo Linux on it]
Tom
"'probably cut corners'? And where do you get this from?"
... what type of thinking goes into the OS that they bundle with everything, and you have to pay for before you bring it home and realize how craptacular it is?
I get that from a live demonstration in which Gates essentially looked like the ass he is.
Had they tested [at least the fucking demonstration] sufficiently they wouldn't have that mishap.
Now think about this, if they can't test out a 15 minute presentation sufficiently before going live in front of the WHOLE FRIGGIN PLANET
Tom
It has to?
Again, self-fulfilling prophecy. The sooner you tell your users "use firefox or safari or opera or any number of others" the better off you and they'll be.
I mean, here I am posting on slashdot, reading usenet and gmail, while checking up on my banking and reading web comics... I haven't booted a win32 box in over a year...
You're likely to say "good for you tom, smartass, bahhumbug" or something like that. The point is, I'm not unique here. There are many more people in my camp [e.g. using OSS] and it's only going to grow.
Companies which don't embrace newer [and often better though note I make the distinction] technology are going to just get left by the wayside.
The only way IE can be improved [other than reliability issues] is through standards compliance. So design your websites to use W3C standards and if your users complain point them to Firefox and say "they take your security remotely serious."
Tom
not being a web-o-phile I dunno what this means. All I know is Google can make nice dynamic interactive pages that work with IE and Firefox.
... but ... if you're living in 2005 [as I am] you're aware of ... OTHER PLATFORMS.
So maybe these "DHTML" developers are just narrowminded?
I mean I'm sure there are many Win32GDI applications that don't work in X11
Why would you limit yourself to just one platform when others exist [which often have more merit anyways].
Tom
same here. Firefox user for the last year or so [mozilla before that] on my Gentoo only boxes.
...
Despite what the "leading authorities" [of premium quality bunk] think you can happily browse the net with just about anything other than IE.
This whole "I gotta write for IE because people use IE" is not only depressing and self-fulfilling but a complete fucking lie. I know many windows users who use Firefox in place of IE on a regular basis.
The problem is these "authorities" are uneducated webpage slingers [I'm old enough to be into computers when putting a web page up wasn't a career but just something you did as part of another job...] who grab hold of a single tool, learn it to a certain degree than call themselves experts. Right up there with "Java is the best tool in the world!!!!" types
Sad as it is to say my College experience was at least productive in the aims of countering this tendency. In my web development class [as part of my comp.sci program] we developed pages and back ends [perl CGI] that had to work for both MS IE [5.5/6.0 at the time I think] and Netscape.
Tom
I dunno what the huge fuss is about, I guess my phone is special but I got this iTap thingy [or whatever] which will suggest autocompletes for partial words. So often I only have to enter half a word and make a couple of suggestion changes.
I can enter whole sentence replies [which is all about what you're gonna send] in 20 seconds or so [not 160 chars like in the story... we're talking ~25-30 chars] which isn't that bad.
Tom
The problem is that they represent Microsoft. Even if they are "out sourced" they represent the type of security minded people that MSFT is hiring.
In other words, if they were more concerned about security and not "the bottom line" they would have hired a firm with a better track record to run the website.
As usual they probably cut corners to get "to the market" as soon as possible. Almost like [new rant] Nintendo and Sony did with their new handhelds [both of which I bought, both of which had scores of dead pixels].
Quality is just something no company seems to give a shit about even in light of people demanding it still.
Tom
It'll work in standby for a week or so...
I don't think you understand current... It's a 900mAh battery. Assuming linear drain it takes ~128mAh to run the full device. 7 weeks would require 21504mA of capacity. That's 21 amps. That's with a linear drain which is not how they work anyways. I'm not an EE but I imagine the actual required voltage/capacity is much higher.
First off... that's a shitload of current. Second it's hazardous I'd say. Short that sucker out and it's got a lot of potential energy. Third, assuming a quadratic growth, that means my ~50g battery [guessing] would weigh 62 pounds [28.5Kg] or so.
128mAh is not that much current drain to run the device. By comparison... my laptop takes ~1050mAh to run with the screen dimmed, cpu at low speed, etc. The average flourescent lightbulb takes about 18Wh which is 163mAh on 110v circuits, etc....
In fact I can't point to anything in my house that runs off less than 128mAh. Perhaps my cell phone [which by rough estimate takes ~100mAh when in standby].
However, that's not a fair comparison since my PDA had the screen light on the whole time. I imagine if I turned it off I could get >11 hours of runtime.
I also think you're just not comparing things from "the past". It used to be a Palm3 with a 20Mhz DragonBall processor [68000] with a black and white non-lit LCD would last a few hours per charge. In my case this is an iPaq with a 300Mhz [obviously clocked down but there] ARM processor with a 16-bit colour backlit display, SD card slot, wifi and bluetooth transceivers and way more memory, etc...
Tom
Tom
Dunno bout you but I get 12 hours with my iPaq rx3100 with the light on and 7 with wifi on [in powersave mode]. 7 hours ain't that bad...
;-) [though you have a constant amount of leak even at DC]
Though I agree with the sentiment. No reason why my laptop idles at 530Mhz when 0Hz would work fine
Tom
Because they're not as hand-designed as processors are. For the most part GPUs are written in higher level ASIC tools [e.g. verilog/vhdl] which then filter through the tool chains [automatic...] with some human intervention along the way.
The benefit is that they can produce a graphics card in half the time [hint: the last significant AMD change in terms of logic was from the K6 to the K7...] as a typical CPU like an x86 but the downside is they're less efficient.
Processors are written with high level tools but there is much more human intervention before it goes to tapeout.
The software analogy would be comparing someone who goes from C to binary to someone who goes from C to assembly, tweaks it and then to binary.
Tom
"It is nice to see Intel finally catching up with AMD...."
...
... the comparison looks really shameful.
Now if they could only do this on a instructions per watt basis
The Athlons take less power per unit of wall clock of time as a P4 and they routine excute a higher instruction count per second. This means not only do you get a task [say compiling] done quicker, but you take less power while doing it.
So you may say "wow that dual core dual HT 3.8Ghz sure is fast" but when you realize it takes 300W of power to run [as opposed to the 40W the new AMD Venice core takes]
Tom
because my crypto library [libtomcrypt] is the provider for the BK license engine...
And I wrote all of LibTomCrypt from my parents house while I was in college...
So in other words, McVoy... GO FUCK YOURSELF!
Tom
I call bullshit. I have an FX5200 as well. While I can play Doom3 with it [on an AMD64 at 2.2Ghz with 1GB of DDR400] it's not at "max settings".
It's playable but it does lag in certain sequences even on modest settings. A 6800 would certainly make for a decent improvement.
Though for my case the 5200 is enough power.
Tom
As others pointed out...
The utter failings of windows for serious work [re: software development] has led me to seek alternative sources [re: OSS] and eventually to GNU/Linux and GNU toolchains.
Thanks Microsoft! Your ineptitude led me to where I am now!
Tom
I don't get your position. We're not talking about freedom of speech [which is freedom from the government by the way, I can tell you to shut up all I want] we're talking about property rights.
By having a studio change a film we're not embarking on "1984" or "changing history" [sic] yet instead just a new product.
This is like saying Diet coke is "1984" because coke came in regular first... The simple matter of fact is it's not your property and what the owners do with it is their business.
As to the business of whether it's a good idea or not I don't have a position. I'm not that emotionally attached to cartoons from 75 years ago. Hell I'm not that attached to cartoons from 20 years ago.
If I were to spend a lot of time and energy on this though I'd be more sadden by the utter downward spiral of creativity in the current mainstream cartoons. Pokemon, Digimon, Stupidmon, teletubbies, etc...
We're having a generation of kids who grow up with nothing more than gibberish cartoons aimed directly at the lowest forms of entertainment as their "babysitter". Even things like Seaseme street are following suit. Which is sad because there was a time when you could contrast the two and really show how stupid things like teletubbies are.
As corny [sp?] as it sounds cartoons like Care Bears and teddy ruxpin taught kids about things like patience, sharing and caring with/for others, etc.
Before you dismiss this last idea consider looking into a school [of any age] and look at the attitude the kids have. I'm not talking about the usual youthful defiance but the complete lack of consideration for others.
When I was in school [in the latter years] we had a few students who were disruptive but by and large the other students didn't approve of their actions. We weren't all goody-two-shoes but we had some level of decency. We listened to the teacher when they spoke, we didn't disrupt class, we didn't steal from other and generally we respected other peoples property [yes, with the odd exception].
The grade nines of my high school [when I was in OAC, ontario's grade 13] actually made experienced teachers cry because the students would use personal character attacks to control the situation. I'd show up to something like an English class in the afternoon with the teacher all quiet and upset only to find out that they spent an hour having punk 14 yr olds swear at them...
Anyways, nuff ranting. The point is there is more to worry about in terms of distributed media then a simple line going missing in a 75 year old cartoon.
Tom