I'm just bewildered that Dell corporate policy is that users need to lie to use their new laptops, and to agree to legal agreements that it's completely impossible to have read.
Welcome to the software industry. Why are you crying?
Cases like that are one of the reasons that your Mortgage agent has to go through the whole bloody mortage agreement with you, clause by clause, before they'll even let you sign it.
It's interesting how companies will spend lots of money and resources properly aquiring real estate but totally blow past the legalese for software. If this isn't an inicator about the immaturity of the software industry, I don't know what would be.
Only in the context of general-purpose processors. VLIW CPUs are common in signal processing and video cards. Perhaps the Itanic can become a $5,000 behemoth DSP chip for the next generation of 260-watt graphics cards. Perhaps they can put those rediculous SPEC scores to some use?
The only way to paralelize the sequence is to track dependencies between services.
Then why are we bothering with this System V rc directory structure that encodes dependency orders in the service start-up symbolic link? All that is required is to launch services with the same number simultaneously, and, bam, parallel booting.
So what? Solaris 9 booting on a six year old workstation goes this fast after optimizing the rc directories. Also, most people wait for the hourglass cursor to go away in Win2K after logging in, anyway (I don't trust Windows enough to attempt work while it is still busy--that's just asking for trouble).
And, this is also exactly what Sun's program is aiming for. Highly-threaded processors can use latency to their advantage, by scheduling additional threads during the waiting period.
Charities are among the biggest scum-bags of them all. I will never give to a charity that uses telemarketing as a begging tactic. I know where the charities are, if I want to make a donation.
The doormat that reads "We shoot every third salesman that comes here and the last two just left!" is only funny when you're not a door-to-door salesman.
Where can I get this doormat?
Or, should I just post "no tresspassing" signs all along the driveway and attach the doorbell to a trigger...
I wasn't passing the buck at all. A community raises everyone within it. The parents ultimately have the most influence and bear the brunt of the responsibility, but every member of a community influences everyone else in it. This cannot be ignored.
Basically, it can be argued that humans are going through an adolescence of civilization right now. We still have prisons, personal freedom is still in question, there is still corruption in the government, etc. It will be a long time before any idealistic utopia of humanity comes about. A very long time. Quite honestly, I think we are just a very small notch above the apes, as they often exhibit better social structure than we do!
The real issue of privacy is whether or not we can build a system by which equal accountability will be maintained...
Equal accountability is not possible, because humans write the laws and humans enforce those laws. Those humans have the same personal failings as everyone else, but they are in a unique position to protect themselves from the very world they are creating.
Yeah, imagine how awful it would be if every car had a unique identifier associated with it.
If your car's whereabouts were tracked and stored in a database, there's the chance the employere could find that their employees are interviewing, which customers are shopping around and where, etc. What if you were recorded simply driving down a street within minutes of a crime committed by someone else? What's your alibi? There were no witnesses to the crime other than the database, of course.
if said Coke can is found empty and discarded on the ground somewhere.
All it would take is a little wind to blow it out of the over-full trashcan it was carefully placed in, or a homeless man to accidentally drop the can on the way to the recycling center.
Say a 512-byte packet times 10 million Coke cans per day is 512 megabytes per day. On a high bandwidth network, that doesn't seem too out of line to be coming in-bound to the manufacturer's servers. A modern server can process that much data in a matter of minutes. One 250 gigabyte hard drive can potentially store a year's worth of this data.
Even if my numbers are off by a factor of ten, the technology still could handle it, and it will certainly be within the means of a company with a few million dollars to spare.
You know, IPv6 has serious privacy implications, as well. What if IPv6 is adopted everywhere, and things like DHCP become obselete? Now, law enforcment won't need to get a warrant for an ISP's logs, they know the source based on a static IPv6 number that every device on the planet has.
If IPv6 is spoofable, then who's to stop anyone from making a political enemy into a child porn distributer? "Sir, our information indicates clearly that the offending pictures came from your computer. The evidence never lies. You are under arrest."
This is the same gillette who took photos of customers purchasing their products using an rfid-triggered cameras.
RFID is so very much our friend! Now, like at an amuzement park, they can take our picture while purchasing bladder-control products and post them on a bulletin board under the text "This could be you! Buy your experience at the drug store for only $9.95! If you don't we can publically embarrass you with one post to Usenet! $9.95 doesn't sound so bad, now, does it?"
Information + corporate and political greed = people getting fucked over every step they take.
When our whole lives are encoded in a database, what is to stop future legislation that punishes people for crimes they never knew they commited? What about people who make mistakes in their young adult years and want to reinvent themselves somewhere else but can't due to their digital legacy? What about people whose business isn't our own but who have access to this data and use it against us?
Databases of this scale are immensely dangerous regardless of what trivial conveniences they allow. These databases can take our lives out of their social context and make us vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by public officials.
These databases also violate the Fourth Amendment. What about a future where law enforcement officials don't even need to step on a person's property to execute a search?
Simply, privacy is fundamentally important and is a fundamental human right. Only when citizens can control their own information, can a proper balance of power be mainained in a representative democracy like the USA. Remember, those who hold the information are those who are truly in power.
I was unaware that Tennessee was even a state still.
Yes, Tennesee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are still states. And, living there is loads of fun! Have you ever seen Deliverance? Ahh, those were the days...
It seems glaringly obvious the parents are at fault here, and people are once again looking for the scapegoat to blame.
Actually, the parents and the community that family lives in are at fault. Cliques in school can reinforce bizarre and counter-intuitive ideas about morality, teachers often don't keep the kids stimulated while managing their "day care", and other adults in the community may simply be bad role models. For example, if a neighbor resorts to baiting a deer to his back yard and shooting it from his deck, what kind of lesson is that? If kids see movies like "Fast and Furious" and there is no local cultural restraints towards complete irresponsibility and the parents buy each kid a 200HP compact sports car for their 16th birthday, what should we expect?
One thing I've noticed, is that if a kid is a complete asshole, the people around him or her are very likely complete assholes, too. Either that, or the parents are so weak-willed that the kids walk all over them daily with no retribution.
None of these sites shut down. They simply replaced their index page with the statement, which also provided links to the old index. Hardly shutting down.
Who, here, would be wearing a big smile when they say to their boss, "Sorry, I can't get that information/patch/download for our production webservers, because the Apache site voluntarily decided that some political issue was more important than our business."
In fact, it was/is/will be responsible and expected for widely-used and critical websites to say what they want while still allowing users to get to what they need when they need it. Anything less would be a much bigger kick in open source's nuts than any software patent.
Personal responsibility and accountability is perhaps the most important thing that people can teach their kids. However, it seems that popular culture is increasing making it appear that people are rewarded for lying, cheating, killing, bribery, getting something for no effort, etc. Take Enron, WorldCom, the current Republican administration, reality television, nationalized health care proposals, Grand Theft Auto (to be on topic, of course), public schools, the Earned Income Credit, short-term cash loans, pre-approved credit, six-year car loans, no-money-down mortgages, rent subsidies, many organized religions and labor unions, student loans, professional sports, soft drink commercials, and so forth.
People need to be much more cynical than they are. They need to realize that both large government (whether Republican or Democrat flavored) and large corporations do not act in the interests of individual people. They are much too wealthy, powerful, and corrupt to care. They are their own means and their own ends. People need to stand up for themselves in the midst of this, vote their conscience with both their wallets and their ballots, and be prepared to sacrifice materialistic prestige and social popularity in favor of knowing they made the right decision and did the best they could. Corporations and government need to become more modest and come back to realizing that they exist because of and for the People, not the other way around. It seems that every day the opposite of this is actually happening, and, ultimately, people will exist miserably in a rusty machine of regulation and consumption and live in complete fear of their creditors and their own government.
To respond to: "technical diversity and freedom from proprietary dead-ends." This simply doesn't exist.
I was mainly referring to software. For example, UNIX. Lots of companies who have had roots in the proprietary UNIX world are beginning to embrace Linux. I know of two CAD companies off-hand who are porting to Linux (one is no less than PTC). Ultimately, it doesn't have to be a matter of whether something is open source, but a matter of whether a particular company really understands where their grocery money comes from. Given that UNIX is standardized and highly accessible, now, there aren't large burdens for companies to compile their software for multiple platforms. Thus, the hardware itself does not have to be a dead end in any form. Only companies that choose a single platform and tie themselves by the neck to that platform's proprietary APIs are the true dead ends.
All the platforms you list have at least two C compilers available to them (GCC + optimized proprietary compilers), and most of them also have at least one recent version of Java available.
Looks like anyone can reverse-engineer a pretty good word-processor, but it must take work to make a serious (not hobbyist) application.
This is because it is mind-bendingly hard to create a good CAD application, for example. A CAD company would have no choice but to keep Ph.Ds. in engineering and mathematics on staff to tackle difficult problems in topology, constructive solids, tolerancing, etc. Put on top of that the challenge of creating a usable and productive user interface, and creating something like Pro/ENGINEER becomes a multi-billion dollar task. Note, however, that 99% of the difficulty in CAD software is platform independent, as long as wise architectural choices are made (no DirectX, no MFC, no.NET, no C#, and highly abstracted platform dependencies).
As for things like FireWire, USB, etc. I can order for under $50 a good USB card that will work on Sun workstations going back to the Ultra 30 (the first PCI Sun workstation). As long as there is a standard interface, support seems to appear even among the proprietary hardware. There is no reason why something like an Ultra 30 (built in 1997) couldn't be useful until 2010 (after all, the damn thing is built like a tank and sounds like one too:). In 2010, then the choices are either to get a used Sun Blade for better performance and another five years or recompile for PPC or x86.
Jesus fucking christ. Are you working on a nine-year old machine running Win 3.1? Please. If a Flash plug-in able machine is beyond your needs, you are most likely NO ONE'S valuable customer.
I've seen flash websites saturate 500MHz CPUs for several seconds at a time...just for a nifty menu system! What happens is a web developer gets their brand-spankin-new dual 3 GHz P4 workstation and goes crazy developing all sorts of crap in his little micro-universe of top of the line computers. Does he test on a 300MHz Pentium II? Does he test on a 28.8Kbaud modem? Of course not, because he is an idiot.
I wouldn't mind seeing a distribution of what computers people have in the real world. My bets are that all the people that bought sub-gigahertz computers in the late 1990s are still going strong today. Hell, I haven't owned anything faster than 500MHz myself. There's only one computer in my whole family that is less than one year old. The other computers are two to ten years old...and the ten-year-old still gets used (by me, occassionally as a X terminal).
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I'm just bewildered that Dell corporate policy is that users need to lie to use their new laptops, and to agree to legal agreements that it's completely impossible to have read.
Welcome to the software industry. Why are you crying?
Cases like that are one of the reasons that your Mortgage agent has to go through the whole bloody mortage agreement with you, clause by clause, before they'll even let you sign it.
It's interesting how companies will spend lots of money and resources properly aquiring real estate but totally blow past the legalese for software. If this isn't an inicator about the immaturity of the software industry, I don't know what would be.
EPIC is clearly dead in the water.
Only in the context of general-purpose processors. VLIW CPUs are common in signal processing and video cards. Perhaps the Itanic can become a $5,000 behemoth DSP chip for the next generation of 260-watt graphics cards. Perhaps they can put those rediculous SPEC scores to some use?
The only way to paralelize the sequence is to track dependencies between services.
Then why are we bothering with this System V rc directory structure that encodes dependency orders in the service start-up symbolic link? All that is required is to launch services with the same number simultaneously, and, bam, parallel booting.
Windows 2000 - 45 seconds
So what? Solaris 9 booting on a six year old workstation goes this fast after optimizing the rc directories. Also, most people wait for the hourglass cursor to go away in Win2K after logging in, anyway (I don't trust Windows enough to attempt work while it is still busy--that's just asking for trouble).
Latency is the problem, not throughput.
And, this is also exactly what Sun's program is aiming for. Highly-threaded processors can use latency to their advantage, by scheduling additional threads during the waiting period.
charities
Charities are among the biggest scum-bags of them all. I will never give to a charity that uses telemarketing as a begging tactic. I know where the charities are, if I want to make a donation.
sending them seaworthy jobwise a good idea? isn't the economy full of the jobless already.
What about "fuck you" do the telemarketers not understand?
Telemarketing is an assault on people's personal time. Telemarketers are scum.
The doormat that reads "We shoot every third salesman that comes here and the last two just left!" is only funny when you're not a door-to-door salesman.
Where can I get this doormat?
Or, should I just post "no tresspassing" signs all along the driveway and attach the doorbell to a trigger...
How long can we keep passing the buck?
I wasn't passing the buck at all. A community raises everyone within it. The parents ultimately have the most influence and bear the brunt of the responsibility, but every member of a community influences everyone else in it. This cannot be ignored.
Basically, it can be argued that humans are going through an adolescence of civilization right now. We still have prisons, personal freedom is still in question, there is still corruption in the government, etc. It will be a long time before any idealistic utopia of humanity comes about. A very long time. Quite honestly, I think we are just a very small notch above the apes, as they often exhibit better social structure than we do!
The real issue of privacy is whether or not we can build a system by which equal accountability will be maintained...
Equal accountability is not possible, because humans write the laws and humans enforce those laws. Those humans have the same personal failings as everyone else, but they are in a unique position to protect themselves from the very world they are creating.
Yeah, imagine how awful it would be if every car had a unique identifier associated with it.
If your car's whereabouts were tracked and stored in a database, there's the chance the employere could find that their employees are interviewing, which customers are shopping around and where, etc. What if you were recorded simply driving down a street within minutes of a crime committed by someone else? What's your alibi? There were no witnesses to the crime other than the database, of course.
if said Coke can is found empty and discarded on the ground somewhere.
All it would take is a little wind to blow it out of the over-full trashcan it was carefully placed in, or a homeless man to accidentally drop the can on the way to the recycling center.
Say a 512-byte packet times 10 million Coke cans per day is 512 megabytes per day. On a high bandwidth network, that doesn't seem too out of line to be coming in-bound to the manufacturer's servers. A modern server can process that much data in a matter of minutes. One 250 gigabyte hard drive can potentially store a year's worth of this data.
Even if my numbers are off by a factor of ten, the technology still could handle it, and it will certainly be within the means of a company with a few million dollars to spare.
IPv6 number
You know, IPv6 has serious privacy implications, as well. What if IPv6 is adopted everywhere, and things like DHCP become obselete? Now, law enforcment won't need to get a warrant for an ISP's logs, they know the source based on a static IPv6 number that every device on the planet has.
If IPv6 is spoofable, then who's to stop anyone from making a political enemy into a child porn distributer? "Sir, our information indicates clearly that the offending pictures came from your computer. The evidence never lies. You are under arrest."
This is the same gillette who took photos of customers purchasing their products using an rfid-triggered cameras.
RFID is so very much our friend! Now, like at an amuzement park, they can take our picture while purchasing bladder-control products and post them on a bulletin board under the text "This could be you! Buy your experience at the drug store for only $9.95! If you don't we can publically embarrass you with one post to Usenet! $9.95 doesn't sound so bad, now, does it?"
Information + corporate and political greed = people getting fucked over every step they take.
When our whole lives are encoded in a database, what is to stop future legislation that punishes people for crimes they never knew they commited? What about people who make mistakes in their young adult years and want to reinvent themselves somewhere else but can't due to their digital legacy? What about people whose business isn't our own but who have access to this data and use it against us?
Databases of this scale are immensely dangerous regardless of what trivial conveniences they allow. These databases can take our lives out of their social context and make us vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by public officials.
These databases also violate the Fourth Amendment. What about a future where law enforcement officials don't even need to step on a person's property to execute a search?
Simply, privacy is fundamentally important and is a fundamental human right. Only when citizens can control their own information, can a proper balance of power be mainained in a representative democracy like the USA. Remember, those who hold the information are those who are truly in power.
I was unaware that Tennessee was even a state still.
Yes, Tennesee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are still states. And, living there is loads of fun! Have you ever seen Deliverance? Ahh, those were the days...
It seems glaringly obvious the parents are at fault here, and people are once again looking for the scapegoat to blame.
Actually, the parents and the community that family lives in are at fault. Cliques in school can reinforce bizarre and counter-intuitive ideas about morality, teachers often don't keep the kids stimulated while managing their "day care", and other adults in the community may simply be bad role models. For example, if a neighbor resorts to baiting a deer to his back yard and shooting it from his deck, what kind of lesson is that? If kids see movies like "Fast and Furious" and there is no local cultural restraints towards complete irresponsibility and the parents buy each kid a 200HP compact sports car for their 16th birthday, what should we expect?
One thing I've noticed, is that if a kid is a complete asshole, the people around him or her are very likely complete assholes, too. Either that, or the parents are so weak-willed that the kids walk all over them daily with no retribution.
Lawyers are the middle-(wo)men in all this. Removing the lawyers won't solve the problem.
True, but you cannot ignore that lawyers, as middle-men, have very serious financial interests in favor of complex and antagonistic legislation.
None of these sites shut down. They simply replaced their index page with the statement, which also provided links to the old index. Hardly shutting down.
Who, here, would be wearing a big smile when they say to their boss, "Sorry, I can't get that information/patch/download for our production webservers, because the Apache site voluntarily decided that some political issue was more important than our business."
In fact, it was/is/will be responsible and expected for widely-used and critical websites to say what they want while still allowing users to get to what they need when they need it. Anything less would be a much bigger kick in open source's nuts than any software patent.
Personal responsibility and accountability is perhaps the most important thing that people can teach their kids. However, it seems that popular culture is increasing making it appear that people are rewarded for lying, cheating, killing, bribery, getting something for no effort, etc. Take Enron, WorldCom, the current Republican administration, reality television, nationalized health care proposals, Grand Theft Auto (to be on topic, of course), public schools, the Earned Income Credit, short-term cash loans, pre-approved credit, six-year car loans, no-money-down mortgages, rent subsidies, many organized religions and labor unions, student loans, professional sports, soft drink commercials, and so forth.
People need to be much more cynical than they are. They need to realize that both large government (whether Republican or Democrat flavored) and large corporations do not act in the interests of individual people. They are much too wealthy, powerful, and corrupt to care. They are their own means and their own ends. People need to stand up for themselves in the midst of this, vote their conscience with both their wallets and their ballots, and be prepared to sacrifice materialistic prestige and social popularity in favor of knowing they made the right decision and did the best they could. Corporations and government need to become more modest and come back to realizing that they exist because of and for the People, not the other way around. It seems that every day the opposite of this is actually happening, and, ultimately, people will exist miserably in a rusty machine of regulation and consumption and live in complete fear of their creditors and their own government.
To respond to: "technical diversity and freedom from proprietary dead-ends." This simply doesn't exist.
.NET, no C#, and highly abstracted platform dependencies).
:). In 2010, then the choices are either to get a used Sun Blade for better performance and another five years or recompile for PPC or x86.
I was mainly referring to software. For example, UNIX. Lots of companies who have had roots in the proprietary UNIX world are beginning to embrace Linux. I know of two CAD companies off-hand who are porting to Linux (one is no less than PTC). Ultimately, it doesn't have to be a matter of whether something is open source, but a matter of whether a particular company really understands where their grocery money comes from. Given that UNIX is standardized and highly accessible, now, there aren't large burdens for companies to compile their software for multiple platforms. Thus, the hardware itself does not have to be a dead end in any form. Only companies that choose a single platform and tie themselves by the neck to that platform's proprietary APIs are the true dead ends.
All the platforms you list have at least two C compilers available to them (GCC + optimized proprietary compilers), and most of them also have at least one recent version of Java available.
Looks like anyone can reverse-engineer a pretty good word-processor, but it must take work to make a serious (not hobbyist) application.
This is because it is mind-bendingly hard to create a good CAD application, for example. A CAD company would have no choice but to keep Ph.Ds. in engineering and mathematics on staff to tackle difficult problems in topology, constructive solids, tolerancing, etc. Put on top of that the challenge of creating a usable and productive user interface, and creating something like Pro/ENGINEER becomes a multi-billion dollar task. Note, however, that 99% of the difficulty in CAD software is platform independent, as long as wise architectural choices are made (no DirectX, no MFC, no
As for things like FireWire, USB, etc. I can order for under $50 a good USB card that will work on Sun workstations going back to the Ultra 30 (the first PCI Sun workstation). As long as there is a standard interface, support seems to appear even among the proprietary hardware. There is no reason why something like an Ultra 30 (built in 1997) couldn't be useful until 2010 (after all, the damn thing is built like a tank and sounds like one too
Do you have a deep unwavering belief that the quote is yours? (just kidding)
Jesus fucking christ. Are you working on a nine-year old machine running Win 3.1? Please. If a Flash plug-in able machine is beyond your needs, you are most likely NO ONE'S valuable customer.
I've seen flash websites saturate 500MHz CPUs for several seconds at a time...just for a nifty menu system! What happens is a web developer gets their brand-spankin-new dual 3 GHz P4 workstation and goes crazy developing all sorts of crap in his little micro-universe of top of the line computers. Does he test on a 300MHz Pentium II? Does he test on a 28.8Kbaud modem? Of course not, because he is an idiot.
I wouldn't mind seeing a distribution of what computers people have in the real world. My bets are that all the people that bought sub-gigahertz computers in the late 1990s are still going strong today. Hell, I haven't owned anything faster than 500MHz myself. There's only one computer in my whole family that is less than one year old. The other computers are two to ten years old...and the ten-year-old still gets used (by me, occassionally as a X terminal).