... the smaller versions of the Fujitsu Lifebook, the P1610. I still run Ubuntu on my old P1120. And the battery life is usually about 4.5 hours (even with wifi running).
Why, oh why, do we have to read the same answers about Iraq in every situation, despite it being wildly off-topic?
Maybe because most people don't get chances every day to ask presidential candidates about issues they care about? And that the people at the conference may not be unidimensional geeks who think that the war in Iraq is just a video game that shows up on their TV occasionally? And that, therefore, they might like to ask a question about it because, as people are dying, it might be a bit more important to know why this candidate supports it rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? Sheesh.
... because this is essentially what the manufacturers of this type of system do (modulo file system, volume manager, specialized networking (perhaps), choice of base OS, and nifty cases). The main differences are this:
(1) The manufacturer can get hardware much cheaper than you. This doesn't make much difference in cost, because all of it goes to the profit margin. What it does buy you is that the manufacturer probably has a stock of these things that he can shove in if something breaks. At worst, he can have an entire working system delivered to your door before you could even start rustling up the parts for a replacement.
(2) The manufacturer has a service staff. What happens if you leave the company? What happens if you want to take a vacation? Someone else has to fix your cobbled up server. It's more likely that they'll screw up the configuration or break the thing. Un less you want to give 24/7 support.
(3) The manufacturer has better management software than your set of cobbled up scripts or web pages. At least it's been tested more thoroughly (probably).
(4) The hardware and software configurations are actually tested. Not that you won't do a few tests, but it's fairly likely that you won't do the burn-in testing that these manufacturers do. Nor can you guarantee appropriate SLAs.
So, yeah. You do pay more to these people. There's a reason. If I were your boss, I wouldn't let you build some wonk box. Maybe yours will. In the final analysis, you're just making more work for yourself. Besides, if you're so good at putting together these kinds of system, why aren't you out there in the marketplace competing with these high price suppliers? Don't tell me - it's just altruism for your boss...
Ok, ok, I'm just being mean, I should go and do something useful.
No. Actually, you're being accurate. Unless folks can solve the multiple taxonomy problem (and, no, deciding on a common taxonomy and taxonomy translation approaches have not worked in the past) and the metadata cheating problem, the "Semantic Web" is BS promulgated by someone who probably doesn't know the history of epistemology, taxology, or why hard AI problems really are hard, even if he has been knighted. And the people who think that this is worthwhile are the same techno-utopians who probably don't know much about the problem either. When you have a robot that can actually return a Dewey Decimal System classification to four digits to the right of the decimal for a set of randomly selected web pages (and, no, just returning the word "pr0n" doesn't count, although it would probably have the best score of most algorithms you can think of) then you can come and talk about having a start. Otherwise, it's all just BS.
I'm not a natural born citizen, nor 35 or older, nor lived in the US for 14 years though I did go there for two weeks on vacation.
Well, luckily, I am! So you Slashdotters better get off your butts to raise money for my campaign, 'cause I sure as hell ain't doing that. I can make a couple of dandy speeches, though (as long as the campaign pays for my travel expenses and my $20K per diem). So, it's ME or nobody! OK, now get to work and get me elected!
P.S. I was Time's Man of the Year last year, so I should have enough name recognition to make it into the White House.
I was wondering who the community thinks will make the best President when it comes to representing issues Slashdot readers might care about?
This has got to be one of the stupidest questions ever asked. Slashdotters are not some group of insulated nerds living divorced from the real world (I mean, if your parents go broke, whose basement are you going to live in, huh?:-).
Off-hand, issues that I find most important are little things like the Iraq War, the disastrous ecological problems and looming energy crisis we need to face, the national debt and potential meltdown of the economy, trade imbalance and job outsourcing, to name a few. Compared to these, the technical things that I care about (i.e., copyright law, internet control, etc.) are so far down the list of issues that will form the basis for my vote they don't even register. Sorry if that's not nerdly enough for you, but if you really make your choice on technical issues at this point, you really are a clueless geek.
You need to take away a plausible defense that the Supremes are likely to decide in the Executive's favor. The Iraq War Resolution was far too fuzzy in its delegation of powers. This bill is so cut and dried that it will make sure that the Congress has no leeway in interpreting the law when it comes time for an impeachment. Even though you (and I) think that Bush is a war criminal, even criminals are allowed a fair trial. And when the court (in this case, the Senate) is so closely balanced, you need to have such a clear violation that even Republicans can't pass the smell test if they vote against conviction. All I'm saying is that impeachment is a very high bar (and was meant to be). It is also, ultimately, a political decision rather than a legal one. I'd rather have a slam dunk that can get these clowns out of office than fire prematurely and let them off the hook.
What people who say that "This is redundant" are missing is that, for the past three or so years, when Bush has been asked about illegal activities, he states that the Iraq War Resolution gave him, in his role as "the commander guy", the power to undertake whatever means necessary to "defend the country". This law is making it explicitly clear that Congress no longer wants him to assume this particular power and, if the President tries to use this excuse again for this purpose, it is very likely that the Congress would have serious grounds for impeachment. This, of course, assumes that the bill becomes law, something that is very uncertain, given that Bush is likely to veto the legislation and that there are probably not Congressional votes to override his veto. On the other hand, it also lets the Democrats say that they are clearly not in favor of this activity and firmly ties the opposition to (implicit) support this action. All-in-all, it's a good thing, either way.
But then, they could also take up fighting genocide in Darfur. They could take up preventing AIDS in Africa. They could take up womens' reproductive rights. They could take up building tidal wave detection and alerting systems in southeast Asia. They could spend every dime they have on solving the world's problems.
Yes, they could. However, comparing these activities to no bowing to Chinese government pressure is comparing apples and oranges.
In the cases you mention, Google is not abetting or exacerbating the problem (unless they're doing something I don't know about to spread genocide, AIDS, tidal waves, and inequitable treatment of women). In not passing this resolution, Google says it's fine if the Chinese government asks for their logs - it's perfectly OK to hand them over. It's fine to help the government censor information. Both of these actively hurt those who fight for their freedom in China and, as such, Google is doing evil. Perhaps they are right in their moral calculus when saying that the access to information they give Chinese people balances out these smaller evils, but they set the bar pretty high when they (of their own accord) chose their motto: Do no evil. Unless no or evil has changed it's meaning recently (I'll Google it later to check), this action is not in line with the corporate slogan they wrap themselves in.
There is only one thing worse than being evil - crowing about not doing evil and then doing it anyway.
I'm guaranteed the hardware will work out of the box without having to use ndiswrapper or any other weird methods to get drivers to work.
Why? Couldn't Dell just set up the system so that it uses ndiswrapper? Why do you think that Dell would be pure about this sort of thing rather than just getting something that "worked", regardless of how it was done? As far as I know, they'll tell some R&D flunky to get a disk image of Ubuntu that works with the hardware du jour and then, after reasonable testing, ship it. If this happens to use ndis or some other shortcut, so be it. Having this available doesn't necessarily mean that it will be done the way you want it to be done. In fact, you may even have to point Synaptic to a repository to get a package or two you want, too. Or they may just leave Synaptic out and use the standard Ubuntu update tool, instead. Who knows. In any case, you're being way too optimistic about a distribution being shipped by someone who wants to make money as opposed to a distribution made for "geek cred".
That's OK, because the Republicans are getting the lion's share from big pharma, software vendors, and publishers, all of whom use the IP laws just as much as the entertainment industry.
The implementation still has to rely on some registers to hold the intermediate computations whether they are exposed in the ISA or hidden in the instruction dispatch unit. This doesn't seem that new. Tomasulo used a similar idea in the FP unit of the IBM 360/195 back in 1967. The dataflow idea was extensively mined at MIT in the eighties. This seems to be just an implementation of the latter that uses the former with a large number of functional units and reservation stations thrown in. Most modern microprocessors do something similar - the only difference is in scale. Remember that there are usually no really new ideas in computer architecture - the old ideas just get revisited with a couple new twists every twenty-five years or so.
I'm sure there are many many right-wing types here who would love to show their support for bringing this vital infrastructure to Iraq. God knows it's safe enough to go over there now - John McCain said that there were several neighborhoods in Baghdad that he could stroll around in without any trouble and the Representative Mike Pence from Indiana said going shopping there was no different than going shopping back home. Especially now that the surge is working!
So come on, right-wing types! Where's your "support the troops" spirit?
Slashdot Mirror
... the smaller versions of the Fujitsu Lifebook, the P1610. I still run Ubuntu on my old P1120. And the battery life is usually about 4.5 hours (even with wifi running).
Maybe because most people don't get chances every day to ask presidential candidates about issues they care about? And that the people at the conference may not be unidimensional geeks who think that the war in Iraq is just a video game that shows up on their TV occasionally? And that, therefore, they might like to ask a question about it because, as people are dying, it might be a bit more important to know why this candidate supports it rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? Sheesh.
... because this is essentially what the manufacturers of this type of system do (modulo file system, volume manager, specialized networking (perhaps), choice of base OS, and nifty cases). The main differences are this:
(1) The manufacturer can get hardware much cheaper than you. This doesn't make much difference in cost, because all of it goes to the profit margin. What it does buy you is that the manufacturer probably has a stock of these things that he can shove in if something breaks. At worst, he can have an entire working system delivered to your door before you could even start rustling up the parts for a replacement.
(2) The manufacturer has a service staff. What happens if you leave the company? What happens if you want to take a vacation? Someone else has to fix your cobbled up server. It's more likely that they'll screw up the configuration or break the thing. Un less you want to give 24/7 support.
(3) The manufacturer has better management software than your set of cobbled up scripts or web pages. At least it's been tested more thoroughly (probably).
(4) The hardware and software configurations are actually tested. Not that you won't do a few tests, but it's fairly likely that you won't do the burn-in testing that these manufacturers do. Nor can you guarantee appropriate SLAs.
So, yeah. You do pay more to these people. There's a reason. If I were your boss, I wouldn't let you build some wonk box. Maybe yours will. In the final analysis, you're just making more work for yourself. Besides, if you're so good at putting together these kinds of system, why aren't you out there in the marketplace competing with these high price suppliers? Don't tell me - it's just altruism for your boss...
No. Actually, you're being accurate. Unless folks can solve the multiple taxonomy problem (and, no, deciding on a common taxonomy and taxonomy translation approaches have not worked in the past) and the metadata cheating problem, the "Semantic Web" is BS promulgated by someone who probably doesn't know the history of epistemology, taxology, or why hard AI problems really are hard, even if he has been knighted. And the people who think that this is worthwhile are the same techno-utopians who probably don't know much about the problem either. When you have a robot that can actually return a Dewey Decimal System classification to four digits to the right of the decimal for a set of randomly selected web pages (and, no, just returning the word "pr0n" doesn't count, although it would probably have the best score of most algorithms you can think of) then you can come and talk about having a start. Otherwise, it's all just BS.
Well, luckily, I am! So you Slashdotters better get off your butts to raise money for my campaign, 'cause I sure as hell ain't doing that. I can make a couple of dandy speeches, though (as long as the campaign pays for my travel expenses and my $20K per diem). So, it's ME or nobody! OK, now get to work and get me elected!
P.S. I was Time's Man of the Year last year, so I should have enough name recognition to make it into the White House.
This has got to be one of the stupidest questions ever asked. Slashdotters are not some group of insulated nerds living divorced from the real world (I mean, if your parents go broke, whose basement are you going to live in, huh? :-).
Off-hand, issues that I find most important are little things like the Iraq War, the disastrous ecological problems and looming energy crisis we need to face, the national debt and potential meltdown of the economy, trade imbalance and job outsourcing, to name a few. Compared to these, the technical things that I care about (i.e., copyright law, internet control, etc.) are so far down the list of issues that will form the basis for my vote they don't even register. Sorry if that's not nerdly enough for you, but if you really make your choice on technical issues at this point, you really are a clueless geek.
So the TeleTubbies are coming to a playground near you? Think of the children!
No, but you should be able to embed the genes for THC production into hops. Mmmm... good beer!
Just flush XML and then it wouldn't be an issue...
Don't worry, they won't go all the way to Gitmo - we'll just set up small local doggie detention centers. The canine terrorists be well taken care of.
Great! That means that he's giving the pr0n industry more dollars (as this is probably the most pirated data out there)!
You need to take away a plausible defense that the Supremes are likely to decide in the Executive's favor. The Iraq War Resolution was far too fuzzy in its delegation of powers. This bill is so cut and dried that it will make sure that the Congress has no leeway in interpreting the law when it comes time for an impeachment. Even though you (and I) think that Bush is a war criminal, even criminals are allowed a fair trial. And when the court (in this case, the Senate) is so closely balanced, you need to have such a clear violation that even Republicans can't pass the smell test if they vote against conviction. All I'm saying is that impeachment is a very high bar (and was meant to be). It is also, ultimately, a political decision rather than a legal one. I'd rather have a slam dunk that can get these clowns out of office than fire prematurely and let them off the hook.
How about "Virus in a Box"?
What people who say that "This is redundant" are missing is that, for the past three or so years, when Bush has been asked about illegal activities, he states that the Iraq War Resolution gave him, in his role as "the commander guy", the power to undertake whatever means necessary to "defend the country". This law is making it explicitly clear that Congress no longer wants him to assume this particular power and, if the President tries to use this excuse again for this purpose, it is very likely that the Congress would have serious grounds for impeachment. This, of course, assumes that the bill becomes law, something that is very uncertain, given that Bush is likely to veto the legislation and that there are probably not Congressional votes to override his veto. On the other hand, it also lets the Democrats say that they are clearly not in favor of this activity and firmly ties the opposition to (implicit) support this action. All-in-all, it's a good thing, either way.
I guess so, except for all those decaying bodies lying around.
Yes, they could. However, comparing these activities to no bowing to Chinese government pressure is comparing apples and oranges.
In the cases you mention, Google is not abetting or exacerbating the problem (unless they're doing something I don't know about to spread genocide, AIDS, tidal waves, and inequitable treatment of women). In not passing this resolution, Google says it's fine if the Chinese government asks for their logs - it's perfectly OK to hand them over. It's fine to help the government censor information. Both of these actively hurt those who fight for their freedom in China and, as such, Google is doing evil. Perhaps they are right in their moral calculus when saying that the access to information they give Chinese people balances out these smaller evils, but they set the bar pretty high when they (of their own accord) chose their motto: Do no evil. Unless no or evil has changed it's meaning recently (I'll Google it later to check), this action is not in line with the corporate slogan they wrap themselves in.
There is only one thing worse than being evil - crowing about not doing evil and then doing it anyway.
Yeah? But now we got movies and you don't! So there! Nyah, nyah!
Q: What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians?
A: A drummer...
Why? Couldn't Dell just set up the system so that it uses ndiswrapper? Why do you think that Dell would be pure about this sort of thing rather than just getting something that "worked", regardless of how it was done? As far as I know, they'll tell some R&D flunky to get a disk image of Ubuntu that works with the hardware du jour and then, after reasonable testing, ship it. If this happens to use ndis or some other shortcut, so be it. Having this available doesn't necessarily mean that it will be done the way you want it to be done. In fact, you may even have to point Synaptic to a repository to get a package or two you want, too. Or they may just leave Synaptic out and use the standard Ubuntu update tool, instead. Who knows. In any case, you're being way too optimistic about a distribution being shipped by someone who wants to make money as opposed to a distribution made for "geek cred".
What!?!? Best bet!? What about Gentoo? After all, no one will want to use Ubuntu - it has all that extra stuff built in!
P.S. Yes, I am kidding. Dell made a great choice with Ubuntu.
That's OK, because the Republicans are getting the lion's share from big pharma, software vendors, and publishers, all of whom use the IP laws just as much as the entertainment industry.
The implementation still has to rely on some registers to hold the intermediate computations whether they are exposed in the ISA or hidden in the instruction dispatch unit. This doesn't seem that new. Tomasulo used a similar idea in the FP unit of the IBM 360/195 back in 1967. The dataflow idea was extensively mined at MIT in the eighties. This seems to be just an implementation of the latter that uses the former with a large number of functional units and reservation stations thrown in. Most modern microprocessors do something similar - the only difference is in scale. Remember that there are usually no really new ideas in computer architecture - the old ideas just get revisited with a couple new twists every twenty-five years or so.
No, here are the real articles on TRIPS. These and many others can be found here.
I'm sure there are many many right-wing types here who would love to show their support for bringing this vital infrastructure to Iraq. God knows it's safe enough to go over there now - John McCain said that there were several neighborhoods in Baghdad that he could stroll around in without any trouble and the Representative Mike Pence from Indiana said going shopping there was no different than going shopping back home. Especially now that the surge is working!
So come on, right-wing types! Where's your "support the troops" spirit?
True enough, but they're not Christians either! That's the real issue!