The cheap solution for persistant RAM is to provide a constant power source for your RAM from either some form of battery or just a power source that is always on.
Where this stuff is actually useful is for better Hard Drives. In fact it's already being used for that, and has been for a while.
Not only is it a matter of trading known problems for unknown ones, but it is a matter of trading problems on which a great deal of headway and investment has been made, for a new frontier where all that capital will be wasted. And not only that, but async is fundamentally harder to accomplish. Synchronos logic fits much better with our transistor technology.
Async processing is a very old idea. The problem is that designing the logic for it is a far greater chore than for regular chips. CPU designers are simply not good enough to do it well yet.
Scientists working with Japan's Super-Duper-Kamiokande anounce that they have lost containment on a micro black hole.
Apparently, an undergrad triped over the power cable.
Officials tell us that there is no need to panic. The mini black hole plunged straight to the center of the earth.
Happily, it will feed on the other mini black hole that was created when the first copy of Windows 2047 was burned onto CD and collapsed on its own data mass -- it was thought at the time that the universe was acting to protect both itself and the second law of Thermodynamics from Windows 2047's immense entropic mass.
There is some speculation that the black hole could actually provide enough energy to run Windows 2047, but Physicists are highly dubious.
Who here (above the age of 16) doesn't carry some form of ID with them every time they leave the house? (Your reply does not count if you are currenty wanted by the police of any nation in the world.)
I've got my driver's license with me everywhere I go.
It's dumb not to have a credit card with you, in case of some sort of emergency or whatever.
Anytime you do something involving alchool, you've got to have proof of your age, so on weekends...
Now, it's not as if the US government doesn't already keep records on everybody, SS#, plus whatever they do for foreigners.
Theft and counterfeit duplication of a National ID would be a problem, but the problem is worse right now. All you've got to do is fake a SS card and a birth certificate, and you have got your victim at your mercy. And SS cards are easier to fake than driver's licenses. (You don't even need to fake the SS card. The only requirement for a replacement SS card is one form of ID, which may include a student ID.) Big Brother is not here, nor will be here in America in the foreseeable future, but we don't have the option of being anarchists either.
Wasn't MSFT being prosecuted under Federal Anti-Trust Laws?
It's important not to underestimate the leverage of the states, but when the Justice Department says "STOP!", they don't have all that much room to maneuver.
Win XP can be slow if you leave all the graphical eye candy on. Go to the system menu, find the settings button that lets you "adjust settings for best performance." There is a very noticable speed up on my 1.33 GHz T-bird. I'll bet the benchmarks were run with the settings adjusted for best look.
The planned features list seems a little unambitious to me. I know that many of the programmers working on KDE are top-notch, but there needs to be some other talent in there as well. In my opinion the KDE developers need to be concentrating on productivity features. They have the opportunity to be at the forefront of that kind of thing. Microsoft wastes plenty of money in researching that kind of thing, but they lack the flexibility to be cutting edge.
Not a word about employees who actually used the new software afterwords. What was the cost in lost productivity getting used to a new system suite? What about training costs?
The software comparisons all seem to be based on feature comparisons, not a single comment from a windows office drone getting used to the new system.
This report isn't going to make me switch over to Linux. I'll need to see or do some real testing first.
OSS is founded on the idea of programmers giving away their time for free to help you with your project. Sure, you get a almost minisculely better piece of software in return, but it's more productive to go out and make some money with your programming time so that you can waste it all on cars and girls. Damn skanks.
Anyway, true open source collaboration actually costs a lot of money. You need to find some way of compensating programers who donate their time, as well as those people who administrate the product and include fixes.
Maybe some projects can get away with charity, but in our society, we'll never see an open source community that truly rivals the commercial.
Today, if you are a small business, there are a few open source solutions available to you, but as soon as you need a piece of software that is even slightly specialized, you'll never find an open source solution.
I think OSS is a viable programming methodology, but you have to pay through the nose for it to truly work.
This is the greatest attack on American soil in our history. The cost in life will overwhelm that of Pearl Harbor.
This attack of terrorism was a tremendous miscalculation on the part of its perpetrators. Just like the Japanese before WWII, they will have "awakened a sleeping giant."
On the other hand, we have only begun to see the cost to ourselves. We'll survive, undoubtably, but there will be a great bill to pay. Our economy will plunge into Recession and may even flirt with Depression before this is over.
The National Review Online seems to be the first news organization to start with major opinion commentary. Check it out.
They decide how much money they put into developing quality. The customer decides whether to buy the product or to go with a better product. All you get to do is find someplace cool to work. If you have fun where you work, stay. If not, don't. Maybe there are moral issues about programming hack jobs, but that's up to your conscience.
The best thing you could do would be to start up your own company if you think you could make more money doing things your way.
Now, I don't believe that open source is always the right tool for the job, but I think it is perfect for this sort of situation.
The standard business model of selling software simply isn't right for Lego. They're basically selling hardware.
Open source is the right business tool for this market. Lego should get together with some of the hackers and release a source code pack for anyone who wants to use it. If it gets modified into something better, all the more profits for Lego.
Let's see open source do what it has always promised to do: make some serious dough.
Just wait until some kid decides to shoot up his school again.
We don't really know what set off this victim of child-abuse and school bullying who just happened to have easy access to firearms. But we think it might be the fact that he was a Java programmer.
And we'll have Oprah and Senator Liebermann calling for a ban on applets for a few months afterword.
Their report, due to be presented for discussion on Saturday, also recommends placing limits on the power of the board and setting up a bill of rights for individual users.
I wonder what will be in that bill of rights? What sort of rights should we have to domain names? I don't know how I would write it.
Just you wait until my registration of *.* comes through. Then you'll all be sorry.
There are all sorts of possibilities. The temp differential in spring could be changing the reflectivity of the soil or something. Not that it ever gets warm--just changes from way below freezing to less way below freezing. The only way we will ever know will be to keep sending unmanned probes over there. (Don't expect manned craft in your lifetimes.) And probably before we ever know for sure, we will have infected Mars with Earthly life, and the question will be unanswerable forever.
I wonder how they even begin to get away with comparing this to GPL.
Music is so simple to reverse engineer that it is fundamentally open source. You listen, write down the lyrics, and pick out some chords. You can't really totally copy someone else, but you can get away with stealing a lot. Everybody does. So much for some sort of viral license.
OAL is all about musicians living in the "free as in beer" world ushered in by Napster. But it is also stupid. It's all about giving away rights without getting anything at all in return. With computer code, at least there are a some people out there who might modify your code and make it better. There is nothing similar in the music world.
The music industry is going to continue on pretty much as it has in the past. It'll sue where it thinks it can, but it's never going back to the pre-napster days. And it's not about to shift paradigms either. The only way things are going to change will be some revolutionary security technology (unlikely) or a complete revision of copyright law into some entirely new beast (who knows?).
Well I am a fairly competent vim http://www.vim.org user. I have to strongly disagree that their is a direct correlation between cutting and pasting and a GUI.
Are you using a mouse to cut and paste, or is it all keystrokes? It's a simple GUI, but it's still GUI.
The ideal GUI dev tool gives you all the command-line functionality you could want, while at the same time intelligently automating some of the more mind-numbing activities. If you have ever cut and pasted, then you have already taken your first step down the long, long, road of GUI-dom.
And if you haven't, someone is paying you a lot more money than they need to be.
Me, I think we should go back to the real command-lines -- typewriters! Finding a complier might be a pain, though.
Slashdot Mirror
But let's be clear, the patent is still stupid.
The cheap solution for persistant RAM is to provide a constant power source for your RAM from either some form of battery or just a power source that is always on.
Where this stuff is actually useful is for better Hard Drives. In fact it's already being used for that, and has been for a while.
Not only is it a matter of trading known problems for unknown ones, but it is a matter of trading problems on which a great deal of headway and investment has been made, for a new frontier where all that capital will be wasted. And not only that, but async is fundamentally harder to accomplish. Synchronos logic fits much better with our transistor technology.
Async processing is a very old idea. The problem is that designing the logic for it is a far greater chore than for regular chips. CPU designers are simply not good enough to do it well yet.
Nov 12, 2050,
Scientists working with Japan's Super-Duper-Kamiokande anounce that they have lost containment on a micro black hole.
Apparently, an undergrad triped over the power cable.
Officials tell us that there is no need to panic. The mini black hole plunged straight to the center of the earth.
Happily, it will feed on the other mini black hole that was created when the first copy of Windows 2047 was burned onto CD and collapsed on its own data mass -- it was thought at the time that the universe was acting to protect both itself and the second law of Thermodynamics from Windows 2047's immense entropic mass.
There is some speculation that the black hole could actually provide enough energy to run Windows 2047, but Physicists are highly dubious.
It's a few hours of work besides, and they run the risk of destroying a piece of expensive hardware to do it.
This space for rent.
Who here (above the age of 16) doesn't carry some form of ID with them every time they leave the house? (Your reply does not count if you are currenty wanted by the police of any nation in the world.) I've got my driver's license with me everywhere I go. It's dumb not to have a credit card with you, in case of some sort of emergency or whatever. Anytime you do something involving alchool, you've got to have proof of your age, so on weekends... Now, it's not as if the US government doesn't already keep records on everybody, SS#, plus whatever they do for foreigners. Theft and counterfeit duplication of a National ID would be a problem, but the problem is worse right now. All you've got to do is fake a SS card and a birth certificate, and you have got your victim at your mercy. And SS cards are easier to fake than driver's licenses. (You don't even need to fake the SS card. The only requirement for a replacement SS card is one form of ID, which may include a student ID.) Big Brother is not here, nor will be here in America in the foreseeable future, but we don't have the option of being anarchists either.
Wasn't MSFT being prosecuted under Federal Anti-Trust Laws? It's important not to underestimate the leverage of the states, but when the Justice Department says "STOP!", they don't have all that much room to maneuver.
Then they must have simply cooked their results instead. Shows what a dumbass I was to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Win XP can be slow if you leave all the graphical eye candy on. Go to the system menu, find the settings button that lets you "adjust settings for best performance." There is a very noticable speed up on my 1.33 GHz T-bird. I'll bet the benchmarks were run with the settings adjusted for best look.
Yeah, I suppose so. I'll have to try developing a couple applications for it to see what it's like.
The planned features list seems a little unambitious to me. I know that many of the programmers working on KDE are top-notch, but there needs to be some other talent in there as well. In my opinion the KDE developers need to be concentrating on productivity features. They have the opportunity to be at the forefront of that kind of thing. Microsoft wastes plenty of money in researching that kind of thing, but they lack the flexibility to be cutting edge.
Not a word about employees who actually used the new software afterwords. What was the cost in lost productivity getting used to a new system suite? What about training costs?
The software comparisons all seem to be based on feature comparisons, not a single comment from a windows office drone getting used to the new system.
This report isn't going to make me switch over to Linux. I'll need to see or do some real testing first.
OSS is founded on the idea of programmers giving away their time for free to help you with your project. Sure, you get a almost minisculely better piece of software in return, but it's more productive to go out and make some money with your programming time so that you can waste it all on cars and girls. Damn skanks.
Anyway, true open source collaboration actually costs a lot of money. You need to find some way of compensating programers who donate their time, as well as those people who administrate the product and include fixes.
Maybe some projects can get away with charity, but in our society, we'll never see an open source community that truly rivals the commercial.
Today, if you are a small business, there are a few open source solutions available to you, but as soon as you need a piece of software that is even slightly specialized, you'll never find an open source solution.
I think OSS is a viable programming methodology, but you have to pay through the nose for it to truly work.
Opinion stuff: National Review Online
The Economist
The best commentary I've picked up today.
This is the greatest attack on American soil in our history. The cost in life will overwhelm that of Pearl Harbor.
This attack of terrorism was a tremendous miscalculation on the part of its perpetrators. Just like the Japanese before WWII, they will have "awakened a sleeping giant."
On the other hand, we have only begun to see the cost to ourselves. We'll survive, undoubtably, but there will be a great bill to pay. Our economy will plunge into Recession and may even flirt with Depression before this is over.
The National Review Online seems to be the first news organization to start with major opinion commentary. Check it out.
They decide how much money they put into developing quality. The customer decides whether to buy the product or to go with a better product. All you get to do is find someplace cool to work. If you have fun where you work, stay. If not, don't. Maybe there are moral issues about programming hack jobs, but that's up to your conscience.
The best thing you could do would be to start up your own company if you think you could make more money doing things your way.
Now, I don't believe that open source is always the right tool for the job, but I think it is perfect for this sort of situation.
The standard business model of selling software simply isn't right for Lego. They're basically selling hardware.
Open source is the right business tool for this market. Lego should get together with some of the hackers and release a source code pack for anyone who wants to use it. If it gets modified into something better, all the more profits for Lego.
Let's see open source do what it has always promised to do: make some serious dough.
Just wait until some kid decides to shoot up his school again.
We don't really know what set off this victim of child-abuse and school bullying who just happened to have easy access to firearms. But we think it might be the fact that he was a Java programmer.
And we'll have Oprah and Senator Liebermann calling for a ban on applets for a few months afterword.
Their report, due to be presented for discussion on Saturday, also recommends placing limits on the power of the board and setting up a bill of rights for individual users.
I wonder what will be in that bill of rights? What sort of rights should we have to domain names? I don't know how I would write it.
Just you wait until my registration of *.* comes through. Then you'll all be sorry.
There are all sorts of possibilities. The temp differential in spring could be changing the reflectivity of the soil or something. Not that it ever gets warm--just changes from way below freezing to less way below freezing. The only way we will ever know will be to keep sending unmanned probes over there. (Don't expect manned craft in your lifetimes.) And probably before we ever know for sure, we will have infected Mars with Earthly life, and the question will be unanswerable forever.
I wonder how they even begin to get away with comparing this to GPL.
Music is so simple to reverse engineer that it is fundamentally open source. You listen, write down the lyrics, and pick out some chords. You can't really totally copy someone else, but you can get away with stealing a lot. Everybody does. So much for some sort of viral license.
OAL is all about musicians living in the "free as in beer" world ushered in by Napster. But it is also stupid. It's all about giving away rights without getting anything at all in return. With computer code, at least there are a some people out there who might modify your code and make it better. There is nothing similar in the music world.
The music industry is going to continue on pretty much as it has in the past. It'll sue where it thinks it can, but it's never going back to the pre-napster days. And it's not about to shift paradigms either. The only way things are going to change will be some revolutionary security technology (unlikely) or a complete revision of copyright law into some entirely new beast (who knows?).
Well I am a fairly competent vim http://www.vim.org user. I have to strongly disagree that their is a direct correlation between cutting and pasting and a GUI. Are you using a mouse to cut and paste, or is it all keystrokes? It's a simple GUI, but it's still GUI.
Makes you more attractive to the opposite sex than even showers or alchool can!
The ideal GUI dev tool gives you all the command-line functionality you could want, while at the same time intelligently automating some of the more mind-numbing activities. If you have ever cut and pasted, then you have already taken your first step down the long, long, road of GUI-dom. And if you haven't, someone is paying you a lot more money than they need to be. Me, I think we should go back to the real command-lines -- typewriters! Finding a complier might be a pain, though.