Scalability is a real property, though. But hardware resources are only a single aspect of scalability. Take the IPv4 address depletion problem. You can throw all the hardware you want to at the problem, but it's not going to budge. That's a problem with the addressing architecture. When IPv6 happens, we still have the router-table growth problem, and that you can throw hardware at, to a degree, although for how much longer, nobody really knows. Moore's Law has kept us ahead of that particular issue.
Essentially, scalability is how well a piece of software performs given an increase in some workload. More users, more nodes, more addresses, more work. The answer to that question is highly application-dependent, and as every experienced programmer knows, not always something that can be solved with more CPU cycles. Being able to solve the problem with more CPU cycles is typically something you have to plan for, meaning that your application is already scalable if you can solve your problem with a cluster. As usual, of course, the business types rarely understand this.
You're missing the point. What I'm saying is that is is impossible not to interpret a document. It's easy to pick a section out of the Constitution like "Congress shall make no law" and say "well, this means that Congress shouldn't legislate such and such", but in reality, life is not so simple. Really, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech? What if it's a nuclear weapons specialist who wants to speak about state secrets to the Chinese? Is a law OK now? This has nothing to do with what I want-- it is simply the reality of working with the law. The Supreme Court's function is not a boolean one ("Constitutional? yes/no"), and never has been.
You realize, of course, that the 2nd Amendment starts with the phrase "A well regulated militia", right? Do you have any idea how long people have been arguing about the meaning of that phrase? Do you have any idea how long the Founders themselves argued about that?
Let's also not forget that the Constitution itself allows for the document to change, and that all of the freedoms you outlined above were amendments to that document. It was designed from the get-go to anticipate interpretation, because the Founders had had experience interpreting the Magna Carta, as well as many, many other historical legal documents.
I like/. more for the discussions than anything else. I find that, inevitably, someone here either knows more about the subject than the author of TFA, or was, in fact, the author of TFA.
But I also appreciate ('like' is not really the appropriate word) being exposed to the extremely diverse opinions you see here, because I've found that technical people are a rather heterogeneous group of people. Were I only to listen to, say, NPR's news coverage, I'd be well-informed about events, but would completely miss out on the whole "popular perception" stuff that most people have in their heads, as I don't have cable TV, and thus, miss out completely on the cable news nutters.
Nonsense. The Supreme Court is about BALANCE OF POWER. The Constitution is an old document. It is simple and elegant, but not perfect. Many laws over many years have clarified and reinterpreted its meaning, as has court precedent, and the administrative guidelines devised to clarify those laws for government personnel. Interpretation-- of the facts and of the laws-- is a fundamental activity of any judge, with that activity being more important as you move up in the judicial system. There is simply NO WAY to understand a law without interpreting it, despite what strict Constitutionalists would like to believe.
This article on stare decisis talks about the problem at length, since courts generally favor regularity over conformity with the original meaning of the law. Stare decisis is not strictly limited to legal precedent, either-- judges are often split about whether the common law aspects of our legal system are important, since our system is derived from the English common law system. Regardless, an understanding of history, and the way people live now, is essential to the correct interpretation of a law.
If an academic has the knowledge required to do the job, I don't have any problems with this, particularly if the focus of that person's academic career has been the law. Even if you ARE a strict Constitutionalist, wouldn't you want someone who has a deep understanding of the law rather than a person who has grown jaded over the years by seeing the repeated application of the murkier parts of law? I would.
I am not a downloader. Despite all of the content-producing industry's failings, I believe that I should pay for what other people spend their long hours producing, even if that means, in the end, what the artist gets is minuscule. I didn't invent bad contracts.
But what really ticks me off is when people actually prevent me from willingly parting with my own money due to geography. There was a show on the SciFi channel recently, Defying Gravity. It wasn't exactly the greatest bit of science fiction out there, but I like Ron Livingston, the acting was generally decent, the story was compelling, and on the whole, the show was entertaining. About halfway through the season, ABC cancelled the show. But Canadian and Australian networks continued to show it. You could buy the episodes online via Amazon's video page, but after the ABC cancellation, you could only buy the first half of the show. WTF? I fired up BitTorrent for the first time.
While I'm at it, let me say: region coding for DVDs is a gigantic anti-competitive crock of shit. Fortunately, I have me a region 2 DVD-R, a Linux machine, and Handbrake, so that I can actually pay for and watch good television from another English-speaking country.
Actually, just a nitpick, ARM itself is bi-endian. It can switch on demand. But machines built with ARM chips tend to settle on one byte order or the other. IIRC, the iPod is little-endian because of assumptions made by PortalPlayer's customizations.
If the rumors I hear are true from Microsoft developers, Microsoft is fully committed to moving their applications to the.NET platform. All of that stuff is compiled to an intermediate, interpreted bytecode that runs in a VM, just like Java. So actually, it is very portable. Portable enough that one of the applications I wrote in C#.NET and compiled in Visual Studio on a 32-bit platform ran unmodified on Ubuntu 64-bit with Mono. They may still do some low-level things here and there, but I suspect that if they really need to, they can port to another processor without having to reinvent the wheel.
called expertise. Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users. These things will all be good for HP if they're really serious about competing in the mobile arena. Many companies fail because their business plan/marketing sucks, and not because they don't make a good product. I'm ambivalent about Palm's stuff, but other people, like my father, is absolutely fanatical about his Palm gear.
My guess is that HP, like Apple, sees computing appliances as the death knell for general purpose computers. They want to make sure they're still around for awhile.
That's right, solar can't compete on an unsubsidized market, but oil can! Oh... I'm sorry, were we talking about the same thing? The fact that we subsidize perhaps the most profitable industry on the planet is patently absurd.
We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants
Exactly, I mean, it's not like it could power a global transportation system. Oh wait.... d'oh!.
There's a shitload (SI units only, please) of energy bombarding (and emanating) from the Earth. If we're not capturing it, it's either because the other forms are easier to capture, or we're not being creative enough. Capture from a diverse enough pool, combine it with clever storage systems, and there's your base load.
My thoughts exactly. If the FAA is going to ban things that keep pilots awake, they need to offer an alternative. Maybe 900,000 lb aircraft should come with games built-in? Something that turns itself off during critical moments. Seriously, did they do a study before they made this ruling?
I have a lot more faith that a seasoned pilot playing minesweeper knows what he's doing than I do in some lawsuit-averse bureaucrat. That pilot is fully aware that errors will result in not just the deaths of everyone on board, but of himself too.
There's also Soekris stuff. I've had my trusty net4801 for many years now, running off the same 2GB CF card. I'm running OpenBSD + PF. I originally set it up to provide wireless to my house from a cable connection. Recently I moved into a place that already had wireless, so by simply changing a couple macros in PF, I am now feeding wireless into my wired PC, essentially the same thing as a wireless gateway, but in reverse. Try that with a wireless router you get at Best Buy.
Soekris gear is a bit on the pricey side, but it's pretty damned durable stuff. If you're looking for something cheaper, Atom-based motherboards are relatively inexpensive these days. Get an old case, a new mobo, and a wireless PCI card and you're good to go. I did something similar with an old Pentium Pro for the 3 years prior to the Soekris (which has been running 24/7 now for about 5).
One good reason for windows in doors, especially the swinging, double-door type found in hallways, is so that you don't clobber someone (or get clobbered by someone) when opening them. Because you can see them through the glass.
I could probably smash my glass-top desk with a hammer, but barring anything really unusual, I'm not sure I could smash it with my body. The glass is very thick. Given that your predilection for smashing glass (are you big and wobbly, or just not very careful?), I can see why you'd want to stay away. I like the coldness of glass, though. One of my favorite materials. Inert, hard, easily formed into useful shapes. But as you point out, brittle.
Trucking companies aren't known for their fresh and new approach to... well, anything really.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Computer science is really about thinking carefully about a method of doing something. Logistics are very important to trucking companies, and if there's one thing that computer scientists are good at, it's logistics.
I'm quite partial to Galant. I'm typing on one right now. You can get them cheaper if you don't go with the glass top. It's pretty sexy. Steel and glass. It's the perfect height for me, and it's primary properties are being big and flat. It doesn't have any annoying drawers or other "features".
One downside: my wife is convinced that the next time we have to move it, we're going to drop it and she's going to somehow be hacked to pieces by the shards.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding, right? If not, your applications aren't big enough. Do you think Google runs on a computer under somebody's desk?
Scalability is a real property, though. But hardware resources are only a single aspect of scalability. Take the IPv4 address depletion problem. You can throw all the hardware you want to at the problem, but it's not going to budge. That's a problem with the addressing architecture. When IPv6 happens, we still have the router-table growth problem, and that you can throw hardware at, to a degree, although for how much longer, nobody really knows. Moore's Law has kept us ahead of that particular issue.
Essentially, scalability is how well a piece of software performs given an increase in some workload. More users, more nodes, more addresses, more work. The answer to that question is highly application-dependent, and as every experienced programmer knows, not always something that can be solved with more CPU cycles. Being able to solve the problem with more CPU cycles is typically something you have to plan for, meaning that your application is already scalable if you can solve your problem with a cluster. As usual, of course, the business types rarely understand this.
You're missing the point. What I'm saying is that is is impossible not to interpret a document. It's easy to pick a section out of the Constitution like "Congress shall make no law" and say "well, this means that Congress shouldn't legislate such and such", but in reality, life is not so simple. Really, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech? What if it's a nuclear weapons specialist who wants to speak about state secrets to the Chinese? Is a law OK now? This has nothing to do with what I want-- it is simply the reality of working with the law. The Supreme Court's function is not a boolean one ("Constitutional? yes/no"), and never has been.
You realize, of course, that the 2nd Amendment starts with the phrase "A well regulated militia", right? Do you have any idea how long people have been arguing about the meaning of that phrase? Do you have any idea how long the Founders themselves argued about that?
Let's also not forget that the Constitution itself allows for the document to change, and that all of the freedoms you outlined above were amendments to that document. It was designed from the get-go to anticipate interpretation, because the Founders had had experience interpreting the Magna Carta, as well as many, many other historical legal documents.
I like /. more for the discussions than anything else. I find that, inevitably, someone here either knows more about the subject than the author of TFA, or was, in fact, the author of TFA.
But I also appreciate ('like' is not really the appropriate word) being exposed to the extremely diverse opinions you see here, because I've found that technical people are a rather heterogeneous group of people. Were I only to listen to, say, NPR's news coverage, I'd be well-informed about events, but would completely miss out on the whole "popular perception" stuff that most people have in their heads, as I don't have cable TV, and thus, miss out completely on the cable news nutters.
Nonsense. The Supreme Court is about BALANCE OF POWER. The Constitution is an old document. It is simple and elegant, but not perfect. Many laws over many years have clarified and reinterpreted its meaning, as has court precedent, and the administrative guidelines devised to clarify those laws for government personnel. Interpretation-- of the facts and of the laws-- is a fundamental activity of any judge, with that activity being more important as you move up in the judicial system. There is simply NO WAY to understand a law without interpreting it, despite what strict Constitutionalists would like to believe.
This article on stare decisis talks about the problem at length, since courts generally favor regularity over conformity with the original meaning of the law. Stare decisis is not strictly limited to legal precedent, either-- judges are often split about whether the common law aspects of our legal system are important, since our system is derived from the English common law system. Regardless, an understanding of history, and the way people live now, is essential to the correct interpretation of a law.
If an academic has the knowledge required to do the job, I don't have any problems with this, particularly if the focus of that person's academic career has been the law. Even if you ARE a strict Constitutionalist, wouldn't you want someone who has a deep understanding of the law rather than a person who has grown jaded over the years by seeing the repeated application of the murkier parts of law? I would.
Oh, but you are paying for content over the air. Commercials. You're paying with your time, even if you aren't watching those commercials.
By "downloader", I meant "illegal downloader". You know, what TFA is about.
I know. For all the hype, you'd think you'd at least get some multiplication action in there, or heaven forbid, a divide.
I am not a downloader. Despite all of the content-producing industry's failings, I believe that I should pay for what other people spend their long hours producing, even if that means, in the end, what the artist gets is minuscule. I didn't invent bad contracts.
But what really ticks me off is when people actually prevent me from willingly parting with my own money due to geography. There was a show on the SciFi channel recently, Defying Gravity. It wasn't exactly the greatest bit of science fiction out there, but I like Ron Livingston, the acting was generally decent, the story was compelling, and on the whole, the show was entertaining. About halfway through the season, ABC cancelled the show. But Canadian and Australian networks continued to show it. You could buy the episodes online via Amazon's video page, but after the ABC cancellation, you could only buy the first half of the show. WTF? I fired up BitTorrent for the first time.
While I'm at it, let me say: region coding for DVDs is a gigantic anti-competitive crock of shit. Fortunately, I have me a region 2 DVD-R, a Linux machine, and Handbrake, so that I can actually pay for and watch good television from another English-speaking country.
I don't hear many people complaining about not being able to write novels on their Playstations.
Just Base64-encode it. Plenty o' plain text now.
Speed of light. That's a rather serious obstacle, and it is already a factor in chip design. Larger dies will suffer timing problems.
The problem was that Gordon Moore's mouth was full at the time. It wasn't "Moore's Law". It was "more slaw". The rest is history.
No kidding. What's next? Ox-powered cars? Have we forgotten that centrifuges predate electric motors?
Actually, just a nitpick, ARM itself is bi-endian. It can switch on demand. But machines built with ARM chips tend to settle on one byte order or the other. IIRC, the iPod is little-endian because of assumptions made by PortalPlayer's customizations.
If the rumors I hear are true from Microsoft developers, Microsoft is fully committed to moving their applications to the .NET platform. All of that stuff is compiled to an intermediate, interpreted bytecode that runs in a VM, just like Java. So actually, it is very portable. Portable enough that one of the applications I wrote in C#.NET and compiled in Visual Studio on a 32-bit platform ran unmodified on Ubuntu 64-bit with Mono. They may still do some low-level things here and there, but I suspect that if they really need to, they can port to another processor without having to reinvent the wheel.
called expertise. Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users. These things will all be good for HP if they're really serious about competing in the mobile arena. Many companies fail because their business plan/marketing sucks, and not because they don't make a good product. I'm ambivalent about Palm's stuff, but other people, like my father, is absolutely fanatical about his Palm gear.
My guess is that HP, like Apple, sees computing appliances as the death knell for general purpose computers. They want to make sure they're still around for awhile.
That's right, solar can't compete on an unsubsidized market, but oil can! Oh... I'm sorry, were we talking about the same thing? The fact that we subsidize perhaps the most profitable industry on the planet is patently absurd.
We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants
Exactly, I mean, it's not like it could power a global transportation system. Oh wait.... d'oh!.
There's a shitload (SI units only, please) of energy bombarding (and emanating) from the Earth. If we're not capturing it, it's either because the other forms are easier to capture, or we're not being creative enough. Capture from a diverse enough pool, combine it with clever storage systems, and there's your base load.
My thoughts exactly. If the FAA is going to ban things that keep pilots awake, they need to offer an alternative. Maybe 900,000 lb aircraft should come with games built-in? Something that turns itself off during critical moments. Seriously, did they do a study before they made this ruling?
I have a lot more faith that a seasoned pilot playing minesweeper knows what he's doing than I do in some lawsuit-averse bureaucrat. That pilot is fully aware that errors will result in not just the deaths of everyone on board, but of himself too.
There's also Soekris stuff. I've had my trusty net4801 for many years now, running off the same 2GB CF card. I'm running OpenBSD + PF. I originally set it up to provide wireless to my house from a cable connection. Recently I moved into a place that already had wireless, so by simply changing a couple macros in PF, I am now feeding wireless into my wired PC, essentially the same thing as a wireless gateway, but in reverse. Try that with a wireless router you get at Best Buy.
Soekris gear is a bit on the pricey side, but it's pretty damned durable stuff. If you're looking for something cheaper, Atom-based motherboards are relatively inexpensive these days. Get an old case, a new mobo, and a wireless PCI card and you're good to go. I did something similar with an old Pentium Pro for the 3 years prior to the Soekris (which has been running 24/7 now for about 5).
One good reason for windows in doors, especially the swinging, double-door type found in hallways, is so that you don't clobber someone (or get clobbered by someone) when opening them. Because you can see them through the glass.
I could probably smash my glass-top desk with a hammer, but barring anything really unusual, I'm not sure I could smash it with my body. The glass is very thick. Given that your predilection for smashing glass (are you big and wobbly, or just not very careful?), I can see why you'd want to stay away. I like the coldness of glass, though. One of my favorite materials. Inert, hard, easily formed into useful shapes. But as you point out, brittle.
Trucking companies aren't known for their fresh and new approach to... well, anything really.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Computer science is really about thinking carefully about a method of doing something. Logistics are very important to trucking companies, and if there's one thing that computer scientists are good at, it's logistics.
Easily fixed. Use a hexagonal table. Or six triangular ones :^P
I'm quite partial to Galant. I'm typing on one right now. You can get them cheaper if you don't go with the glass top. It's pretty sexy. Steel and glass. It's the perfect height for me, and it's primary properties are being big and flat. It doesn't have any annoying drawers or other "features".
One downside: my wife is convinced that the next time we have to move it, we're going to drop it and she's going to somehow be hacked to pieces by the shards.
Wow, talk about having an appropriate username. What happens when you hit 20?