Look at what these countries were doing about 5 years ago with the steel trade. They were dumping steel at such a low cost that US companies like Huntco were getting creamed and having to shut down facilities. The cost of imported steel was so low that after paying to ship it over, process it, and then ship it to the location the imported steel was still way under US rates. The steel was at such a low price that it was almost like the foreign companies were giving it away.
(Very similar things have happened more recently.) So, essentially, what you are saying is that that its illegal for any country to produce steel at a lower price than a US foundry can? And it's especially, especially illegal if it will force good old american companies out of buisness?
Summary: "Look at what [they did]. Huntco [... had] to shut down facilities. The cost of [...] steel was so low that after [production,processing,shipping] it was still under US rates.
If eastern steel producers are really dumping the price (as in selling below profit) why can't the US companies simply compete? Do you really believe a poor Ukranian steel company could sell below cost for a decade? (hardly likely). Do you think a major US steel company could price fight with the Ukranian one for the period? (extremely likely).
Perhaps the real problem is oversaturation in the US steel market?
I work for a microscopic consultant company. We have four clients. Thanks to the economic climate one client has dropped us, one client has cut down on consultant fees and one client wants to use us, but has no budget. The fourth client is still going strong, I hope (I work for the other three). Our budget is stretched to the limit.
What to do? I'm sitting on my ass (with a relatively large paycheck) two days of the week, at least. We decided to use my time to make a (large) prototype web service for client three (the ones who want us but have no budget), hoping that they'll accept it for free in return for paying us to flesh it out.
Essentially, I have put in >200 hours of work (so far) without any revenue for the company. Am I their bitch? Am I just sensible? Should I seek other employement? (That last bit was rethoric. I haven't gotten any replies in the last four months...)
Suppose a former employer contacted me, wanting some help... Would I go "Of course. $100 an hour, minimum charge four hours." or would I go "Yeah! Sure! I'll do it all day Sunday, no charge!". Depressingly enough I think I would go with the latter, hoping they are thinking of rehiring me.
The magnetic fields are forcing upwelling gas away from the spot (hot as well as cold). However, the effect can only be so strong. Even the magnetic fields of the sun can't cause a complete vacuum in the sunspot. Gass will diffuse in from every direction.
The end result is that the region simply has a somewhat lower density than surrounding regions. Lower density==lower temperature==(much) lower luminosity.
Or was this just because the Y2K and euro 'problem', which 'required' lots of MCSE drones.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Seriously, I did the Y2K fixing for two major labor unions in Sweden (Unix). There were problems, dozens of them. Some would have lead to large amounts of money being lost ("%d", tm_year leading to our banking bands becoming invalid because of row length). I fixed most of them, one went unfixed (bringing heaps of abuse on my head. I of course never got any praise for the 30 bugs I fixed.)
I'm suprised that more companies didn't do what the first union (the Swedish Union of Goverment Employees) did. Apparently they decided that as long as they were going to have to inspect every line of code in the system, why not use this opportunity to upgrade it?
Which was what I did. I went through about 150.000 lines of code, checking for y2k bugs and translating the system from SCO/Informix/4GL/VB (client) to Linux/MySQL/C/Java.
No, Thendic haven't said that they'll get a license. They have said that they'd love to see AmigaOS run on their hardware, the Pegasos mobo.
If they would love it so much, how come that...
Hyperion ordered a Pegasos developer board about 8 (more?) months ago, in order to port OS 4 to Pegasos. They still haven't received it, even though Pegasos is now being mass (heh) produced and sold to the public.
Don't bite my head of. Don't go ranting about THE NAME. I really like Pegasos. I even like MorphOS a lot. It's just that it's my second option. I want a Pegasos with Amiga OS 4.
So, if your product is sold in Libya, and Libya thinks that your "action figures" are offensive because the women aren't covering their faces, you'd have no problem with the US packaging you up and shipping you off to Libya, to spend the next 5 years in THEIR prison.
Of course! That's how the US acts isn't it? A non american person programming a program that is not illegal in his country, being "extradited" (not really, he visited the US) and sentenced in a second country.
Could someone please explain to me again why the US has the right to try a person that has violated US law, but lives in a totally different country, with totally different laws, and performed the 'crime' in his country?!
You need to check out the Acorncommunity (or perhaps that's where you're coming from?). Acorn was an English Arm-based home computer of the late 80's that competed (none to sucessfully, outside Britain at least) against Amiga an Atari.
Even though the Acorn community is now shriveled enough to make Amiga look healthy by comparision, they have been the one and only group pushing Arm-based desktops over the last decades.
There seems to be at least a couple hardwareresellers still in operation. The pricing didn't seem to extortionate to me, either.
Except, of course, that the Amiga One was finished and shipping months ago, and no-one has a Pegasos board (excepting prototypes).
Anyway, both are based on a Mai reference design. Pegasos is clearly (IMHO) the better product since it has socketed processors (A1 has a surface mounted G3 600MHz (?)). Eyetech will allegedly release an updated version of the A1 with socketed processor if the initial version sells well enough.
PS. Yes, A1/Amiga OS Vs Pegasos/MorphOS is a very inflamed subject in Amigaland. Three sentence summary follows.
The Pegasos (a new Amiga PPC motherboard) and MorphOS (an Amiga work-alike OS) was started when Amiga was essentially abandoned. Then, some former employees of Gateway and some Amiga enthusiasts bought the trademarks and started working towards a new, official Amiga platform. The two groups couldn't get along, and now we've wound up with two competing platforms, with a combined market measured in 5 digits, if that (sigh).
The SAAB JAS-39 Griffon crash you mention was in fact caused by the pilot not being warned about "pilot induced oscillations" (though there was a crash in testing that was attributed to the control systems). Basically, the plane started to weer left, the pilot quickly compensated as did the control system, leading to overcompensation. So, the pilot compensated back the other way, as did the plane...
Rinse, lather, repeat. End result: plane rears up, suffer complete loss of air speed, falls like a brick into a crowd of about 200 000 spectators (this was an airshow over central Stockholm!), and through divine intervention happens to hit to one empty spot in a sea of people.
Interesting fact 1: footage shows the plane stabilizing back down into a correct flight attitude once the pilot ejected. Not much use without airspeed, though.
Interesting fact 2: SAABs division for Flight Control (presumably the same guys who did the Griffon control systems) also programmed the flight control systems for the Ariadne...
Interesting (or at least humurous) fact 3: This is the monument marking the spot where JAS crashed.
Windows is getting more stable all the time. However, an improvement from 0.01 acceptable to 0.5 acceptable isn't going to impress anyone, even if it's a 50-fold improvement.
You conveniently chose to ignore the other two points, namely:
Insecurity. Sure, MS is currently putting lots of money into securing all their products, but the only reason this huge drive was nesescary is that most any MS product is shock-full of security holes!
Breaches of privacy. MS is all for BoP! Hell, that's their middle name! They do everything they can to screw over their customers any way they can!
Not true! This is valid information on how to improve your computer!
For other great advice, check out Datadocktorn (approx. "The Computer Docktor"). They have great guides on how to make your computer plenty better. Especially check out the disk defraggle section. The minimizing tutorial is also very helpful. I never realized that I cut just saw off those wasteful parts of my motherboard and fit the whole thing in a much smaller case!
I sleep about 1 meter from my home server. Every time the general level of sound changes sharply (even if at low volume), I wake up. Momentarily. Let me tell you, 10+ "Micro-wakenings" per night will do you no good!
Possible fix: REMOVE all ability to vary fan speed! And to park disks! And perhaps even to slow processor.
...are eula's treated like contracts, legally speaking?
Nope. Neither are "shrink wrap" contracts (you know, the kinds that are kept inside the sealed plastic covering that start "By breaking this seal you agree to..."
, and continues "...Microsoft does not garantue the usefuleness of this software for any purpose what-so-ever, even including purposes stated by Microsoft or Microsoft employees."
Yes, that's more-or-less an actual "shrink wrap" "agreement" I once had with Microsoft. Anyway, it's all illegal, if you live in Sweden, or any European country, or come to think of it most any country in the world except the US.
1 million processors+, to simulate folding a measly protein? Yikes.
The protein itself "calulates" how it should fold in nanoseconds, using a "hardware" consting of a couple of thousand atoms. I guess this is why we should push for quantum computers.
Side note: I once read about a proposed method of factoring large primes which involved transforming the prime into a protein sequence, and getting the factors by letting the protein fold. This is based on the fact that any instance of a NP-hard problem can be transformed into an instance of any other NP-hard problem in polynomial time (protein folding and prime cracking are both NP-hard).
Abuse me if the above paragraph made no sense. Long time no complexity theory.
While I agree that we do need an open, portable distributed computing platform for these kinds of efforts, I think you have underestimated the need for communication between nodes in some kinds of calculations.
You mention fluid dynamics. These programs require data to be exchanged between nodes and their neighbors every iteration. That won't ever work when the two nodes in question are connected by 14.4 modems and down 80% of the time.
Massively distributed PC-based efforts can only work if the problem can be partitioned into parts that do not rely on any data on any other node.
Very few real life computing tasks fulfill that condition.
Uhm... You do realise that the city lights have been added manually? If this is anything like Living Earths map (it seems based on it), the simply added a dot for each city with brightness based on population. North Korea looks like a case of "No Data".
An upper bound of the number of chess positions: assume each square can have 15 states (white pawn, black pawn, white rook, black rook,..., empty). Number of board states: 15^64, or about 1.96e71.
The vast majority of those states are invalid. I've seen estimates of as little as 1e40 valid boards.
<jedi>This is not the classified aircraft you are looking for.</jedi>
Damn, I was hoping this was about the über-large, super-low-speed, really gigantic, maybe-helium-inflated, possibly-heavy-duty-troop-transport aircraft previoulsy reported (several times) on Slashdot.
Now, that would be killer. I'm really very disapointed here.
Hell, many people in Afghanistan use Windows XP. If MS was to put anti-piracy measures, those people would be forced to switch unless they like paying a whole years salary just to buy Windows.
Switch?
I used to have a Windows machine. I would try to get the latest nuclear modeling programs to run, but they were like "duh".
Then I got a Macintosh, and the modelling programs I got where just like "yeah!"
I'm only sad I didn't switch earlier. I'm Omar Sadii, and I'm a nuclear weapons specialist.
Of course, if you can't afford to pirate Windows, you sure as hell can't afford to pirate MacOS (or buy the hardware).
Except, of course, no Palladium signed media (ie. in a slight interval, all media, and even documents from individual users) will be showable on your non-Palladium platform.
Yes of course I hope that there will be enough Linux users/Copyright Criminals that media will still be leaked onto the general internet/Evil P2P Pirating Machine that I will get it, but I wouldn't count on it:-(
Yes, I did make a few mistakes in that text. "Speach" is one I keep doing, despite reminders. "We'll" must have been a temporary neural short-circuit. "The" was just my keyboard failing to register the 'n'.
On the other hand, I guess my English is a whole lot better than your Swedish (or? Type something devastating in Swedish:-). Of course, you noted from my URL that I was from a non-English-Language-Region. If not, I'm afraid you'll need a brain.
I saw an actual vote form (or whatever you call it) in the paper. There were actually two options. "Yes" and "no". The displayed form had "yes" ticked, in the voters own blood. Scary.
Slashdot Mirror
(Very similar things have happened more recently.) So, essentially, what you are saying is that that its illegal for any country to produce steel at a lower price than a US foundry can? And it's especially, especially illegal if it will force good old american companies out of buisness?
Summary: "Look at what [they did]. Huntco [... had] to shut down facilities. The cost of [...] steel was so low that after [production,processing,shipping] it was still under US rates.
If eastern steel producers are really dumping the price (as in selling below profit) why can't the US companies simply compete? Do you really believe a poor Ukranian steel company could sell below cost for a decade? (hardly likely). Do you think a major US steel company could price fight with the Ukranian one for the period? (extremely likely).
Perhaps the real problem is oversaturation in the US steel market?
I'm in a similar situation, but not quite.
I work for a microscopic consultant company. We have four clients. Thanks to the economic climate one client has dropped us, one client has cut down on consultant fees and one client wants to use us, but has no budget. The fourth client is still going strong, I hope (I work for the other three). Our budget is stretched to the limit.
What to do? I'm sitting on my ass (with a relatively large paycheck) two days of the week, at least. We decided to use my time to make a (large) prototype web service for client three (the ones who want us but have no budget), hoping that they'll accept it for free in return for paying us to flesh it out.
Essentially, I have put in >200 hours of work (so far) without any revenue for the company. Am I their bitch? Am I just sensible? Should I seek other employement? (That last bit was rethoric. I haven't gotten any replies in the last four months...)
Suppose a former employer contacted me, wanting some help... Would I go "Of course. $100 an hour, minimum charge four hours." or would I go "Yeah! Sure! I'll do it all day Sunday, no charge!". Depressingly enough I think I would go with the latter, hoping they are thinking of rehiring me.
Not quite, but almost. :-)
The magnetic fields are forcing upwelling gas away from the spot (hot as well as cold). However, the effect can only be so strong. Even the magnetic fields of the sun can't cause a complete vacuum in the sunspot. Gass will diffuse in from every direction.
The end result is that the region simply has a somewhat lower density than surrounding regions. Lower density==lower temperature==(much) lower luminosity.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Seriously, I did the Y2K fixing for two major labor unions in Sweden (Unix). There were problems, dozens of them. Some would have lead to large amounts of money being lost ("%d", tm_year leading to our banking bands becoming invalid because of row length). I fixed most of them, one went unfixed (bringing heaps of abuse on my head. I of course never got any praise for the 30 bugs I fixed.)
I'm suprised that more companies didn't do what the first union (the Swedish Union of Goverment Employees) did. Apparently they decided that as long as they were going to have to inspect every line of code in the system, why not use this opportunity to upgrade it?
Which was what I did. I went through about 150.000 lines of code, checking for y2k bugs and translating the system from SCO/Informix/4GL/VB (client) to Linux/MySQL/C/Java.
If they would love it so much, how come that...
Hyperion ordered a Pegasos developer board about 8 (more?) months ago, in order to port OS 4 to Pegasos. They still haven't received it, even though Pegasos is now being mass (heh) produced and sold to the public.
Don't bite my head of. Don't go ranting about THE NAME. I really like Pegasos. I even like MorphOS a lot. It's just that it's my second option. I want a Pegasos with Amiga OS 4.
Of course! That's how the US acts isn't it? A non american person programming a program that is not illegal in his country, being "extradited" (not really, he visited the US) and sentenced in a second country.
Could someone please explain to me again why the US has the right to try a person that has violated US law, but lives in a totally different country, with totally different laws, and performed the 'crime' in his country?!
You need to check out the Acorn community (or perhaps that's where you're coming from?). Acorn was an English Arm-based home computer of the late 80's that competed (none to sucessfully, outside Britain at least) against Amiga an Atari.
Even though the Acorn community is now shriveled enough to make Amiga look healthy by comparision, they have been the one and only group pushing Arm-based desktops over the last decades.
There seems to be at least a couple hardware resellers still in operation. The pricing didn't seem to extortionate to me, either.
Except, of course, that the Amiga One was finished and shipping months ago, and no-one has a Pegasos board (excepting prototypes).
Anyway, both are based on a Mai reference design. Pegasos is clearly (IMHO) the better product since it has socketed processors (A1 has a surface mounted G3 600MHz (?)). Eyetech will allegedly release an updated version of the A1 with socketed processor if the initial version sells well enough.
PS. Yes, A1/Amiga OS Vs Pegasos/MorphOS is a very inflamed subject in Amigaland. Three sentence summary follows.
The Pegasos (a new Amiga PPC motherboard) and MorphOS (an Amiga work-alike OS) was started when Amiga was essentially abandoned. Then, some former employees of Gateway and some Amiga enthusiasts bought the trademarks and started working towards a new, official Amiga platform. The two groups couldn't get along, and now we've wound up with two competing platforms, with a combined market measured in 5 digits, if that (sigh).
The SAAB JAS-39 Griffon crash you mention was in fact caused by the pilot not being warned about "pilot induced oscillations" (though there was a crash in testing that was attributed to the control systems). Basically, the plane started to weer left, the pilot quickly compensated as did the control system, leading to overcompensation. So, the pilot compensated back the other way, as did the plane...
Rinse, lather, repeat. End result: plane rears up, suffer complete loss of air speed, falls like a brick into a crowd of about 200 000 spectators (this was an airshow over central Stockholm!), and through divine intervention happens to hit to one empty spot in a sea of people.
Interesting fact 1: footage shows the plane stabilizing back down into a correct flight attitude once the pilot ejected. Not much use without airspeed, though.
Interesting fact 2: SAABs division for Flight Control (presumably the same guys who did the Griffon control systems) also programmed the flight control systems for the Ariadne...
Interesting (or at least humurous) fact 3: This is the monument marking the spot where JAS crashed.
Windows is getting more stable all the time. However, an improvement from 0.01 acceptable to 0.5 acceptable isn't going to impress anyone, even if it's a 50-fold improvement.
You conveniently chose to ignore the other two points, namely:
Not true! This is valid information on how to improve your computer!
For other great advice, check out Datadocktorn (approx. "The Computer Docktor"). They have great guides on how to make your computer plenty better. Especially check out the disk defraggle section. The minimizing tutorial is also very helpful. I never realized that I cut just saw off those wasteful parts of my motherboard and fit the whole thing in a much smaller case!
Actually, it's more about sound level variations
I sleep about 1 meter from my home server. Every time the general level of sound changes sharply (even if at low volume), I wake up. Momentarily. Let me tell you, 10+ "Micro-wakenings" per night will do you no good!
Possible fix: REMOVE all ability to vary fan speed! And to park disks! And perhaps even to slow processor.
Nope. Neither are "shrink wrap" contracts (you know, the kinds that are kept inside the sealed plastic covering that start "By breaking this seal you agree to..." , and continues "...Microsoft does not garantue the usefuleness of this software for any purpose what-so-ever, even including purposes stated by Microsoft or Microsoft employees."
Yes, that's more-or-less an actual "shrink wrap" "agreement" I once had with Microsoft. Anyway, it's all illegal, if you live in Sweden, or any European country, or come to think of it most any country in the world except the US.
<simpsons>Haha!</simpsons>
OpenWindows? There are no bugs in SunOS/Solaris! Well, except... And that... Mumble...
I guess the sun shining through our open windows reveal the bugs all to well. ;-)
1 million processors+, to simulate folding a measly protein? Yikes.
The protein itself "calulates" how it should fold in nanoseconds, using a "hardware" consting of a couple of thousand atoms. I guess this is why we should push for quantum computers.
Side note: I once read about a proposed method of factoring large primes which involved transforming the prime into a protein sequence, and getting the factors by letting the protein fold. This is based on the fact that any instance of a NP-hard problem can be transformed into an instance of any other NP-hard problem in polynomial time (protein folding and prime cracking are both NP-hard).
Abuse me if the above paragraph made no sense. Long time no complexity theory.
While I agree that we do need an open, portable distributed computing platform for these kinds of efforts, I think you have underestimated the need for communication between nodes in some kinds of calculations.
You mention fluid dynamics. These programs require data to be exchanged between nodes and their neighbors every iteration. That won't ever work when the two nodes in question are connected by 14.4 modems and down 80% of the time.
Massively distributed PC-based efforts can only work if the problem can be partitioned into parts that do not rely on any data on any other node.
Very few real life computing tasks fulfill that condition.
Eh... "Asynchronous" means "without synchronization" (ie. "without clock"). It has nothing to do with serial vs. parallell operation.
HIBT?
Uhm... You do realise that the city lights have been added manually? If this is anything like Living Earths map (it seems based on it), the simply added a dot for each city with brightness based on population. North Korea looks like a case of "No Data".
I've seen the stamement that there're more positions in chess than atoms in the universe many times. It's false.
Some estimates of number of atoms in the (visible) universe courtesy of Google:
An upper bound of the number of chess positions: assume each square can have 15 states (white pawn, black pawn, white rook, black rook, ..., empty). Number of board states: 15^64, or about 1.96e71.
The vast majority of those states are invalid. I've seen estimates of as little as 1e40 valid boards.
<jedi>This is not the classified aircraft you are looking for.</jedi>
Damn, I was hoping this was about the über-large, super-low-speed, really gigantic, maybe-helium-inflated, possibly-heavy-duty-troop-transport aircraft previoulsy reported (several times) on Slashdot.
Now, that would be killer. I'm really very disapointed here.
Switch?
I used to have a Windows machine. I would try to get the latest nuclear modeling programs to run, but they were like "duh".
Then I got a Macintosh, and the modelling programs I got where just like "yeah!"
I'm only sad I didn't switch earlier. I'm Omar Sadii, and I'm a nuclear weapons specialist.
Of course, if you can't afford to pirate Windows, you sure as hell can't afford to pirate MacOS (or buy the hardware).
Except, of course, no Palladium signed media (ie. in a slight interval, all media, and even documents from individual users) will be showable on your non-Palladium platform.
Yes of course I hope that there will be enough Linux users/Copyright Criminals that media will still be leaked onto the general internet/Evil P2P Pirating Machine that I will get it, but I wouldn't count on it :-(
Yes, I did make a few mistakes in that text. "Speach" is one I keep doing, despite reminders. "We'll" must have been a temporary neural short-circuit. "The" was just my keyboard failing to register the 'n'.
On the other hand, I guess my English is a whole lot better than your Swedish (or? Type something devastating in Swedish :-). Of course, you noted from my URL that I was from a non-English-Language-Region. If not, I'm afraid you'll need a brain.
Nice troll. Plausible all through, except for this part:
And as we all now, key lengths are selected so that it would take about 1,000,000,000 years to "just factor" that number with "any microcomputer".
Try again :-)
I saw an actual vote form (or whatever you call it) in the paper. There were actually two options. "Yes" and "no". The displayed form had "yes" ticked, in the voters own blood. Scary.