The other solution is to simultaneously remove anti-freedom nuts like Valenti and give legal protection to copyright owning corporations that allow bootlegging on some meaningful scale to keep their customers happy.
Can't do that. Valenti are just symptoms of the root problem. Remove him (illegal as that would be) and another would take his place.
But all this is based in the traditional meaning of "terrorist", which I don't think is what they're aiming at here. They're aiming at the new definition of "terrorist", that amalgamation of terrorist organizations and nation-states that support them and/or are hostile to the "western democracies".
I think you mean 'hostile to the current Bush administration'. Or haven't you seen Ari Fleischer telling people to watch what they say and the Senate discussing bans on French wine because they won't support our war effort.
Example: CD-ROMs... Philips hold the patent, and has been very generous with it. But the technology protected by that patent is SO widespread that any abuse of the CD-ROM patent would ruin the technology sector. Think of how much some companies (or the RIAA, to supress non-DRM formats) would pay to control that patent - the value is inconceivable.
Sorry, the CR-ROM is an example of the patent system working as designed. If the CD-ROM had already been widespread when philips applied for the patent, you would have a point.
Before people post "Burn down the IP laws!", make sure you have a valid alternative that comes some way toward protecting the rights of creative people.
What makes you think that the current system does that? Copyright law was designed to protect publishers, and IP laws in general don't work unless you have a pile of money to pay lawyers.
I don't want to eliminate Copyright and patent law, but I do want to limit severely what they cover and how low they last.
If it's too hot during some seasons for CO2 to stay frozen, the ice caps wouldn't stay frozen
Given the low low atmospheric pressure on Mars and CO2's tendency to sublimate into gas, wouldn't the poles (presuming CO2 composition) simply evaporate into space?
There are very few reasons why you'd need root to anything on a Windows box other than poor design - things like writing temp files to improper locations
This shouldn't even be an issue - on win2k, the TEMP and TMP environment variables point to my private temp directory. Hardcoding C:\winnt\temp is just lazy.
But the DMCA is the same mentality as suing McDonald's for dropping coffee in your lap.
You had me until that one. I'm all for suing McDonalds because they serve 190+ degree coffee that melts the plastic lid and explodes all over your lap, causing third degree burns on your thighs and genitals. Especially when they had already settled this exact same situation over 700 times for about $20,000 each.
The DMCA is a bit different, to say the least. It's more like declaring it a felony to install aftermarket parts on your car.
Is the casual user who might look things up once or twice a year really a likely customer of WestLaw or Lexis/Nexis?
No, so a librarian mediated search should be sufficient. Westlaw just doesn't want to give away their service to the lawyers.
If all case law was made available on-line by the courts themselves, all you would need would be a sophisticated database query assembler to poke the right courts with the right queries and assemble it all in a web page at the end.
care to back that up? Sure, if you send the drive out to get random sectors and disable reordering, that will happen, but it doesn't work like that. You frequently get contiguous chunks of a MB or more, which don't suffer from the 5ms access time. How did you think SCSI disks hit 40MB/s sustained, anyway?
Server manufacturers sell hardware RAID as expensive add-on, but they are not advertising any benchmarks showing speed advantage. Because there is none. Current controllers are just not good enough, can't keep up with speed advances of CPUs.
The main selling point for RAID on a server (at least for me) is ease of management. When you have something as basic as your drives, you'd rather not worry about driver incompatibility, problems with upgrades or anything like that. Just address the sucker as sda and be done with it.
Re:What is an example that can't run in parallel?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
Most code today isn't optimized by hand there's actually a lot of research going into building a better compiler.
Who cares? I know I don't care if Word is 10% faster. When it actually does matter, the compiler won't give you much - that's pretty much given. It's the programmer and the architect that make the large leaps in performance.
Or even worse, "Uhm, hi. We're at a trade show right now and killer 'feature' Q isn't working in our live demo. Fix. Now."
Simple answer to that: "We're two years into this, and the first any of us have heard about it is a story on Slashdot. It will take at least 3 months to implement; I suggest you network at that trade show - you may need a new job".
no amount of programming or "Fatal Error: Wing no longer attached to craft" terminal prompts would've saved them from what happened.
Yeah, the wing coming off is a QA problem (yes, I'm serious - have you seen what has happened to NASA's safety budget?).
Re:What is an example that can't run in parallel?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
When hardware routinely has multiple processors, every parallelizable problem will tend to be written to exploit the capability of the hardware
I disagree. Most code today isn't terribly optimized, it just runs 'fast enough'. Barring a new application that has a large CPU demand, this code won't be rewritten. If (when) a new application is demanded, it will make enough use of parallel processors to run 'fast enough', but no further. This is because performance tuning is hard and can introduce bugs, especially with threads.
As far as scalability goes, it's just as bad to have too many threads as too few, sometimes worse. If you run something on an SMP box, it's probably fairly specialized and it likely won't run as efficiently as it can on a massively larger box without some work.
Most software right now is fast enough. I don't see any of it being rewritten.
I mean, c'mon! The great U.S. of A. is gonna remain on top of the world by "obscurity" ?
No, we are selling our seed corn. If this keeps up, what will we do when the other guys decide they don't need a middleman.
The reason the guy in India/Mexico/Nebraska/whereever makes $5/hr and is worth it is because he does a job that is only worth $5/hr. If the job is worth $55/hr, then a $55/hr person will get that job.
No, the reason is that $5/hr is pretty decent money in Bangalore, or at least livable, while it's egregious in San Francisco. You can't live on $5/hr in San Fran and you can't move to India because you're probably white and American and Indian corps don't hire for that. Also, India is fairly protectionist, so good luck getting a work permit.
It is this mentality that has stifled innovation.
Irrelevant. Innovation usually starts with a new codebase. What best stifles competition is when a monopoly or a cartel is formed in order to protect the status quo.
The reason the work is being outsourced is that it is no longer work worthy of a high-paying (and supposedly higher-quality) employee.
Worth doesn't enter into the discussion. The only reason work is being outsourced is because it appears cheaper. It is cheaper if your idea of vision has a 90 day window. It discounts the lower quality (and lower number of successful projects), the difficulty of suing someone who either steals your product or sells it to the highest bidder, and the long term problem where we don't have any engineers because nobody is willing to pay them a decent wage. That isn't too god for innovation.
If you are salaried then D will not apply since it is only for employees who are "compensated on an hourly basis". So any salaried employee who's job description fits A,B or C above is exempt from overtime.
Sorry, but it may not work that way (I'm not a lawyar, and I can't quote precedent either). If your salary works out to less to $27.63/hr over a pay period, then you are not exempt. I came across this when I heard from a sysadmin who caused a large stir by mentioning that she was coming close to triggering this rule. As I recall, they either hired her an assistant or gave her a raise. I forget which.
I suffer an additional tax burden because I work overtime, so uncle sam get a bigger slice of my pie...all in all this BLOWS
But you pocket more money for the same work, right? Having your corp pull up stakes does ttruly suck, but don't bitch about paying more taxes unless you aren't making proportionally more money.
You are high. The French unemployment rate is somewhere around 9%, the US unemployment rate is just under 6%.
And you're naive. The 6% figure is people actively seeking a job and on unemployment. It discounts independent contractors (who haven't worked in over a year in some cases), people whose benefits have run out, and those who just gave up.
The other thing that isn't addressed is efficient use of expertise. Having an experienced and competent embedded C++ programmer working at the Gap because he doesn't have a clearance (Washington DC mtreo area) is hardly good for the economy, especially when multiplied by millions.
Opposing that is the theory that any sufficiently large empty space starts spouting matter (sounds like spontaneous creation, doesn't it?). This is apparently an attempt to explain the 'foamy' shape of the observable universe.
Am I the only one who put these three ideas together and (upon realizing that Westerners typically don't read manga for the words) ended up with a vision of "Horton Tentacle-Rapes A Who"
Yes. I was contemplating the Zen nature of the Cat in the Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
The other solution is to simultaneously remove anti-freedom nuts like Valenti and give legal protection to copyright owning corporations that allow bootlegging on some meaningful scale to keep their customers happy.
Can't do that. Valenti are just symptoms of the root problem. Remove him (illegal as that would be) and another would take his place.
But all this is based in the traditional meaning of "terrorist", which I don't think is what they're aiming at here. They're aiming at the new definition of "terrorist", that amalgamation of terrorist organizations and nation-states that support them and/or are hostile to the "western democracies".
I think you mean 'hostile to the current Bush administration'. Or haven't you seen Ari Fleischer telling people to watch what they say and the Senate discussing bans on French wine because they won't support our war effort.
I think you'll find that's 'Ignorance is bliss'.
I see ignorant people every day and they don't look very happy.
Example: CD-ROMs... Philips hold the patent, and has been very generous with it. But the technology protected by that patent is SO widespread that any abuse of the CD-ROM patent would ruin the technology sector. Think of how much some companies (or the RIAA, to supress non-DRM formats) would pay to control that patent - the value is inconceivable.
Sorry, the CR-ROM is an example of the patent system working as designed. If the CD-ROM had already been widespread when philips applied for the patent, you would have a point.
Before people post "Burn down the IP laws!", make sure you have a valid alternative that comes some way toward protecting the rights of creative people.
What makes you think that the current system does that? Copyright law was designed to protect publishers, and IP laws in general don't work unless you have a pile of money to pay lawyers.
I don't want to eliminate Copyright and patent law, but I do want to limit severely what they cover and how low they last.
If it's too hot during some seasons for CO2 to stay frozen, the ice caps wouldn't stay frozen
Given the low low atmospheric pressure on Mars and CO2's tendency to sublimate into gas, wouldn't the poles (presuming CO2 composition) simply evaporate into space?
There are very few reasons why you'd need root to anything on a Windows box other than poor design - things like writing temp files to improper locations
This shouldn't even be an issue - on win2k, the TEMP and TMP environment variables point to my private temp directory. Hardcoding C:\winnt\temp is just lazy.
But the DMCA is the same mentality as suing McDonald's for dropping coffee in your lap.
You had me until that one. I'm all for suing McDonalds because they serve 190+ degree coffee that melts the plastic lid and explodes all over your lap, causing third degree burns on your thighs and genitals. Especially when they had already settled this exact same situation over 700 times for about $20,000 each.
The DMCA is a bit different, to say the least. It's more like declaring it a felony to install aftermarket parts on your car.
Is the casual user who might look things up once or twice a year really a likely customer of WestLaw or Lexis/Nexis?
No, so a librarian mediated search should be sufficient. Westlaw just doesn't want to give away their service to the lawyers.
If all case law was made available on-line by the courts themselves, all you would need would be a sophisticated database query assembler to poke the right courts with the right queries and assemble it all in a web page at the end.
Essentially, isn't that what WEstlaw is doing?
a 5ms access time SCSI HDD - 200 ops / sec.
care to back that up? Sure, if you send the drive out to get random sectors and disable reordering, that will happen, but it doesn't work like that. You frequently get contiguous chunks of a MB or more, which don't suffer from the 5ms access time. How did you think SCSI disks hit 40MB/s sustained, anyway?
Server manufacturers sell hardware RAID as expensive add-on, but they are not advertising any benchmarks showing speed advantage. Because there is none. Current controllers are just not good enough, can't keep up with speed advances of CPUs.
The main selling point for RAID on a server (at least for me) is ease of management. When you have something as basic as your drives, you'd rather not worry about driver incompatibility, problems with upgrades or anything like that. Just address the sucker as sda and be done with it.
Most code today isn't optimized by hand there's actually a lot of research going into building a better compiler.
Who cares? I know I don't care if Word is 10% faster. When it actually does matter, the compiler won't give you much - that's pretty much given. It's the programmer and the architect that make the large leaps in performance.
Or even worse, "Uhm, hi. We're at a trade show right now and killer 'feature' Q isn't working in our live demo. Fix. Now."
Simple answer to that: "We're two years into this, and the first any of us have heard about it is a story on Slashdot. It will take at least 3 months to implement; I suggest you network at that trade show - you may need a new job".
no amount of programming or "Fatal Error: Wing no longer attached to craft" terminal prompts would've saved them from what happened.
Yeah, the wing coming off is a QA problem (yes, I'm serious - have you seen what has happened to NASA's safety budget?).
When hardware routinely has multiple processors, every parallelizable problem will tend to be written to exploit the capability of the hardware
I disagree. Most code today isn't terribly optimized, it just runs 'fast enough'. Barring a new application that has a large CPU demand, this code won't be rewritten. If (when) a new application is demanded, it will make enough use of parallel processors to run 'fast enough', but no further. This is because performance tuning is hard and can introduce bugs, especially with threads.
As far as scalability goes, it's just as bad to have too many threads as too few, sometimes worse. If you run something on an SMP box, it's probably fairly specialized and it likely won't run as efficiently as it can on a massively larger box without some work.
Most software right now is fast enough. I don't see any of it being rewritten.
I mean, c'mon! The great U.S. of A. is gonna remain on top of the world by "obscurity" ?
No, we are selling our seed corn. If this keeps up, what will we do when the other guys decide they don't need a middleman.
The reason the guy in India/Mexico/Nebraska/whereever makes $5/hr and is worth it is because he does a job that is only worth $5/hr. If the job is worth $55/hr, then a $55/hr person will get that job.
No, the reason is that $5/hr is pretty decent money in Bangalore, or at least livable, while it's egregious in San Francisco. You can't live on $5/hr in San Fran and you can't move to India because you're probably white and American and Indian corps don't hire for that. Also, India is fairly protectionist, so good luck getting a work permit.
It is this mentality that has stifled innovation.
Irrelevant. Innovation usually starts with a new codebase. What best stifles competition is when a monopoly or a cartel is formed in order to protect the status quo.
The reason the work is being outsourced is that it is no longer work worthy of a high-paying (and supposedly higher-quality) employee.
Worth doesn't enter into the discussion. The only reason work is being outsourced is because it appears cheaper. It is cheaper if your idea of vision has a 90 day window. It discounts the lower quality (and lower number of successful projects), the difficulty of suing someone who either steals your product or sells it to the highest bidder, and the long term problem where we don't have any engineers because nobody is willing to pay them a decent wage. That isn't too god for innovation.
As i recall, residents actually make more than that when you consider that the hospital covers their malpractice.
If you are salaried then D will not apply since it is only for employees who are "compensated on an hourly basis". So any salaried employee who's job description fits A,B or C above is exempt from overtime.
Sorry, but it may not work that way (I'm not a lawyar, and I can't quote precedent either). If your salary works out to less to $27.63/hr over a pay period, then you are not exempt. I came across this when I heard from a sysadmin who caused a large stir by mentioning that she was coming close to triggering this rule. As I recall, they either hired her an assistant or gave her a raise. I forget which.
I suffer an additional tax burden because I work overtime, so uncle sam get a bigger slice of my pie...all in all this BLOWS
But you pocket more money for the same work, right? Having your corp pull up stakes does ttruly suck, but don't bitch about paying more taxes unless you aren't making proportionally more money.
You are high. The French unemployment rate is somewhere around 9%, the US unemployment rate is just under 6%.
And you're naive. The 6% figure is people actively seeking a job and on unemployment. It discounts independent contractors (who haven't worked in over a year in some cases), people whose benefits have run out, and those who just gave up.
The other thing that isn't addressed is efficient use of expertise. Having an experienced and competent embedded C++ programmer working at the Gap because he doesn't have a clearance (Washington DC mtreo area) is hardly good for the economy, especially when multiplied by millions.
Peter Devries? As in the twisted mentat and Harkonen servant?
Funny, I thought he was a sysadmin. Oh well, same difference.
Opposing that is the theory that any sufficiently large empty space starts spouting matter (sounds like spontaneous creation, doesn't it?). This is apparently an attempt to explain the 'foamy' shape of the observable universe.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe. -- Peter DeVries
Now all I have to do is find out how to emit this energy and I can build starships!
explain to me how MS became a Multi-billion dollar corporation if somemany user were returning software?
They get about $35 on every computer that Dell, Gateway, and all the rest sell, windows or not.
Am I the only one who put these three ideas together and (upon realizing that Westerners typically don't read manga for the words) ended up with a vision of "Horton Tentacle-Rapes A Who"
Yes. I was contemplating the Zen nature of the Cat in the Hat.