Wasn't google buying up a bunch of dark fiber? Perhaps they think they can enter the provider market? Maybe they foresaw this coming and plan to do an end run around any kind of extortion from Verizon or Comcast.
If they can get into as many places as Verizon and Comcast, they might have a good shot at getting people to jump ship. Still, it's kind of complicated because, at first, I would imagine Verizon and Comcast will make any "GoogleNet" packets as slow as they can to prevent providers and subscribers from jumping ship. Though, in a world where content providers want speed, they may be hosted on several networks. So perhaps it will be complex.
The whole thing is rediculous, though. It's like people forgot what makes TCP/IP cool.
Yes, but do you also realize that the amount of information necessary to find a bug in each of those scenarios goes up or, at least, trends up as the cost to fix goes up? Therefore, it is much harder to understand that there is even a bug to find in the requirements phase, vs. when it's found in any of the later phases.
In other words, while the cost for fixing bugs in earlier phases is low, the probability of detecting a bugs in earlier phases is also low.
Close but Linux is really poised to take off in embedded devices and if ATI is in those devices you can be sure they wil have a reason to make good drivers.
Besides, I don't think games are going to come to the Linux market yet because Linux doesn't have enough of the desktop market.
For one thing my editor doesn't support this, and not all editors do. For another thing it depends on the folding implementation in the editor as to how distracting this is.
> Redirect stdout/stderr to a file. Besides, this sounds like a straw man. There's nothing stopping you from having differently detailed level of debugging output.
So now you want me to sit down and create sed/awk/grep/perl scripts to filter out stuff I don't want. No thanks. I'd rather just put in the print statements I actually need rather than waste time filtering out useless printfs I didn't want in the first place.
Again, I've found most printfs to be useless except to the person debugging the particular problem. A reusable debug printf is a RARE thing. Why bother preserving them?
> Fine, but I hope you document how you tested/debugged the algorithm so another developer can recreate whatever it was that you did.
All I can say is: DUH. First off, I never said to delete comments, and as far as detailing how the file/problem was debugged, that's what the checkin log is for..
Of course, if you don't know what the type of a variable is you can also just look at the type declaration.
Unless you're using something like BASIC where variables just suddenly appear out of the ether I really can't see how Hungarian notation is necessary. Especially in an age where we have advanced editors with split windows, and powerful search tools like glimpse, cscope, and ctags.
Besides, why should I trust some agglutinated letters on a variable name when I can do the same thing the compiler will do and look at the type declaration and be totally _sure_ of the type of the variable? What if some doofus changed the type of the variable in the declaration but was too lazy to update all the instances of Hungarian notation? Hungarian notation can only lead to a code maintainence nightmare!
The "missing instruction" wasn't an instruction at all. The PPC 970 doesn't have little endian mode and I don't think any other 9xx chip will have little endian mode either.
It just means that endian swapping has to take place in the emulation code instead of in hardware.
Except those "foreign national" parents eventually became citizens and were no longer "foreign nationals". They competed with workers locally, they paid taxes locally, and they bought local goods and services.
Overseas consultants are not citizens, they don't pay taxes locally (unless they live here), and they don't buy local goods and services.
1. The oldest Greek fragment is John from, I think 120. That's still earlier than the Old Syriac NT, which is probably from 300.
2. In both the Greek and Syriac texts, phrases that Jesus spoke in Aramaic are translated (such as in Mark). If the Syriac or Greek versions were from some original written Aramaic source they wouldn't contain the translations (in the same spots!) since the hypothetical Aramaic text wouldn't have contained them!
Even if the Syriac could be shown to be earlier than the Greek texts it doesn't really matter because Syriac is not the same as Aramaic. It is actually a language that is derived, much as Arabic, from Late Aramaic which is different than the Aramaic spoken in 1st century Palestine.
In any case, even if a hypothetical original Aramaic text existed, we don't have it.
However, while it may be doubtful that the _written_ documents were in Aramaic, I will conceed that the oral tradition that preceeded it must have initially been in Aramaic, if only because Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic.
The Peshitta New Testament is from the late 400's. It is also a translation. The Old Syriac NT is placed sometime between the second and fourth centuries.
May of Paul's letters were written by the 60's. Mark by 80. Matthew by 100. Luke by 130. John by 120. All are in Greek (AFAIK).
The oral tradition clearly included Aramaic at some point:) and perhaps there may have even been some lost documents that were written in Aramaic (maybe Q?). However, all the surviving documents for the New Testament that we have at our disposal are all in Greek.
Thus, if anybody is making transalations from Aramaic they are either working on Old Testament documents, they have discovered ancient Aramaic documents which they aren't sharing with the rest of the community (which isn't very nice), or they are charlatans.
The other possibility is that they believe they can somehow reconstruct hypothetical original Aramaic texts from the Greek texts, and then back into English. While that might be an interesting exercise, it's probably not going to be horribly accurate.
Unforutnately, we've also lost some things we used to have. For instance, we lost "thou" leaving us with only "you". Previously, English was like many European languages with a distinction between a thou which was a singular/personal "you" (like "tu" in French) and "you" which was strictly a plural/impersonal "you" (like "vous" in French).
Even after all this time English still lacks certain words or concepts that translate well from ancient Greek. For instance, Greek has several words that we would translate as "to know". But Greek and other European languages (Slovak, for instance) have two (or more) forms of "to know". For instance one form is to know something in the abstract (I know math) and the other is to know someone personally (I know Fred).
Subtleties like this don't seem to matter in isolation but religious texts are often trying to convey very subtle notions. If your granularity of translation is too corse, the subtleties can get lost very easily.
When I was a freshman in college, CS majors had to take one of two courses depending on whether they took the CS AP exam or not:
* Non-AP Students - Programming I. Programming I was basically a course on how to use the UNIX machines in the lab and how to write small programs in Modula-2 (the language foisted on all CS students who hadn't gotten to third year).
* AP Students - Introduction to CS, which was pretty much the same as Programming I.
So, as far as I could tell, the CS AP basically did nothing for you. Perhaps times have changed.
Fielding bad candidates is not in your best interest when there is the possibility of more than one vote. What's to prevent the other party from fielding their best candidate in the round you chose to field a chump?
Collusion could occur to prevent this uncertainty, but it's possible that a third party could put up a good candidate when the losers are put up by the "regulars".
But you say "But what about the last US election? We had two doorknobs and the third parties didn't take it!" Ah ha, but that's not the same! Those were the _best_ two candidates the parties could offer. Imagine a three round system where they try and field a _bad_ candidate or two and you can start to see how it is possible for even a mildly good third party to shoot the moon.
Anyway, that's one idea. Some of the other vote ideas are good but the main advantage of this system is that it's pretty simple and more like the system that already exists. I suppose it's not fool-proof though:-)
All the candidates that lost to "None of the above" are flushed and a new election is held with new candidates. To prevent too many retries the number of elections is capped at, say, three with the third round of ballots lacking a "None of the above" field.
Of course, a new election requires new campaigning time. So if elections are held 9 months before the end of the term, each election has a little less than three months for campaigning.
The trouble of course, is that if candidates are elected right away in the first election, the lame duck period is 6 months!
Mod the parent up. S/he makes a good point. I probably got a little over zealous at the end of my last post.:)
You're right in the general case: Unless a right is enumerated there may be some question as to its existance and that its existance has to arbitrated in some way (though, how this should happen is also a matter for some debate).
However, in the specific case of a right to privacy, I think it is a right. It seems implicit in the 4th amendment to me and there is probably more support for it elsewhere in law and history.
First off let me just say, I am not a lawyer, but this is the way I see it:
While privacy is not a constitutional right...
All rights are constitutional. The constitution is not some kind of listing of rights. The people have all rights. The point of the 9th Ammendment is to make this crystal clear:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The real question boils down to whether privacy is actually a right or some kind of privilege. I would argue that it is a right and that the 4th ammendment supports this notion, even if it doesn't explicitly enumerate it.
Thus:
* Privacy is a right as implied by the 4th ammendment (secure in persons and papers from government interference).
* Just because it isn't enumerated explicitly we still have that right and the government should have no power to deny that right by the 9th ammendment.
The frightening trend these days is the federal government seems to want to declare everything a privilege that isn't explicitly listed in the constitution. Something many of the Founding Fathers were afraid of. The tactic here is to shift the burden of proof of a right off of the government and on to the people. Thus, the government assumes something is a privilege until it is proven a right. This makes the 9th Ammendment a sort of tautology in their eyes. The people have the ability to retain all other rights but too bad the government doesn't recognize anything as a right until it's rammed down SCOTUS's throat a few times and they start tentatively viewing it as a right.
sigh. At least thats the way it seems using the knowlege given to my by my high school US government class.:)
I think what the Supremes are saying is that the mechanism to solve this problem is for normal citizens to go to Congress and get the extension laws repealed. The people haven't been stripped of their power to lobby congress, they just haven't gotten off their collective butts.
The only thing the Supremes can talk about is "What does 'limited times' really mean". Basically, as long as the law doesn't say one billion years it's OK.
So basically, 90 years or whatever it is currently isn't long enough to trigger a ruling of "Ok, this is effectively infinite copyright".
I would also imagine the Supremes were a little wary of ruling on the whole idea of "infinite extension = infinite copyright" because that deals with Congress's ability to pass a _future_ law. That would be the judicial branch tinkering with the business of the legislative branch's opertaion. That's something the Supremes are probably very wary of.
If somebody puts coffee between their legs they take the chance that they might get burned. They have to weigh the convenience of holding it between their legs against the potential pain/damage spillage might cause. Such a choice requires proper information.
When most people think of hot coffee being spilled on their skin, it's painful, but once the coffee is wiped off, they would generally expect a small amount of coffee to give them a 1st degree burn (run it under water for a few minutes) and rarely would expect damage over a second degree burn (severe blistering). What a person does not expect is that the coffee is so hot their skin melts off on contact (3rd degree burns) and that they need to go to the hospital to have it treated with such things as skin grafts.
McDonalds is NOT at fault for the coffee spilling.
What McDonalds IS at fault for is not revealing information that their coffee is hotter than expected and if you spill it, your skin will melt off and you will need to be taken to the hospital. If a person were properly warned they would treat that PARTICULAR cup of coffee with far more respect than a normal cup of coffee. What makes it worse for McDonalds is that they KNEW that their coffee was more dangerous than an average cup of coffee and did nothing to warn the consumer.
So coffee is dangerous but McDonalds coffee was especially dangerous, far more than regular coffee. Because of that, their coffee required more respect to handle than normal coffee. And because McDonalds knew this they needed to inform consumers that their coffee was more danagerous than normal coffee. ` Finally, because McDonalds willingly decided not to inform consumers of the special danger that their coffee posed, they are liable.
However, it is also important to keep in mind that people don't always know what to ask for. If a man says he's hungry and asks for a fish, sure, give him a fish. However, you might also point out that you can teach him how to get his own supply of fish. If he says, "Ok", then you show him how to fish.
I think what you're getting at is that aid is more than just throwing free goods/services at people. There has to be a dialog about what people need/want and working together to build a better future.
Sorry if that sounds a little syrupy, but it's true.
The other day, NPR was talking to some teachers in Afghanistan and they basically said everybody was sending them computers, textbooks, etc. The only problem was they didn't even have walls for their school, or chairs, or desks, much less anywhere to plug in a computer. The kids basically had to an agreed upon spot outside and sit on the ground.
Don't get me as jaded, though. I think donating computers to these folks is great. However, before we send them computers, we should first help them get to the point where the computers will do them some good.
If you want your donation of a computer to do some good in the 3rd world, send a few desks, chairs, and maybe a generator along with the computer.
Of course, while Central/South America is not well off, particularly in certain areas, a donation of computers might actually be OK because they might have some or all of the requisite items (like 4 walls). Sending a generator might help, though.
It's amazing that somebody could make such a relatively long article from what amounts to one sentence in Linus's email!
Reading the Linus's email it seems that he wasn't endorsing one way or the other. He was just hoping x86-64 became dominant since it would stave off some issues related to how pages were handled.
Apparently, if things go the Itanium route then some page related things get more complicated but that's it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't google buying up a bunch of dark fiber? Perhaps they think they can enter the provider market? Maybe they foresaw this coming and plan to do an end run around any kind of extortion from Verizon or Comcast.
If they can get into as many places as Verizon and Comcast, they might have a good shot at getting people to jump ship. Still, it's kind of complicated because, at first, I would imagine Verizon and Comcast will make any "GoogleNet" packets as slow as they can to prevent providers and subscribers from jumping ship. Though, in a world where content providers want speed, they may be hosted on several networks. So perhaps it will be complex.
The whole thing is rediculous, though. It's like people forgot what makes TCP/IP cool.
Yes, but do you also realize that the amount of information necessary to find a bug in each of those scenarios goes up or, at least, trends up as the cost to fix goes up? Therefore, it is much harder to understand that there is even a bug to find in the requirements phase, vs. when it's found in any of the later phases.
In other words, while the cost for fixing bugs in earlier phases is low, the probability of detecting a bugs in earlier phases is also low.
How is that supposed to be addressed?
Close but Linux is really poised to take off in embedded devices and if ATI is in those devices you can be sure they wil have a reason to make good drivers.
Besides, I don't think games are going to come to the Linux market yet because Linux doesn't have enough of the desktop market.
> Use an editor with folding capability.
For one thing my editor doesn't support this, and not all editors do. For another thing it depends on the folding implementation in the editor as to how distracting this is.
> Redirect stdout/stderr to a file. Besides, this sounds like a straw man. There's nothing stopping you from having differently detailed level of debugging output.
So now you want me to sit down and create sed/awk/grep/perl scripts to filter out stuff I don't want. No thanks. I'd rather just put in the print statements I actually need rather than waste time filtering out useless printfs I didn't want in the first place.
Again, I've found most printfs to be useless except to the person debugging the particular problem. A reusable debug printf is a RARE thing. Why bother preserving them?
> Fine, but I hope you document how you tested/debugged the algorithm so another developer can recreate whatever it was that you did.
All I can say is: DUH. First off, I never said to delete comments, and as far as detailing how the file/problem was debugged, that's what the checkin log is for..
Of course, if you don't know what the type of a variable is you can also just look at the type declaration.
Unless you're using something like BASIC where variables just suddenly appear out of the ether I really can't see how Hungarian notation is necessary. Especially in an age where we have advanced editors with split windows, and powerful search tools like glimpse, cscope, and ctags.
Besides, why should I trust some agglutinated letters on a variable name when I can do the same thing the compiler will do and look at the type declaration and be totally _sure_ of the type of the variable? What if some doofus changed the type of the variable in the declaration but was too lazy to update all the instances of Hungarian notation? Hungarian notation can only lead to a code maintainence nightmare!
Little endian mode is not available on the 970.
On PPC's where it was available, it was just a bit in the MSR. So you could have some processes running little endian and others running big endian.
The "missing instruction" wasn't an instruction at all. The PPC 970 doesn't have little endian mode and I don't think any other 9xx chip will have little endian mode either.
It just means that endian swapping has to take place in the emulation code instead of in hardware.
Except those "foreign national" parents eventually became citizens and were no longer "foreign nationals". They competed with workers locally, they paid taxes locally, and they bought local goods and services.
Overseas consultants are not citizens, they don't pay taxes locally (unless they live here), and they don't buy local goods and services.
1. The oldest Greek fragment is John from, I think 120. That's still earlier than the Old Syriac NT, which is probably from 300.
2. In both the Greek and Syriac texts, phrases that Jesus spoke in Aramaic are translated (such as in Mark). If the Syriac or Greek versions were from some original written Aramaic source they wouldn't contain the translations (in the same spots!) since the hypothetical Aramaic text wouldn't have contained them!
Even if the Syriac could be shown to be earlier than the Greek texts it doesn't really matter because Syriac is not the same as Aramaic. It is actually a language that is derived, much as Arabic, from Late Aramaic which is different than the Aramaic spoken in 1st century Palestine.
In any case, even if a hypothetical original Aramaic text existed, we don't have it.
However, while it may be doubtful that the _written_ documents were in Aramaic, I will conceed that the oral tradition that preceeded it must have initially been in Aramaic, if only because Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic.
The Peshitta New Testament is from the late 400's. It is also a translation. The Old Syriac NT is placed sometime between the second and fourth centuries.
May of Paul's letters were written by the 60's.
Mark by 80.
Matthew by 100.
Luke by 130.
John by 120.
All are in Greek (AFAIK).
The oral tradition clearly included Aramaic at some point :) and perhaps there may have even been some lost documents that were written in Aramaic (maybe Q?). However, all the surviving documents for the New Testament that we have at our disposal are all in Greek.
Thus, if anybody is making transalations from Aramaic they are either working on Old Testament documents, they have discovered ancient Aramaic documents which they aren't sharing with the rest of the community (which isn't very nice), or they are charlatans.
The other possibility is that they believe they can somehow reconstruct hypothetical original Aramaic texts from the Greek texts, and then back into English. While that might be an interesting exercise, it's probably not going to be horribly accurate.
Unforutnately, we've also lost some things we used to have. For instance, we lost "thou" leaving us with only "you". Previously, English was like many European languages with a distinction between a thou which was a singular/personal "you" (like "tu" in French) and "you" which was strictly a plural/impersonal "you" (like "vous" in French).
Even after all this time English still lacks certain words or concepts that translate well from ancient Greek. For instance, Greek has several words that we would translate as "to know". But Greek and other European languages (Slovak, for instance) have two (or more) forms of "to know". For instance one form is to know something in the abstract (I know math) and the other is to know someone personally (I know Fred).
Subtleties like this don't seem to matter in isolation but religious texts are often trying to convey very subtle notions. If your granularity of translation is too corse, the subtleties can get lost very easily.
These guys must be try to pull one over on you because the New Testament was originally written greek.
Too bad. I'll be in Slovakia the following week. I wouldn't mind going on a turistiku through the hory with a little Linux and, of course, pivo!
When I was a freshman in college, CS majors had to take one of two courses depending on whether they took the CS AP exam or not:
* Non-AP Students - Programming I. Programming I was basically a course on how to use the UNIX machines in the lab and how to write small programs in Modula-2 (the language foisted on all CS students who hadn't gotten to third year).
* AP Students - Introduction to CS, which was pretty much the same as Programming I.
So, as far as I could tell, the CS AP basically did nothing for you. Perhaps times have changed.
Fielding bad candidates is not in your best interest when there is the possibility of more than one vote. What's to prevent the other party from fielding their best candidate in the round you chose to field a chump?
:-)
Collusion could occur to prevent this uncertainty, but it's possible that a third party could put up a good candidate when the losers are put up by the "regulars".
But you say "But what about the last US election? We had two doorknobs and the third parties didn't take it!" Ah ha, but that's not the same! Those were the _best_ two candidates the parties could offer. Imagine a three round system where they try and field a _bad_ candidate or two and you can start to see how it is possible for even a mildly good third party to shoot the moon.
Anyway, that's one idea. Some of the other vote ideas are good but the main advantage of this system is that it's pretty simple and more like the system that already exists. I suppose it's not fool-proof though
All the candidates that lost to "None of the above" are flushed and a new election is held with new candidates. To prevent too many retries the number of elections is capped at, say, three with the third round of ballots lacking a "None of the above" field.
Of course, a new election requires new campaigning time. So if elections are held 9 months before the end of the term, each election has a little less than three months for campaigning.
The trouble of course, is that if candidates are elected right away in the first election, the lame duck period is 6 months!
Mod the parent up. S/he makes a good point. I probably got a little over zealous at the end of my last post. :)
You're right in the general case: Unless a right is enumerated there may be some question as to its existance and that its existance has to arbitrated in some way (though, how this should happen is also a matter for some debate).
However, in the specific case of a right to privacy, I think it is a right. It seems implicit in the 4th amendment to me and there is probably more support for it elsewhere in law and history.
All rights are constitutional. The constitution is not some kind of listing of rights. The people have all rights. The point of the 9th Ammendment is to make this crystal clear:
The real question boils down to whether privacy is actually a right or some kind of privilege. I would argue that it is a right and that the 4th ammendment supports this notion, even if it doesn't explicitly enumerate it.
Thus:
* Privacy is a right as implied by the 4th ammendment (secure in persons and papers from government interference).
* Just because it isn't enumerated explicitly we still have that right and the government should have no power to deny that right by the 9th ammendment.
The frightening trend these days is the federal government seems to want to declare everything a privilege that isn't explicitly listed in the constitution. Something many of the Founding Fathers were afraid of. The tactic here is to shift the burden of proof of a right off of the government and on to the people. Thus, the government assumes something is a privilege until it is proven a right. This makes the 9th Ammendment a sort of tautology in their eyes. The people have the ability to retain all other rights but too bad the government doesn't recognize anything as a right until it's rammed down SCOTUS's throat a few times and they start tentatively viewing it as a right.
sigh. At least thats the way it seems using the knowlege given to my by my high school US government class. :)
I think what the Supremes are saying is that the mechanism to solve this problem is for normal citizens to go to Congress and get the extension laws repealed. The people haven't been stripped of their power to lobby congress, they just haven't gotten off their collective butts.
The only thing the Supremes can talk about is "What does 'limited times' really mean". Basically, as long as the law doesn't say one billion years it's OK.
So basically, 90 years or whatever it is currently isn't long enough to trigger a ruling of "Ok, this is effectively infinite copyright".
I would also imagine the Supremes were a little wary of ruling on the whole idea of "infinite extension = infinite copyright" because that deals with Congress's ability to pass a _future_ law. That would be the judicial branch tinkering with the business of the legislative branch's opertaion. That's something the Supremes are probably very wary of.
If somebody puts coffee between their legs they take the chance that they might get burned. They have to weigh the convenience of holding it between their legs against the potential pain/damage spillage might cause. Such a choice requires proper information.
When most people think of hot coffee being spilled on their skin, it's painful, but once the coffee is wiped off, they would generally expect a small amount of coffee to give them a 1st degree burn (run it under water for a few minutes) and rarely would expect damage over a second degree burn (severe blistering). What a person does not expect is that the coffee is so hot their skin melts off on contact (3rd degree burns) and that they need to go to the hospital to have it treated with such things as skin grafts.
McDonalds is NOT at fault for the coffee spilling.
What McDonalds IS at fault for is not revealing information that their coffee is hotter than expected and if you spill it, your skin will melt off and you will need to be taken to the hospital. If a person were properly warned they would treat that PARTICULAR cup of coffee with far more respect than a normal cup of coffee. What makes it worse for McDonalds is that they KNEW that their coffee was more dangerous than an average cup of coffee and did nothing to warn the consumer.
So coffee is dangerous but McDonalds coffee was especially dangerous, far more than regular coffee. Because of that, their coffee required more respect to handle than normal coffee. And because McDonalds knew this they needed to inform consumers that their coffee was more danagerous than normal coffee.
`
Finally, because McDonalds willingly decided not to inform consumers of the special danger that their coffee posed, they are liable.
Of course we should ask them.
However, it is also important to keep in mind that people don't always know what to ask for. If a man says he's hungry and asks for a fish, sure, give him a fish. However, you might also point out that you can teach him how to get his own supply of fish. If he says, "Ok", then you show him how to fish.
I think what you're getting at is that aid is more than just throwing free goods/services at people. There has to be a dialog about what people need/want and working together to build a better future.
Sorry if that sounds a little syrupy, but it's true.
The other day, NPR was talking to some teachers in Afghanistan and they basically said everybody was sending them computers, textbooks, etc. The only problem was they didn't even have walls for their school, or chairs, or desks, much less anywhere to plug in a computer. The kids basically had to an agreed upon spot outside and sit on the ground.
Don't get me as jaded, though. I think donating computers to these folks is great. However, before we send them computers, we should first help them get to the point where the computers will do them some good.
If you want your donation of a computer to do some good in the 3rd world, send a few desks, chairs, and maybe a generator along with the computer.
Of course, while Central/South America is not well off, particularly in certain areas, a donation of computers might actually be OK because they might have some or all of the requisite items (like 4 walls). Sending a generator might help, though.
It's amazing that somebody could make such a relatively long article from what amounts to one sentence in Linus's email!
Reading the Linus's email it seems that he wasn't endorsing one way or the other. He was just hoping x86-64 became dominant since it would stave off some issues related to how pages were handled.
Apparently, if things go the Itanium route then some page related things get more complicated but that's it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Nah. All it would mean would be a shift from TV, car, whatever manufacturers to energy providers.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!