I think I speak for just about everyone when I give a hearty "Thanks!" to Novell.
Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.
[Sigh] Yes, this is always where the argument gets uncomfortable, because you're forced into a position of attacking someone's current source of income, and that pretty much always makes people unhappy.
You're posting AC and didn't link to the patent, so I assume that you don't want people to know who you are. This is a little unfortunate, since I have to be abstract. However, I can say that, despite reading a number of software patents, I have seen not one idea that I would consider novel enough and intelligent enough in software to warrant a patent -- stuff that wouldn't have been produced without a patent in place and that actually helps mankind. The RSA patent qualifies as a non-trivial, very helpful patent, but the ideas behind RSA were developed without a patent as a driver, more as a personal interest. It is possible, of course, that RSA would not have been publicized in such an event, though, so I'll give RSA a pass. Other than that, though, I've seen a huge flood of bullshit patents. If I go to the USPTO and search for "computer", the hits that come up are a mass of ridiculous, obvious (in the conventional sense, not the legal sense unfortunately used to determine patent validity) patents.
So, I can't see your patent and say "that should really not be a patent". However, I don't understand why, if you have the ability to come up with a new mechanism, you can't simply implement it and make money from that.
It's an ARG - Alternate Reality Game. It's a sequel to "The Beast", a highly successful ARG which was used in the promotion of the movie AI.
It's fun, it's free, and it can get very engrossing.
ARGs are the new form of collaborative gaming - they are here to stay, and they have a lot of potential. Down knock what you haven't tried.
My issue is that Bungie *used* to do this before but was much more subtle and elegant about it -- they didn't make mistakes that would let people pick up on impossibilities or errors they made. As a matter of fact, the worst "tears" in the illusion came when they tried to get elaborate with early Halo hoaxes -- they started sending forged emails from Cortana and techies starting picking up on mistakes they made in the email structure. The online collaboration and discussion that happened during the Marathon era was far more sophisticated and interesting.
You'll in most CPU intensive emulators find some magical code which translates code from the emulated CPU type to the native CPU type, meaning you only have to do the interpretation once, and whenever a piece of code needs to be emulated in the future, the translated code is just run.
It's called dynamic recompilation, and I referenced it (when I was talking about the compilers -- my point is that you're going to need real static code analysis) in my original post. That's not bad when the processor is a Z80 and has even fewer registers than the x86 and simple opcodes that map cleanly to x86 opcodes.
It also takes a little more work than you're representing to use dynamic recompilation, because you have to worry about things like self-modifying code (I remember self-modifying code being an irritation for the Alpha Centauri port team, so it's still present in software) and ensuring that detecting modification and recompiling code be quick.
If the memory block used for register emulation is locked in L1 cache, it should be much faster than memory access and still comparable to register access, shoudn't it?
It's better than uncached, but let's assume it's in the L1 cache already (2 cycles on my P4). You're already looking at, in register fetches alone, overhead already probably making the promised speed impossible. For even something simple like a single-operand increment operation, we have to:
Look up the instruction to map to an x86 instruction. Lookup table hit, at best L1 cache (2 cycles, and we've already shown the performance claims to be overly high), probably some bit operations, a branch, don't know exactly how many cycles required.
Look up which register we're working with. Probably L1 cache latency again, another 2 cycles.
Check to see whether we have the appropriate register loaded.
If not, load it. L1 cache again.
And this is the simplest, fastest possible instance I can think of -- one operand, not worrying about seriously differing instructions or anything like that.
There's no way you're getting an 80% ratio out of that. Just not going to happen.
Look, let me put it this way. If someone could make something that would let people use Mac software on the Mac OS on PC hardware, it would have been done a long time ago. Companies are not stupid. They see the number of people that would be interested.
But hey, fine, don't believe me. Go to the PearPC folks, people who you can trust to know what they're talking about. Ask them how plausible an 80% performance ratio is.:-)
That's because it's not possible to get 80% speed with an emulator as described. You *cannot* do this on a PowerPC emulator hosted on an x86 system. Even ignoring things like the fact that the endianness of all integer values is reversed, the PowerPC has several times more general-purpose registers than the x86. Even if the emulation system has zero overhead for its own code, you're going to have to be pulling registers in and out of main memory, which is going to be vastly slower -- that will immediately cut you down to a small fraction of the performance.
It *might* be possible to write a compiler that can build x86 binaries with PPC binaries as input. It would be hard and the performance would probably still suck, but this is the route that will give the best performance. There has to be a lot of register usage analysis that needs to be done to get something like this even remotely usable, and you are going to want to do this statically.
If someone ran out and made a legitimate system like this, several things would be true:
1) These people would probably be from a compiler company, because the work that needs to be done to do this efficiently is *hard* and requires a lot of techniques that compilers use.
2) If this is a commercial project (i.e. people are actually serious about making money and not getting hit by lawsuits), they would have gotten an OK from Apple and Apple would have made noise promoting this. Why? The only practical reason to build a modern Mac emulator is to run Mac OS X, which, on non-Apple hardware, is a violation of Apple's EULA.
3) The ROM problem is still present -- you can't make a Mac emulator legally without the Mac ROMs, which Apple keeps copyrighted. -- see #2.
I think that most people know what RvB is because it's achieved cult status.
Put briefly, it's a short set of video captures made in the popular first-person-shooter videogame Halo that are then dubbed with the voices of the RvB people. Basically, they make sitcoms.
The content is actually pretty amaturish, and frequently not very funny, in my opinion. However, RvB is notable for several reasons:
* It is a video series that is free. There are not many sizeable series of video files that are available for free on the Internet (well, legally).
* It is somewhat funny. Every now and then, RvB comes up with a really, really funny joke (the babies/pacifiers joke seems to be very popular). Their pacing is very uneven, though.
* It is notable in that it is an example of amateurs without the ability to either film the video in real life or to model and render this to be able to create a watchable show. It's used as a bit of a herald of the future, where easy-to-use tools will let people easily express their ideas -- as much as computers have improved ease of writing, so do we expect them to improve ease of video composition.
* Halo is a good game. People like watching Halo characters.
* Halo is made by Bungie. Everybody loves Bungie. Bungie made a series of great games and had the most amazing conspiracy theories and story analysis surrounding them -- no other game company has ever even come close. After they were bought by Microsoft, their "It's done when it's done" philosophy had to go (which didn't help the quality of Halo at all). Their current conspiracy theories are weak attempts to be as interesting as the earlier ones (the new ilovebees.com is blatant and in-your-face rather than just hinted at). However, there's still a lot of love for Bungie left out there.
Seriously, I'd love to see some drastic changes made to strengthen fair use.
First, copyright shouldn't last nearly as long as it does -- it goes well beyond the Consititutional mandate. Furthermore, copyright should not depend on the date the author dies -- why should the work of the author last longer because an author happens to be healthier than another? Why should the willingness of a publisher to fund an artist depend on whether they have leukemia or not? Have a fixed number of years (I'd like to see the 14 plus an additional 14 if the holder chooses to renew the copyright -- the copyright term shouldn't exceed fifty years, at the longest. Let copyright serve its goal of being an incentive to authors to create work so that they can make money.)
Second of all, I want to see fair use vastly strengthened. The main thing I'd like to see allowed -- the use of characters and settings in derivative works. I think that use of characters and settings from a work should be *always* allowed (obviously, aside from old grandfathered-in works) in new works. This would supersede trademark protection (i.e. if you don't want someone to be able to use your trademark, don't trademark a character). If taking advantage of this fair use exemption, one would be responsible for ensuring that one's derivative works cannot be confused with the original work, and would be liable (much in the same manner that we are currently liable for trademark infringement) for making a derivative work that can be confused with the original. Why do I want to see this? I want to see fan fictions and alternate series plot branches made legal. Currently, fan fictions aren't legal. Companies often turn a blind eye and simply choose not to exercise their protections, but every fanfic author must live constantly in the knowledge that he could be nailed by a copyright-holding company if that company feels like applying legal pressure at some point. I don't think that discouraging the production of fanfics helps society at all. Also, there are times when I read a book series that I like -- but I dislike a particular event that happens, and wish that the plot had gone in another direction. For example, what if Jar Jar had been killed off early on in Star Wars Episode 1? (Though this is more useful for books -- creating alternate movies is hard because of the expense involved.) I want to see someone be able to say "That sucked. Here's *my* interpretation on how things should have gone!" That's also illegal -- but if characters and settings could be used in derivative works (as long as those derivative works are clearly marked as "unofficial") I think we'd see a lot more by way of interesting ideas.
Just read the summary again and you'll see this isn't that major of a victory for P2P fans... all the RIAA has to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit, and then Verizon will have to turn over the info so that the user is identified and dropped into the defendant's chair.
Sorry, this doesn't make P2P copyrighted music stealing legal...
So? Swiping copyrighted music was *always* illegal. What's fantastic about this is that ISPs don't have to give up personal information to anyone who can make up a "Yeah, I own the copyright on something that this guy has" email. It means that only people concerned enough about something being stolen are going to get involved with requesting personal data. This means no more RIAA/MPAA mass-mailings generated by bots (well, unless they figure out how to have a bot produce lawsuits).
There was a serious privacy issue, as demonstrated recently on Slashdot by people making up bogus copyright-claim letters and sending them out and getting personal data without the ISP even researching the problem (not that I think that the ISP should be expected to do research on the basis of a bogus email). If you're upset enough to want someone's personal data, you're upset enough to file a lawsuit.
This is true. However, they also donated the majority to the Republicans. I'm not saying I'm blaming them -- the Clinton administration was doing antitrust stuff -- but it does explain why they get kid glove handling.
If your sitter suspects your child has broken an arm while you're in the cinema, the correct thing for your sitter to do is to call an Ambulance on 999 and deal with the problem. Your sitter should not have to call you to be told to call an ambulance. If your house catches fire, your sitter should call the Fire Brigade, not you. If a nutter with a big knife attacks, call the police, not you.
Where their right to do something is touted, but not at the expense of their entertainment.
Where is it that you were granted the right to be reachable via phone anywhere you go 24/7?
Heck, phone access isn't even a right, much less that kind of much stronger statement. If you defraud all the cell companies and landline companies, you may not be able to get service at all.
You know, I'm not going to argue that there can be some benefit -- I'm not really interesting in arguing who is right or wrong on this.
I did however, start to think about this, and the kind of life workers have to lead:
For some people mobiles mean freedom from sitting home where you can be called.
Who in their right minds wants to work a job where they must always be reached? I mean, you maintain a server, okay, someone needs to be reached quickly. Then maybe you can rotate with six other guys and be on call one day a week. But I honestly think that if you have to be on-call all the time, that you simply aren't living a reasonable life. You *deserve* to not have to be at some manager's beck and call when you go home. Even coal miners, who worked shitty, long, and dangerous hours, still got to be *home*, *not at work*, when they came home. Until they walked in the front door of their work next morning, *they* were master of their own lives, living in their own castle.
I meant to highlight the fact that just because there are a few out there who do not bother switching off their cellphones, they're denying reception to all others.
Could be true. The point is that this is a chronic social problem to which people have tried other solutions (installing signs asking people to turn off cell phones, building peer pressure and social etiquette, even placing a short bit at the beginning of the movie). They haven't worked. I'm sure that if you can propose a better system that is more acceptable to people, that it will be used instead.
What you don't realize is that using the universities name makes them responsible for actions your organization may perform...
Please provide a link to either reputable case law (findlaw, say) or to legal code (USC, etc) that supports this claim -- I, for one, am quite dubious.
I, like many, will be watching closely for any signs of favoring certain manufacturers/advertisers (including the suspicious fact that most reviews just happen to take place with a cutting-edge Intel CPU--not like there's a contract in place...).
Honestly, most folks simply have some preference.
I don't see what the problem is with Tom's liking Intel and, oh, Anand liking AMD as long as it doesn't color their actual *CPU* reviews -- if they're reviewing some random game, it's fine to let them use whatever chip they want, but if they're reviewing CPUs, they should definitely not be flavoring things.
I moved from Tom's Hardware to AnandTech, but I think that you're doing Tom a disservice here. While I agree that Tom's isn't perfect, that doesn't make his point here any less valid. The "preview culture" and hype does customers no good and gives them a good deal of hype.
As a matter of fact, I would expect a good, reputable product review site to follow the following policies:
1) No non-shipping products. This is a *review* not an advertisement (i.e. "preview"). What good is a review two days earlier if it's incorrect and misleading? If it isn't shipping, it's a "preview" and should be called that (and those of us looking for hard product data can skip it).
2) Absolutely no reviewing based on promises. If a driver is buggy and the product crashes, then the product crashes. Calling the vendor and saying "Hi, this is Mike's Review Center and we'd like to know whether you plan to fix this issue soon so that we know what to tell our readers" is fruitless. Of *course* they will tell you that they're working on the problem and will have it fixed in the moment. You are reviewing the customer experience. If a customer can go out to a store and buy the product and it crashes, then that product has problems that need to be mentioned. If there is an existing patch, then it is certainly reasonable to apply the patch (and mention to readers that you had problems that had to be corrected with a patch). However, reference to what "NVidia says" or "Adobe says" has no place in a review.
3) Use a sane resolution for ratings. Frequently reviewers use an absolutely insane resolution for their product ratings, such as a 1-20 scale (often 1-10 with half-point increments) or even a 1-100 scale). There is absolutely no way that they have the ability to make that kind of call. Opinions are already subjective, and it's a good bet that the reviewer is unable to (a) consistently give the same rating within a 10% range and (b) consistently give the same rating as other reviewers within even a 30% range. Eliminate this kind of false data. I could see using a "Very impressed", "Somewhat impressed", "unimpressed", "Somewhat disappointed", "Very disappointed" scale.
4) Eliminate the concept of a "combined rating". Frequently, products (especially games) are reviewed based on a scale where they are given ratings in several areas. "Graphics", "Audio", "Sound", and so forth. There is no reasonable mathematical way to make an effective "combined" rating of these scores. If you want to have a category for "Overall opinion", that's great -- but don't try to make it a mechanical synthesis of the other scores. I remember when themes.org tried doing an essentially mechanical score, with very little leeway given to the reviewer -- it was disappointing. If a user cares most about reviewers having good "overall opinion" of a game, great -- let them search based on that criteria. If a reviewer really likes or dislikes a game, even though it has fantastic/really bad sound, they shouldn't be restricted from panning/extolling the game.
5) Expect reviewers to note what percentage of the game they played/how many hours they played. If a reviewer played half the game and gave a review (not unreasonable for a large game, in my opinion -- in the case of a strategy game with long campaigns, 50% of the levels is probably far overkill). If they played the whole game, great. If they played five levels at the beginning and skipped to the last level to play that, they should mention it. There's no secrets involved, but I think that it is important to let people have honest data on what portions of the games were included in the review.
Neal, at one point you were a coder. Eventually, you became a writer. There are many programmers on Slashdot -- do you recommend this path to them? How do you find writing English as a profession versus writing code as a profession?
Do you ever plan to do another book with gritty and over-the-top descriptions, along the lines of Snow Crash? I apologize for not being able to characterize the style used in this book better, but I think you know what I mean...
Okay, let's see...Slashdot story description reads:
Now you can ask Neal whatever you want.
I ask:
Neal, what's your Slashdot account name?
I get modded:
(Score:0, Offtopic)
I might just be dumb, but I can't understand the logic behind this moderation. I could see someone maybe moderating it as overrated -- maybe they're not interested in whether or not Neal uses Slashdot (I'm curious, but I could see them not caring). But moderating it Offtopic is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Novell just did something that
a) They're good at.
b) It's hard for the FOSS community to do.
c) Helps the FOSS community a lot.
I think I speak for just about everyone when I give a hearty "Thanks!" to Novell.
Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.
[Sigh] Yes, this is always where the argument gets uncomfortable, because you're forced into a position of attacking someone's current source of income, and that pretty much always makes people unhappy.
You're posting AC and didn't link to the patent, so I assume that you don't want people to know who you are. This is a little unfortunate, since I have to be abstract. However, I can say that, despite reading a number of software patents, I have seen not one idea that I would consider novel enough and intelligent enough in software to warrant a patent -- stuff that wouldn't have been produced without a patent in place and that actually helps mankind. The RSA patent qualifies as a non-trivial, very helpful patent, but the ideas behind RSA were developed without a patent as a driver, more as a personal interest. It is possible, of course, that RSA would not have been publicized in such an event, though, so I'll give RSA a pass. Other than that, though, I've seen a huge flood of bullshit patents. If I go to the USPTO and search for "computer", the hits that come up are a mass of ridiculous, obvious (in the conventional sense, not the legal sense unfortunately used to determine patent validity) patents.
So, I can't see your patent and say "that should really not be a patent". However, I don't understand why, if you have the ability to come up with a new mechanism, you can't simply implement it and make money from that.
It's an ARG - Alternate Reality Game. It's a sequel to "The Beast", a highly successful ARG which was used in the promotion of the movie AI.
It's fun, it's free, and it can get very engrossing.
ARGs are the new form of collaborative gaming - they are here to stay, and they have a lot of potential. Down knock what you haven't tried.
My issue is that Bungie *used* to do this before but was much more subtle and elegant about it -- they didn't make mistakes that would let people pick up on impossibilities or errors they made. As a matter of fact, the worst "tears" in the illusion came when they tried to get elaborate with early Halo hoaxes -- they started sending forged emails from Cortana and techies starting picking up on mistakes they made in the email structure. The online collaboration and discussion that happened during the Marathon era was far more sophisticated and interesting.
You'll in most CPU intensive emulators find some magical code which translates code from the emulated CPU type to the native CPU type, meaning you only have to do the interpretation once, and whenever a piece of code needs to be emulated in the future, the translated code is just run.
It's called dynamic recompilation, and I referenced it (when I was talking about the compilers -- my point is that you're going to need real static code analysis) in my original post. That's not bad when the processor is a Z80 and has even fewer registers than the x86 and simple opcodes that map cleanly to x86 opcodes.
It also takes a little more work than you're representing to use dynamic recompilation, because you have to worry about things like self-modifying code (I remember self-modifying code being an irritation for the Alpha Centauri port team, so it's still present in software) and ensuring that detecting modification and recompiling code be quick.
We actually do generally get notification of serious Linux kernel/Apache/OpenSSL problems.
They're just presented in a much, much more positive light.
If the memory block used for register emulation is locked in L1 cache, it should be much faster than memory access and still comparable to register access, shoudn't it?
:-)
It's better than uncached, but let's assume it's in the L1 cache already (2 cycles on my P4). You're already looking at, in register fetches alone, overhead already probably making the promised speed impossible. For even something simple like a single-operand increment operation, we have to:
Look up the instruction to map to an x86 instruction. Lookup table hit, at best L1 cache (2 cycles, and we've already shown the performance claims to be overly high), probably some bit operations, a branch, don't know exactly how many cycles required.
Look up which register we're working with. Probably L1 cache latency again, another 2 cycles.
Check to see whether we have the appropriate register loaded.
If not, load it. L1 cache again.
And this is the simplest, fastest possible instance I can think of -- one operand, not worrying about seriously differing instructions or anything like that.
There's no way you're getting an 80% ratio out of that. Just not going to happen.
Look, let me put it this way. If someone could make something that would let people use Mac software on the Mac OS on PC hardware, it would have been done a long time ago. Companies are not stupid. They see the number of people that would be interested.
But hey, fine, don't believe me. Go to the PearPC folks, people who you can trust to know what they're talking about. Ask them how plausible an 80% performance ratio is.
That's because it's not possible to get 80% speed with an emulator as described. You *cannot* do this on a PowerPC emulator hosted on an x86 system. Even ignoring things like the fact that the endianness of all integer values is reversed, the PowerPC has several times more general-purpose registers than the x86. Even if the emulation system has zero overhead for its own code, you're going to have to be pulling registers in and out of main memory, which is going to be vastly slower -- that will immediately cut you down to a small fraction of the performance.
It *might* be possible to write a compiler that can build x86 binaries with PPC binaries as input. It would be hard and the performance would probably still suck, but this is the route that will give the best performance. There has to be a lot of register usage analysis that needs to be done to get something like this even remotely usable, and you are going to want to do this statically.
If someone ran out and made a legitimate system like this, several things would be true:
1) These people would probably be from a compiler company, because the work that needs to be done to do this efficiently is *hard* and requires a lot of techniques that compilers use.
2) If this is a commercial project (i.e. people are actually serious about making money and not getting hit by lawsuits), they would have gotten an OK from Apple and Apple would have made noise promoting this. Why? The only practical reason to build a modern Mac emulator is to run Mac OS X, which, on non-Apple hardware, is a violation of Apple's EULA.
3) The ROM problem is still present -- you can't make a Mac emulator legally without the Mac ROMs, which Apple keeps copyrighted. -- see #2.
I think that most people know what RvB is because it's achieved cult status.
Put briefly, it's a short set of video captures made in the popular first-person-shooter videogame Halo that are then dubbed with the voices of the RvB people. Basically, they make sitcoms.
The content is actually pretty amaturish, and frequently not very funny, in my opinion. However, RvB is notable for several reasons:
* It is a video series that is free. There are not many sizeable series of video files that are available for free on the Internet (well, legally).
* It is somewhat funny. Every now and then, RvB comes up with a really, really funny joke (the babies/pacifiers joke seems to be very popular). Their pacing is very uneven, though.
* It is notable in that it is an example of amateurs without the ability to either film the video in real life or to model and render this to be able to create a watchable show. It's used as a bit of a herald of the future, where easy-to-use tools will let people easily express their ideas -- as much as computers have improved ease of writing, so do we expect them to improve ease of video composition.
* Halo is a good game. People like watching Halo characters.
* Halo is made by Bungie. Everybody loves Bungie. Bungie made a series of great games and had the most amazing conspiracy theories and story analysis surrounding them -- no other game company has ever even come close. After they were bought by Microsoft, their "It's done when it's done" philosophy had to go (which didn't help the quality of Halo at all). Their current conspiracy theories are weak attempts to be as interesting as the earlier ones (the new ilovebees.com is blatant and in-your-face rather than just hinted at). However, there's still a lot of love for Bungie left out there.
What, you've never filled out "Microsoft" for your contact information?
And they shortened "Corporation" to "Corp", unlike the microsoft.com WHOIS entry.
Hmm...actually, less than I thought -- in the past, Microsoft gave about 2/3 to the Republicans.
Where did you get 53%, though? I see 58% here.
Seriously, I'd love to see some drastic changes made to strengthen fair use.
First, copyright shouldn't last nearly as long as it does -- it goes well beyond the Consititutional mandate. Furthermore, copyright should not depend on the date the author dies -- why should the work of the author last longer because an author happens to be healthier than another? Why should the willingness of a publisher to fund an artist depend on whether they have leukemia or not? Have a fixed number of years (I'd like to see the 14 plus an additional 14 if the holder chooses to renew the copyright -- the copyright term shouldn't exceed fifty years, at the longest. Let copyright serve its goal of being an incentive to authors to create work so that they can make money.)
Second of all, I want to see fair use vastly strengthened. The main thing I'd like to see allowed -- the use of characters and settings in derivative works. I think that use of characters and settings from a work should be *always* allowed (obviously, aside from old grandfathered-in works) in new works. This would supersede trademark protection (i.e. if you don't want someone to be able to use your trademark, don't trademark a character). If taking advantage of this fair use exemption, one would be responsible for ensuring that one's derivative works cannot be confused with the original work, and would be liable (much in the same manner that we are currently liable for trademark infringement) for making a derivative work that can be confused with the original. Why do I want to see this? I want to see fan fictions and alternate series plot branches made legal. Currently, fan fictions aren't legal. Companies often turn a blind eye and simply choose not to exercise their protections, but every fanfic author must live constantly in the knowledge that he could be nailed by a copyright-holding company if that company feels like applying legal pressure at some point. I don't think that discouraging the production of fanfics helps society at all. Also, there are times when I read a book series that I like -- but I dislike a particular event that happens, and wish that the plot had gone in another direction. For example, what if Jar Jar had been killed off early on in Star Wars Episode 1? (Though this is more useful for books -- creating alternate movies is hard because of the expense involved.) I want to see someone be able to say "That sucked. Here's *my* interpretation on how things should have gone!" That's also illegal -- but if characters and settings could be used in derivative works (as long as those derivative works are clearly marked as "unofficial") I think we'd see a lot more by way of interesting ideas.
Just read the summary again and you'll see this isn't that major of a victory for P2P fans... all the RIAA has to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit, and then Verizon will have to turn over the info so that the user is identified and dropped into the defendant's chair.
Sorry, this doesn't make P2P copyrighted music stealing legal...
So? Swiping copyrighted music was *always* illegal. What's fantastic about this is that ISPs don't have to give up personal information to anyone who can make up a "Yeah, I own the copyright on something that this guy has" email. It means that only people concerned enough about something being stolen are going to get involved with requesting personal data. This means no more RIAA/MPAA mass-mailings generated by bots (well, unless they figure out how to have a bot produce lawsuits).
There was a serious privacy issue, as demonstrated recently on Slashdot by people making up bogus copyright-claim letters and sending them out and getting personal data without the ISP even researching the problem (not that I think that the ISP should be expected to do research on the basis of a bogus email). If you're upset enough to want someone's personal data, you're upset enough to file a lawsuit.
This is true. However, they also donated the majority to the Republicans. I'm not saying I'm blaming them -- the Clinton administration was doing antitrust stuff -- but it does explain why they get kid glove handling.
But would you prefer it if a Democratic administration couldn't decide to soft-pedal decisions made by, say, the appointees of Bush's administration?
It's not quite the same. The Republicans have stronger ties to big business.
Granted, the Dems have their own set of sources of bribes, like lawyers and the labor unions....
The current government is a
1) Republican administration
2) To which Microsoft was the third largest corporate donor.
This means that things like Department of Justice orders from *previous* administrations don't count.
If your sitter suspects your child has broken an arm while you're in the cinema, the correct thing for your sitter to do is to call an Ambulance on 999 and deal with the problem. Your sitter should not have to call you to be told to call an ambulance. If your house catches fire, your sitter should call the Fire Brigade, not you. If a nutter with a big knife attacks, call the police, not you.
:-)
The English are a wonderful people.
Where their right to do something is touted, but not at the expense of their entertainment.
Where is it that you were granted the right to be reachable via phone anywhere you go 24/7?
Heck, phone access isn't even a right, much less that kind of much stronger statement. If you defraud all the cell companies and landline companies, you may not be able to get service at all.
You know, I'm not going to argue that there can be some benefit -- I'm not really interesting in arguing who is right or wrong on this.
I did however, start to think about this, and the kind of life workers have to lead:
For some people mobiles mean freedom from sitting home where you can be called.
Who in their right minds wants to work a job where they must always be reached? I mean, you maintain a server, okay, someone needs to be reached quickly. Then maybe you can rotate with six other guys and be on call one day a week. But I honestly think that if you have to be on-call all the time, that you simply aren't living a reasonable life. You *deserve* to not have to be at some manager's beck and call when you go home. Even coal miners, who worked shitty, long, and dangerous hours, still got to be *home*, *not at work*, when they came home. Until they walked in the front door of their work next morning, *they* were master of their own lives, living in their own castle.
I meant to highlight the fact that just because there are a few out there who do not bother switching off their cellphones, they're denying reception to all others.
Could be true. The point is that this is a chronic social problem to which people have tried other solutions (installing signs asking people to turn off cell phones, building peer pressure and social etiquette, even placing a short bit at the beginning of the movie). They haven't worked. I'm sure that if you can propose a better system that is more acceptable to people, that it will be used instead.
Try using a pager. They operate on a different set of frequencies, at least in the United States.
What you don't realize is that using the universities name makes them responsible for actions your organization may perform...
Please provide a link to either reputable case law (findlaw, say) or to legal code (USC, etc) that supports this claim -- I, for one, am quite dubious.
I, like many, will be watching closely for any signs of favoring certain manufacturers/advertisers (including the suspicious fact that most reviews just happen to take place with a cutting-edge Intel CPU--not like there's a contract in place...).
Honestly, most folks simply have some preference.
I don't see what the problem is with Tom's liking Intel and, oh, Anand liking AMD as long as it doesn't color their actual *CPU* reviews -- if they're reviewing some random game, it's fine to let them use whatever chip they want, but if they're reviewing CPUs, they should definitely not be flavoring things.
I moved from Tom's Hardware to AnandTech, but I think that you're doing Tom a disservice here. While I agree that Tom's isn't perfect, that doesn't make his point here any less valid. The "preview culture" and hype does customers no good and gives them a good deal of hype.
As a matter of fact, I would expect a good, reputable product review site to follow the following policies:
1) No non-shipping products. This is a *review* not an advertisement (i.e. "preview"). What good is a review two days earlier if it's incorrect and misleading? If it isn't shipping, it's a "preview" and should be called that (and those of us looking for hard product data can skip it).
2) Absolutely no reviewing based on promises. If a driver is buggy and the product crashes, then the product crashes. Calling the vendor and saying "Hi, this is Mike's Review Center and we'd like to know whether you plan to fix this issue soon so that we know what to tell our readers" is fruitless. Of *course* they will tell you that they're working on the problem and will have it fixed in the moment. You are reviewing the customer experience. If a customer can go out to a store and buy the product and it crashes, then that product has problems that need to be mentioned. If there is an existing patch, then it is certainly reasonable to apply the patch (and mention to readers that you had problems that had to be corrected with a patch). However, reference to what "NVidia says" or "Adobe says" has no place in a review.
3) Use a sane resolution for ratings. Frequently reviewers use an absolutely insane resolution for their product ratings, such as a 1-20 scale (often 1-10 with half-point increments) or even a 1-100 scale). There is absolutely no way that they have the ability to make that kind of call. Opinions are already subjective, and it's a good bet that the reviewer is unable to (a) consistently give the same rating within a 10% range and (b) consistently give the same rating as other reviewers within even a 30% range. Eliminate this kind of false data. I could see using a "Very impressed", "Somewhat impressed", "unimpressed", "Somewhat disappointed", "Very disappointed" scale.
4) Eliminate the concept of a "combined rating". Frequently, products (especially games) are reviewed based on a scale where they are given ratings in several areas. "Graphics", "Audio", "Sound", and so forth. There is no reasonable mathematical way to make an effective "combined" rating of these scores. If you want to have a category for "Overall opinion", that's great -- but don't try to make it a mechanical synthesis of the other scores. I remember when themes.org tried doing an essentially mechanical score, with very little leeway given to the reviewer -- it was disappointing. If a user cares most about reviewers having good "overall opinion" of a game, great -- let them search based on that criteria. If a reviewer really likes or dislikes a game, even though it has fantastic/really bad sound, they shouldn't be restricted from panning/extolling the game.
5) Expect reviewers to note what percentage of the game they played/how many hours they played. If a reviewer played half the game and gave a review (not unreasonable for a large game, in my opinion -- in the case of a strategy game with long campaigns, 50% of the levels is probably far overkill). If they played the whole game, great. If they played five levels at the beginning and skipped to the last level to play that, they should mention it. There's no secrets involved, but I think that it is important to let people have honest data on what portions of the games were included in the review.
Neal, at one point you were a coder. Eventually, you became a writer. There are many programmers on Slashdot -- do you recommend this path to them? How do you find writing English as a profession versus writing code as a profession?
Do you ever plan to do another book with gritty and over-the-top descriptions, along the lines of Snow Crash? I apologize for not being able to characterize the style used in this book better, but I think you know what I mean...
Okay, let's see...Slashdot story description reads:
Now you can ask Neal whatever you want.
I ask:
Neal, what's your Slashdot account name?
I get modded:
(Score:0, Offtopic)
I might just be dumb, but I can't understand the logic behind this moderation. I could see someone maybe moderating it as overrated -- maybe they're not interested in whether or not Neal uses Slashdot (I'm curious, but I could see them not caring). But moderating it Offtopic is just silly.