gcc is known to produce shit code on computers. I find these benchmarks interesting not because of what they say about the hardware, but because of what they say about gcc. It would make me nervous if my 64-bit platform of the future were tied to gcc. I hope for AMD's sake that they are working very hard either on producing their own compiler (maybe they have and I just haven't heard about it) or making gcc stop sucking quite so hard.
It doesn't say that in the quote he gave, nor is anyone claiming it does. OSX has about as much in common with FreeBSD as FreeBSD has with OpenBSD or NetBSD: a common ancestry and a good-sized chunk of similar code. But the time since the fork has created a lot of really dissimilar code too, so it's no longer correct to think of OSX as FreeBSD with a different GUI. Instead, it's just a BSD. That's the point he's making when he says "FreeBSD-specific."
I think it's kind of an empty comment, since by definition FreeBSD-specific code is going to be of interest to nobody but FreeBSD users, but... For whatever purpose the statement serves, it's correct.
Most people want a mouse they can grab. It's like they're afraid it's going to fly out of their hand and through a window or something. They want a mouse that's small enough that they can hold it with their fingers, not with their palms. I'm pretty confident it's ergonomically a very poor design, but it's what people want and so it's what people get.
FPS gaming is popular enough nowadays that there are a wide variety of "specialty mice." Hopefully this means we'll eventually be able to find decent mice with modern features at a fair price. I'm definitely willing to pay a markup for a (comparatively) big mouse, even if that's the only feature it has over other mice.
SimCity 4 lets you create your own terrain for map regions, complete with altitudes and water bodies. I think you give it a greyscale BMP and it figures out how to do it all. Anyway, using some of the terrain data governments generate, you can create incredibly realistic regions for play in the game. It's not a trivial process, but there are webpages saying how to do it all.
I expect this is how the SC4 creators came up with their built-in regions of real-life areas, like NYC and San Francisco. I don't know how else they could manage the required level of detail.
Hardware is a fundamentally different beast than software. Software can be copied and modified easily once the initial version has been created. Hardware, on the other hand, continues to bear an associated cost per-copy even after the initial development is finished. Because of the nature of the medium, after-the-fact modifications are extraordinarily difficult. So it's not really valid to compare hardware licensing to software licensing, at least not using the oversimplified "free as in beer/speech" simile.
In any event, if Intel are letting groups take their spec and implement it in hardware that's meant to be sold for profit... It doesn't get much freer than that. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean you have to give away the farm. You're allowed to keep certain rights for yourself, and make certain restrictions on use, just like open source software does. (And just like there are for free speech, in fact.)
I first was exposed to MP3s on my college's LAN. This was back when I ran OS/2, so I think my first player was actually a port of mpg123. (Later there came a Winamp clone that was slightly better.) But all my first MP3s were not actually music. At the time I was much more into classical music and very strange genres, which weren't really available. But there were lots of clips from Dennis Leary, Chris Rock, and other comedians. So that's what I started with. The music came later, when MP3s were popular enough that other people on the network got music I actually liked. Eventually I started listening to the other stuff too, just because it was so easy, and found I liked a lot of it.
I probably had a P-133. My roommate had a P2-266 of which I was extremely jealous. Of course, I graduated with a P3-450 and he graduated with a P2-266, so I suppose I had the last laugh.
Who the fuck cares? You appear to be getting genuinely upset about something even most nerds don't care about. The distinction is utterly meaningless to everyone of any significance. I say "KB" because that's what I've been saying for the past 15 years. If, 15 years from now, KiB turns out to be more popular, I expect I'll be saying that instead.
I'm reminded of an episode of the Simpsons. Milhouse says, "Don't look at me, Bart, I don't want you to see me cry." Bart replies, "What are you talking about? I see you cry all the time. [...] You cry when you're doing long division and you have a remainder."
Your remainder is 24. Make a note of it and get on with your life.
The problem I have with "KiB" et al. is that they are changing the meaning of existing definitions. It's kind of like if you just suddenly said a foot will be 10 inches, and a fiboot will be 12 inches. It's stupid, and it's condoning the behavior of marketers who sell 1000 bytes as 1KB.
Is there something that people sign when they receive a screener which says that if the screener shows up on the net they are somehow liable?
RTFA. Yes, although the liability they are talking about is expulsion from the Academy. They may also be liable from a legal perspective, but you don't have to sign a contract for that to happen. The one these guys got is more holding them accountable for the actions of their staff. The MPAA is guessing, probably correctly, that most of the leaks come not from the actors themselves, but from their low-paid subordinates (secretaries, gofers, all the thousands of Hollywood camp followers).
Since when is nonsensical paranoia interesting? Common sense proves the AC's an idiot. Go down to your local pharmacy. Note the shelves full of dirt-cheap medications, both brand names and generics. Obviously drug companies can continue to make money off extremely old medications.
The reason is incredibly simple. The entire cost of a new medication comes from years and years of research. Not just of the medication that makes it to market, but of the ten which don't. Producing the actual pills costs virtually nothing.
So you see, it does make sense for drug companies to sell unpatented pills. They won't make a killing, but they don't need to: they invested no money in research of the medication, they have no losses to recoup. Even if they only make five cents per hundred thousand pills, it's five cents they wouldn't otherwise have.
You're a little slanted by Slashdot here. The space program is not something that the average American cares a great deal about. There are probably a hundred projects that rate higher in terms of popularity. So if that's all Bush cares about, it makes no sense for him to latch onto the space program. Especially considering his timetable, even if everything goes exactly as planned, he'll be long gone by the time man sets foot on Mars - all the kudos will go to whatever president is in office at the time, not the guy who got the ball rolling. At best he'll get a footnote.
I know it's unpopular to attribute human feelings to politicians, especially here on Slashdot, but I really think Bush is going with this at least partly because he wants to see it happen. Of course it's not the only reason - he's not a king, he's supposed to consider what the voters want, even if it goes against what he thinks is best - but I think it's what made him pick that program out of the ten or twenty he could've chosen instead.
Remember, we don't want to become what we're fighting against. Force them to live up to the terms of the GPL - which would probably mean open-sourcing most or all of their player's firmware - and take a tiny royalty from their past sales. Add in legal fees and you've got a fair settlement that lets KISS stay in business while solving the original problem.
The goal here is to make these companies play fair, and suing them into oblivion doesn't further that end.
That's not ethnocentrism, that's reasonable decision-making. We're not saying "We won't use IPv6, so fuck you guys." We're saying "We have no need to go to IPv6, so those countries who do have a need are going to do the bulk of the work rolling it out. When it catches on, we'll join in."
So the burden is on China, Japan, India, and other countries worried about IP address shortages. And, as it happens, that's where the bulk of the development is being done (Japan especially). So you see, it works: the people who need IPv6 most are doing the most work on it, and the people who need it the least are contributing less.
Limited access to the Internet would be the kind you got from services like CompuServe or AOL back in the day. You didn't get an IP address, so you had to send everything (basically email) through the service, which would then relay it to the larger Internet. I think Netcom did something similar. It was also common to dial into a Unix shell server which itself had Internet access.
As it happens, the service you get isn't unlimited even by that definition, because Cox firewalls several ports at their offices. But since they're doing that to prevent the flow of spam and worms, not legitimate traffic, I don't get too worked up over their use of the word.
Google generally satisfies my search needs, but too many websites know how to bias their page rankings. So if you search for something, it's now common for the first 2 or 3 hits to be junk (just a page of search terms). It's not unusual for the first page to be junk hits, all identical but with different hostnames. This problem is only going to get worse as time goes on, and so far Google isn't doing to enough to combat it.
I'm not going to spend 30 minutes explaining it to you. Suffice it to say that it's not a good idea, on certainly highly-charged questions, to ask questions which imply the self-evident rightness of your own position. The only purpose to asking such questions is to provoke a fight, which is almost always exactly what happens. If that's what you wanted to do, fine; otherwise, you might try explaining your position instead. Of course, this sort of questioning has an honored tradition dating back to Socrates (and look what happened to him).
The reasoning behind the original poster's comment is that he gave his life (sort of) in defense of his country and way of life, same as any soldier. His weapons were slide rules and pencils instead of guns and grenades, but he paid the same price. I'm not sure I really buy that, but obviously that's what he meant.
If you were trying to make a point about the morality of dropping nuclear weapons, I suggest a less cutesy way of doing it. On the list of ways to start a thought-provoking discussion of ideas, "button-pushing" is right below "illustrating my point by kneeing my fellow debator in the groin."
So your proof is that you don't trust politicians, and you count on them always to do the worst thing possible. That's not proof so much as your belief, but that's okay. Your beliefs are your own, and I won't try to change them. Suffice it to say that I don't feel all politicians are necessarily evil, so I think that sometimes the government really does do the right thing (and not just by accident).
You know that unless you back up a slippery-slope claim with evidence, it's a logical fallacy, right?
We've been taking fingerprints of criminals - and suspected criminals - for decades, and it hasn't extended to include anything unreasonable. So given that we have a history of doing exactly the same thing, and doing it generally responsible, the burden of proof is pretty clearly on you to demonstrate why this is really a slippery slope.
I suppose this is where I'm expected to say something like, "We're capable of forming our own opinions, pudge, so why don't you just post the stories and leave the editorializing to us?"
This is Slashdot. You don't need to put a slant on a story. No matter how unbiased the submission is, rest assured that we'll find a way to turn it into a Microsoft conspiracy of some sort.
Do you have any actual evidence to support this claim? Don't bother answering, I know very well you don't. For crying out loud, moderators, it's your job to weed out inflammatory, made-up nonsense like this! It's not being biased to mod down articles that make extraordinary claims with zero evidence - it's responsible moderation.
I suppose I should spend some time demonstrating why this is stupid to avoid being flamebait. So first, Intel isn't working on a competitive processor, not in the sense you mean it. If they are working on one, it would almost certainly be a year or longer before they could roll it out, and there's no way MS would agree to wait that long. Second, there is no possible reason for MS to withhold Windows just because Intel asked them to. MS is allowing free operating systems to have a monopoly on AMD64 right now. Do you really think they'd do that voluntarily? Third, it seems clear that Intel is betting on there being no market for desktop 64-bit machines. I don't want to get into that particular flamewar, so let's just say that, right or not, that's what Intel believes, so it makes sense for their business decisions to reflect that belief.
Everything is obvious once you know about it. It's easy to point at an idea someone else has already had and say "I could've done that!" I'm not saying that this specific patent - which I haven't read - is necessarily non-obvious, simply that I think Slashdotters are a little glib when applying the term "obvious" to patents.
Drug companies spend tens of millions of dollars getting new drugs to market. If their investment isn't reimbursed, they'll just stop researching new drugs. The reason Americans pay so much for meds is precisely that nobody else does. Most other countries have government-provided healthcare, which means the gov't sets the prices it pays for meds. Those prices are usually orders of magnitude below levels that would allow drug companies to get their research investment back. So what they do is charge more in the United States, since they know we'll pay it. As a result, we face increasing health care costs across the board, and every year there are new cries for gov't controls of drug prices. Eventually we'll get it, drug companies will stop making money, and they'll get out of the business. Medical innovation will dry up, viruses will adapt to the existing medications, and we'll see epidemics.
Don't believe me? The flu shot problem, which some people are predicting will turn into an epidemic, is directly caused by price controls of flu shots. None of the flu shot makers were making any money off their product, so they got out of the game. That left only a handful of makers of the vaccine, and they can't keep up with the demand (and they can't keep up with new research: at least one new strain of the flu isn't vaccinated against in this year's shots). So people go without and the vaccine quality gets lower, and next year the problem will only be worse.
Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but this is one of those cases where it really is important (in a life-threatening way) to protect intellectual property rights. It's probably not the best way, but until we've got another system in place to protect the drug companies who do the research, we can't cheat.
Slashdot Mirror
gcc is known to produce shit code on computers. I find these benchmarks interesting not because of what they say about the hardware, but because of what they say about gcc. It would make me nervous if my 64-bit platform of the future were tied to gcc. I hope for AMD's sake that they are working very hard either on producing their own compiler (maybe they have and I just haven't heard about it) or making gcc stop sucking quite so hard.
I think it's kind of an empty comment, since by definition FreeBSD-specific code is going to be of interest to nobody but FreeBSD users, but... For whatever purpose the statement serves, it's correct.
FPS gaming is popular enough nowadays that there are a wide variety of "specialty mice." Hopefully this means we'll eventually be able to find decent mice with modern features at a fair price. I'm definitely willing to pay a markup for a (comparatively) big mouse, even if that's the only feature it has over other mice.
I expect this is how the SC4 creators came up with their built-in regions of real-life areas, like NYC and San Francisco. I don't know how else they could manage the required level of detail.
In any event, if Intel are letting groups take their spec and implement it in hardware that's meant to be sold for profit... It doesn't get much freer than that. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean you have to give away the farm. You're allowed to keep certain rights for yourself, and make certain restrictions on use, just like open source software does. (And just like there are for free speech, in fact.)
I probably had a P-133. My roommate had a P2-266 of which I was extremely jealous. Of course, I graduated with a P3-450 and he graduated with a P2-266, so I suppose I had the last laugh.
I'm reminded of an episode of the Simpsons. Milhouse says, "Don't look at me, Bart, I don't want you to see me cry." Bart replies, "What are you talking about? I see you cry all the time. [...] You cry when you're doing long division and you have a remainder."
Your remainder is 24. Make a note of it and get on with your life.
The problem I have with "KiB" et al. is that they are changing the meaning of existing definitions. It's kind of like if you just suddenly said a foot will be 10 inches, and a fiboot will be 12 inches. It's stupid, and it's condoning the behavior of marketers who sell 1000 bytes as 1KB.
The reason is incredibly simple. The entire cost of a new medication comes from years and years of research. Not just of the medication that makes it to market, but of the ten which don't. Producing the actual pills costs virtually nothing.
So you see, it does make sense for drug companies to sell unpatented pills. They won't make a killing, but they don't need to: they invested no money in research of the medication, they have no losses to recoup. Even if they only make five cents per hundred thousand pills, it's five cents they wouldn't otherwise have.
I know it's unpopular to attribute human feelings to politicians, especially here on Slashdot, but I really think Bush is going with this at least partly because he wants to see it happen. Of course it's not the only reason - he's not a king, he's supposed to consider what the voters want, even if it goes against what he thinks is best - but I think it's what made him pick that program out of the ten or twenty he could've chosen instead.
The goal here is to make these companies play fair, and suing them into oblivion doesn't further that end.
So the burden is on China, Japan, India, and other countries worried about IP address shortages. And, as it happens, that's where the bulk of the development is being done (Japan especially). So you see, it works: the people who need IPv6 most are doing the most work on it, and the people who need it the least are contributing less.
As it happens, the service you get isn't unlimited even by that definition, because Cox firewalls several ports at their offices. But since they're doing that to prevent the flow of spam and worms, not legitimate traffic, I don't get too worked up over their use of the word.
Google generally satisfies my search needs, but too many websites know how to bias their page rankings. So if you search for something, it's now common for the first 2 or 3 hits to be junk (just a page of search terms). It's not unusual for the first page to be junk hits, all identical but with different hostnames. This problem is only going to get worse as time goes on, and so far Google isn't doing to enough to combat it.
Lander lander lander lander lander lander lander lander, airbag airbag! Lander lander lander lander lander lander lander lander lander... Ahh, it's a rock! Rock! Ooooh, it's a rock! It's a... Lander lander lander lander lander lander...
(I managed to get that damn badger thing stuck in my head now, just from writing that. I suppose it serves me right.)
I'm not going to spend 30 minutes explaining it to you. Suffice it to say that it's not a good idea, on certainly highly-charged questions, to ask questions which imply the self-evident rightness of your own position. The only purpose to asking such questions is to provoke a fight, which is almost always exactly what happens. If that's what you wanted to do, fine; otherwise, you might try explaining your position instead. Of course, this sort of questioning has an honored tradition dating back to Socrates (and look what happened to him).
If you were trying to make a point about the morality of dropping nuclear weapons, I suggest a less cutesy way of doing it. On the list of ways to start a thought-provoking discussion of ideas, "button-pushing" is right below "illustrating my point by kneeing my fellow debator in the groin."
So your proof is that you don't trust politicians, and you count on them always to do the worst thing possible. That's not proof so much as your belief, but that's okay. Your beliefs are your own, and I won't try to change them. Suffice it to say that I don't feel all politicians are necessarily evil, so I think that sometimes the government really does do the right thing (and not just by accident).
We've been taking fingerprints of criminals - and suspected criminals - for decades, and it hasn't extended to include anything unreasonable. So given that we have a history of doing exactly the same thing, and doing it generally responsible, the burden of proof is pretty clearly on you to demonstrate why this is really a slippery slope.
A little longer than that. 2^63 seconds is more than 292 billion years, or something like 15 times the estimated age of the universe.
This is Slashdot. You don't need to put a slant on a story. No matter how unbiased the submission is, rest assured that we'll find a way to turn it into a Microsoft conspiracy of some sort.
I suppose I should spend some time demonstrating why this is stupid to avoid being flamebait. So first, Intel isn't working on a competitive processor, not in the sense you mean it. If they are working on one, it would almost certainly be a year or longer before they could roll it out, and there's no way MS would agree to wait that long. Second, there is no possible reason for MS to withhold Windows just because Intel asked them to. MS is allowing free operating systems to have a monopoly on AMD64 right now. Do you really think they'd do that voluntarily? Third, it seems clear that Intel is betting on there being no market for desktop 64-bit machines. I don't want to get into that particular flamewar, so let's just say that, right or not, that's what Intel believes, so it makes sense for their business decisions to reflect that belief.
Everything is obvious once you know about it. It's easy to point at an idea someone else has already had and say "I could've done that!" I'm not saying that this specific patent - which I haven't read - is necessarily non-obvious, simply that I think Slashdotters are a little glib when applying the term "obvious" to patents.
Don't believe me? The flu shot problem, which some people are predicting will turn into an epidemic, is directly caused by price controls of flu shots. None of the flu shot makers were making any money off their product, so they got out of the game. That left only a handful of makers of the vaccine, and they can't keep up with the demand (and they can't keep up with new research: at least one new strain of the flu isn't vaccinated against in this year's shots). So people go without and the vaccine quality gets lower, and next year the problem will only be worse.
Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but this is one of those cases where it really is important (in a life-threatening way) to protect intellectual property rights. It's probably not the best way, but until we've got another system in place to protect the drug companies who do the research, we can't cheat.