Despite a tremendous expenditure of willpower, I just can't bring myself to give a damn what Bill O'Reilly thinks.
Yeah, but what worries me is the large number of people who forget to take a grain of salt with whatever zany conspiracies they hear newscasters speak of on tv. Especially here in the US where so many people just think if something was said on CNN/Fox News/etc then it must be true.
Can anyone doubt that 80% of the silicon is for supporting legacy apps at this point?
Umm...yeah, I can. There's a lot of other stuff that's fabricated onto a chip than legacy support. Remember this isn't software. There's the pipelining hardware, the on-chip cache, and lots of other stuff.
Is x86 outdated and incredibly inconvenient for assembly programming? Definitely. And sure, there is a good amount of hardware in an x86 chip to translate CISC instructions to simple operations performed within an ALU.
Are people that damn lazy they can't type 'make' on a new system?
How many computer users actually know what 'make' even is? And as other posts pointed out, closed source software models don't allow people to simply remake when a new compiler or chip comes out.
This is probably why x86 isn't going away either. Closed source software doesn't allow for quick transitions when a new chip comes out. The company selling the software has to have engineers rebuild the code, and of course add on other eyecandy and such so that they can release the new binary as an upgrade. I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.
I have a friend who uses ssh to tunnel to his home box (from work) and then uses IM off of that. Not that anyone really cares if he uses IM in his spare time at work, but it does guarantee him privacy.
At work, I find that most people actually reply to email promptly. And sometimes email really complements a prior conversation. If you mention a quick idea to your boss, and then follow up with a more detailed email, I think you're more likely to get his/her attention.
And when you're working in IT, where your manager is probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown half the day, email is a lifesaver. I know that my boss preferred getting emails to having people walk into his office for everything. Sure, urgent matters are a different issue. But at least he could reply to important emails quickly and the rest of the email after the working day was done and not be interrupted in the middle of whatever he was doing earlier.
But, there's also laziness. I can't think of how many times my college roommates and I used to IM each other when we were all within shouting distance of each other.
Washington University's Robotic Photographer,
on
Kernel 2.2 - It Lives!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Lewis, which was featured here on/. sometime ago, is still running red hat 6.2. And I don't know of any software upgrades our lab will be giving him any time soon.
The key to taking the crown in the microprocessor is to make sure people actually buy your cool, new box of transistors after you get them on the market.
Just putting a 64-bit chip on the market doesn't mean that AMD will be on top. No stockholder cares about a 64-bit processor that no one buys (think itanium).
Even after opterons are plentiful on the market, who do we know that will buy one? Sure, 90% of/. might be drooling over it. But how many of those people are actually in a position to replace their company's old Xeon servers with new 64-bit opteron servers?
I know it's been said before, but cool processors don't always make investors rich. AMD has been worrying more about improving their company's image as a provider of die-hard, dependable chips . And rightly so (see/. article on opterons being used in new cray supercomputer).
I've spent a good amount of time working in more than one IT department. And I've never had a manager make a buying decision based on/. posts. Fact is, when the s@*t goes down (aka server hardware fails), the IT manager doesn't want any chance for that failure to be due to parts that lack industry-wide acceptance.
So despite all the "technobabble" that goes on (and I'm guilty of it too), it's important to think of how your non-technologist boss views a tech company and the products it puts out. I'm glad that AMD realizes this. I just hope AMD's/. fanbase comes to the same conclusion.
>>But Apple do provide X11 for you to run and you
>>can compile a lot of Unix stuff for the Mac, so
>>in that sense it is cross-platform.
>No, open source UNIX apps are cross platform,
>MacOS apps are not. You can run linux apps on
>windows too. Is Windows nice and cross-platform?
>I don't think so.
Don't give Bill any ideas for new marketing slogans. I'm sure they could afford the court costs to prove that "cross-platform" actually means something other than what we here at/. think it does.
Not, I think, what Congress had in mind when enacting the DMCA.
Sadly, I think the only thing going through Congressmen's minds when they pass laws is somthing along the lines of:
What the hell is DRM?
Why didn't we use the word paradigm at the end of DMCA? The more buzzwords, the fewer calls from constituents I'll get.
Alright, let me pull up my sleeve so I can see the note on my arm regarding which way the lobbyist told me to vote.
Man, we need some more hot, permiscuous interns.
Oh crap, my ass just fell asleep. I'd better get up there and filibuster for a while to get it to wake up.
Yes, I am an American, and proud to say so. But, I am also embarassed by so many of our politicians, or should I say, our corporate-controlled politicians. Sad but true, Corporate America is the aristocracy of the new world.
I went through years of school where I was taught that we fought for independence from Great Britain because of taxation without representation and a lack of other such basic freedoms.
And now we're faced with pretty much the same thing. Sure, we elect politicians. But the corporations pay for their campaigns, shower them with "perks" (aka: legal bribes), and tell them how to vote. Sure, frivolous claims such as this garage door crap is going to make people realize the DMCA is stupid. But it's most likely corporations, rather than constituents, will control how the DMCA is modified.
Hmmm...I didn't even think of that. I guess I just skimmed over part of your post rather quickly.
However, such a debugger, even if it did exist, probably wouldn't be incredibly useful. Sure, you could catch some errors. But most non-trivial programs I've written consist of so much on I/O (user & device) and system calls that a write-time debugger couldn't possibly tell me the values of enough variables such that it would be nearly as useful as a decent run-time debugger.
And c'mon, who wants to debug until it doesn't work? That's what testing is for.:-)
Also I'd like to be able to hover my mouse over a variable and see what range of values it could have. From here you can check that you never go outside the bounds of a variable, and so on.
Try using DDD. It's a graphical frontend to gdb. Also, it's open source.
I can only hope that the publishing companies will stop treating us like cattle (the type from Texas, not India) sometime within the next decade. But this will only happen when they can no longer get away with it. However, I don't see that happening any time soon.
Politicians aren't average consumers. The only time most of them back consumer (rather than corporate) interests is when they absolutely have to do so.
I highly doubt that any of the major music labels or film companies are too worried about a lack of consumer demand. Sure they whine a whole bunch about pirating leading them to bankruptcy, but I think we all know well enough by now that's just not true.
Hmmm...have I said anything that hasn't been said in at least 100/. posts thus far? Oh well, screw the karma, I'm procrastinating homework right now.
Anyway, I applaud you for doing the ethical thing. Yes, if everyone else followed your model of boycotting ridiculously over-priced entertainmet, then maybe traditional economics would come into play and movie ticket prices would drop down. But most people do one or both of the following instead:
a) Pirate the movie/music instead
b) Pay whatever it costs anyway
From personal experience, I find that most people pirate movies/music they would have rented/borrowed . And they still pay to see/buy movies/CDs they really want to see/own. Let's face it, Yoda yielding a light saber on your 17" CRT and Altec Lansings isn't the same as watching it on the big screen with theater audio.
So, all in all, we're back where we were at the beginning. Pirating won't stop anytime soon (check out last sunday's userfriendly). The movie & music industries aren't about to agree to all our demands. DRM isn't going to disappear simply due to geek dislike (does your mom know what DRM is?). Instead, let's just try to get the letter of the law placed somewhere in the middle and play it by ear from there.
I know he didn't do all those things, just the second one. But I may as well clear that up before 50 people post on my inaccuracies in delineating the situation at hand.
Prior to my hearing about this case, if you had asked me
Can I register a domain name SomeCompany.com and then do the following:
Talk about how much I dislike the company
Feature ad banners for sites related to that company
Talk trash about the management of the company
Post numerous comments on the low quality of the company's products (thereby "diluting their image")
My response would have been, "damn right, freedom of speech..."
But now, I'm just confused.
What did he do that violated any laws?
He's paid $2.2 million in legal fees. It's not like he had a choice about showing up in court to defend himself.
Now Nissan motors can take his domain name after all the legal bills? And if not, he'll be ordered to give them financial reparations for "diluting their brand name?"
why can't they goto a book store? If libraries become closely watched, then I think any smart crook will just go over to a Borders or Barnes & Noble instead.
It's just another thing to boost our false sense of security. The people who end up paying for it are law-abiding citizens. Anyone who flew in the US in the few months after 9/11 knows what I mean.
people see a movie, like it a lot, and then buy it. For many, movie piracy is just a way of obtaining an early copy of a film before--and only until--they can purchase it on dvd. And of course, a way to avoid paying to see a movie that doesn't look like it's worth the money.
On the other hand, there are very few cds that I like completely. I listen to less than half the songs on 90% of the cds I own. I'd be willing to pay $1 per song in.wav format, but I can't do that for every song I want. And I really don't give a darn for paying $20 for a cd half full of songs I don't like, songs which I think the artist may have recorded only to fill the rest of the cd.
I read this article thinking that it would give me a different perspective on why so many are eager to jump on the open source bandwagon.
I was wrong.
Instead I found myself reading paragraph after paragraph thinking "duh." I could not help but notice that nearly everything he said is a commonly known fact to every/. reader I know. Or at least every/. reader who's got any common sense.
Joel goes on and on about how companies are switching to open source in order to commoditize operating systems. That's great. I kinda already had a feeling that people didn't want to let M$ continue to rape them.
Too bad he didn't give some educated speculation on where we'll be 5 or 10 years from now due to increased industry support for open source software.
but I've considered it to be out of commission for about 1.5 years now.
Is it right or wrong, well, I think that's been debated enough already.
Since they shut down, and then scour disappeared quite a while ago, I've been a bit hard-pressed to find *good* alternatives.
I don't want to mess with the spyware and slow downloads of Kazaa/Morpheus. I've tried using direct connect, but I don't have the 30GB (or more) of shares required to get into many of their download groups. The last time I tried lopster was before their 3/27 release, and I wasn't extremely impressed.
But often times I end up resorting to getting mp3s from other people's computers on network neighborhood. Yeah, it's a bit primitive, but it's often the easiest way when you're in college. Now that I'm getting ready to graduate, I'm starting to wonder what my next best alternative is, any suggestions?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what worries me is the large number of people who forget to take a grain of salt with whatever zany conspiracies they hear newscasters speak of on tv. Especially here in the US where so many people just think if something was said on CNN/Fox News/etc then it must be true.
Umm...yeah, I can. There's a lot of other stuff that's fabricated onto a chip than legacy support. Remember this isn't software. There's the pipelining hardware, the on-chip cache, and lots of other stuff.
Is x86 outdated and incredibly inconvenient for assembly programming? Definitely. And sure, there is a good amount of hardware in an x86 chip to translate CISC instructions to simple operations performed within an ALU.
Are people that damn lazy they can't type 'make' on a new system?
How many computer users actually know what 'make' even is? And as other posts pointed out, closed source software models don't allow people to simply remake when a new compiler or chip comes out.
This is probably why x86 isn't going away either. Closed source software doesn't allow for quick transitions when a new chip comes out. The company selling the software has to have engineers rebuild the code, and of course add on other eyecandy and such so that they can release the new binary as an upgrade. I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.
I have a friend who uses ssh to tunnel to his home box (from work) and then uses IM off of that. Not that anyone really cares if he uses IM in his spare time at work, but it does guarantee him privacy.
And when you're working in IT, where your manager is probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown half the day, email is a lifesaver. I know that my boss preferred getting emails to having people walk into his office for everything. Sure, urgent matters are a different issue. But at least he could reply to important emails quickly and the rest of the email after the working day was done and not be interrupted in the middle of whatever he was doing earlier.
But, there's also laziness. I can't think of how many times my college roommates and I used to IM each other when we were all within shouting distance of each other.
Lewis, which was featured here on /. sometime ago, is still running red hat 6.2. And I don't know of any software upgrades our lab will be giving him any time soon.
Just putting a 64-bit chip on the market doesn't mean that AMD will be on top. No stockholder cares about a 64-bit processor that no one buys (think itanium).
Even after opterons are plentiful on the market, who do we know that will buy one? Sure, 90% of /. might be drooling over it. But how many of those people are actually in a position to replace their company's old Xeon servers with new 64-bit opteron servers?
I know it's been said before, but cool processors don't always make investors rich. AMD has been worrying more about improving their company's image as a provider of die-hard, dependable chips . And rightly so (see /. article on opterons being used in new cray supercomputer).
I've spent a good amount of time working in more than one IT department. And I've never had a manager make a buying decision based on /. posts. Fact is, when the s@*t goes down (aka server hardware fails), the IT manager doesn't want any chance for that failure to be due to parts that lack industry-wide acceptance.
So despite all the "technobabble" that goes on (and I'm guilty of it too), it's important to think of how your non-technologist boss views a tech company and the products it puts out. I'm glad that AMD realizes this. I just hope AMD's /. fanbase comes to the same conclusion.
>>But Apple do provide X11 for you to run and you
/. think it does.
>>can compile a lot of Unix stuff for the Mac, so
>>in that sense it is cross-platform.
>No, open source UNIX apps are cross platform,
>MacOS apps are not. You can run linux apps on
>windows too. Is Windows nice and cross-platform?
>I don't think so.
Don't give Bill any ideas for new marketing slogans. I'm sure they could afford the court costs to prove that "cross-platform" actually means something other than what we here at
Actually, I think their goal is to have you prefix "MS" before each of their products' names.
Not, I think, what Congress had in mind when enacting the DMCA.
Sadly, I think the only thing going through Congressmen's minds when they pass laws is somthing along the lines of:
Yes, I am an American, and proud to say so. But, I am also embarassed by so many of our politicians, or should I say, our corporate-controlled politicians. Sad but true, Corporate America is the aristocracy of the new world.
I went through years of school where I was taught that we fought for independence from Great Britain because of taxation without representation and a lack of other such basic freedoms.
And now we're faced with pretty much the same thing. Sure, we elect politicians. But the corporations pay for their campaigns, shower them with "perks" (aka: legal bribes), and tell them how to vote. Sure, frivolous claims such as this garage door crap is going to make people realize the DMCA is stupid. But it's most likely corporations, rather than constituents, will control how the DMCA is modified.
fp maybe?
However, such a debugger, even if it did exist, probably wouldn't be incredibly useful. Sure, you could catch some errors. But most non-trivial programs I've written consist of so much on I/O (user & device) and system calls that a write-time debugger couldn't possibly tell me the values of enough variables such that it would be nearly as useful as a decent run-time debugger.
And c'mon, who wants to debug until it doesn't work? That's what testing is for. :-)
Try using DDD. It's a graphical frontend to gdb. Also, it's open source.
Finally, a portable that automatically switches to prostitute mode whenever necessary.
Yeah...I know it's not a nice thing to say. But fsck that, and fsck the karma too.
Politicians aren't average consumers. The only time most of them back consumer (rather than corporate) interests is when they absolutely have to do so.
I highly doubt that any of the major music labels or film companies are too worried about a lack of consumer demand. Sure they whine a whole bunch about pirating leading them to bankruptcy, but I think we all know well enough by now that's just not true.
Hmmm...have I said anything that hasn't been said in at least 100 /. posts thus far? Oh well, screw the karma, I'm procrastinating homework right now.
Anyway, I applaud you for doing the ethical thing. Yes, if everyone else followed your model of boycotting ridiculously over-priced entertainmet, then maybe traditional economics would come into play and movie ticket prices would drop down. But most people do one or both of the following instead:
a) Pirate the movie/music instead
b) Pay whatever it costs anyway
From personal experience, I find that most people pirate movies/music they would have rented/borrowed . And they still pay to see/buy movies/CDs they really want to see/own. Let's face it, Yoda yielding a light saber on your 17" CRT and Altec Lansings isn't the same as watching it on the big screen with theater audio.
So, all in all, we're back where we were at the beginning. Pirating won't stop anytime soon (check out last sunday's userfriendly). The movie & music industries aren't about to agree to all our demands. DRM isn't going to disappear simply due to geek dislike (does your mom know what DRM is?). Instead, let's just try to get the letter of the law placed somewhere in the middle and play it by ear from there.
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:JmwQcVoG-ucJ: www.microsoft.com/insider/opsystems/windowsxp_setu p.asp+Windows+XP+gives+me+more+choices+and+flexibi lity&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
...see, I told you there were people outside of the United States that bring stupid lawsuits to court!
I know he didn't do all those things, just the second one. But I may as well clear that up before 50 people post on my inaccuracies in delineating the situation at hand.
Can I register a domain name SomeCompany.com and then do the following:
My response would have been, "damn right, freedom of speech..."
But now, I'm just confused.
What did he do that violated any laws?
He's paid $2.2 million in legal fees. It's not like he had a choice about showing up in court to defend himself.
Now Nissan motors can take his domain name after all the legal bills? And if not, he'll be ordered to give them financial reparations for "diluting their brand name?"
It's just another thing to boost our false sense of security. The people who end up paying for it are law-abiding citizens. Anyone who flew in the US in the few months after 9/11 knows what I mean.
On the other hand, there are very few cds that I like completely. I listen to less than half the songs on 90% of the cds I own. I'd be willing to pay $1 per song in .wav format, but I can't do that for every song I want. And I really don't give a darn for paying $20 for a cd half full of songs I don't like, songs which I think the artist may have recorded only to fill the rest of the cd.
If you like this, then you might also want to check other authors that like to ramble on with no real message such as; 1) Jon Katz 2) see #1
I was wrong.
Instead I found myself reading paragraph after paragraph thinking "duh." I could not help but notice that nearly everything he said is a commonly known fact to every /. reader I know. Or at least every /. reader who's got any common sense.
Joel goes on and on about how companies are switching to open source in order to commoditize operating systems. That's great. I kinda already had a feeling that people didn't want to let M$ continue to rape them.
Too bad he didn't give some educated speculation on where we'll be 5 or 10 years from now due to increased industry support for open source software.
If I could goto a music store and pay $2 for every song I want (in .wav format), and have them burned onto a cd-r, then I'd gladly do it.
Until that becomes available, I'm looking for better alternatives.
but I've considered it to be out of commission for about 1.5 years now. Is it right or wrong, well, I think that's been debated enough already. Since they shut down, and then scour disappeared quite a while ago, I've been a bit hard-pressed to find *good* alternatives. I don't want to mess with the spyware and slow downloads of Kazaa/Morpheus. I've tried using direct connect, but I don't have the 30GB (or more) of shares required to get into many of their download groups. The last time I tried lopster was before their 3/27 release, and I wasn't extremely impressed. But often times I end up resorting to getting mp3s from other people's computers on network neighborhood. Yeah, it's a bit primitive, but it's often the easiest way when you're in college. Now that I'm getting ready to graduate, I'm starting to wonder what my next best alternative is, any suggestions?