In the Heise article, the rebate offered by Ballmer is not specified. In fact, the details of the offer seem to be secret. The 90% number seems to originate from earlier discussions (not linked to Munich) about an internal Microsoft order not to lose to Linux at any cost.
1. The rotation of the Earth decays slowly because of interaction with the moon, i.e. the friction of the tides.
2. The interaction between Earth (solid ground plus oceans) and atmosphere can only exchange each participant's orbital momentum; it does not change the total orbital momentum.
3. Therefore, large-scale atmospheric phenomena can accelerate/decelerate the rotation of the earth on slow timescales (months/years). They have no influence on the long-scale deceleration (cf. point 1). The main point of the article is that one can use this short-time correlation as a test of measurements of the atmosphere and numerics:
The fact that the two vastly different systems, namely the meteorological and the astronomical, are in good agreement according to the conservation of angular momentum gives us assurance that both these types of measurements must be accurate.
As a German taxpayer let me say: glad if we could help you out. In these times, any thankful remark, even an ironic one, is appreciated.
And even without thank from other nations, the money would be well invested: in the end, all of our institutions will have access to a working, trusted solution. And our government will have experts on open source software. The prospects could be worse.
DNS caching kept most people from noticing this assault. In very rough terms, if the root servers are disrupted, only about 1 percent of the Internet should notice for every two hours the attack continues--so it would take about a week for an attack to have a full effect. In this cat-and-mouse game between the attackers and network operators, defenders count on having time to respond to an assault.
Isn't it about time that you Americans drastically change your legal system? How can someone claim damages for an imperfect product other than a simple money-back deal? We are not talking about explosive disks, right? And then there's still Microsoft...
This is wrong. The only reason that high-speed trains have to slow down is for picking up passengers. Other practical limitations are the extent of high-speed routes (with minimal curvature and slope and improved rails and electric system) and to some degree risk (while going through/near stations) and noise. These latter are, however, only a matter of spending.
Our german system of ICE trains travelling at some 150 mph is just getting reasonably dense to be useful. Ultra high speed like maglev would only be useful for connecting very large towns (e.g. Berlin and Hamburg) some 300 km apart.
By the way: Cows are not endangered by maglev since the rails are several meters above ground.
Older kernels are maintained for the same reason that RedHat applies fixes to all recently shipped kernels: if a user needs a security update in a production system, he/she does only want to have the bug removed. Updating to the latest and greatest (kernel) with hundreds of new features might even be more risky than keeping the old (bugged/insecure) kernel version.
On the other hand, if you have new hardware like e.g. a nforce2-board: use and test the newest kernel versions. I for my part am anxiously waiting for the new X86 version which will support the new Intel 845G chipsets.
"The GPL reads like the Golden Rule. Microsoft EULA's are a few steps away from demanding your firstborn child."
Thank you for this formulation. It's just perfekt.
Relation computer power - score
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 1
According to information in the corresponding Heise forum, doubling the computer power brings about 100-150 ELO points (all combinations should be in the 3000 ELO range). A citation is Ernst A. Heinz: Scalable
Search in Computer Chess, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden 2000, p. 126. Since AMD has about 20% advantage in the 186.crafty SPECINT benchmark (see here and here),
one should expect a 20-30 ELO advantage for AMD. Weighted over all combinations of programs, the AMD architecture should score about 53-54% if the cited benchmark was significant.
In any case, the about 400 games to be played should suffice to find the true chess champion among both dual-processor setups.
Update: submission is from yesterday
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The first match ended with a slight advantage for Shredder/Intel versus Fritz/AMD: 20 wins, 22 losses, 29 draws. The present match is for the flipped combinations: now Shredder/AMD leads with 11 wins, 7 losses, and 8 draws against Fritz/Intel. These results indicate a superiority of the AMD architecture (2x Athlon MP 2000+) over the Intel architecture (2x Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz) (see
here) which would be in line with the chess SPECINT result.
Note that both programs learn from game to game within each match, but are reset after the match. In the first match, Shredder started very weak and had a steeper learning curve against Fritz. Since in the second match Shredder/AMD already started strong, a landslide victory for this combination appears likely.
Time is limited
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 4, Informative
For each game, both opponents have 10 minutes in total plus 2 seconds per move. Everything else being equal (or symmetric, with all combinations of programs being used) it is not too far fetched to assume that the faster machine wins on average
Isn't the problem very similar to snail mail? If a japanese or russian family lives in the states, they better use an ascii address (including transscriptions for their own names). The post office just can't handle japanese or cyrillic characters properly. For foreign addresses, however, it suffices if the country designation "Japan" or "Russia" is in ascii; then, the mail is just forwarded to that domain where the rest of the address can be deciphered.
Obviously, the problem for email/IP is not completely analogous since (in digital form)
unicode is unambiguous. As stated in the article,
this fact does not help for recognition and transmission of rendered characters on-screen (or in printed form).
Hey guys, I would never ask what do you smoke on the occasion of a repeated story since such a question is clearly offtopic. However, it might be interesting for the poor folks who only know (and regularly visit) Slashdot to learn from you editors: what news sites do you visit? where do you go for discussions? I mean, the only thing we know is that it isn't Slashdot.
The efficiency of the Carnot process depends on the intended usage. Generally, in this process, the heat Q exchanged at one of the reservoirs is proportional to the temperature, the rest is work. In your nomenclature, the following efficiencies follow:
W/Qh=(Th-Tc)/Th for a machine that converts heat to work
Qh/W=Th/(Th-Tc) for a heat pump that uses work for providing heat at a useful temperature (where the absorbed heat at Tc is "free" and not counted)
Qc/W=Tc/(Th-Tc) for a cooling device
The third (and not the first) case is relevant here. Note that the efficiency is strongly dependent on Th so cooling is much cheaper for small temperature differences.
Why couldn't one limit the maximum liability
to, say, 10 times the license / distribution price? So a typical private MS customer might claim some thousand dollars while a company or school (with a single contract covering thousands of machines) could start multi-million dollar lawsuits. Obviously, the risk for authors of free software is then still zero. For linux distributors, the liability might be limited to the non-free software parts (like yast in SuSE) and to the editing process (identification of alpha/beta/production grade software). In any case, big money will only be at stake for companies which make big money.
Several people asked about his feelings. Some asked about what he does besides kernel hacking. Half of the answer is here:
Alan's diary, the other half is here:
Alan's wife's diary.
I don't think it would be appropriate to mail him questions already answered repeatedly in the diary.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Heise article, the rebate offered by Ballmer is not specified. In fact, the details of the offer seem to be secret. The 90% number seems to originate from earlier discussions (not linked to Munich) about an internal Microsoft order not to lose to Linux at any cost.
... it's about government control. Should you be scared? Yes!
2. The interaction between Earth (solid ground plus oceans) and atmosphere can only exchange each participant's orbital momentum; it does not change the total orbital momentum.
3. Therefore, large-scale atmospheric phenomena can accelerate/decelerate the rotation of the earth on slow timescales (months/years). They have no influence on the long-scale deceleration (cf. point 1). The main point of the article is that one can use this short-time correlation as a test of measurements of the atmosphere and numerics: The fact that the two vastly different systems, namely the meteorological and the astronomical, are in good agreement according to the conservation of angular momentum gives us assurance that both these types of measurements must be accurate.
And even without thank from other nations, the money would be well invested: in the end, all of our institutions will have access to a working, trusted solution. And our government will have experts on open source software. The prospects could be worse.
a Beowulf cluster out of these...
DNS caching kept most people from noticing this assault. In very rough terms, if the root servers are disrupted, only about 1 percent of the Internet should notice for every two hours the attack continues--so it would take about a week for an attack to have a full effect. In this cat-and-mouse game between the attackers and network operators, defenders count on having time to respond to an assault.
Thanks. Now we have this OGRE left, Sir...
You are an Object oriented Graphics Rendering Engine??? By the way, what's the meaning of CYOA? Enlighten me!
Isn't it about time that you Americans drastically change your legal system? How can someone claim damages for an imperfect product other than a simple money-back deal? We are not talking about explosive disks, right? And then there's still Microsoft...
Our german system of ICE trains travelling at some 150 mph is just getting reasonably dense to be useful. Ultra high speed like maglev would only be useful for connecting very large towns (e.g. Berlin and Hamburg) some 300 km apart.
By the way: Cows are not endangered by maglev since the rails are several meters above ground.
Good to know. As someone who is asked to moderate on Slashdot nearly every week, I certainly appreciate some examples to measure against.
I would rather say people should look at environmental pollution and global warming if they wish to survive 500 years or so.
On the other hand, if you have new hardware like e.g. a nforce2-board: use and test the newest kernel versions. I for my part am anxiously waiting for the new X86 version which will support the new Intel 845G chipsets.
If you need to know what the text above the mail header says: ask a friend or babelfish...
Personally, however, I am very sensitive to flicker and lack of sharpness so that I really enjoy my (great) Dell 20" TFT.
RedHat Linux 7.3 (kernel release 4.2.18-3)
(from the article, page 3)
"The GPL reads like the Golden Rule. Microsoft EULA's are a few steps away from demanding your firstborn child." Thank you for this formulation. It's just perfekt.
In any case, the about 400 games to be played should suffice to find the true chess champion among both dual-processor setups.
Note that both programs learn from game to game within each match, but are reset after the match. In the first match, Shredder started very weak and had a steeper learning curve against Fritz. Since in the second match Shredder/AMD already started strong, a landslide victory for this combination appears likely.
For each game, both opponents have 10 minutes in total plus 2 seconds per move. Everything else being equal (or symmetric, with all combinations of programs being used) it is not too far fetched to assume that the faster machine wins on average
Obviously, the problem for email/IP is not completely analogous since (in digital form) unicode is unambiguous. As stated in the article, this fact does not help for recognition and transmission of rendered characters on-screen (or in printed form).
---
Proud holder of a mensa / cafeteria card
Hey guys, I would never ask what do you smoke on the occasion of a repeated story since such a question is clearly offtopic. However, it might be interesting for the poor folks who only know (and regularly visit) Slashdot to learn from you editors: what news sites do you visit? where do you go for discussions? I mean, the only thing we know is that it isn't Slashdot.
W/Qh=(Th-Tc)/Th for a machine that converts heat to work
Qh/W=Th/(Th-Tc) for a heat pump that uses work for providing heat at a useful temperature (where the absorbed heat at Tc is "free" and not counted)
Qc/W=Tc/(Th-Tc) for a cooling device
The third (and not the first) case is relevant here. Note that the efficiency is strongly dependent on Th so cooling is much cheaper for small temperature differences.
Why couldn't one limit the maximum liability to, say, 10 times the license / distribution price? So a typical private MS customer might claim some thousand dollars while a company or school (with a single contract covering thousands of machines) could start multi-million dollar lawsuits. Obviously, the risk for authors of free software is then still zero. For linux distributors, the liability might be limited to the non-free software parts (like yast in SuSE) and to the editing process (identification of alpha/beta/production grade software). In any case, big money will only be at stake for companies which make big money.
Several people asked about his feelings. Some asked about what he does besides kernel hacking. Half of the answer is here: Alan's diary, the other half is here: Alan's wife's diary. I don't think it would be appropriate to mail him questions already answered repeatedly in the diary.