Are we, the general public, capable of sending the right messages to the large corporations, or are we cattle, following where we are led, buying what we are told to buy.
In a recent interview, Lowry Mays, CEO of
Clear Channel, made the following remark:
"We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."
Therefore, whatever you think Clear Channel is
today is whatever the consumers wanted.
They operated outside of the Geneva Convention, some even acting under cover as civilians, and therefore ARE NOT prisoners of war, and ARE NOT required to be repatriated, nor treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention
What you're really saying is that some
people, perhaps by their actions, can rightfully
be detained with no charges, no lawyers, no
rights of any sort, except at the whim and
grace of their captor. Oh, by the way, this
is unprecendented, so even if the detainees
in question were educated, they had no way of
knowing this is how they'd be treated if they
surrendered or were captured. Are you so sure
of this right?
If so, are you aware that some of the detainees
in question are there by mistake?
The government makes mistakes. That's why
there's something called "due process".
That's why we give even the really bad people
the benefit of the doubt, until convicted.
Read the article I linked to. The process
involves determining whether the detainees
can provide intelligence information, then
whether they are criminals or "should be kept
off the street". Are you really comfortable
with your government - the same one that you
trust so little that you reserve the right to
bear arms to protect yourself against - to make
all these determinations?
The United Nations is a failed, disgraced, and corrupt organization. It is far better to be in violation of politically motivated UN resolutions than to kow-tow to countries that would see millions of people die if it meant that the United States lost a debate.
The UN, by its very charter, cannot be a very
active organization. Its members are by no
means independent (major powers routinely
bribe and threaten for votes), and it acts
more on interest than on principle. The
veto power of permanent members of the
Security Council is a tool of inaction (they
don't have the opposite power to compel the
UN to act). Try to remember who put this
system in place.
Anyway, yes, it might be better to act
without the UN. Unfortunately, unilateralism
is not necessarily better, unless it is backed
by principle.
What principles are the US abiding by? Not
the one where punishment requires first a
crime. Iraq was invaded, partly because it
might develop nuclear weapons, and
might give it to terrorists. This
violates all prior accepted principles of
pre-emptive attacks, which require a clear and
imminent threat.
The US further violated war conventions, by
inventing the concept of "illegal combatant".
This is an entirely new concept that does not
appear to have any other purpose than to dodge
the Geneva Convention. At the same time, the
US expected Iraq to treat prisoners according
to the Convention. Now, you can argue the
term as much as you like, but you cannot deny
that the US failed to take the moral high ground
and grant these prisoners the protection under
the Convention anyway.
The US violated various civil rights guarantees
inside its own borders, detaining suspects for
long periods of time without access to lawyers
or even being charged. Again, argue all you
want, the US failed again to take the moral
high ground, if its actions are even legal.
The US could not even bring itself to
acknowledge the democratic wishes of many
people around the world against the war,
nevermind to address them. The President
was dismissive, at best, and Turkey was
being bribed to supply bases, against the
express wishes of its people.
All of these taint the moral rightness of
US actions. Point is, when you act
unilaterally, you should try to act beyond
reproach, and the principles you abide by
should be clear. To put it in even plainer
words, just because the UN sucks doesn't
mean the US should follow suit. The way
you treat the least humane of people is an
indicator of how humane you are.
Al Qaeda operatives [...] thrive in the
environment of despotic regimes like the one
that Iraq used to be
Actually, no. Iraq was a secular dictatorship,
and one of the last things Saddam Hussein wants
is an uncontrollable fundamentalist Islamic
terrorist organization operating freely in his
country. Al Qaeda is probably a bigger threat
to Saddam Hussein's regime than it is to the
US, and Iraq today is probably a more fertile
recruiting ground for Al Qaeda than ever before.
The only difference between "pacifists" and "peace-loving people", and those who are "warmongering" and "hawkish", is that the latter are ready to protect themselves and their society from those who would attack it.
There are also "doves" who are willing and able
to use force if sufficiently threatened.
Likewise, there are "hawks" who will back down
and run away if you stand up to them.
[Pacifists] come in two categories - those who simply don't get the real world and think everyone else is 100% peaceful and harmless as a daisy, and those who aren't that naive, but are cynical enough to let the "hawkish" to protect them and their family while acting all nice and dovish and "better than the warmongers".
Some "hawks" are much more willing
to send somebody else's sons to fight and die,
than to send his own. There are also "hawks"
who start unprovoked and unjustified wars.
See, humans come in all forms and shapes.
So why put them in just two buckets, hawks and
doves? Realize, instead, that people resort to
force at different thresholds of patience or
pain. The spectrum runs all the way from
Jesus Christ's turning the other cheek through
Israel's various wars for survival, through
George W. Bush's someday-they-might-threaten-us
war, to Hitler's hopes of world domination.
That stat came from China's state-run news agency which has been documented to inflate figures hundreds of times and even out right lie. Please get another source.
Sure. This
quotes the IDC as expecting "China's PC sales to nearly double in a few years, from 11.3 million in 2002 to 21.1 million in 2006." Note that IDC's
estimates are even higher than Xinhua's.
Furthermore, do not confuse current market share of NEW computers with the installed base of PCs as a whole.
Who's showing signs of confusion? I estimated
conservatively (assuming people keep computers
for 3 years), that there are 20 million PCs
in use in China, based on sales figures in
2002. I further quoted that China now has the
second largest PC market, which is not
the same as installed base.
It is quite possible for China to have much millions more NEW sales than Japan because of their economic growth and still have fewer installed computers at the end of the year or even 5 years.
That's actually less likely. Poor countries
are likely to hang on to PCs longer than rich
countries. I wouldn't be surprised if there
were a good number of 5-year old computers in
use in China.
When, at last count, less than 1% of households have PCs and few people are likely to be able to afford or use multiple computers; it's basic math and a tiny amount of extropolation.
Your 1% figure is simply inaccurate. The
10.1 or 11.3 million PCs sold in 2002 already
account for the 1%, and that's assuming nobody
in this third world country throw away their
computer after one year.
However, your meaning came across quite clearly on my end because of your insistance that the apparent disparity needs to be justified somehow.
Try to understand that some people don't give
a damn one way or the other, except that
people are arguing the right topics (in this
case, actual users versus percentage of
population), and are using the right numbers
to back up their arguments.
Given that there are probably no more than, say, 10m PCs in all of China, please tell me why they need more than 2x as many IPs.
Try not to say "nonsense" and "inescapable
logic" right before you start guessing.
This article
states that PC sales exceeded 10.1 million units
in 2002 alone. Assuming that people keep their
PCs for 3 years (which is not unreasonable for
a poorer country where a PC is a major
investment), we should be talking about a
population of over 20 million PCs. Even
that conservative estimate is already twice
your guess. In fact, if you believe this
article,
China overtook Japan as the second biggest
PC market in the world last year.
Prove it. I think you mis-googled.
The CIA World Factbook China page, under "Communications", says
"Internet Users: 45.8 million (2002)".
In any event though, even if they have 50m internet users, it doesn't mean there is a problem.
The trouble with Slashdot, and in particular
with folks of "inescapable logic", is that you
don't actually read. Where did I ever say
there was a problem? I was
answering somebody's question as to how many
people in China can read or write, or have
ever seen a computer, relative to the US.
Later, I was correcting your apparent
mental block with the low percentages of
users from China.
I would li to point out that we may have 160 million users, many of those users consume at least 2 ip. sometime more. One for home, one for work. Actually, I have my desk machine, a test machine, and a qa machine.
Many of those 160 million, perhaps most of
them, use less than 1 at home. The majority
of that 160 million are still using dial-up,
and are probably sharing a pool of IP addresses
when the connect. Many broadband users don't
have static IPs either.
Even proplr who don't work directly with PC's may consume one. Perhaps a fast food place has one for each register?
We're talking about public IP addresses here.
Cash registers are unlikely to be connected
to the Internet, even if they are IP based.
Please try to be polite, mainly because you
could be wrong, but also if you're right.
Your fundamental mistake is thinking of China
as a single country, and pretending that the
percentages makes sense. You think that
"12% phone penetration" means that ten people
share one phone, which is completely wrong.
The fact is probably that 10 of the 12% are
owned by 5% of the people, and the 2% left
are owned by 95% of the people. (I made up
the actual numbers as an example.)
That is, it's infinitely more useful to
think of China as two countries: one with
a population of 65 million and two phones
each, and another with a population of
1.2 billion and very few phones. The needs
of "China One" are very different from the
needs of "China Two".
Coming back specifically to this issue, the
question is how we figure the demand per
Internet user for an IP address. This
involves direct needs (equipment owned by
the user) and indirect needs (servers that
were built to satisfy this user). All in
all, the US now consumes some 3 billion IP
addresses with about 160 million users, and
"China One" consumes 22 million IP addresses
with about 40 million users.
The ratio here is off by about 30x. That
is, on average, US Internet users require
30x more IP addresses than a Chinese Internet
user. The challenge here is to explain the
discrepancy, and to determine if the US is
wasteful. Beyond the population, there's
also the question of "how much Internet" the
user consumes. Somebody who just uses
email obviously has a smaller need than
somebody who downloads Linux ISOs.
Your task, should you wish to defend the
discrepancy, is to show that "China One"
really doesn't need that many IPs, rather
than diluting the needs of "China One" with
the sheer numbers of "China Two".
I'd love to some facts to backup your claim
of 45.8m internet users in China
CIA World Factbook. It's probably your
responsibility if they're lying again.:)
How much of ther population have even seen a computer? How many can read?
The CIA factbook reports 81.5% who can read
and write. That's roughly one billion people,
about four times the total population of the US.
As of 2002, there are some 45.8 million
Internet users in China.
In comparison, the US has about 166 million
Internet users.
think about the same ratios in the US.
Yeah, let's do that. 22 million IPs for some
46 million Internet users comes to just under
1 IP address every two people. Since the US
has 70% of the 4 billion IP addresses, that
comes to just over 18 IP addresses per
Internet user. The US now holds 36 times
more IP addresses per Internet user than
China.
This way, you don't have to rewrite existing
apps or retrain the dev team to make them work
in an "embedded" environment.
This might be a very specific solution for a
small number of embedded applications, but for
the most part a product "ported" this way will
have a hard time competing in the marketplace.
Embedded systems typically have less powerful
CPUs, a lot less RAM, and frequently strict
power consumption requirements. Running off
a flash chip usually also means that you have
to disable swap space. These are not
constraints that can be ignored, in general.
If production volume is a concern at all,
then a competitor that doesn't have to use
a Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM will have a
much lower cost than you will.
we have not been able to make anything!!! anytime we started, we found out that someone
else has done the same before us!!!
The fact that you had to "find out" that somebody
beat you to an idea means that the execution
(or possibly the idea itself) was poor. That
is, you'll never have to "find out" that you
reinvented Doom, because it's a big success both
in fame and fortune.
The question is, then, what did they do wrong?
Was the premise implausible? Was the game
itself buggy? Bad sound, graphics, or perhaps
control? Is there some emerging technology
that you could fuse with the game to make it
a lot more fun? Could you have done better?
It's a rare game that creates a new genre, and
it's not a terribly realistic goal for three
part-timers. Maybe your team can try to
revive a failure instead.
a wakeup to you Apple people: your company will be just as willing to cater to the RIAA as ours, but it's better at letting you think you're getting your way. It's just a matter of time before iTunes becomes entirely music rental.
Don't be silly. There is no shortage of
alternatives for an Apple customer, if Apple
becomes just like everybody else. It's a
good bet to assume that Apple understands
that its survival depends on being better.
This is simply a case of a little secret that
people should've just enjoyed quietly. As
for the indignant protests from people who
want to stream music from home to work: do
you really think your IT department will not
pay you a visit once more than a few people
start continuously sucking 128 kbps each?
someone that powerful is going to be surrounded by people who reinforce whatever he believes. It is very hard for someone in power to get honest feedback from anyone.
That's still his fault. If he can't manage to surround
himself with honest people who will not be afraid to
contradict him, then he needs to take full responsibility
for it. We're not talking about people falsely
complimenting his golf game. We're talking about
potentially illegal business deals here!
This is not to say Bill Gates is a bad person. When
somebody donates billions to charity, I would rather
not second guess his motives. However, to extrapolate
that into believing that he's not responsible for his
company's dealings is just silly.
Are you sure you're not just making this up as a hypothetical case?
The line I specifically quoted in my post was:
you can decompile every binary programm at least to assembler code
which is what I am trying to refute. Yes, the example
was hypothetical, but it presents an impossibility
(rather than just a very very difficult problem) to the
disassembler, unlike things like self-modifying code
or function pointers.
you can decompile every binary programm at least to assembler code
No. Assuming we're talking about software disassemblers
here, not every program can be reliably disassembled.
Disassemblers work by mainly following the execution
paths of already disassembled code, so that it knows
exactly where a subroutine begins. In many instruction
sets, instructions have variable length, and not
starting your decoding on the right byte will be a big
mistake that cascades on to the next instructions.
Now, knowing this, all we have to do is to change the
execution path without the disassembler knowing.
A function pointer (address loaded at run-time) already
presents a serious problem to a disassembler, but
simply asking the user to enter the instruction address
to jump to will completely defeat the automatic
disassembler. There's no way for the disassembler to
know what the user will enter, and hence where the
program will go to next.
Humans will still be able to disassemble your program,
of course. However, you still won't get the original
assembly source back. Assembly languages usually
support macros and pseudo-instructions that improve
readability, but have no correspondence in assembled
form.
You can't tell me that my 45 year old Phd uncle's complete loss of mobility and ability to make an income is only worth 3/4 of a million!
Indeed I can't. Your uncle's life and health are
priceless to him and his loved ones.
Unfortunately, your reasoning is flawed. If not for
the unfortunate medical incident, your uncle could
indeed go on and work another 20 years as a
productive member of society, and retire a wealthy
man. However, he might also win the lottery the
very next day, and retire immediately with millions
in the bank. How do you place a monetary value on
human life this way?
Moreover, bad things happen to people all the time.
It makes sense to compensate them for their loss,
and to take good care of them. However, it's too much
to ask society to give you everything you might've
had. Where do you think the $750K comes from?
Think about it this way: how would Bill Gates get a
doctor to prescribe even an aspirin if it means you
may have to pay $100B (the amount of money he
likely could earn) if something goes wrong? The
system you imply is untenable.
I've sent people home with ECGs that read ****ACUTE MI***** in large, upper-case font on the top, because the machine was totally, completely wrong.
I'm obviously not qualified to comment on your
clinical diagnosis, but this statement worries me.
My expectation as an engineer (but not one of
medical devices) is not to replace the professional
operating the device, but to supplement him or
her in a useful way. That is, if I designed the ECG
you use, I would like that 99% of the time it agrees
with you, and the 1% of the time that it doesn't you
take it so seriously that you consult a panel of
specialists. That's my idea of a working man-machine
system.
If you regularly ignore its conclusions, then it's
better not even having the feature. The one time
in a thousand that you're wrong and it's right, you'll
ignore it anyway. There's something broken in the
system here, in my uninformed opinion.
It is pretty clear in the article that, in
a lot of the tests, the driver is simply not
doing some of the things that the driver is
telling it to do.
Sure. So it may be in violation of, say, OpenGL
specifications. I don't know the licensing
details, but OpenGL might prohibit NVidia
from using its logo or claiming compatibility
until that's fixed. That's about as close as
you can get to a "legal" remedy.
The market remedy is far simpler. Just don't
buy NVidia products if you don't agree with
the way they do business. Litigation should
really not be the first resort.
This is obviously done quite deliberately to fool the benchmark.
So is shortening pipeline stages to achieve
higher clock rates. I think they are both
sleazy practices, preying on the least
informed consumer, but it does not constitute
fraud. Their product really does 3.06 GHz,
or 300 FPS. It's your assumption that it
translates directly to general performance
that is misinformed.
McDonald's has "America's favorite fries",
based on sales. If you conclude that it
means they taste best, there's no fraud
involved here.
Optimization would be a better, but mathematically equivalent algorithm.
I understand your outrage, but your energy is
misdirected.
The 3-D graphics industry has always been
about "deception". The most commonly used
lighting model consists of "ambient",
"diffuse", and "specular" lights. These
lights are not mathematically accurate, in
the sense that they do not simulate real
world lights. Instead, they produce a rough
approximation. Hell, the basic concept of
subdividing an object into polygons is a
deception.
Point is, this industry has never been about
mathematical correctness, but apparent
visual quality. It would be valid for you
to ask for magnified screenshots along with
FPS ratings, which would then tell a more
complete picture of the card's performance,
but it's quixotic to ask for mathematically
equivalent optimizations in this industry.
You're not going to get it, even with the
most honest vendors.
Nvidia (and ATI before) are guilty of using deceit to attempt to sell more video cards. Thus, they are guilty of fraud.
No, they are not guilty of fraud. They did not
misrepresent their benchmark score; merely to
optimize for the benchmark score. Whether or
not benchmark scores are representative of
general real world performance is not their
responsibility.
This is similar to Intel realizing that MHz
meant everything to silly consumers, and
optimizing their CPUs to achieve the highest
MHz rating possible. As Apple has proven,
it's possible to match Intel's performance
in niche applications with alternative
CPU architectures running at much lower CPU
clock speeds.
These are shady business practices, and is
good reason to avoid a vendor for, but it's
probably not illegal. You just had the wrong
assumption that benchmark numbers meant
real performance. That's not NVidia or
Intel's fault.
Re:Kernel developers and FSF file lawsuit against
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Why not? Isn't SCO's action libelous against the core developers of Linux? There appear to be several derisive comments about Linux in the SCO complaint.
Libel must be published, proven false, and made
with malice. The first element is not a problem.
The second one specifically means that it must
be a (false) statement of fact, rather than
hyperbole or even name-calling. The third
element means that the defendant must know it
to be false, and recklessly made the statement
anyway.
Libel is hard as hell to prove, as it's supposed
to be. Libel laws are usually scrutinized very
closely by legislatures and courts because of
their inherent limitations on freedom of speech.
I believe that this is a big factor in why videoconferencing always "feels strange" and perhaps part of why it hasn't caught on.
I doubt it.
In the good days, managers don't like
videoconferencing because they don't earn
airline miles that way. A lot of people like
to travel on company expense, and pick up
free tickets or upgrades for themselves along
the way. Videoconferencing also tend to be
troublesome to set up, so less technical
people would probably rather use the phone if
they can't just fly there.
For technical types, it's nearly impossible
to conduct a meeting with the jerky motion
and poor resolution. I frequently need to
draw complex diagrams (which is why you needed
a meeting in the first place, not just an
email), and videoconferencing systems today
fail miserably here.
Why hasn't it caught on? The question is
what you're trying to replace. Most business
or technical problems can be solved over the
phone, instant messaging, and email. The
ones that can't be solved that way can't be
solved using videoconferencing either.
it's still my opinion and the opinion of some of my profs that you should remain true to the form of the function of the structure. If you say you're going to break out if something happens, use a while. If you say you're going to iterate i times, do so. If you're going to iterate i times but might break out, use the while.
This is not a bad general rule of thumb to
follow, but it's important not to get anal
about the small stuff like "for(;;)" versus
"while(1)", or somebody else's indentation.
These are co-workers or groupsmates you have
to work with in the future, so the relationship
you build is more important than any little
inelegance in their code.
That's not to say you shouldn't speak up if
their code cannot be understood. In fact,
if you didn't acquire a reputation of being
a nitpicker, your suggestion to rephrase the
code where it counts will be that much more
powerful.
One property I like to keep repeating is that
there's no such thing* as an unreadable snippet
of code. If a function is twenty lines long,
even if poorly written, a person who speaks
the language can figure things out slowly.
The real problem with unmaintainable code is
when the maintainer has no idea what the code
is supposed to do, or where to make that
simple change. IOW, it's the overall structure
and high level purpose of the code base that's
the problem, and never because somebody wrote
"for(;;)".
Don't sweat the small stuff. Point it out
once if you want (to share the general
programming philosophy), but it's not really
worth fighting for.
* Except for deliberately obfuscated code, of
course, but we're talking about real world
code here.
Isn't that somewhat saying that you don't need guns because you already have bayonets?
I didn't say you don't need the GPS. I'm saying
you shouldn't grow over-reliant on the GPS,
because it has its own different risk vectors.
I was implicitly saying that you should learn
to use both and carry both. You don't need to
look too far in the past for an example. The
biggest humiliation to the US in the Iraq war
started with a convoy taking a wrong turn.
(I'm not saying the GPS is to blame, just that
the consequences of GPS failure can be severe
without a backup solution.)
For your example, soldiers should still learn
hand-to-hand combat, because their weapons
could in fact malfunction or run out of
ammunition.
More or less the same line of reasoning.
No, you're just suffering from a form of
faulty reasoning called a false dichotomy.
Saying that GPS is riskier than paper maps,
because it has a more centralized point of
failure, does not mean it's not a useful tool
when it is working. You just have to be
aware that it is vulnerable, and you need to
have a backup plan.
Slashdot Mirror
In a recent interview, Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel, made the following remark: "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."
Therefore, whatever you think Clear Channel is today is whatever the consumers wanted.
What you're really saying is that some people, perhaps by their actions, can rightfully be detained with no charges, no lawyers, no rights of any sort, except at the whim and grace of their captor. Oh, by the way, this is unprecendented, so even if the detainees in question were educated, they had no way of knowing this is how they'd be treated if they surrendered or were captured. Are you so sure of this right?
If so, are you aware that some of the detainees in question are there by mistake? The government makes mistakes. That's why there's something called "due process". That's why we give even the really bad people the benefit of the doubt, until convicted.
Read the article I linked to. The process involves determining whether the detainees can provide intelligence information, then whether they are criminals or "should be kept off the street". Are you really comfortable with your government - the same one that you trust so little that you reserve the right to bear arms to protect yourself against - to make all these determinations?
The UN, by its very charter, cannot be a very active organization. Its members are by no means independent (major powers routinely bribe and threaten for votes), and it acts more on interest than on principle. The veto power of permanent members of the Security Council is a tool of inaction (they don't have the opposite power to compel the UN to act). Try to remember who put this system in place.
Anyway, yes, it might be better to act without the UN. Unfortunately, unilateralism is not necessarily better, unless it is backed by principle.
What principles are the US abiding by? Not the one where punishment requires first a crime. Iraq was invaded, partly because it might develop nuclear weapons, and might give it to terrorists. This violates all prior accepted principles of pre-emptive attacks, which require a clear and imminent threat.
The US further violated war conventions, by inventing the concept of "illegal combatant". This is an entirely new concept that does not appear to have any other purpose than to dodge the Geneva Convention. At the same time, the US expected Iraq to treat prisoners according to the Convention. Now, you can argue the term as much as you like, but you cannot deny that the US failed to take the moral high ground and grant these prisoners the protection under the Convention anyway.
The US violated various civil rights guarantees inside its own borders, detaining suspects for long periods of time without access to lawyers or even being charged. Again, argue all you want, the US failed again to take the moral high ground, if its actions are even legal.
The US could not even bring itself to acknowledge the democratic wishes of many people around the world against the war, nevermind to address them. The President was dismissive, at best, and Turkey was being bribed to supply bases, against the express wishes of its people.
All of these taint the moral rightness of US actions. Point is, when you act unilaterally, you should try to act beyond reproach, and the principles you abide by should be clear. To put it in even plainer words, just because the UN sucks doesn't mean the US should follow suit. The way you treat the least humane of people is an indicator of how humane you are.
Al Qaeda operatives [...] thrive in the environment of despotic regimes like the one that Iraq used to be
Actually, no. Iraq was a secular dictatorship, and one of the last things Saddam Hussein wants is an uncontrollable fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization operating freely in his country. Al Qaeda is probably a bigger threat to Saddam Hussein's regime than it is to the US, and Iraq today is probably a more fertile recruiting ground for Al Qaeda than ever before.
There are also "doves" who are willing and able to use force if sufficiently threatened. Likewise, there are "hawks" who will back down and run away if you stand up to them.
[Pacifists] come in two categories - those who simply don't get the real world and think everyone else is 100% peaceful and harmless as a daisy, and those who aren't that naive, but are cynical enough to let the "hawkish" to protect them and their family while acting all nice and dovish and "better than the warmongers".
Some "hawks" are much more willing to send somebody else's sons to fight and die, than to send his own. There are also "hawks" who start unprovoked and unjustified wars.
See, humans come in all forms and shapes.
So why put them in just two buckets, hawks and doves? Realize, instead, that people resort to force at different thresholds of patience or pain. The spectrum runs all the way from Jesus Christ's turning the other cheek through Israel's various wars for survival, through George W. Bush's someday-they-might-threaten-us war, to Hitler's hopes of world domination.
Sure. This quotes the IDC as expecting "China's PC sales to nearly double in a few years, from 11.3 million in 2002 to 21.1 million in 2006." Note that IDC's estimates are even higher than Xinhua's.
Furthermore, do not confuse current market share of NEW computers with the installed base of PCs as a whole.
Who's showing signs of confusion? I estimated conservatively (assuming people keep computers for 3 years), that there are 20 million PCs in use in China, based on sales figures in 2002. I further quoted that China now has the second largest PC market, which is not the same as installed base.
It is quite possible for China to have much millions more NEW sales than Japan because of their economic growth and still have fewer installed computers at the end of the year or even 5 years.
That's actually less likely. Poor countries are likely to hang on to PCs longer than rich countries. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a good number of 5-year old computers in use in China.
When, at last count, less than 1% of households have PCs and few people are likely to be able to afford or use multiple computers; it's basic math and a tiny amount of extropolation.
Your 1% figure is simply inaccurate. The 10.1 or 11.3 million PCs sold in 2002 already account for the 1%, and that's assuming nobody in this third world country throw away their computer after one year.
However, your meaning came across quite clearly on my end because of your insistance that the apparent disparity needs to be justified somehow.
Try to understand that some people don't give a damn one way or the other, except that people are arguing the right topics (in this case, actual users versus percentage of population), and are using the right numbers to back up their arguments.
Try not to say "nonsense" and "inescapable logic" right before you start guessing.
This article states that PC sales exceeded 10.1 million units in 2002 alone. Assuming that people keep their PCs for 3 years (which is not unreasonable for a poorer country where a PC is a major investment), we should be talking about a population of over 20 million PCs. Even that conservative estimate is already twice your guess. In fact, if you believe this article, China overtook Japan as the second biggest PC market in the world last year.
Prove it. I think you mis-googled.
The CIA World Factbook China page, under "Communications", says "Internet Users: 45.8 million (2002)".
In any event though, even if they have 50m internet users, it doesn't mean there is a problem.
The trouble with Slashdot, and in particular with folks of "inescapable logic", is that you don't actually read. Where did I ever say there was a problem? I was answering somebody's question as to how many people in China can read or write, or have ever seen a computer, relative to the US. Later, I was correcting your apparent mental block with the low percentages of users from China.
Many of those 160 million, perhaps most of them, use less than 1 at home. The majority of that 160 million are still using dial-up, and are probably sharing a pool of IP addresses when the connect. Many broadband users don't have static IPs either.
Even proplr who don't work directly with PC's may consume one. Perhaps a fast food place has one for each register?
We're talking about public IP addresses here. Cash registers are unlikely to be connected to the Internet, even if they are IP based.
Please try to be polite, mainly because you could be wrong, but also if you're right.
Your fundamental mistake is thinking of China as a single country, and pretending that the percentages makes sense. You think that "12% phone penetration" means that ten people share one phone, which is completely wrong. The fact is probably that 10 of the 12% are owned by 5% of the people, and the 2% left are owned by 95% of the people. (I made up the actual numbers as an example.)
That is, it's infinitely more useful to think of China as two countries: one with a population of 65 million and two phones each, and another with a population of 1.2 billion and very few phones. The needs of "China One" are very different from the needs of "China Two".
Coming back specifically to this issue, the question is how we figure the demand per Internet user for an IP address. This involves direct needs (equipment owned by the user) and indirect needs (servers that were built to satisfy this user). All in all, the US now consumes some 3 billion IP addresses with about 160 million users, and "China One" consumes 22 million IP addresses with about 40 million users.
The ratio here is off by about 30x. That is, on average, US Internet users require 30x more IP addresses than a Chinese Internet user. The challenge here is to explain the discrepancy, and to determine if the US is wasteful. Beyond the population, there's also the question of "how much Internet" the user consumes. Somebody who just uses email obviously has a smaller need than somebody who downloads Linux ISOs.
Your task, should you wish to defend the discrepancy, is to show that "China One" really doesn't need that many IPs, rather than diluting the needs of "China One" with the sheer numbers of "China Two".
I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China
CIA World Factbook. It's probably your responsibility if they're lying again. :)
The CIA factbook reports 81.5% who can read and write. That's roughly one billion people, about four times the total population of the US. As of 2002, there are some 45.8 million Internet users in China.
In comparison, the US has about 166 million Internet users.
think about the same ratios in the US.
Yeah, let's do that. 22 million IPs for some 46 million Internet users comes to just under 1 IP address every two people. Since the US has 70% of the 4 billion IP addresses, that comes to just over 18 IP addresses per Internet user. The US now holds 36 times more IP addresses per Internet user than China.
What do you think now?
This might be a very specific solution for a small number of embedded applications, but for the most part a product "ported" this way will have a hard time competing in the marketplace.
Embedded systems typically have less powerful CPUs, a lot less RAM, and frequently strict power consumption requirements. Running off a flash chip usually also means that you have to disable swap space. These are not constraints that can be ignored, in general. If production volume is a concern at all, then a competitor that doesn't have to use a Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM will have a much lower cost than you will.
The fact that you had to "find out" that somebody beat you to an idea means that the execution (or possibly the idea itself) was poor. That is, you'll never have to "find out" that you reinvented Doom, because it's a big success both in fame and fortune.
The question is, then, what did they do wrong? Was the premise implausible? Was the game itself buggy? Bad sound, graphics, or perhaps control? Is there some emerging technology that you could fuse with the game to make it a lot more fun? Could you have done better?
It's a rare game that creates a new genre, and it's not a terribly realistic goal for three part-timers. Maybe your team can try to revive a failure instead.
What flavor is it?
Don't be silly. There is no shortage of alternatives for an Apple customer, if Apple becomes just like everybody else. It's a good bet to assume that Apple understands that its survival depends on being better.
This is simply a case of a little secret that people should've just enjoyed quietly. As for the indignant protests from people who want to stream music from home to work: do you really think your IT department will not pay you a visit once more than a few people start continuously sucking 128 kbps each?
That's still his fault. If he can't manage to surround himself with honest people who will not be afraid to contradict him, then he needs to take full responsibility for it. We're not talking about people falsely complimenting his golf game. We're talking about potentially illegal business deals here!
This is not to say Bill Gates is a bad person. When somebody donates billions to charity, I would rather not second guess his motives. However, to extrapolate that into believing that he's not responsible for his company's dealings is just silly.
The line I specifically quoted in my post was:
you can decompile every binary programm at least to assembler code
which is what I am trying to refute. Yes, the example was hypothetical, but it presents an impossibility (rather than just a very very difficult problem) to the disassembler, unlike things like self-modifying code or function pointers.
No. Assuming we're talking about software disassemblers here, not every program can be reliably disassembled. Disassemblers work by mainly following the execution paths of already disassembled code, so that it knows exactly where a subroutine begins. In many instruction sets, instructions have variable length, and not starting your decoding on the right byte will be a big mistake that cascades on to the next instructions. Now, knowing this, all we have to do is to change the execution path without the disassembler knowing. A function pointer (address loaded at run-time) already presents a serious problem to a disassembler, but simply asking the user to enter the instruction address to jump to will completely defeat the automatic disassembler. There's no way for the disassembler to know what the user will enter, and hence where the program will go to next.
Humans will still be able to disassemble your program, of course. However, you still won't get the original assembly source back. Assembly languages usually support macros and pseudo-instructions that improve readability, but have no correspondence in assembled form.
Indeed I can't. Your uncle's life and health are priceless to him and his loved ones.
Unfortunately, your reasoning is flawed. If not for the unfortunate medical incident, your uncle could indeed go on and work another 20 years as a productive member of society, and retire a wealthy man. However, he might also win the lottery the very next day, and retire immediately with millions in the bank. How do you place a monetary value on human life this way?
Moreover, bad things happen to people all the time. It makes sense to compensate them for their loss, and to take good care of them. However, it's too much to ask society to give you everything you might've had. Where do you think the $750K comes from?
Think about it this way: how would Bill Gates get a doctor to prescribe even an aspirin if it means you may have to pay $100B (the amount of money he likely could earn) if something goes wrong? The system you imply is untenable.
I'm obviously not qualified to comment on your clinical diagnosis, but this statement worries me. My expectation as an engineer (but not one of medical devices) is not to replace the professional operating the device, but to supplement him or her in a useful way. That is, if I designed the ECG you use, I would like that 99% of the time it agrees with you, and the 1% of the time that it doesn't you take it so seriously that you consult a panel of specialists. That's my idea of a working man-machine system.
If you regularly ignore its conclusions, then it's better not even having the feature. The one time in a thousand that you're wrong and it's right, you'll ignore it anyway. There's something broken in the system here, in my uninformed opinion.
Sure. So it may be in violation of, say, OpenGL specifications. I don't know the licensing details, but OpenGL might prohibit NVidia from using its logo or claiming compatibility until that's fixed. That's about as close as you can get to a "legal" remedy.
The market remedy is far simpler. Just don't buy NVidia products if you don't agree with the way they do business. Litigation should really not be the first resort.
This is obviously done quite deliberately to fool the benchmark.
So is shortening pipeline stages to achieve higher clock rates. I think they are both sleazy practices, preying on the least informed consumer, but it does not constitute fraud. Their product really does 3.06 GHz, or 300 FPS. It's your assumption that it translates directly to general performance that is misinformed.
McDonald's has "America's favorite fries", based on sales. If you conclude that it means they taste best, there's no fraud involved here.
Optimization would be a better, but mathematically equivalent algorithm.
I understand your outrage, but your energy is misdirected.
The 3-D graphics industry has always been about "deception". The most commonly used lighting model consists of "ambient", "diffuse", and "specular" lights. These lights are not mathematically accurate, in the sense that they do not simulate real world lights. Instead, they produce a rough approximation. Hell, the basic concept of subdividing an object into polygons is a deception.
Point is, this industry has never been about mathematical correctness, but apparent visual quality. It would be valid for you to ask for magnified screenshots along with FPS ratings, which would then tell a more complete picture of the card's performance, but it's quixotic to ask for mathematically equivalent optimizations in this industry. You're not going to get it, even with the most honest vendors.
No, they are not guilty of fraud. They did not misrepresent their benchmark score; merely to optimize for the benchmark score. Whether or not benchmark scores are representative of general real world performance is not their responsibility.
This is similar to Intel realizing that MHz meant everything to silly consumers, and optimizing their CPUs to achieve the highest MHz rating possible. As Apple has proven, it's possible to match Intel's performance in niche applications with alternative CPU architectures running at much lower CPU clock speeds.
These are shady business practices, and is good reason to avoid a vendor for, but it's probably not illegal. You just had the wrong assumption that benchmark numbers meant real performance. That's not NVidia or Intel's fault.
Libel must be published, proven false, and made with malice. The first element is not a problem. The second one specifically means that it must be a (false) statement of fact, rather than hyperbole or even name-calling. The third element means that the defendant must know it to be false, and recklessly made the statement anyway.
Libel is hard as hell to prove, as it's supposed to be. Libel laws are usually scrutinized very closely by legislatures and courts because of their inherent limitations on freedom of speech.
I doubt it.
In the good days, managers don't like videoconferencing because they don't earn airline miles that way. A lot of people like to travel on company expense, and pick up free tickets or upgrades for themselves along the way. Videoconferencing also tend to be troublesome to set up, so less technical people would probably rather use the phone if they can't just fly there.
For technical types, it's nearly impossible to conduct a meeting with the jerky motion and poor resolution. I frequently need to draw complex diagrams (which is why you needed a meeting in the first place, not just an email), and videoconferencing systems today fail miserably here.
Why hasn't it caught on? The question is what you're trying to replace. Most business or technical problems can be solved over the phone, instant messaging, and email. The ones that can't be solved that way can't be solved using videoconferencing either.
This is not a bad general rule of thumb to follow, but it's important not to get anal about the small stuff like "for(;;)" versus "while(1)", or somebody else's indentation. These are co-workers or groupsmates you have to work with in the future, so the relationship you build is more important than any little inelegance in their code.
That's not to say you shouldn't speak up if their code cannot be understood. In fact, if you didn't acquire a reputation of being a nitpicker, your suggestion to rephrase the code where it counts will be that much more powerful.
One property I like to keep repeating is that there's no such thing* as an unreadable snippet of code. If a function is twenty lines long, even if poorly written, a person who speaks the language can figure things out slowly. The real problem with unmaintainable code is when the maintainer has no idea what the code is supposed to do, or where to make that simple change. IOW, it's the overall structure and high level purpose of the code base that's the problem, and never because somebody wrote "for(;;)".
Don't sweat the small stuff. Point it out once if you want (to share the general programming philosophy), but it's not really worth fighting for.
* Except for deliberately obfuscated code, of course, but we're talking about real world code here.
I didn't say you don't need the GPS. I'm saying you shouldn't grow over-reliant on the GPS, because it has its own different risk vectors. I was implicitly saying that you should learn to use both and carry both. You don't need to look too far in the past for an example. The biggest humiliation to the US in the Iraq war started with a convoy taking a wrong turn. (I'm not saying the GPS is to blame, just that the consequences of GPS failure can be severe without a backup solution.)
For your example, soldiers should still learn hand-to-hand combat, because their weapons could in fact malfunction or run out of ammunition.
More or less the same line of reasoning.
No, you're just suffering from a form of faulty reasoning called a false dichotomy. Saying that GPS is riskier than paper maps, because it has a more centralized point of failure, does not mean it's not a useful tool when it is working. You just have to be aware that it is vulnerable, and you need to have a backup plan.