If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.
America's losing its balls.
This insanity got modded +5 insightful. Luckily this is only slashdot, or I'd be worried for the future of humanity.
By your reasoning, why not remove any pretense of manned space flight being a return trip? Why not save a whole lot of dollars and leave the astronauts to die in space, or to burn up on reentry? It would make the engineering so much simpler and think of the weight savings to be made by not including heat shields and parachutes!
After all: It amazes me that this is a serious concern. There IS a price for manned spaceflight and if it goes too high, it's over. Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
I know you'd be first in line to volunteer, cowboy!
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
No it doesn't.
It raises the bar for competition. It allows everyone to start from a more advanced position, the whole "Shoulders of Giants" thing.
We are very lucky to live in a world with GPL software. The GPL has succeeded in allowing real progress to flourish where monopolies have stifled progress in an unregulated "free" market.
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back.
What is "shell code" supposed to be? Bourne shell scripts?
Someone had to ask it!
From the wikipedia:
In computer security, a shellcode is a small piece of code used as the payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability. It is called "shellcode" because it typically starts a command shell from which the attacker can control the compromised machine. Shellcode is commonly written in machine code, but any piece of code that performs a similar task can be called shellcode. Because the function of a payload is not limited to merely spawning a shell, some have suggested that the name shellcode is insufficient.[1] However, attempts at replacing the term have not gained wide acceptance.
So it's a poor piece of new terminology that has stuck, unfortunately.
When a computer develops a mind of it's own in a logical manner it's starting to reach the human level and we can start to discuss if it's primitive or not. If it starts to reproduce on it's own it's time to be careful.
That's not directly related to computing power per se. A computer 100 000 000 times as powerful as today's, running today's software will still not have developed a mind of its own. It'll just be very, very fast indeed.
Around this time they created an instruction extension called 3D-Now that did what MMX did and accelerated video.
The AMD K6 (bought in from NexGen) had MMX. (MMX uses the integrated x87 floating point register file for backwards compatibility with existing OSes). The K6-2 introduced 3DNow!. MMX is integer and 3DNow! is floating-point: it's effectively a floating-point extension to MMX. A K6-2 could do two single precision floating point adds and multiplications in parallel using 3DNow! (4 operations). It can also do fast single-precision square roots and reciprocation.
Intel never implemented 3DNow! but came up with SSE which uses a whole new bank of registers (and different instructions) which required OSes to be modified. Up until very recently on intel processors, SSE instructions (which operate on 4 single-precision floats) took two clock cycles to execute! Much slower than 3DNow!...
SSE2 extended SSE to double-precision floating point. All AMD processors since the Opteron and all intel processors since the Pentium IV implement SSE2.
Subsequent SSEs appear every so often to add new instructions, but they never went passed double-precision.
Now, UltraSPARC, which came out in 1995-1996 can do quad-precision floating-point in hardware...
Have you seen ITV news recently? It's like a cross between the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Heat Magazine.
The BBC1 news is going the same way. The only TV news I watch now is Channel 4 News. Channel 4, although partly commercial is a public service broadcaster so its news tends to be reasonably independent.
because I sure as hell don't know who TD is or care
But he says "F***" in public on the intertubes and so he must have a large amount of courage and really know his own mind. He probably already drives a BMW and is fighting off hordes of gorgeous young women with an excrement-covered stick as we speak.
Programmers have been using 64bit programming for a long time. Use an __int64 in Visual Studio 6 and it ends up using the EAX and EDX registers to get the number of bits.
News just in: Primary school children around the world are being taught how to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication - and even division - on numbers with more than one decimal digit.
This radical new scientific advancement known as "long arithmetic" is set to take the world by storm. Researchers at the Cleverest Computer Science Company in the World, Microsoft, think that this principle could be applied to digital computers.
To quote Bill Gates, cleverest man ever, "On the Innernet we think that this new technology which Microsoft has innovated for our customers has great potential to drive world economies, cure poverty and disease and our children are the future. What I have done is to treat each byte or 32-bit word like a decimal digit and add them up in pairs from the smallest, carrying over anything left to the next pair of 32-bit values. You can use it on 64-bit computers too, but out customers are telling us they don't need those for another five or six years yet at least."
In that case, it's a colossal marketing blunder. You don't sell/drive adoption of a product by mimicking look and feel of a competitor, you got to create a distinct brand image and say that youth is better.
Troll, but I'll bite.
Linux is a kernel. You, the user, don't see it. You see the desktop environment running on the top of the whole software stack which sits upon the Linux kernel.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions out there and most of them have KDE or GNOME as their desktop environments by default, depending on which one you choose. The great thing is, it is always possible, and often quite easy, for a user to install or to select a different desktop environment, or even just a window manager, if they like.
Back in the 90's, before my beard went grey, the big issue for Linux (and hence other free and commercial unixes) was the desktop environment. Most people in the world who had used a computer had only ever seen Windows. Therefore, to make Linux (and *BSD etc.) more palatable to the non-computer literate masses, some kind of environment similar to Windows was needed. KDE and GNOME were born. They were superior to the Windows UI in many ways and the competition forced improvements from Microsoft.
These environments helped commercial Linux distributions (RedHat, SuSE) get a foothold in the conservative corporate world. Heck, I use RHEL ever day at work for software development.
There is no Linux brand image. Linux is a kernel. It is the basis of many Operating Systems i.e. Linux distributions. They all have there own brand images. This diversity and choice is wonderful.
You can't expect to apply the same marketing and branding standards to the Linux ecosystem as you do to commercial proprietary operating systems and companies such as Microsoft and Windows.
I have been using Slackware since I started with Linux in 1995. I had a brief detour to Slamd64 until Slackware64 came out. I have developed for Solaris and Linux. I have used RedHat, debian, Solaris x86 and SPARC, NetBSD and FreeBSD. My desktop has WindowMaker on it. Years ago I put WindowMaker in Solaris. I was recently sing FluxBox on Slamd64. Back in the day I used BlackBox and before that the OpenLook Virtual Window Manager. I've played with Enlightenment, KDE and GNOME (when they were in alpha), XFce, GNUstep.... and I suffer with Windows on my desktop PeeCee at work on a daily basis.
Thank goodness the Linux world isn't in a corporate branding straight-jacket like Microsoft and Apple. I like my choice. The diversity and innovation is there, but you've got to look for it. If you can't be bothered to use google, you won't find it. And if you don't know how to install and remove packages on your distribution at least, you won't be using any of it.
As for branding, let me restate: that's what RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu are for.
i digress. however, i'm just saying there's nothing wrong with firefox incorporating the ribbon bar.
People used to complain that "Linux" (i.e. the desktop) was too unfamiliar (unlike Windows) therefore should be avoided. The commercial distributions and unix companies like Sun spent a lot of time and money making first class desktop environments that would be familiar and easy to use by Windows users. It worked. Look at how successful Ubuntu has been as a result.
As for the ribbon in Firefox, that has nothing to do with Linux. Firefox is a cross-platform web browser. Linux is a kernel. If they put the ribbon in Firefox I'll be switching browsers. In fact, I might do that now so I can help with bug reports and fixes to whatever I switch to.
Running Slackware64 13.0 with WindowMaker here (sometimes FluxBox). Scares Windows people like yourself, but it does come with KDE if you are that way inclined.
See, most popular Linux distros "look like Windows", i.e. come with KDE or GNOME as the default desktop to appeal to the Windows crowd, to make them feel at home, so that their learning curve isn't too steep.
However, their is a vast choice of desktop environments (e.g. KDE, GNOME, XFCe, GNUstep) and window managers so you get you use the one you like best rather than the single one that the OS vendor thinks you should be using.
I like the choice. Most people don't and they are quite welcome to stay with Windows or Mac OS X if that's what floats their boats.
Windows doesn't float mine, so I'll stick to Slackware Linux and Slamd64. I won't tell you what you should and shouldn't use. That's your choice. It's entirely your own business, not mine.
This is indicative of a greater problem in the world economy. There are so few people that actually produce anything anymore (whether it's a machinist making engine blocks or a guitar player making music), that a huge chunk of the economy revolves around being a middle man.
Sun tacitly admitted back in 2004 that conventional UltraSPARC CPUs were dead when it did the deal with Fujitsu to use SPARC64 and killed Millennium aka UltraSPARC V. Sun wanted to concentrate on more novel designs such as Niagara, which has been pretty successful, and ROCK which was a dud it would seem.
The Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs are pretty competitive with IBM POWER and intel x86-64. Forget itanic. It's dead. Fujistu has always made some pretty impressive SPARC CPUs. They've always been enthusiastic about SPARC and seem to do a better job than Sun. I remember back in the 80s when Fujistu had a 32-bit SPARC implementation that was the first CPU to average more than one instruction per clock cycle (it was superscalar).
Before the Sun/Fujitsu deal, Sun restricted the versions of Solaris that you could get on high-end Fujitsu boxes to at least one generation behind what it was shipping on its UltraSPARC systems. Presumably this was to make UltraSPARC more attractive. For example, you could buy a big UltraSPARC IV system with Solaris 9, but you could only get Solaris 8 on an equivalent Fujitsu SPARC64 box. Obviously, if you could have bought the SPARC64 box with Solaris 9, you wouldn't have wanted the UltraSPARC IV box...
Given the vast quantity of content, I seriously doubt that very many people go through any sort of hassle to determine what is legit and what is not, which results in virtually everyone obtaining material that is copyrighted, regardless whether they know (or care).
Copyrighted != illegal to download.
The license determines whether it is legal to download/upload/share etc. not the copyright.
Can we please start being more clear about this. Then we can have a sensible discussion.
People on welfare have all the spare minutes in the world. Why aren't they bettering themselves?
People on "welfare" include the badly mentally and physically disabled, the sick, the dying, the frail, etc.
Not everyone is a capitalist powerhouse able to toil relentlessly for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week for a pittance to put a manky, dilapidated roof over their head and moldy bread in their mouth.
At least in a civillised country, these people will be fed, housed, clothed and probably cared for medically at some reasonable minimum level.
Thankfully, we all don't aspire to being American. You can keep your Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. I hope you enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it. America's losing its balls.
This insanity got modded +5 insightful. Luckily this is only slashdot, or I'd be worried for the future of humanity.
By your reasoning, why not remove any pretense of manned space flight being a return trip? Why not save a whole lot of dollars and leave the astronauts to die in space, or to burn up on reentry? It would make the engineering so much simpler and think of the weight savings to be made by not including heat shields and parachutes!
After all: It amazes me that this is a serious concern. There IS a price for manned spaceflight and if it goes too high, it's over. Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
I know you'd be first in line to volunteer, cowboy!
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
No it doesn't.
It raises the bar for competition. It allows everyone to start from a more advanced position, the whole "Shoulders of Giants" thing.
We are very lucky to live in a world with GPL software. The GPL has succeeded in allowing real progress to flourish where monopolies have stifled progress in an unregulated "free" market.
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back.
The double-speak of a Microsoft apologist.
Hardly new terminology. I have issues of Phrack from over a decade ago that discuss shellcode.
Well, I still consider a kilobyte to be 1024 bytes and I've never heard of "shellcode."
At first sight, I thought this had something to do with lusers downloading and running (as root) malicious sh scripts.
What is "shell code" supposed to be? Bourne shell scripts?
Someone had to ask it!
From the wikipedia: In computer security, a shellcode is a small piece of code used as the payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability. It is called "shellcode" because it typically starts a command shell from which the attacker can control the compromised machine. Shellcode is commonly written in machine code, but any piece of code that performs a similar task can be called shellcode. Because the function of a payload is not limited to merely spawning a shell, some have suggested that the name shellcode is insufficient.[1] However, attempts at replacing the term have not gained wide acceptance.
So it's a poor piece of new terminology that has stuck, unfortunately.
When a computer develops a mind of it's own in a logical manner it's starting to reach the human level and we can start to discuss if it's primitive or not. If it starts to reproduce on it's own it's time to be careful.
That's not directly related to computing power per se. A computer 100 000 000 times as powerful as today's, running today's software will still not have developed a mind of its own. It'll just be very, very fast indeed.
Around this time they created an instruction extension called 3D-Now that did what MMX did and accelerated video.
The AMD K6 (bought in from NexGen) had MMX. (MMX uses the integrated x87 floating point register file for backwards compatibility with existing OSes). The K6-2 introduced 3DNow!. MMX is integer and 3DNow! is floating-point: it's effectively a floating-point extension to MMX. A K6-2 could do two single precision floating point adds and multiplications in parallel using 3DNow! (4 operations). It can also do fast single-precision square roots and reciprocation.
Intel never implemented 3DNow! but came up with SSE which uses a whole new bank of registers (and different instructions) which required OSes to be modified. Up until very recently on intel processors, SSE instructions (which operate on 4 single-precision floats) took two clock cycles to execute! Much slower than 3DNow!...
SSE2 extended SSE to double-precision floating point. All AMD processors since the Opteron and all intel processors since the Pentium IV implement SSE2.
Subsequent SSEs appear every so often to add new instructions, but they never went passed double-precision.
Now, UltraSPARC, which came out in 1995-1996 can do quad-precision floating-point in hardware...
Since when is drug legalization seriously discussed?
*cough*
You might want to ask the British government.
You'll be waiting a long time, I believe.
Have you seen ITV news recently? It's like a cross between the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Heat Magazine.
The BBC1 news is going the same way. The only TV news I watch now is Channel 4 News. Channel 4, although partly commercial is a public service broadcaster so its news tends to be reasonably independent.
The best news is on Radio 4 twice a day.
That sounds like marketing-speak. That's the whole point of preemptively scheduled native threads.
GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores
Been there, done that on Solaris and Linux 10 years ago in plain old C. No magic required, just
and away you go. In fact, I spent an hour one day writing some C to automatically multi-thread those embarrassingly parallel array operations.
man 3 pthread_create - the world is your lobster.
because I sure as hell don't know who TD is or care
But he says "F***" in public on the intertubes and so he must have a large amount of courage and really know his own mind. He probably already drives a BMW and is fighting off hordes of gorgeous young women with an excrement-covered stick as we speak.
Wouldn't we all want to be this dude?
Programmers have been using 64bit programming for a long time. Use an __int64 in Visual Studio 6 and it ends up using the EAX and EDX registers to get the number of bits.
News just in: Primary school children around the world are being taught how to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication - and even division - on numbers with more than one decimal digit.
This radical new scientific advancement known as "long arithmetic" is set to take the world by storm. Researchers at the Cleverest Computer Science Company in the World, Microsoft, think that this principle could be applied to digital computers.
To quote Bill Gates, cleverest man ever, "On the Innernet we think that this new technology which Microsoft has innovated for our customers has great potential to drive world economies, cure poverty and disease and our children are the future. What I have done is to treat each byte or 32-bit word like a decimal digit and add them up in pairs from the smallest, carrying over anything left to the next pair of 32-bit values. You can use it on 64-bit computers too, but out customers are telling us they don't need those for another five or six years yet at least."
More exciting news from Microsoft tomorrow.
Even with a passport you can't now leave without informing the Government in advance, even if you own a small boat.
Is that true? When did that happen? Is this the Peoples' Democratic Republic of England now or something?
My only hope is to move to Scotland and fight for independence.
If only there were decent jobs up there I'd move back, but I can't afford to.
would you drive on a bridge that only went 99% of the way across?
If the missing 1% were of the order of one centimetre, I might.
I use X for multiplexing xterms. Menus are too slow. The simpler the environment, the better.
In that case, it's a colossal marketing blunder. You don't sell/drive adoption of a product by mimicking look and feel of a competitor, you got to create a distinct brand image and say that youth is better.
Troll, but I'll bite.
Linux is a kernel. You, the user, don't see it. You see the desktop environment running on the top of the whole software stack which sits upon the Linux kernel.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions out there and most of them have KDE or GNOME as their desktop environments by default, depending on which one you choose. The great thing is, it is always possible, and often quite easy, for a user to install or to select a different desktop environment, or even just a window manager, if they like.
Back in the 90's, before my beard went grey, the big issue for Linux (and hence other free and commercial unixes) was the desktop environment. Most people in the world who had used a computer had only ever seen Windows. Therefore, to make Linux (and *BSD etc.) more palatable to the non-computer literate masses, some kind of environment similar to Windows was needed. KDE and GNOME were born. They were superior to the Windows UI in many ways and the competition forced improvements from Microsoft.
These environments helped commercial Linux distributions (RedHat, SuSE) get a foothold in the conservative corporate world. Heck, I use RHEL ever day at work for software development.
There is no Linux brand image. Linux is a kernel. It is the basis of many Operating Systems i.e. Linux distributions. They all have there own brand images. This diversity and choice is wonderful.
You can't expect to apply the same marketing and branding standards to the Linux ecosystem as you do to commercial proprietary operating systems and companies such as Microsoft and Windows.
I have been using Slackware since I started with Linux in 1995. I had a brief detour to Slamd64 until Slackware64 came out. I have developed for Solaris and Linux. I have used RedHat, debian, Solaris x86 and SPARC, NetBSD and FreeBSD. My desktop has WindowMaker on it. Years ago I put WindowMaker in Solaris. I was recently sing FluxBox on Slamd64. Back in the day I used BlackBox and before that the OpenLook Virtual Window Manager. I've played with Enlightenment, KDE and GNOME (when they were in alpha), XFce, GNUstep.... and I suffer with Windows on my desktop PeeCee at work on a daily basis.
Thank goodness the Linux world isn't in a corporate branding straight-jacket like Microsoft and Apple. I like my choice. The diversity and innovation is there, but you've got to look for it. If you can't be bothered to use google, you won't find it. And if you don't know how to install and remove packages on your distribution at least, you won't be using any of it.
As for branding, let me restate: that's what RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu are for.
i digress. however, i'm just saying there's nothing wrong with firefox incorporating the ribbon bar.
People used to complain that "Linux" (i.e. the desktop) was too unfamiliar (unlike Windows) therefore should be avoided. The commercial distributions and unix companies like Sun spent a lot of time and money making first class desktop environments that would be familiar and easy to use by Windows users. It worked. Look at how successful Ubuntu has been as a result.
As for the ribbon in Firefox, that has nothing to do with Linux. Firefox is a cross-platform web browser. Linux is a kernel. If they put the ribbon in Firefox I'll be switching browsers. In fact, I might do that now so I can help with bug reports and fixes to whatever I switch to.
Slackware comes with seamonkey...
so why does all linux distro look like windows?
Running Slackware64 13.0 with WindowMaker here (sometimes FluxBox). Scares Windows people like yourself, but it does come with KDE if you are that way inclined.
See, most popular Linux distros "look like Windows", i.e. come with KDE or GNOME as the default desktop to appeal to the Windows crowd, to make them feel at home, so that their learning curve isn't too steep.
However, their is a vast choice of desktop environments (e.g. KDE, GNOME, XFCe, GNUstep) and window managers so you get you use the one you like best rather than the single one that the OS vendor thinks you should be using.
I like the choice. Most people don't and they are quite welcome to stay with Windows or Mac OS X if that's what floats their boats.
Windows doesn't float mine, so I'll stick to Slackware Linux and Slamd64. I won't tell you what you should and shouldn't use. That's your choice. It's entirely your own business, not mine.
This is indicative of a greater problem in the world economy. There are so few people that actually produce anything anymore (whether it's a machinist making engine blocks or a guitar player making music), that a huge chunk of the economy revolves around being a middle man.
Highly insightful.
There's never enough time to correct all the idiots in the world. They are simply too great in number and proliferate too quickly.
Indeed.
Sun tacitly admitted back in 2004 that conventional UltraSPARC CPUs were dead when it did the deal with Fujitsu to use SPARC64 and killed Millennium aka UltraSPARC V. Sun wanted to concentrate on more novel designs such as Niagara, which has been pretty successful, and ROCK which was a dud it would seem.
The Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs are pretty competitive with IBM POWER and intel x86-64. Forget itanic. It's dead. Fujistu has always made some pretty impressive SPARC CPUs. They've always been enthusiastic about SPARC and seem to do a better job than Sun. I remember back in the 80s when Fujistu had a 32-bit SPARC implementation that was the first CPU to average more than one instruction per clock cycle (it was superscalar).
Before the Sun/Fujitsu deal, Sun restricted the versions of Solaris that you could get on high-end Fujitsu boxes to at least one generation behind what it was shipping on its UltraSPARC systems. Presumably this was to make UltraSPARC more attractive. For example, you could buy a big UltraSPARC IV system with Solaris 9, but you could only get Solaris 8 on an equivalent Fujitsu SPARC64 box. Obviously, if you could have bought the SPARC64 box with Solaris 9, you wouldn't have wanted the UltraSPARC IV box...
Yes, of course they will. The world is full of pointy hairs and other stupid people.
If the number of Microsoft apologists on slashdot over the last couple of years is anything to go by, Microsoft has got it made.
Microsoft has cornered the PC, netbook, PDA, mobile phone, server, mainframe, education, business and now the "Open Source" markets.
It's game over for everyone else.
If you want a "stable ABI" commit to a particular version of Red Hat, Ubuntu or SuSE. Or get Solaris.
Given the vast quantity of content, I seriously doubt that very many people go through any sort of hassle to determine what is legit and what is not, which results in virtually everyone obtaining material that is copyrighted, regardless whether they know (or care).
Copyrighted != illegal to download.
The license determines whether it is legal to download/upload/share etc. not the copyright.
Can we please start being more clear about this. Then we can have a sensible discussion.
Yeah, well, I'm having a few bad days, so I'm having a good rant here!!!
People on welfare have all the spare minutes in the world. Why aren't they bettering themselves?
People on "welfare" include the badly mentally and physically disabled, the sick, the dying, the frail, etc.
Not everyone is a capitalist powerhouse able to toil relentlessly for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week for a pittance to put a manky, dilapidated roof over their head and moldy bread in their mouth.
At least in a civillised country, these people will be fed, housed, clothed and probably cared for medically at some reasonable minimum level.
Thankfully, we all don't aspire to being American. You can keep your Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. I hope you enjoy it.