A floating point bug is one thing. A bug that creates an exploitable security hole is something very different.
And no. I seriously doubt that every modern processor has a known security problem in its hardware. For me, the Intel processors mentioned in that errata Theo made some noises a couple days ago are out of question on any critical activities for now.
So, I suppose you will blame the BIOS or the OS or anything _but_ _your_choice_ of CPUs when the security-related bugs that promise to allow any script kid to compromise your servers in unprecedented ways are exploited.
For me, choosing any CPU that has known security bugs to be used on any connected computer is reason enough to be fired.
So, products imported from any theocracy should be taxed, say, 500%.
Better yet, there should be a table all countries should agree upon with cumulative taxations for multiple violations.
Theocracy: 500% Other less-than-democratic regime: 200% Waging wars of aggression: 200% Genocide and other atrocities: 150% Other human-rights violations (including health issues): 100% Lack of effective freedom of press: 100% Other violations of civil liberties: 100% Bad distribution of wealth: 75% Having the same president for two consecutive terms: 50%
I like the idea.;-)
And, BTW, I hate not being able to build a table here.
IIRC, there is some questioning going on about the pollution generated by nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. Truly nasty stuff comes out from them.
So, unless we are talking about nuclear fusion, we still have problems. Different ones, perhaps. Less immediate ones, certainly, but still quite a few of them.
But I agree on something: bio-fuels are more on the carbon neutral side (no more increases in atmospheric CO2), but we really need carbon-negative power sources if we are to undo the mistakes we have been doing since some fellow had the bright idea of burning fossil fuels. Maybe we should start burying huge amounts of waste carbon to make it unlikely it gets back to the atmosphere anytime in the next million years.
And it's not like "it's economically unfeasible" when it comes to the survival of our species.
"Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us"
Right now and until your current president steps down, it means just about every country. I can separate a really bad presidency from a so-so people I happen to like, but most people around the globe can't, won't or are politically manipulated not to do so.
On the bright side, things are likely to improve. As lousy as a next presidency can be, it can't possibly be worse than the current one (or I will be sadly disappointed on you, people). As about half mankind grew up watching the current one, anything seems destined to look better.
So, you are trying to tell us you precisely mistyped an "m" between tho "e"s (quite far from the "m") and a spacebar (closer to the "m" but usually activated by a different finger), forming the word "methanol" instead of "ethanol", and thus making us all believe you don't know the difference between them.
We are sorry to underestimate your knowledge on the subject in such an unfair way.
"No one is switching to Solaris, because Solaris is dying, if not dead already. The only reason why Sun has opened it up is because they're desperate. Their expensive hardware has been replaced with commodity components, and their expensive OS has been replaced with one that costs nothing to aquire, Linux"
I am not sure how you got that impression, but Solaris is still a very interesting choice in operating systems. ZFS is amazing and it handles heavy loads much, much better than Linux does. And, in case you haven't noticed, Sun sells both SPARC and x86 systems these days and the Niagara-based servers are incredibly effective in several throughput scenarios.
"You conclusion doesn't follow, since both BSD and GPL provide efficiency by leveraging the Bazaar as ESR called it."
Right. That's why there is so much going on in BSD-based systems and so little going around GPL-based ones. BSD creates a perverse incentive for corporations to take someone's code and run (Microsoft, remember?) while GPL does not allow that. Don't get confused about how good the hearts of Red Hat and Novell are - they are not. They are only kept honest _because_ of GPL.
"Yeah, and RMS writes 1500 LOCs a day."
I gather that, as a true LISP hacker, RMS can achieve much more per LOC than Linus ever will.;-)
"Isn't that all RMS does? And even more to the point, what you're doing?"
Personal attacks won't bring us a healthy discussion.
"Now run along and file your bug report against the Linux kernel for using bitkeeper"
BSD-type licenses would have never created the fertile ground where Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva and Canonical now thrive.
If you can remember the balkanization of the Unix OS, it's quite obvious each BSD vendor would have made their modifications and kept them for themselves, creating a bunch of increasingly incompatible operating systems and kernels not unlike what existed before the GPL-powered Linux ecosystem. The GPL is what ties them together and what makes egoistical corporations cooperate in a civilized fashion.
And I guess you think we should leave politics to politicians, as we all know their conducts have been irreproachable.
Seriously, if people don't speak up for their ideals, who will speak for them?
Linus disagrees with the directions of GPL3 and, perhaps, gets a little too much carried away in that, but I think this is a debatable point. I always prefer hardware I can modify and I have so many issues with DRM being used by totalitarian states (remember how the broadcast flag can be misused) to control what people store and, consequently, remember.
Perhaps Linus is not as paranoid as I am. Perhaps he is right.
So, if there needs to be another kernel that is GPL3-compatible, let that be my kernel of choice when I move away from Linux.
I am pretty sure suggesting a revolution or anything similar would qualify someone as a terrorist under the Patriot Act or some other law that may be passed under the same spirit.
Despite that, revolutions have a pretty high probability to go awfully wrong. Just because one went right doesn't guarantee the next will.
You know the drill - register as a voter and mobilize your community (visit your neighbors, propose meetings and other forms of discussion where you can explore your differences and inform yourselves about all candidates) so everyone in it can and will exercise their right - and duty - to vote well.
"I must however add that CUPS has always been a torture to get working. (How do YOU add a local printer to the local setup using only the Web intardface ? Answer : either you use that http service to hack into your own machine, or you start a terminal and type sudo vim/etc/cups/cups.conf. Then you pray, read the Bible (man cups.conf) and get to work. Maybe someday your prints will come..."
I don't know what you have been using, but I use CUPS under Ubuntu and it has proven over and over again to be remarkably simple to set-up.
Last time I had to do it, it even located my networked HP printer all by itself and set it up for me. It can't be much more painless than that.
As if the CUPS stuff changes license to, say, something GPL-hostile, we can always fork it and keep it GPL2. Forever.
I know there is no Java on the iPhone. But are you sure about the applications on the iPhone being an entirely different thing from the widgets on Dashboard? That seems to be mostly the reason for porting Safari to Windows - to enable windows vict^H^H^H^Husers to develop and test web-applications that can run on the iPhone. Unless I am terribly wrong, Dashboard widgets are mostly composed of HTML, JavaScript and, on occasion, some Java and run on the same engine Safari runs.
With 500 GB of data on a single package one could use a whole lot more space for data-correction, data-redundancy and so on. So, if you scratch it really bad, then you have a problem. otherwise, it may read a little bit slower and warn you of data errors.;-)
But 500 GB does not look like much. Unless the disc is really cheap, I would prefer the data stored in a disk array of 1 TB hard-drives.
I can see a couple million iPhone users outraged by this revelation.
Just imagine... They can't write their own YouTube viewer...
To be fair, almost all applications I run on my phone can be easily materialized in form of web applications. Even the ones I developed use mostly HTTP calls to bring data to the screen. And they were designed this way to be ajax-ready. They should be trivial to port to widgets that could run on the iPhone.
I see no big problem apart from having to port some Java code to a different platform.
And, with the instant benefit of allowing MacOS desktop users to access the same applications from their Macs.
How much effort would it take to build a dashboard-widget runner on top of KHTML? As a Linux user, I would love it.
"There is nothing stopping you from installing your own certificate or disabling the application certificate checking altogether on Windows Mobile Smartphone. For full-blown Windows Mobile PDAs with touchscreens, this is simply not a problem."
You can probably do so with a cleverly crafted MMS, Bluetooth handshake or GIF image.
"Well, the brand name certainly helped, but so did Lotus 123, WordStar, MultiMate, WordPerfect, dBase, etc. At almost any point in the 80's, the most desirable business software was available for the PC and not the Apple II. Obviously, it quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation but software played a critical role in the PC's dominance right from the beginning (not that I'm happy about it)."
It could have been the actions from both Intel (who made the 8086/88 backwards-assembly-compatible with the 8080 - 8080 asm source was legal 8086 asm source) and Microsoft (who made MS-DOS notoriously easy to migrate from CP/M) that made it easy to port CP/M applications to the IBM PC. IIRC, from the list you mention, only 123 was PC-only and the others were introduced before on CP/M.
And, of course, the 6502 in the Apple II, while seemingly fast enough for most stuff (an original IBM PC is infuriatingly slow) had a hard 64K memory limitation (the 8088 while using a horrible page/offset mechanism, could use a lot more memory). In the end, the 65816 did not arrive soon enough to save the II.
Slashdot Mirror
"Would have loved to see a G6 pwn Intel and AMD"
If you are thinking about floating point performance, it does. It's not called G6 - we call it Cell.
A floating point bug is one thing. A bug that creates an exploitable security hole is something very different.
And no. I seriously doubt that every modern processor has a known security problem in its hardware. For me, the Intel processors mentioned in that errata Theo made some noises a couple days ago are out of question on any critical activities for now.
So, I suppose you will blame the BIOS or the OS or anything _but_ _your_choice_ of CPUs when the security-related bugs that promise to allow any script kid to compromise your servers in unprecedented ways are exploited.
For me, choosing any CPU that has known security bugs to be used on any connected computer is reason enough to be fired.
Careful. You are mixing fuel with fertilizer in the same post. Please do not smoke next to it.
So, products imported from any theocracy should be taxed, say, 500%.
;-)
Better yet, there should be a table all countries should agree upon with cumulative taxations for multiple violations.
Theocracy: 500%
Other less-than-democratic regime: 200%
Waging wars of aggression: 200%
Genocide and other atrocities: 150%
Other human-rights violations (including health issues): 100%
Lack of effective freedom of press: 100%
Other violations of civil liberties: 100%
Bad distribution of wealth: 75%
Having the same president for two consecutive terms: 50%
I like the idea.
And, BTW, I hate not being able to build a table here.
IIRC, there is some questioning going on about the pollution generated by nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. Truly nasty stuff comes out from them.
So, unless we are talking about nuclear fusion, we still have problems. Different ones, perhaps. Less immediate ones, certainly, but still quite a few of them.
But I agree on something: bio-fuels are more on the carbon neutral side (no more increases in atmospheric CO2), but we really need carbon-negative power sources if we are to undo the mistakes we have been doing since some fellow had the bright idea of burning fossil fuels. Maybe we should start burying huge amounts of waste carbon to make it unlikely it gets back to the atmosphere anytime in the next million years.
And it's not like "it's economically unfeasible" when it comes to the survival of our species.
"Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us"
Right now and until your current president steps down, it means just about every country. I can separate a really bad presidency from a so-so people I happen to like, but most people around the globe can't, won't or are politically manipulated not to do so.
On the bright side, things are likely to improve. As lousy as a next presidency can be, it can't possibly be worse than the current one (or I will be sadly disappointed on you, people). As about half mankind grew up watching the current one, anything seems destined to look better.
"There's no need to be snide over a typo"
So, you are trying to tell us you precisely mistyped an "m" between tho "e"s (quite far from the "m") and a spacebar (closer to the "m" but usually activated by a different finger), forming the word "methanol" instead of "ethanol", and thus making us all believe you don't know the difference between them.
We are sorry to underestimate your knowledge on the subject in such an unfair way.
"No one is switching to Solaris, because Solaris is dying, if not dead already. The only reason why Sun has opened it up is because they're desperate. Their expensive hardware has been replaced with commodity components, and their expensive OS has been replaced with one that costs nothing to aquire, Linux"
;-)
I am not sure how you got that impression, but Solaris is still a very interesting choice in operating systems. ZFS is amazing and it handles heavy loads much, much better than Linux does. And, in case you haven't noticed, Sun sells both SPARC and x86 systems these days and the Niagara-based servers are incredibly effective in several throughput scenarios.
"You conclusion doesn't follow, since both BSD and GPL provide efficiency by leveraging the Bazaar as ESR called it."
Right. That's why there is so much going on in BSD-based systems and so little going around GPL-based ones. BSD creates a perverse incentive for corporations to take someone's code and run (Microsoft, remember?) while GPL does not allow that. Don't get confused about how good the hearts of Red Hat and Novell are - they are not. They are only kept honest _because_ of GPL.
"Yeah, and RMS writes 1500 LOCs a day."
I gather that, as a true LISP hacker, RMS can achieve much more per LOC than Linus ever will.
"Isn't that all RMS does? And even more to the point, what you're doing?"
Personal attacks won't bring us a healthy discussion.
"Now run along and file your bug report against the Linux kernel for using bitkeeper"
They run Git now. Oh... And, BTW, Git is GPL.
BSD-type licenses would have never created the fertile ground where Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva and Canonical now thrive.
If you can remember the balkanization of the Unix OS, it's quite obvious each BSD vendor would have made their modifications and kept them for themselves, creating a bunch of increasingly incompatible operating systems and kernels not unlike what existed before the GPL-powered Linux ecosystem. The GPL is what ties them together and what makes egoistical corporations cooperate in a civilized fashion.
And I guess you think we should leave politics to politicians, as we all know their conducts have been irreproachable.
Seriously, if people don't speak up for their ideals, who will speak for them?
Linus disagrees with the directions of GPL3 and, perhaps, gets a little too much carried away in that, but I think this is a debatable point. I always prefer hardware I can modify and I have so many issues with DRM being used by totalitarian states (remember how the broadcast flag can be misused) to control what people store and, consequently, remember.
Perhaps Linus is not as paranoid as I am. Perhaps he is right.
So, if there needs to be another kernel that is GPL3-compatible, let that be my kernel of choice when I move away from Linux.
It is, after all, just a kernel.
It certainly seems they did their homework.
It's too bad that any government that deserves to be overthrown will do away with this inconvenient law as soon as possible.
But... Is it serious? A law like this wouldn't last long these days...
I think armed revolt usually comes after the revolted people has already given up on that law thing.
I am pretty sure suggesting a revolution or anything similar would qualify someone as a terrorist under the Patriot Act or some other law that may be passed under the same spirit.
Despite that, revolutions have a pretty high probability to go awfully wrong. Just because one went right doesn't guarantee the next will.
You know the drill - register as a voter and mobilize your community (visit your neighbors, propose meetings and other forms of discussion where you can explore your differences and inform yourselves about all candidates) so everyone in it can and will exercise their right - and duty - to vote well.
It's your country and your laws. Take them back.
"I must however add that CUPS has always been a torture to get working. (How do YOU add a local printer to the local setup using only the Web intardface ? Answer : either you use that http service to hack into your own machine, or you start a terminal and type sudo vim /etc/cups/cups.conf. Then you pray, read the Bible (man cups.conf) and get to work. Maybe someday your prints will come..."
I don't know what you have been using, but I use CUPS under Ubuntu and it has proven over and over again to be remarkably simple to set-up.
Last time I had to do it, it even located my networked HP printer all by itself and set it up for me. It can't be much more painless than that.
As if the CUPS stuff changes license to, say, something GPL-hostile, we can always fork it and keep it GPL2. Forever.
I would like to add:
"after all, this is not Digg."
It's just you.
The PS2 continues to sell extremely well and continues to be a major revenue driver.
You don't really want to have the most GFLOPS/polygons/texels per second videogame. What you want is to have the most profitable one.
Yeah... Right...
Just try to pull that off with flight control, nuclear facility operation or something equally critical.
"Geez, chief. Dunno what happened. The software said we could remove the moderator bars safely"
or
"How come we crashed the plane? The navigation software assured us the mountains were 1.6 miles to the left!"
This is getting increasingly Digg-like...
I know there is no Java on the iPhone. But are you sure about the applications on the iPhone being an entirely different thing from the widgets on Dashboard? That seems to be mostly the reason for porting Safari to Windows - to enable windows vict^H^H^H^Husers to develop and test web-applications that can run on the iPhone. Unless I am terribly wrong, Dashboard widgets are mostly composed of HTML, JavaScript and, on occasion, some Java and run on the same engine Safari runs.
With 500 GB of data on a single package one could use a whole lot more space for data-correction, data-redundancy and so on. So, if you scratch it really bad, then you have a problem. otherwise, it may read a little bit slower and warn you of data errors. ;-)
But 500 GB does not look like much. Unless the disc is really cheap, I would prefer the data stored in a disk array of 1 TB hard-drives.
I can see a couple million iPhone users outraged by this revelation.
Just imagine... They can't write their own YouTube viewer...
To be fair, almost all applications I run on my phone can be easily materialized in form of web applications. Even the ones I developed use mostly HTTP calls to bring data to the screen. And they were designed this way to be ajax-ready. They should be trivial to port to widgets that could run on the iPhone.
I see no big problem apart from having to port some Java code to a different platform.
And, with the instant benefit of allowing MacOS desktop users to access the same applications from their Macs.
How much effort would it take to build a dashboard-widget runner on top of KHTML? As a Linux user, I would love it.
"There is nothing stopping you from installing your own certificate or disabling the application certificate checking altogether on Windows Mobile Smartphone. For full-blown Windows Mobile PDAs with touchscreens, this is simply not a problem."
You can probably do so with a cleverly crafted MMS, Bluetooth handshake or GIF image.
Sorry... Couldn't resist.
I think he wanted to say something like "someone who thinkd a PC BIOS is a capable boot loader".
While it's a boot loader, it's a pretty brain dead one.
BTW, there is hope in the x86 world: the OLPC has a pretty decent one that reminded me of my Sun Ultra 1...
"Well, the brand name certainly helped, but so did Lotus 123, WordStar, MultiMate, WordPerfect, dBase, etc. At almost any point in the 80's, the most desirable business software was available for the PC and not the Apple II. Obviously, it quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation but software played a critical role in the PC's dominance right from the beginning (not that I'm happy about it)."
It could have been the actions from both Intel (who made the 8086/88 backwards-assembly-compatible with the 8080 - 8080 asm source was legal 8086 asm source) and Microsoft (who made MS-DOS notoriously easy to migrate from CP/M) that made it easy to port CP/M applications to the IBM PC. IIRC, from the list you mention, only 123 was PC-only and the others were introduced before on CP/M.
And, of course, the 6502 in the Apple II, while seemingly fast enough for most stuff (an original IBM PC is infuriatingly slow) had a hard 64K memory limitation (the 8088 while using a horrible page/offset mechanism, could use a lot more memory). In the end, the 65816 did not arrive soon enough to save the II.