"Yes, we normally cover fire. However, we have clear indication that this particular fire was a punishment from God, and damages caused by acts of God are not covered."
Yeah, right. The only person that ended up wealthy was him - he sold the company, and the people that had worked to build it up got nothing, and had no recourse, as we had nothing in writing.
The latter was your real problem. Working for free to get more money later is no problem if you can afford it (and you don't expect the company to go bankrupt). Working for free without getting a written and signed agreement that you get more money later is.
> The problem is that his staff have been working unpaid in order for the company to recover.
But that's retarded. They had little reason to do that other than some profoundly misplaced loyalty - they're apparently employees not company partners? Of course I may not be getting the full story, but working for someone without being paid and without keeping the result of your work (i.e. open source, in fact the whole reason open source makes economic sense is because you keep the fruits of your labor and other people also having copies doesn't diminish that) is dumb.
Well, working for free does make sense if you expect to get the money later. Basically they've given the company a loan. It turned out the company owner was not credit-worthy, though.
With all the camera and video technologies coming out, I wouldn't be surprised if creating an exact digital replica in the future was as simple as putting a camera in front of a screen and loading in a "record video on a screen" app.
1. Find a small village where rooms are cheap. No one will want to go there, but that doesn't matter; you don't actually plan to sell much there anyway. 2. Rent a small room, and pay one employee to be there and sell. The selling happens to be just that if someone goes to him to buy, he orders the product online to the shop address, and then the person ordering it can fetch it there. You will not sell much this way (maybe a few items per year), but then, it's only to comply to the law. 3. Tell the regulators about this brick-and-mortar shop.
Yes, the electrons in an electrical wire are moving at the speed of light, but in all directions.
No. Electrons don't go at the speed of light. Indeed, they usually don't even go near the speed of light (except in accelerators). Even if you accelerate it from rest with a voltage of 1 kV, you're still only at about 6% of the speed of light.
Also, just to be extremely pedantic, electrons always travel at the speed of light, regardless of the medium.
Electrons never travel at the speed of light, regardless of the medium.
Google Global Government. Operating on the principle: One gmail adress, one vote. Getting candidate however is in perpetual beta and only available by invite.
Even with DC, at the time the ads would reach you, they would already be outdated. Electrons in electric wires quite literally move with the speed of a snail.
Will Google offer the energy free of cost? And how long until Google Energy gets out of beta? Will you initially need an invite?
Coupled with intelligent power management (where appliances communicate to optimize energy consumption), it could be a data miner's wet dream: Base the ads not only on what web pages you view, but also on what appliances you use when and how often. You use your washing machine a lot? Get lots of ads for washing agents. You watch TV a lot? Get ads for a new plasma TV. You use lots of kitchen machines? Get ads for cookbooks, ingredients for your cooking, kitchen knives, etc. Oh, and your health insurance might be interested in the fact that your lights are on during much of the night. You seem to have a very unhealthy lifestyle; your insurance rates unfortunately have to be increased...
3. Lawyers hate America, so they can claim anything, and also be WRONG. For example, the activist US Supreme Court claims that Corporations are People and have the same rights as Citizens, which no sane citizen agrees with.
Including voting for president? Or even being president?
Or did you mean a callback into the running app? No, there's no requirement on Windows for an application to define an interface (function) that the OS can call. That's what paging is there for.
I meant the latter. Especially with with garbage collected languages becoming widespread, I consider that a must. Imagine a Java program and another (non-Java) program running side by side. The Java program initially does some large allocations, which become garbage soon, but don't get collected by the Java VM because, after all, the Java program currently doesn't need the memory for anything else, and there's currently enough memory, no need to collect. Now the other program needs a larger amount of memory. But the memory is filled up with Java garbage, and the OS memory management of course has no clue that it's garbage (how could it, it's assigned to the JVM), and the JVM isn't informed that more memory is needed (that's what you said) and therefore cannot give the memory back, so the OS has no choice but to swap that memory out. In other words, it will waste a lot of time to write garbage to disk. Even worse, when the JVM later collects, it will force all that garbage into memory again (causing parts of the working set of the other program to be temporarily swapped out), just to collect it.
Or in short, the machine will slow down considerably just because it has to swap garbage out and back in, while the memory would have been sufficient if the JVM had just been informed that some program needs more memory.
I'm assuming you're joking, since I said nothing about amperage, and naturally if we're talking about an actual flip-flop unit in a stick of RAM, we're going to be talking about mA or even nA.
DRAM doesn't contain flip-flops. It contains capacitors. However I'm not sure how the number of ones and zeroes affects the power consumption of the refresh cycle. After all, an empty capacitor doesn't need to be refilled.
Well, it's easy to get wrong - and considering Windows is used by regular Joes, it's OK that task manager simplifies matters a bit instead of showing up pages of detailed information.
There's nothing wrong with simplifying. However, given that the simplifying is exactly for those who don't want to learn the details, the simplification should give them the information which is most useful to them, and will best fit their mental image. In this case, I think a better solution would be to count cached pages as "free" memory (because after all, your programs can allocate them). An alternative could be to count unmodified cached pages as "free" (because they can be disposed with little extra cost), but modified cached pages as "used" (because they need to be written out to disk, just like when swapping out pages in use by a program).
What if the programs don't "play nice" and refuse to release their RAM when it's needed? (i.e. Internet Explorer is storing a bunch of images you downloaded two days ago, and refuses to erase them from cache.) Wouldn't that force the OS to do HDD thrashing?
I understand that's not supposed to happen, but neither was Vista supposed to be a flop. I no longer trust MS to implement this stuff correctly.
Is there actually an interface in Windows to tell programs "I need more memory, please try to free some"?
OK, but buffer overflows are not visible to the customer. So probably the better analogy would be cars with locks which accept any key, not just yours. Have you ever tried to open your car with another key? I guess not. You simply trust that your car company did it right. And if they didn't do it right, you certainly would blame the car company for using insecure locks, not the customers for not checking that the locks really don't work with any keys.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, we normally cover fire. However, we have clear indication that this particular fire was a punishment from God, and damages caused by acts of God are not covered."
The latter was your real problem. Working for free to get more money later is no problem if you can afford it (and you don't expect the company to go bankrupt). Working for free without getting a written and signed agreement that you get more money later is.
> The problem is that his staff have been working unpaid in order for the company to recover.
But that's retarded. They had little reason to do that other than some profoundly misplaced loyalty - they're apparently employees not company partners? Of course I may not be getting the full story, but working for someone without being paid and without keeping the result of your work (i.e. open source, in fact the whole reason open source makes economic sense is because you keep the fruits of your labor and other people also having copies doesn't diminish that) is dumb.
Well, working for free does make sense if you expect to get the money later. Basically they've given the company a loan. It turned out the company owner was not credit-worthy, though.
It's not necessary to be perfect. It suffices to be close enough that no one notices the difference.
Note that all subsequent copies are perfect.
You think so?
1. Find a small village where rooms are cheap. No one will want to go there, but that doesn't matter; you don't actually plan to sell much there anyway.
2. Rent a small room, and pay one employee to be there and sell. The selling happens to be just that if someone goes to him to buy, he orders the product online to the shop address, and then the person ordering it can fetch it there. You will not sell much this way (maybe a few items per year), but then, it's only to comply to the law.
3. Tell the regulators about this brick-and-mortar shop.
No. Electrons don't go at the speed of light. Indeed, they usually don't even go near the speed of light (except in accelerators).
Even if you accelerate it from rest with a voltage of 1 kV, you're still only at about 6% of the speed of light.
Electrons never travel at the speed of light, regardless of the medium.
Maybe you mixed up electrons with photons?
Fat nerds are the root of all evil. Lol!
You mean people who are very interested in anything related to fat, to the point of neglecting everything else?
Well, if they come up with Google Final Storage ... for nuclear waste, not for data.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Remember that the Matrix was built as result of a war between humans and machines.
First Skynet, then Matrix.
Google Global Government.
Operating on the principle: One gmail adress, one vote.
Getting candidate however is in perpetual beta and only available by invite.
Even with DC, at the time the ads would reach you, they would already be outdated. Electrons in electric wires quite literally move with the speed of a snail.
Well, the day to be really concerned is when Google buys Skynet.
Will Google offer the energy free of cost? And how long until Google Energy gets out of beta? Will you initially need an invite?
Coupled with intelligent power management (where appliances communicate to optimize energy consumption), it could be a data miner's wet dream: Base the ads not only on what web pages you view, but also on what appliances you use when and how often. You use your washing machine a lot? Get lots of ads for washing agents. You watch TV a lot? Get ads for a new plasma TV. You use lots of kitchen machines? Get ads for cookbooks, ingredients for your cooking, kitchen knives, etc. Oh, and your health insurance might be interested in the fact that your lights are on during much of the night. You seem to have a very unhealthy lifestyle; your insurance rates unfortunately have to be increased ...
Including voting for president?
Or even being president?
Actually there is. In C it's malloc().
Or did you mean a callback into the running app? No, there's no requirement on Windows for an application to define an interface (function) that the OS can call. That's what paging is there for.
I meant the latter. Especially with with garbage collected languages becoming widespread, I consider that a must. Imagine a Java program and another (non-Java) program running side by side. The Java program initially does some large allocations, which become garbage soon, but don't get collected by the Java VM because, after all, the Java program currently doesn't need the memory for anything else, and there's currently enough memory, no need to collect. Now the other program needs a larger amount of memory. But the memory is filled up with Java garbage, and the OS memory management of course has no clue that it's garbage (how could it, it's assigned to the JVM), and the JVM isn't informed that more memory is needed (that's what you said) and therefore cannot give the memory back, so the OS has no choice but to swap that memory out. In other words, it will waste a lot of time to write garbage to disk. Even worse, when the JVM later collects, it will force all that garbage into memory again (causing parts of the working set of the other program to be temporarily swapped out), just to collect it.
Or in short, the machine will slow down considerably just because it has to swap garbage out and back in, while the memory would have been sufficient if the JVM had just been informed that some program needs more memory.
Except for people actively avoiding Google accounts.
No, Google is much bigger than telescreen. Telescreen is just 1984, but Google is 10^100.
They aim to make the Slashdot effect permanent? :-)
AFAIK strong cryptography is already forbidden in France.
DRAM doesn't contain flip-flops. It contains capacitors.
However I'm not sure how the number of ones and zeroes affects the power consumption of the refresh cycle. After all, an empty capacitor doesn't need to be refilled.
There's nothing wrong with simplifying. However, given that the simplifying is exactly for those who don't want to learn the details, the simplification should give them the information which is most useful to them, and will best fit their mental image. In this case, I think a better solution would be to count cached pages as "free" memory (because after all, your programs can allocate them). An alternative could be to count unmodified cached pages as "free" (because they can be disposed with little extra cost), but modified cached pages as "used" (because they need to be written out to disk, just like when swapping out pages in use by a program).
What if the programs don't "play nice" and refuse to release their RAM when it's needed? (i.e. Internet Explorer is storing a bunch of images you downloaded two days ago, and refuses to erase them from cache.) Wouldn't that force the OS to do HDD thrashing?
I understand that's not supposed to happen, but neither was Vista supposed to be a flop. I no longer trust MS to implement this stuff correctly.
Is there actually an interface in Windows to tell programs "I need more memory, please try to free some"?
Huh? I'm using Gnome all the time, and I cannot remember it crashing a single time.
OK, but buffer overflows are not visible to the customer. So probably the better analogy would be cars with locks which accept any key, not just yours. Have you ever tried to open your car with another key? I guess not. You simply trust that your car company did it right. And if they didn't do it right, you certainly would blame the car company for using insecure locks, not the customers for not checking that the locks really don't work with any keys.