I get how the Routing Information Service could help you send your Windows image to remote offices faster, but what does Gnu's graphical debugger have to do with installing windows across your enterprise?
> The flames were so intense that people in vehicles 50 feet away were melted.
Short term safety was my first question too, but when the Hindenburg exploded, the only people who died were those who jumped off the blimp. Hydrogen may burn fast, but how much more dangerous is it than gasoline?
A bigger question is long term safety. There are bound to be leaks. Does anyone know what hydrogen does if released into the atmosphere in large quantities*? At least CO2 is a someone significant naturally occurring component of the atmosphere.
* The answer is, in fact, no, we don't know what lots of hydrogen would do in the atmosphere. This concern was actually raised by a meteorologist I work with in a global warming discussion a few months back.
Considering the number of./ articles are repeats of old./ articles, you don't have to subscribe to see articles in the future, you just have to search the archives.:)
Posts (probably including this one) are even easier. Just scroll up.
From TFA: "'Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether,' Sen. Stevens said."
What? Why not? All modern operating systems come password protected (just log off and don't give your kid the password.), and it's a frickin' computer. There's no barrier for software vendors to write software that limits or prevents Internet access. What's your kid going to do, buy his own laptop that you don't know about, unplug your computer and hook his up to your router? That ability is a natural function of computers. TV, on the other hand, has only recently starting coming with technology to password protect specific channels, and I think that's usually only with the upgraded package from the cable provider.
Someone asked the Car Guys about this just last week to settle a bet. I wonder if that set off the lawsuit. Some people are so quick to call their lawyers. Anyway, Tom and Ray said that technically fuel did expand when warm, but they guessed that the temperature of fuel in a large underground tank didn't vary enough to make more than a fraction of a cent of difference per gallon. That sounded reasonable to me, since I can keep my house much cooler just by closing the curtains.
So, Oracle managed to have their systems (presumably running Oracle software) hacked while SAP is programmed by hackers capable of breaking in to a major corporate sites... Maybe it's just me, but I think I might be more inclined to trust my business's data to SAP (assuming they're on my side, of course).
Did anyone else read this headline and say "well of course they don't care if they're destroying Linux. In fact, they'd probably want Linux to be destroyed." "Microsoft not trying to destroy Linux" might be a more accurate headline.
I was a big fan of Xen until I found out it was silently corrupting data. I've only duplicated the problem on an older 3ware card, but I was just about to trash the card, drives, etc. when I discovered that I couldn't duplicate the problem when using a non-xen kernel. Now I'm just waiting for pacifica and ivt solutions to mature before I touch virtualization for anything important.
I used to write for a tech review publication and the quid-pro-quo is very much alive (probably everywhere), it's just indirect. There was definitely a separation between the editorial department and the ad sales department. A big part of my job was to maintain the editorial relationship with vendors. It's not so much an "write a good article about us or we'll pull our ads" as it is that you have to at least listen to the marketing hype of advertisers. You spend so much time listening to marketing people talk about their products that you just don't have time to do the independent research you need to do to write quality product reviews. When you're facing a deadline, you work with the information you have. All to often the vendor's marketing material is all there is time for.
In short, trust stuff written by people who's main jobs is IT support, or programming, or some such thing and who write on the side. These people get to know products as part of their real job. After that, writing a review is easy. Full-time journalists who's primary paycheck comes from the publication, even if they're fairly knowledgeable about IT in general, simply may not have the time to truly get to know a set of products well enough to write a good review.
I took a parallel programming class recently. We took an algorithm and made three performance improvements to it. Two involved parallelization (one on a shared-memory machine (OpenMP), the other on a cluster (MPI)), and the third involved reordering some stuff to take advantage of the CPU's L2 cache. The non-parallel solution provided by far the best performance improvement, even though our parallel machine had 32 CPUs. This is, of course, very specific to the algorithm, but the point is that there are often better AND less error-prone ways of improving performance than parallelization. These techniques are also often viable even for algorithms that aren't parallelizable.
It seems that someone needs to do some sort of massive code review study to figure out what our computers do most and what types of performance improvement techniques would probably be most beneficial before making any broad statements on the subject. That said it seems that increasing the number of cores in a system, especially a desktop system, is limited by cost, technology, and physical space on the chip. Even if we had 32-core desktops, that's still only a 32 fold improvement. Since we have to pay to retrain programmers either way, that cost cancels out. Doesn't it seem like training in other algorithmic approaches may have more potential for quicker improvements than buying our way out of the performance problem with...
Wait a minute, what performance problem? My desktop does all kinds of fancy things I don't need it to do and its single-core CPU is still usually idle. And as for server apps, isn't your database, web server, etc. already multi-threaded? What, exactly, is all this CPU-bound code that's supposedly running out there? I would have though that network and disk speed is by far a greater bottleneck to the majority of things computers do these days. Why not just scrap the CPU crap, write sloppy code, and retrain a bunch of programmers as EE's to do I/O research.
NYSE on Linux? That's ridiculous. For financial transactions, it's about reliable hardware, isn't it? And you just can't get x86/x86_64 hardware with the reliability of big iron, tandem, etc. And yes, I know Linux runs on other platforms, and no, I haven't tried them, but do you really trust Linux to be as stable on hardware that the entire world isn't already using? Maybe they're just using it for some less important stuff at the NYSE, but at other places (like VISA, MC, etc.) they need the best for transaction processing. After all, if my credit card gets denied because some tech is replacing a DIMM that's producing machine check errors, I'll start writing checks again.
I was all ready to write a scathing e-mail of opposition before the deadline, but in reading the FAQ, I couldn't find much I objected to.
1) It's not a national ID because states maintain the databases individually -- there is no national database.
2) It's not necessarily a remotely readable ID. RFID is optional, bar codes are mandatory. This means we need to lobby our state representatives to opt for the bar code. (Unencrypted, please, so I can read what's on it myself, as opposed to just the hackers being able to read it when the encryption scheme is broken 5 seconds after release just like CSS).
3) There's no requirement to use a REALID-compliant license for anything except a) Airplanes, b) Federal facilities, c) Nuclear power plants. I'll gladly get a REALID passport for those purposes (which I keep in an RFID-resistant bag) and lobby my state to provide non-REALID licenses.
4) The federal government isn't providing funds to states, but that's good. The states SHOULD be paying for it so they (and in turn, their voters) maintain control. If we raise local taxes and lower federal taxes, or local governments will have more power and, in turn, each of us will have more power since our votes are part of a smaller state and local pool. How many of us can even name the mayor of our city? Why? Because he's not that important.
My only real objection is that some citizens may not have all the required documents, but I'm not one of them, so I'll let someone else complain about that.
1. AMD Chip with DRM: $150 2. Estimated cost of content I consume without paying in 2 years (CPU lifespan): ~$150 (hypothetically, of course) 3. AMD Chip without DRM: $300
Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that my current Athlon does quite well and I'm perfectly happy extending the chip life to 4 years and simply "acquiring" DRM-free versions of the content I want. If others agree, this simply means lines one and two will decrease as demand declines.
First off, you don't have to train lawyers to go for the wallet. That's just instinct. It's getting them to go for someone else's wallet that's the tricky part.
And as for the "collateral damage", if your hosting provider is supporting sites with illegal content, then doesn't the government have a responsibility to take them down? And won't the government probably have to disconnect everything to preserver evidence and separate the legal from the illegal? It seems only reasonable to me that you would sue your hosting provider for breech of contract (assuming you had some uptime clause in the contract), or, better yet, check that they're picky about their customers before you sign up to prevent the whole problem in the first place.
I'm betting it's a giant building for Saturn's military, just like the Pentagon in DC. But Saturn isn't quite a satanic as D.C., but they have a 6-sided figure instead of a 5-sided one. Maybe they're Jewish?
Who are these people who want linux pre-installed? Especially from Dell, who is well-known for pre-installing adware on their Windows boxes. I imagine they're people who aren't linux users because they can't figure out how to install it, but they'd like to be and they want Dell to do the hard part and support it when things go wrong. Personally, I only buy hardware from a hardware vendor and format the hard drive as soon as I get it.
If we melt the ice to get the natural gas, isn't it just like circumventing the CO2 part of global warming? All the melted ice will just make more dark, solar-energy absorbing dirt.
Shit. Yet another post goes south. Could someone please mod my original post to -1 to make it less likely that anyone has to read the horrible, off-topic flamewar it started.
I guess it just proves that geoffspear is right though. Apparently there are no shortage of morons, and they probably enjoy the mainstream crap. But just for the record, the only realistic criticism of my post, criticizing Brittany SPEARS, was by geoffSPEAR. Coincidence? I think not.
Personally, I'm all for DRM. If we have a effective and uncrackable DRM system, more people wouldn't bother listening to the garbage hollywood and the music industry force on us (Brittany Spears, etc.) because they have to pay for it. Smaller artists who give their music away and make money by dealing directly with local radio stations concert venus would thrive.
Changing ocean currents will plunge most of the northern hemisphere into ice-age like conditions.
The northern hemisphere will get colder because the white snow and ice will reflect most sunlight, but the southern hemisphere will get warmer, due to the lack of ice, greenhouse gasses, and cosmic rays. As both air and water move towards temprature equilibriam, the earth will experience the most severe weather in human history (though not so bad when compared to all of earth's history). Needless to say, human economies and means of survival will be devistated. It will eventually work its way to an equilibiriam again, possibly in time for our great-great-great grand children (the 1 in 100,000 of us who have surviving descedents) to reinvent agriculture.
Slashdot Mirror
I think my Adblock is broken because there's this Intel advertisement at the top of slashdot where I usually expect to see the first article.
Seriously though, adblock should just automatically block anything with the text "next-generation".
I get how the Routing Information Service could help you send your Windows image to remote offices faster, but what does Gnu's graphical debugger have to do with installing windows across your enterprise?
> The flames were so intense that people in vehicles 50 feet away were melted.
Short term safety was my first question too, but when the Hindenburg exploded, the only people who died were those who jumped off the blimp. Hydrogen may burn fast, but how much more dangerous is it than gasoline?
A bigger question is long term safety. There are bound to be leaks. Does anyone know what hydrogen does if released into the atmosphere in large quantities*? At least CO2 is a someone significant naturally occurring component of the atmosphere.
* The answer is, in fact, no, we don't know what lots of hydrogen would do in the atmosphere. This concern was actually raised by a meteorologist I work with in a global warming discussion a few months back.
Considering the number of ./ articles are repeats of old ./ articles, you don't have to subscribe to see articles in the future, you just have to search the archives. :)
Posts (probably including this one) are even easier. Just scroll up.
From TFA: "'Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether,' Sen. Stevens said."
What? Why not? All modern operating systems come password protected (just log off and don't give your kid the password.), and it's a frickin' computer. There's no barrier for software vendors to write software that limits or prevents Internet access. What's your kid going to do, buy his own laptop that you don't know about, unplug your computer and hook his up to your router? That ability is a natural function of computers. TV, on the other hand, has only recently starting coming with technology to password protect specific channels, and I think that's usually only with the upgraded package from the cable provider.
Actually, this is primarily a Linux issue. Windows is fully capable of failure sans any hard drive corruption.
Someone asked the Car Guys about this just last week to settle a bet. I wonder if that set off the lawsuit. Some people are so quick to call their lawyers. Anyway, Tom and Ray said that technically fuel did expand when warm, but they guessed that the temperature of fuel in a large underground tank didn't vary enough to make more than a fraction of a cent of difference per gallon. That sounded reasonable to me, since I can keep my house much cooler just by closing the curtains.
So, Oracle managed to have their systems (presumably running Oracle software) hacked while SAP is programmed by hackers capable of breaking in to a major corporate sites... Maybe it's just me, but I think I might be more inclined to trust my business's data to SAP (assuming they're on my side, of course).
Did anyone else read this headline and say "well of course they don't care if they're destroying Linux. In fact, they'd probably want Linux to be destroyed." "Microsoft not trying to destroy Linux" might be a more accurate headline.
I was a big fan of Xen until I found out it was silently corrupting data. I've only duplicated the problem on an older 3ware card, but I was just about to trash the card, drives, etc. when I discovered that I couldn't duplicate the problem when using a non-xen kernel. Now I'm just waiting for pacifica and ivt solutions to mature before I touch virtualization for anything important.
I used to write for a tech review publication and the quid-pro-quo is very much alive (probably everywhere), it's just indirect. There was definitely a separation between the editorial department and the ad sales department. A big part of my job was to maintain the editorial relationship with vendors. It's not so much an "write a good article about us or we'll pull our ads" as it is that you have to at least listen to the marketing hype of advertisers. You spend so much time listening to marketing people talk about their products that you just don't have time to do the independent research you need to do to write quality product reviews. When you're facing a deadline, you work with the information you have. All to often the vendor's marketing material is all there is time for.
In short, trust stuff written by people who's main jobs is IT support, or programming, or some such thing and who write on the side. These people get to know products as part of their real job. After that, writing a review is easy. Full-time journalists who's primary paycheck comes from the publication, even if they're fairly knowledgeable about IT in general, simply may not have the time to truly get to know a set of products well enough to write a good review.
I took a parallel programming class recently. We took an algorithm and made three performance improvements to it. Two involved parallelization (one on a shared-memory machine (OpenMP), the other on a cluster (MPI)), and the third involved reordering some stuff to take advantage of the CPU's L2 cache. The non-parallel solution provided by far the best performance improvement, even though our parallel machine had 32 CPUs. This is, of course, very specific to the algorithm, but the point is that there are often better AND less error-prone ways of improving performance than parallelization. These techniques are also often viable even for algorithms that aren't parallelizable.
It seems that someone needs to do some sort of massive code review study to figure out what our computers do most and what types of performance improvement techniques would probably be most beneficial before making any broad statements on the subject. That said it seems that increasing the number of cores in a system, especially a desktop system, is limited by cost, technology, and physical space on the chip. Even if we had 32-core desktops, that's still only a 32 fold improvement. Since we have to pay to retrain programmers either way, that cost cancels out. Doesn't it seem like training in other algorithmic approaches may have more potential for quicker improvements than buying our way out of the performance problem with...
Wait a minute, what performance problem? My desktop does all kinds of fancy things I don't need it to do and its single-core CPU is still usually idle. And as for server apps, isn't your database, web server, etc. already multi-threaded? What, exactly, is all this CPU-bound code that's supposedly running out there? I would have though that network and disk speed is by far a greater bottleneck to the majority of things computers do these days. Why not just scrap the CPU crap, write sloppy code, and retrain a bunch of programmers as EE's to do I/O research.
NYSE on Linux? That's ridiculous. For financial transactions, it's about reliable hardware, isn't it? And you just can't get x86/x86_64 hardware with the reliability of big iron, tandem, etc. And yes, I know Linux runs on other platforms, and no, I haven't tried them, but do you really trust Linux to be as stable on hardware that the entire world isn't already using? Maybe they're just using it for some less important stuff at the NYSE, but at other places (like VISA, MC, etc.) they need the best for transaction processing. After all, if my credit card gets denied because some tech is replacing a DIMM that's producing machine check errors, I'll start writing checks again.
I was all ready to write a scathing e-mail of opposition before the deadline, but in reading the FAQ, I couldn't find much I objected to.
1) It's not a national ID because states maintain the databases individually -- there is no national database.
2) It's not necessarily a remotely readable ID. RFID is optional, bar codes are mandatory. This means we need to lobby our state representatives to opt for the bar code. (Unencrypted, please, so I can read what's on it myself, as opposed to just the hackers being able to read it when the encryption scheme is broken 5 seconds after release just like CSS).
3) There's no requirement to use a REALID-compliant license for anything except a) Airplanes, b) Federal facilities, c) Nuclear power plants. I'll gladly get a REALID passport for those purposes (which I keep in an RFID-resistant bag) and lobby my state to provide non-REALID licenses.
4) The federal government isn't providing funds to states, but that's good. The states SHOULD be paying for it so they (and in turn, their voters) maintain control. If we raise local taxes and lower federal taxes, or local governments will have more power and, in turn, each of us will have more power since our votes are part of a smaller state and local pool. How many of us can even name the mayor of our city? Why? Because he's not that important.
My only real objection is that some citizens may not have all the required documents, but I'm not one of them, so I'll let someone else complain about that.
Not yet, but my GMO that does is patent pending, so don't even think of trying to pass your post off as prior art.
1. AMD Chip with DRM: $150
2. Estimated cost of content I consume without paying in 2 years (CPU lifespan): ~$150 (hypothetically, of course)
3. AMD Chip without DRM: $300
Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that my current Athlon does quite well and I'm perfectly happy extending the chip life to 4 years and simply "acquiring" DRM-free versions of the content I want. If others agree, this simply means lines one and two will decrease as demand declines.
First off, you don't have to train lawyers to go for the wallet. That's just instinct. It's getting them to go for someone else's wallet that's the tricky part.
And as for the "collateral damage", if your hosting provider is supporting sites with illegal content, then doesn't the government have a responsibility to take them down? And won't the government probably have to disconnect everything to preserver evidence and separate the legal from the illegal? It seems only reasonable to me that you would sue your hosting provider for breech of contract (assuming you had some uptime clause in the contract), or, better yet, check that they're picky about their customers before you sign up to prevent the whole problem in the first place.
I'm betting it's a giant building for Saturn's military, just like the Pentagon in DC. But Saturn isn't quite a satanic as D.C., but they have a 6-sided figure instead of a 5-sided one. Maybe they're Jewish?
Who are these people who want linux pre-installed? Especially from Dell, who is well-known for pre-installing adware on their Windows boxes. I imagine they're people who aren't linux users because they can't figure out how to install it, but they'd like to be and they want Dell to do the hard part and support it when things go wrong. Personally, I only buy hardware from a hardware vendor and format the hard drive as soon as I get it.
Wouldn't it be cool if those lists were dynamically updated. We could all submit useless kernel patches to game the list and try to get on top. :)
If we melt the ice to get the natural gas, isn't it just like circumventing the CO2 part of global warming? All the melted ice will just make more dark, solar-energy absorbing dirt.
Shit. Yet another post goes south. Could someone please mod my original post to -1 to make it less likely that anyone has to read the horrible, off-topic flamewar it started.
I guess it just proves that geoffspear is right though. Apparently there are no shortage of morons, and they probably enjoy the mainstream crap. But just for the record, the only realistic criticism of my post, criticizing Brittany SPEARS, was by geoffSPEAR. Coincidence? I think not.
Personally, I'm all for DRM. If we have a effective and uncrackable DRM system, more people wouldn't bother listening to the garbage hollywood and the music industry force on us (Brittany Spears, etc.) because they have to pay for it. Smaller artists who give their music away and make money by dealing directly with local radio stations concert venus would thrive.
- a tremendous title wave will wipe out most human life on the southern, western, and eastern coasts of the southern hemisphere;
- water near the surface of the ocean will drop in salinity and temprature, killing off most of the coral reefs and the algae that takes most of the carbon out of the atmosphere;
- Changing ocean currents will plunge most of the northern hemisphere into ice-age like conditions.
The northern hemisphere will get colder because the white snow and ice will reflect most sunlight, but the southern hemisphere will get warmer, due to the lack of ice, greenhouse gasses, and cosmic rays. As both air and water move towards temprature equilibriam, the earth will experience the most severe weather in human history (though not so bad when compared to all of earth's history). Needless to say, human economies and means of survival will be devistated. It will eventually work its way to an equilibiriam again, possibly in time for our great-great-great grand children (the 1 in 100,000 of us who have surviving descedents) to reinvent agriculture.Okay, so I lied. My original post wasn't a troll, but that last reply was. And what a catch!