What Microsoft is trying to do here is to eliminate a low hanging fruit of software security that has led to hundreds if not thousands of buffer overflow conditions and associated vulnerabilities/exploits.
They might be trying, but they are failing, because the mistake that leads to the error in the first place (miscalculating destination buffer size) has the same effect (buffer overrun) whether you use memcpy() or memcpy_s().
Politicians often say one thing to passify the masses and then do the opposite under some obscure justification.
You asked why? Power, support from those who have the power, and control. I don't think there has been a modern president who wasn't in support of more federal government control in the last 30 years.
I asked why does Obama want to quash stem cell research. "Power" is a non-answer; he has the power by having the guidelines researches have to follow, whether those guidelines exclude stem cell research or not. The question is, what does this accomplish, and why would he deliberately restrict the old lines from being used, yet deliberately allow new lines to be created?
So yeah. I completely get that politicians will say one thing and do another, thanks. Now please start making sense, and explain how this makes sense.
You're interpreting 'unsafe' to mean 'possible to exploit/crash'. I think the parent was taking it to mean 'likely to lead to exploitable/crashable code'. You can hardly argue about that. Just look at the number of sprintf/strcpy security vulnerabilities compared to std::string-caused vulnerabilities.
Well yeah I am trying to consider the likelyhood. The question is, how likely is it that you fail to properly determine the size of the destination buffer? That probability is the same as the probability that you perform an unsafe memcpy(), and the same probably that you perform an unsafe memcpy_s(). In other words, it changes nothing regarding the likelihood of a bug.
For the same reason I think the genetic material in the condom I threw away is "mine", and would be upset if someone used it to procreate without my consent!
Go ahead and make a property rights argument about how I don't legally get to say what is done with my stuff that lands in the landfill. Who cares. This is about ethics, and I for one am glad that the medical research profession takes ethics into consideration.
Well of course no matter who you elected it was by and large going to be business as usual (yes, Ron Paulians, even if that long shot had occured).
But what I'm not seeing is how this is actually the same. I RTFA (gasp) and it seems the issue is that the new rules include informed consent requirements for egg donors that the old lines, despite being collected under informed consent standards of their own, don't meet the letter of the new rules, which are applied retroactively. The new rules were drafted by the NIH, who said that they estimated the new rules would make 700 old lines available for research that weren't before. A number of researchers are saying that they don't think that's the case and many of the old lines would not meet the new standard despite being collected ethically.
So which seems more likely: - NIH really intended to make all those old lines available, but botched the legalese, which can be fixed by loosening the retroactive requirements while keeping the new requirements for new lines or various other changes. - NIH was lying and is trying to quash stem cell research "just like Bush, business as usual" by disqualifying these old lines, while simultaneously allowing arbitrarily many new lines to be created using standards that are qualitatively if not technically nearly identical to the old ones.
The second just doesn't make much sense to me. Why bother lying when the practical effect would be obvious and nobody can really do anything about it anyway, why even display the draft rules rather than just put them into effect, why allow new stem cell collection under standards nearly identical to the old if the goal is to quash it entirely? Why's Obama trying to quash stem cell research anyway? Pressure from the religious right? I don't get it.
Just like removing printf, scanf, and most other copy/string functions. There are safe versions of memcpy that work just fine and are just as easy to use...
There's nothing unsafe about printf (since compilers started doing format type checking), as long as you don't use user input as the format string. To print user input, you use printf("%s", user_input).
strcpy() is unsafe because you don't know how many bytes you are going to be copying. strncpy() is completely safe as long as you aren't brain dead and set the 'n' to the size of the destination buffer (as opposed to strlen(src) which would be brain dead) and then slap an '\0' into the last index of the dest. sprintf, same deal, just use snprintf and tell it the max bytes it can print.
So what's unsafe about memcpy()? You explicitly specify the number of bytes to copy. If that number of bytes is greater than the known size of the destination buffer, then you've got a problem that simply adding a second 'size of dest' paramater to the copy won't fix because you already screwed the pooch on figuring that out now didn't you?
Yes memcpy() doesn't work if src and dest overlap. When that's happening, you typically know about it (you've got some clever in-situ array modification going on) and can use memmove(). memmove(), on the other hand, is equally unsafe if you can't properly specify the number of bytes to copy.
Bottom line: There's no such thing as a "safe" copy in C when we're assuming the programmer can't figure out the destination buffer size.
"RP servers? Oh, you mean the ones where I have to choose a "in game style" name, but get rewarded with not having to compete for the surface mobs because everyone else is sitting in the inn, but at my beck and call when I need them for an instance, all I gotta do is ask akin to 'mighty warriors needed to unearth the rock of awesome...'? Yeah, they're cool!"
Ah, see, and for me here the reward of the RP server is that you don't have to deal with the kind of twit who thinks rolling on an RP server makes them a nerd, as if that ship hadn't already sailed when they started playing an MMO. This drastically improves the average quality of player.
The funny thing is that most of the time you don't even see that semi-kinda-RP-ish chat you give an example of. They usually play exactly like a normal server, only with a huge contingent of morons self-selecting out of it.
But yeah, no actual RP to speak of if that's what you're actually looking for.
The last online RPG I played that had good RP was NWN, and that was only when you had an actually DM running the module so you could be rewarded for it.
Pity there isn't a GPU socket on the motherboard the same as the CPU socket. Then we COULD use those big honking CPU cooling solutions (or some derivative of them), provided the case were designed to accommodate the board. You could also get high speed runs between memory (perhaps it could have its own bank), and the CPU.
Not a bad idea, though discrete cards today have dedicated memory for the GPU, with a bus custom designed for that card. Not expandable, but high performance. The connection to main memory would be faster if the new socket was connected directly to the cpu socket, though that mostly helps UMA (i.e. cheap) solutions and having the GPU on die with the CPU would be cheaper. The extra cooling potential would be helpful for sure, either for performance or maybe to provide the same cooling quieter since my GPU is already my loudest fan!
Pity some CPU maker couldn't come along, buy a GPU maker, and make something like this.
Yeah, unless that company was also a motherboard maker, that might be a hard sell. An extra ZIF socket with heat sink mounts and extra memory channel, in mainstream desktop mobos? Yeah, foisting that kind of cost onto the mobo makers doesn't go over well unless you're the 800lb gorilla. Which of course isn't the company you're talking about.
Am I the only one that notices that 'sin' taxes designed, ostensibly, as a deterent are counter productive. For example:
1. Tax Cigaretts to pay for Medicare/Medcaid 2. People cut back on cigarette purchases
Well yeah, because everyone (including the ones writing the laws) knows that Step 2 doesn't actually happen to any significant extent. They're smokers. They're addicted, powerfully so. If cutting back was a reasonable option, most of them would do it without any motivation from taxes. Instead, they're chewing nicotine gum, wearing patches, going to hypnotherapists, and still ending up in the checkout isle bitching about how the price of their weekly carton keeps going up.
They might use the word "deterrent", but they know damn well it's really a "punishment", and "revenue source that's hard to argue against".
Who cares if there is loss of precision? In the end, it spits out a value that is essentially binary: drunk or not. You are not less drunk if it says so with 9 extra bits of precision, and in fact the extra accuracy could itself be considered an error as it shows a certainty about the result that may not be warranted by the design of the machine./facepalm
When flipping the LSB can change the calculated BAC value from well below to well above the legal limit, then anyone with a brain should care.
Do you understand that calculating a BAC from the sensor readings is what it's doing?
And if the 4 bits of precision are used because that's all the precision the sensor has (despite returning a 12 bit value), then you should REALLY care because the device is fucked from the get-go!
Figuring out the sequence of events by which Natalie Portman suddenly acquires an acute allergy to clothes and is driven into my house where we discover that the only cure is hours and hours of passionate woopie and hot grits is a lot more complicated than it sounds!
I agree, this is NOT a worthy cause. Who are they to say who's fat? And if I'm not fat, who are they to say I have to pay because other people are fat, lazy, and unmotivated to help themselves? Some people don't give a shit that they're fat.
So wait, are you saying that you don't consider yourself fat, or worse if you do you don't care? And that there are others like you?
Man, either you're a chain-smoking junkie with a body fat percentage of 1%, or the hollywood/tv/cosmetics/plastic surgery/fitness center industries have seriously dropped the ball on their advertising. And I thought they were doing so well!
Please, at least tell me that you're self conscious about the size of your penis/breasts(whichever applies) and your performance in bed!
So... he wrote a book about the very year he was writing, but included a bunch of futuristic technology in it?
I think the story about it originally being named 1948 is apocryphal. In the version I heard, the publisher wanted him to change it to make it less provocative, as in to not imply that Britain was like the book described at that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four says the original titles were either "The Last Man in Europe" or "1980".
But anyway regardless of the title, it is blatantly obvious that he was talking about an eventual progression to the kind of totalitarianism in the book, from the seeds he saw in his own time but not necessarily even in Britain. Communism and fascism were the forces he saw as threatening complete totalitarianism, and he was saying that eventually even Britain could become totalitarian. Not that it was at the time he wrote it. See the wiki article for a direct quote that says exactly that.
So yeah, it was prophetic. And when you see a liberal democracy sliding towards totalitarianism while telling you that you're more free than ever, "Orwell was right!" is a quite appropriate response.
Which brings me to the point raised by the GP, that either Orwell/Stallman are wrong or they're right and will be removed from history: There's a third option. They're right, people see the world changing in such a way that they realize Orwell and Stallman were right, and successfully take action to prevent that future from coming about. Okay since their predicted futures wouldn't literally come to pass that probably means they can't be called prophets in the same sense as, say, Isaiah. But it would be quite fine from a more secular standpoint, as in: "When the people of Britain saw that Orwell's prophetic novel 1984 was coming to pass, they rose up against the increasing authoritarian government..."
From an economic/social perspective: piracy encourages piracy. While he may not be willing to purchase it, the "everybody does it effect", as well as his making more easily available the work (BitTorrent seeding, etc.), makes it easier for somebody who otherwise would purchase it to pirate it.
Just to be clear, that is an indirect effect, and also in contradiction to your first post, this is all about depriving the creator of something: money.
And when you accept that people who really are just trying to get as much free stuff as they can, whether they would have paid for it or not, are plentiful, then even this indirect effect vanishes. "Making more easily available" than trivially easy is a trivial effect, you see.
Piracy is disrespect: "I'm going to take this without paying because I want it but I don't think you deserve compensation for it." Why work, why spend a hell of a lot of time and money, on a project, just to be disrespected by those who want to use it?
Or another way of putting it: "I think this is worth having for $0, but not for any more than that, and certainly not for the price you're asking." I guess you could call that disrespectful. Am I being disrespectful of Andy Warhol if I said I'd take a print of one of his paintings if it was for free, but wouldn't spend $10 for one and scoff at the idea of paying what an original is worth on the market because I don't think Andy Warhol is worth nearly that much? Am I being disrespectful by looking at and enjoying art of his that comes up on a free Google Image search, but still not buying what I think is an overpriced $10 print?
I mean did you really think that their desire to have what you made should be irrespective of the price?
But if that's just what happens, as in nobody thinks what you have is worth more than $0, then maybe you should consider the possibility that they have a point!
What the fuck's the point? (And please don't give me that tired "it's art, create it for the sake of creating it" nonsense; when you come up with a way for people to make full 3D games competitive with the Unreal Engine and others on their lunch breaks, without any of the previous technology being there, let me know. Some art can't be made without enough money to live off of, and patronage is dead and never coming back.)
Well then I guess the point is nothing more than to make a buck, which plenty of artists seem to be able to do just fine even in the face of piracy. After all at the end of the day, PC gaming is still an 11 billion dollar industry.
Because it isn't even clear that piracy is harming their sales significantly because it isn't clear how many of those are actually lost sales. After all, you don't really think that of the approximately $50000 worth of warez on a pirate's 1TB HD, that if piracy didn't exist that they'd have spent anything close to that amount. And of whatever tiny fraction of that money actually would have been spent, why do you assume that you'd have necessarily been the recipient of any of it?
So instead of throwing your hands up in the air and saying "What the fuck's the point [when everyone will just pirate the game anyway]?", maybe you should instead be asking yourself why you aren't getting any of that $11 billion dollars that the non-pirates are funneling into the industry. Blaming the people who aren't buying games doesn't really make a lot of sense, it's sort of by definition not their fault.
I earnestly want him to shuffle off this mortal coil because people like him directly harm me and my ability to make a livelihood, for the puerile benefit of free entertainment.
Can you explain how, exactly, this directly harms you? Can you even explain how it's indirect harm? And no, you're not allowed to assume they would pay for whatever it is you're selling if that was the only way to obtain it.
It has nothing to do with depriving the creator of anything. It has to do with the creator's rights to have his creations distributed on his terms.
It's not a "natural" right in any way shape or form, it is inherently an unnatural right. You're not depriving the creator of any liberty, you're only going around the purely legal bargain between the people, and content creators, to give them this unnatural "right" with the hopes that in the end it will benefit us more than if we didn't relinquish our ownnatural right to do whatever we wish with our own possessions.
Since the whole concept behind this bargain is that the copyright will help the creator make money and thus be incentivized to create, but in the case in question the person is most definitely not depriving the creator of any money, where exactly is this moral issue that you're so upset over?
Is it simply that this is the law, and breaking the law is amoral? I certainly don't agree to that, but I will as always agree to have you be the first one subject to the world you wish for, and encourage you to eat a bullet the next time you break any law at all. Since you've certainly already done so willfully, I expect no further posts from you.
ACtually, no, given AMD's ability to develop an Intel beater in the first place, despite Intel's massively larger budget, it's not obvious at all.
Fair enough. Consider that Athlon wasn't exactly a cheap product to begin with, and it was a win only in the desktop. Today's more competitive and diverse market requires the same kind of execution but in multiple projects simultaneously while advancing fab technology. If AMD had gotten a fair shot at the market back then, they would have had the resources to carry through today. That's the gist.
The trick though, is to realize when the user really doesn't care for speed, and thus keep the CPU in a lower frequency (e.g., playing music), versus the user is actively doing stuff, and it would be desirable to have it finish as fast as possible (e.g., browsing the web) so while the user ponders, you can put the CPU into a low power state immediately, versus keep it at a slow clock and have the user wait. Also, you have to figure out when the user is doing something that really is requiring a lot of CPU power (playing movies), so you have to bump the speed up and hold it there, and not at the first instance of idleness, drop back down.
Basically, having this feedback ltes you find out what is going on - is the user not caring, and thus you should pick the slowest speed that'll get things done? Is the user actively engaged in the device, but the usage is bursty, so you should go into a low power state after the processing is done, or is the user doing something that requires processor, and dropping down wastes power due to overhead?
Everything you say is true, but it makes vastly more sense to determine the amount of processor speed needed by what the device is actually being asked to do rather than trying to glean the user's mood and how that relates to required processor speed. Decoding an mp3 is a low intensity activity, and you don't need to know the user's heart rate or any nonsense like that to know you can afford to turn down the cpu frequency if that's all its being asked to do. Similarly, no matter how emotional the user is getting over the text message they are typing, the processor is still going to be sitting in its idle loop 99% of the time waiting for the next keypress so it's perfectly safe to lower the frequency there too. If they're doing something that requires a lot more processor, well, again this is obvious from the processor's point of view. And while the switches themselves are slow from the processor's point of view, they are too fast to notice from the user's point of view so it's perfectly feasible to switch from one to the other as processor load indicates.
So given that we already know how* to tune a processor's frequency to match the work being asked of it in a way that minimizes power consumption but never appears "slow" to the user, what exactly does this add? Is it for when someone starts playing a CPU intensive game on their iPhone, but isn't actually playing it? Yeah I'm sure you could save a lot of power by realizing that the user isn't in the same room as the device, so their Quake framerate really dosen't matter. So would an auto-shutoff after two minutes of no user input, and my phone already has that too.
* It's not like there's some proven ideal algorithm for it, but nevertheless existing devices do a pretty good job and are getting better.
In that same joke I suggested that it would be impossible for AMD to ramp up production and intel could simply control the EU by refusing to sell CPU's to the EU.
I was told I was wrong and AMD could ramp up production no problem and intel would take huge losses.
Yes, because while the EU is a large market segment, it is still just a segment of the global market. Servicing 100% of that market, but only their current ~15% of other global markets, would probably be almost doable. If Intel seriously looked like they might follow through on your proposed "threat", then the huge influx of new investment in AMD would easily enable them to make up any difference with new fabs in their own spun off foundry company and deals with other foundries.
Whereas a few individual companies brave/foolish enough to ditch Intel on their own would not cause such an influx because in the global market the rebels simply aren't going to be both competitive and large. It would take Intel doing something monumentally stupid, like deliberately handing a huge segment of the market into AMDs lap, to break this dynamic. Get it?
Now that you mention it, why don't Apple PCs use any AMD chips? They're often better value and have the same compatibility.
Oh, that one's easy and doesn't (necessarily, who knows what went on behind closed doors) involve illegal Intel business practices.
Apple switching away from PowerPC was a risky move. They didn't want to make the move appear more risky by picking the underdog x86 supplier. And they like their hardware to be homogenous, which is why they went with only one supplier. If you're going to pick one x86 supplier...
Also, the main reason they left IBM was because they felt IBM's mobile cpu roadmap was inadequate. Well especially at that time, Intel simply had the more impressive mobile roadmap than AMD.
I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...
Almost certainly and OMG HELL YES.
First, if not for these anti-competitive practices, AMD would have significantly more market share. The difference in Intel's profits with AMD at 15% vs 30% for the past ten years blows this pathetic fine away.
Second, remember how expensive Intel processors were back when AMD was nothing more than a second-source supplier Intel granted an x86 license in order to make IBM et al happy? Intel does! They sure as shit want to get back to the days when they were the only game in town. And these days nobody really cares about second sources, so they wouldn't even need to have a token 'competitor' to blunt their monopoly pricing. Every single one of these illegal practices was ultimately aimed at preventing AMD from getting the foothold needed to stay profitable and driving them out of business. Because the difference in Intel's profit with AMD at 15% vs AMD at 0% is just ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
What Microsoft is trying to do here is to eliminate a low hanging fruit of software security that has led to hundreds if not thousands of buffer overflow conditions and associated vulnerabilities/exploits.
They might be trying, but they are failing, because the mistake that leads to the error in the first place (miscalculating destination buffer size) has the same effect (buffer overrun) whether you use memcpy() or memcpy_s().
Politicians often say one thing to passify the masses and then do the opposite under some obscure justification.
You asked why? Power, support from those who have the power, and control. I don't think there has been a modern president who wasn't in support of more federal government control in the last 30 years.
I asked why does Obama want to quash stem cell research. "Power" is a non-answer; he has the power by having the guidelines researches have to follow, whether those guidelines exclude stem cell research or not. The question is, what does this accomplish, and why would he deliberately restrict the old lines from being used, yet deliberately allow new lines to be created?
So yeah. I completely get that politicians will say one thing and do another, thanks. Now please start making sense, and explain how this makes sense.
You're interpreting 'unsafe' to mean 'possible to exploit/crash'. I think the parent was taking it to mean 'likely to lead to exploitable/crashable code'. You can hardly argue about that. Just look at the number of sprintf/strcpy security vulnerabilities compared to std::string-caused vulnerabilities.
Well yeah I am trying to consider the likelyhood. The question is, how likely is it that you fail to properly determine the size of the destination buffer? That probability is the same as the probability that you perform an unsafe memcpy(), and the same probably that you perform an unsafe memcpy_s(). In other words, it changes nothing regarding the likelihood of a bug.
For the same reason I think the genetic material in the condom I threw away is "mine", and would be upset if someone used it to procreate without my consent!
Go ahead and make a property rights argument about how I don't legally get to say what is done with my stuff that lands in the landfill. Who cares. This is about ethics, and I for one am glad that the medical research profession takes ethics into consideration.
Well of course no matter who you elected it was by and large going to be business as usual (yes, Ron Paulians, even if that long shot had occured).
But what I'm not seeing is how this is actually the same. I RTFA (gasp) and it seems the issue is that the new rules include informed consent requirements for egg donors that the old lines, despite being collected under informed consent standards of their own, don't meet the letter of the new rules, which are applied retroactively. The new rules were drafted by the NIH, who said that they estimated the new rules would make 700 old lines available for research that weren't before. A number of researchers are saying that they don't think that's the case and many of the old lines would not meet the new standard despite being collected ethically.
So which seems more likely:
- NIH really intended to make all those old lines available, but botched the legalese, which can be fixed by loosening the retroactive requirements while keeping the new requirements for new lines or various other changes.
- NIH was lying and is trying to quash stem cell research "just like Bush, business as usual" by disqualifying these old lines, while simultaneously allowing arbitrarily many new lines to be created using standards that are qualitatively if not technically nearly identical to the old ones.
The second just doesn't make much sense to me. Why bother lying when the practical effect would be obvious and nobody can really do anything about it anyway, why even display the draft rules rather than just put them into effect, why allow new stem cell collection under standards nearly identical to the old if the goal is to quash it entirely? Why's Obama trying to quash stem cell research anyway? Pressure from the religious right? I don't get it.
Just like removing printf, scanf, and most other copy/string functions. There are safe versions of memcpy that work just fine and are just as easy to use...
There's nothing unsafe about printf (since compilers started doing format type checking), as long as you don't use user input as the format string. To print user input, you use printf("%s", user_input).
strcpy() is unsafe because you don't know how many bytes you are going to be copying. strncpy() is completely safe as long as you aren't brain dead and set the 'n' to the size of the destination buffer (as opposed to strlen(src) which would be brain dead) and then slap an '\0' into the last index of the dest. sprintf, same deal, just use snprintf and tell it the max bytes it can print.
So what's unsafe about memcpy()? You explicitly specify the number of bytes to copy. If that number of bytes is greater than the known size of the destination buffer, then you've got a problem that simply adding a second 'size of dest' paramater to the copy won't fix because you already screwed the pooch on figuring that out now didn't you?
Yes memcpy() doesn't work if src and dest overlap. When that's happening, you typically know about it (you've got some clever in-situ array modification going on) and can use memmove(). memmove(), on the other hand, is equally unsafe if you can't properly specify the number of bytes to copy.
Bottom line: There's no such thing as a "safe" copy in C when we're assuming the programmer can't figure out the destination buffer size.
"RP servers? Oh, you mean the ones where I have to choose a "in game style" name, but get rewarded with not having to compete for the surface mobs because everyone else is sitting in the inn, but at my beck and call when I need them for an instance, all I gotta do is ask akin to 'mighty warriors needed to unearth the rock of awesome...'? Yeah, they're cool!"
Ah, see, and for me here the reward of the RP server is that you don't have to deal with the kind of twit who thinks rolling on an RP server makes them a nerd, as if that ship hadn't already sailed when they started playing an MMO. This drastically improves the average quality of player.
The funny thing is that most of the time you don't even see that semi-kinda-RP-ish chat you give an example of. They usually play exactly like a normal server, only with a huge contingent of morons self-selecting out of it.
But yeah, no actual RP to speak of if that's what you're actually looking for.
The last online RPG I played that had good RP was NWN, and that was only when you had an actually DM running the module so you could be rewarded for it.
Pity there isn't a GPU socket on the motherboard the same as the CPU socket. Then we COULD use those big honking CPU cooling solutions (or some derivative of them), provided the case were designed to accommodate the board. You could also get high speed runs between memory (perhaps it could have its own bank), and the CPU.
Not a bad idea, though discrete cards today have dedicated memory for the GPU, with a bus custom designed for that card. Not expandable, but high performance. The connection to main memory would be faster if the new socket was connected directly to the cpu socket, though that mostly helps UMA (i.e. cheap) solutions and having the GPU on die with the CPU would be cheaper. The extra cooling potential would be helpful for sure, either for performance or maybe to provide the same cooling quieter since my GPU is already my loudest fan!
Pity some CPU maker couldn't come along, buy a GPU maker, and make something like this.
Yeah, unless that company was also a motherboard maker, that might be a hard sell. An extra ZIF socket with heat sink mounts and extra memory channel, in mainstream desktop mobos? Yeah, foisting that kind of cost onto the mobo makers doesn't go over well unless you're the 800lb gorilla. Which of course isn't the company you're talking about.
Am I the only one that notices that 'sin' taxes designed, ostensibly, as a deterent are counter productive. For example:
1. Tax Cigaretts to pay for Medicare/Medcaid
2. People cut back on cigarette purchases
Well yeah, because everyone (including the ones writing the laws) knows that Step 2 doesn't actually happen to any significant extent. They're smokers. They're addicted, powerfully so. If cutting back was a reasonable option, most of them would do it without any motivation from taxes. Instead, they're chewing nicotine gum, wearing patches, going to hypnotherapists, and still ending up in the checkout isle bitching about how the price of their weekly carton keeps going up.
They might use the word "deterrent", but they know damn well it's really a "punishment", and "revenue source that's hard to argue against".
Who cares if there is loss of precision? In the end, it spits out a value that is essentially binary: drunk or not. You are not less drunk if it says so with 9 extra bits of precision, and in fact the extra accuracy could itself be considered an error as it shows a certainty about the result that may not be warranted by the design of the machine. /facepalm
When flipping the LSB can change the calculated BAC value from well below to well above the legal limit, then anyone with a brain should care.
Do you understand that calculating a BAC from the sensor readings is what it's doing?
And if the 4 bits of precision are used because that's all the precision the sensor has (despite returning a 12 bit value), then you should REALLY care because the device is fucked from the get-go!
Figuring out the sequence of events by which Natalie Portman suddenly acquires an acute allergy to clothes and is driven into my house where we discover that the only cure is hours and hours of passionate woopie and hot grits is a lot more complicated than it sounds!
Well on the plus side at least they'll be easy to recognize...
And catch...
I agree, this is NOT a worthy cause. Who are they to say who's fat? And if I'm not fat, who are they to say I have to pay because other people are fat, lazy, and unmotivated to help themselves? Some people don't give a shit that they're fat.
So wait, are you saying that you don't consider yourself fat, or worse if you do you don't care? And that there are others like you?
Man, either you're a chain-smoking junkie with a body fat percentage of 1%, or the hollywood/tv/cosmetics/plastic surgery/fitness center industries have seriously dropped the ball on their advertising. And I thought they were doing so well!
Please, at least tell me that you're self conscious about the size of your penis/breasts(whichever applies) and your performance in bed!
So... he wrote a book about the very year he was writing, but included a bunch of futuristic technology in it?
I think the story about it originally being named 1948 is apocryphal. In the version I heard, the publisher wanted him to change it to make it less provocative, as in to not imply that Britain was like the book described at that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four says the original titles were either "The Last Man in Europe" or "1980".
But anyway regardless of the title, it is blatantly obvious that he was talking about an eventual progression to the kind of totalitarianism in the book, from the seeds he saw in his own time but not necessarily even in Britain. Communism and fascism were the forces he saw as threatening complete totalitarianism, and he was saying that eventually even Britain could become totalitarian. Not that it was at the time he wrote it. See the wiki article for a direct quote that says exactly that.
So yeah, it was prophetic. And when you see a liberal democracy sliding towards totalitarianism while telling you that you're more free than ever, "Orwell was right!" is a quite appropriate response.
Which brings me to the point raised by the GP, that either Orwell/Stallman are wrong or they're right and will be removed from history: There's a third option. They're right, people see the world changing in such a way that they realize Orwell and Stallman were right, and successfully take action to prevent that future from coming about. Okay since their predicted futures wouldn't literally come to pass that probably means they can't be called prophets in the same sense as, say, Isaiah. But it would be quite fine from a more secular standpoint, as in: "When the people of Britain saw that Orwell's prophetic novel 1984 was coming to pass, they rose up against the increasing authoritarian government..."
From an economic/social perspective: piracy encourages piracy. While he may not be willing to purchase it, the "everybody does it effect", as well as his making more easily available the work (BitTorrent seeding, etc.), makes it easier for somebody who otherwise would purchase it to pirate it.
Just to be clear, that is an indirect effect, and also in contradiction to your first post, this is all about depriving the creator of something: money.
And when you accept that people who really are just trying to get as much free stuff as they can, whether they would have paid for it or not, are plentiful, then even this indirect effect vanishes. "Making more easily available" than trivially easy is a trivial effect, you see.
Piracy is disrespect: "I'm going to take this without paying because I want it but I don't think you deserve compensation for it." Why work, why spend a hell of a lot of time and money, on a project, just to be disrespected by those who want to use it?
Or another way of putting it: "I think this is worth having for $0, but not for any more than that, and certainly not for the price you're asking." I guess you could call that disrespectful. Am I being disrespectful of Andy Warhol if I said I'd take a print of one of his paintings if it was for free, but wouldn't spend $10 for one and scoff at the idea of paying what an original is worth on the market because I don't think Andy Warhol is worth nearly that much? Am I being disrespectful by looking at and enjoying art of his that comes up on a free Google Image search, but still not buying what I think is an overpriced $10 print?
I mean did you really think that their desire to have what you made should be irrespective of the price?
But if that's just what happens, as in nobody thinks what you have is worth more than $0, then maybe you should consider the possibility that they have a point!
What the fuck's the point? (And please don't give me that tired "it's art, create it for the sake of creating it" nonsense; when you come up with a way for people to make full 3D games competitive with the Unreal Engine and others on their lunch breaks, without any of the previous technology being there, let me know. Some art can't be made without enough money to live off of, and patronage is dead and never coming back.)
Well then I guess the point is nothing more than to make a buck, which plenty of artists seem to be able to do just fine even in the face of piracy.
After all at the end of the day, PC gaming is still an 11 billion dollar industry.
Because it isn't even clear that piracy is harming their sales significantly because it isn't clear how many of those are actually lost sales. After all, you don't really think that of the approximately $50000 worth of warez on a pirate's 1TB HD, that if piracy didn't exist that they'd have spent anything close to that amount. And of whatever tiny fraction of that money actually would have been spent, why do you assume that you'd have necessarily been the recipient of any of it?
So instead of throwing your hands up in the air and saying "What the fuck's the point [when everyone will just pirate the game anyway]?", maybe you should instead be asking yourself why you aren't getting any of that $11 billion dollars that the non-pirates are funneling into the industry. Blaming the people who aren't buying games doesn't really make a lot of sense, it's sort of by definition not their fault.
I earnestly want him to shuffle off this mortal coil because people like him directly harm me and my ability to make a livelihood, for the puerile benefit of free entertainment.
Can you explain how, exactly, this directly harms you? Can you even explain how it's indirect harm? And no, you're not allowed to assume they would pay for whatever it is you're selling if that was the only way to obtain it.
Me too!
It has nothing to do with depriving the creator of anything. It has to do with the creator's rights to have his creations distributed on his terms.
It's not a "natural" right in any way shape or form, it is inherently an unnatural right. You're not depriving the creator of any liberty, you're only going around the purely legal bargain between the people, and content creators, to give them this unnatural "right" with the hopes that in the end it will benefit us more than if we didn't relinquish our own natural right to do whatever we wish with our own possessions.
Since the whole concept behind this bargain is that the copyright will help the creator make money and thus be incentivized to create, but in the case in question the person is most definitely not depriving the creator of any money, where exactly is this moral issue that you're so upset over?
Is it simply that this is the law, and breaking the law is amoral? I certainly don't agree to that, but I will as always agree to have you be the first one subject to the world you wish for, and encourage you to eat a bullet the next time you break any law at all. Since you've certainly already done so willfully, I expect no further posts from you.
Your 'S' is upside down.
ACtually, no, given AMD's ability to develop an Intel beater in the first place, despite Intel's massively larger budget, it's not obvious at all.
Fair enough. Consider that Athlon wasn't exactly a cheap product to begin with, and it was a win only in the desktop. Today's more competitive and diverse market requires the same kind of execution but in multiple projects simultaneously while advancing fab technology. If AMD had gotten a fair shot at the market back then, they would have had the resources to carry through today. That's the gist.
The trick though, is to realize when the user really doesn't care for speed, and thus keep the CPU in a lower frequency (e.g., playing music), versus the user is actively doing stuff, and it would be desirable to have it finish as fast as possible (e.g., browsing the web) so while the user ponders, you can put the CPU into a low power state immediately, versus keep it at a slow clock and have the user wait. Also, you have to figure out when the user is doing something that really is requiring a lot of CPU power (playing movies), so you have to bump the speed up and hold it there, and not at the first instance of idleness, drop back down.
Basically, having this feedback ltes you find out what is going on - is the user not caring, and thus you should pick the slowest speed that'll get things done? Is the user actively engaged in the device, but the usage is bursty, so you should go into a low power state after the processing is done, or is the user doing something that requires processor, and dropping down wastes power due to overhead?
Everything you say is true, but it makes vastly more sense to determine the amount of processor speed needed by what the device is actually being asked to do rather than trying to glean the user's mood and how that relates to required processor speed. Decoding an mp3 is a low intensity activity, and you don't need to know the user's heart rate or any nonsense like that to know you can afford to turn down the cpu frequency if that's all its being asked to do. Similarly, no matter how emotional the user is getting over the text message they are typing, the processor is still going to be sitting in its idle loop 99% of the time waiting for the next keypress so it's perfectly safe to lower the frequency there too. If they're doing something that requires a lot more processor, well, again this is obvious from the processor's point of view. And while the switches themselves are slow from the processor's point of view, they are too fast to notice from the user's point of view so it's perfectly feasible to switch from one to the other as processor load indicates.
So given that we already know how* to tune a processor's frequency to match the work being asked of it in a way that minimizes power consumption but never appears "slow" to the user, what exactly does this add? Is it for when someone starts playing a CPU intensive game on their iPhone, but isn't actually playing it? Yeah I'm sure you could save a lot of power by realizing that the user isn't in the same room as the device, so their Quake framerate really dosen't matter. So would an auto-shutoff after two minutes of no user input, and my phone already has that too.
* It's not like there's some proven ideal algorithm for it, but nevertheless existing devices do a pretty good job and are getting better.
In that same joke I suggested that it would be impossible for AMD to ramp up production and intel could simply control the EU by refusing to sell CPU's to the EU.
I was told I was wrong and AMD could ramp up production no problem and intel would take huge losses.
Yes, because while the EU is a large market segment, it is still just a segment of the global market. Servicing 100% of that market, but only their current ~15% of other global markets, would probably be almost doable. If Intel seriously looked like they might follow through on your proposed "threat", then the huge influx of new investment in AMD would easily enable them to make up any difference with new fabs in their own spun off foundry company and deals with other foundries.
Whereas a few individual companies brave/foolish enough to ditch Intel on their own would not cause such an influx because in the global market the rebels simply aren't going to be both competitive and large. It would take Intel doing something monumentally stupid, like deliberately handing a huge segment of the market into AMDs lap, to break this dynamic. Get it?
I can't win either way.
Yeah, I can't fathom why.
Now that you mention it, why don't Apple PCs use any AMD chips? They're often better value and have the same compatibility.
Oh, that one's easy and doesn't (necessarily, who knows what went on behind closed doors) involve illegal Intel business practices.
Apple switching away from PowerPC was a risky move. They didn't want to make the move appear more risky by picking the underdog x86 supplier. And they like their hardware to be homogenous, which is why they went with only one supplier. If you're going to pick one x86 supplier...
Also, the main reason they left IBM was because they felt IBM's mobile cpu roadmap was inadequate. Well especially at that time, Intel simply had the more impressive mobile roadmap than AMD.
I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...
Almost certainly and OMG HELL YES.
First, if not for these anti-competitive practices, AMD would have significantly more market share. The difference in Intel's profits with AMD at 15% vs 30% for the past ten years blows this pathetic fine away.
Second, remember how expensive Intel processors were back when AMD was nothing more than a second-source supplier Intel granted an x86 license in order to make IBM et al happy? Intel does! They sure as shit want to get back to the days when they were the only game in town. And these days nobody really cares about second sources, so they wouldn't even need to have a token 'competitor' to blunt their monopoly pricing. Every single one of these illegal practices was ultimately aimed at preventing AMD from getting the foothold needed to stay profitable and driving them out of business. Because the difference in Intel's profit with AMD at 15% vs AMD at 0% is just ridiculous.
Oh don't worry. This slippery slope has a ramp on it that jumps right over politics.