I think even just the willingness to contribute something to an open BIOS implementation is very commendable.
Additionally, it could be a smart move for AMD. A FOSS BIOS could give them a competitive advantage in sales, as the only/first manufacturer of modern high-end chipsets enabling personal computer products where a full code audit or replacement with user-trusted secure code would be practical.
Compare this to Intel, which includes support for remote administration in the chips, BIOS, and network adapter firmware - as a "feature". This runs under the OS, invisible to it if desired and unstoppable, and provides a hardware man-in-the-middle that can completely control the system - even "phoning home" when traveling or at an IP address not previously known to the "remote administrator".
Switzerland is very picky about the few it lets in.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing.
Depends on whether you're trying to get in or are already in. This was in response to suggestions for where to try.
If you're the multimillionaire founder of a high-tek company who cashed out in time to keep much of its value, you might try Switzerland. With years of legal work and some descent from families still in the country you might manage to be accepted. If you're Joe Upper Middle Class from Meltingpot, cashing out his dwindling home equity, Switzerland would be a very long shot.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software.
The issue is NOT cost of the software, cost or difficulty of the training, or difficulty of operation.
The issue is whether bureaucrats, for their own convenience (or pocket-lining), can be allowed to lock up government documents and government interactions in the proprietary format of a US corporation.
Doing so puts the government and the people, from then on, at the mercy of the corporation. The entire population is faced with the choice of paying ongoing tribute to the corporation or suffering a severe impediment and competitive disadvantage when dealing with their own government or attempting to access its records. (They call certain licensing fees "royalties" for a reason.)
With open formats and FOSS tools there might be a learning curve and (if the corporations are to be believed) some reduced functionality or slightly increased difficulty of operation. But nobody is excluded or unnecessarily handicapped and all records stay accessible to all forever.
Are you honestly arguing for the ethical nature of the Khmer Rouge?
HELL no!
Just pointing out that some of the alleged (and rare) "benefits" claimed by Communist regimes are often transient fallout from their atrocities.
Similar to the one about the Italian Fascists: "At least they made the trains run on time". What they ACTUALLY did was make the media SAY they'd made the trains run on time.
"Truth is Treason in the empire of lies." -Ron Paul
The real problem with CCSC is that, since it tends to be regional, not subject focussed, and not all that good in general, people who live close by will show up, give their talk, and go home.
On the other hand, this can be GOOD for a student. It means a broader range of subjects tangentially related to his current focus - which may provide inspiration either for a career midcourse-correction or a cross-discipline insight leading to a future breakthrough. And the contacts you DO make may be local enough that you can develop them into strong ones - good friends in your field.
I went to SIGGRAPH as an undergrad when I was vaguely interested in computer graphics (before starting grad school in the same field) and it was an awesome experience, both the technical presentations AND the social aspect
Hell, yeah. SIGGRAPH was my annual "Thousand dollar night at the movies", paid for out of my own pocket back when I was a starving student driving a beater held together by rust, car-pooling several similarly impoverished young techies halfway across the continent to attend. Contacts I made back then were important to my career, and contagiously to those of other of my contacts, from then on. (Even just last month.) Similarly with NCC.
To have been invited to present at a one while not yet out of school? That's adding solid-fuel boosters. If this conference is at least tangentially associated with your career path, whether academic or industry, I'd say go for it, and do your best on the paper. It might help you become one of "The Names" in your branch of the industry over the next couple decades.
Why do we have a whole bunch of people taking money from us without our consent, deciding what we should or should not do, and then enforcing those rules upon us?
They don't. You're free to move to another country and denounce your original citizenship.
It's "renounce".
And (as of the last time I looked) it doesn't get you out of US income and death taxes for 10 years (unless you're completely up-to-date on income taxes for the previous five years and have both a low-to-moderate income and little accumulated property). And then you can't be in the US for more than 30 days a year (or 60 if working for a completely out-of-country company) without ending up back on the tax rolls again.
Back when the CD standard was promulgated I recall Steve Eberback (the designer of the excellent DCM loudspeakers) lamenting the quality.
Played through the flat-transient-response speakers his company produced, the 16-bit LINEAR encoding caused annoyingly audible artifacts on any program material with significant dynamic range (such as classical music), both in terms of distortion and bringing up the noise floor (which is acoustic-illusion killing). Meanwhile the too-close-in Nyquist frequency of 22.01 kHz required antialiasing filters which were normally far from phase-flat, time-smearing broadband percussive sounds and mushing-up the splendid crispness that the speakers were capable of reproducing.
They still did better than virtually all of the competition. But CD program material ate most of their advantage over even moderately-good competitive products.
I hope they not only raise the number of bits per sample but also raise the sampling rate. It would be nice to again experience some of the amazing effects these speakers could produce, but with new program material.
It is not impossible to build and deploy a nation-wide infrastructure capable of delivering high quality service to every part of this country.
It IS effectively impossible to build a network where the bandwidth of the interconnect is not mostly idle due to slow last-mile connections, TCP bulk transfers and streaming media play well together, AND the packets of the two are treated equally. This is because TCP works by increasing its speed until packets are dropped and THEN throttling back, while streaming has a much lower bandwidth requirement but performs poorly if some of its packets are dropped due to congstion. The two styles have to be treated differently to make the bulk of the backbone bandwidth available to the users.
The problem is that the same tools that are needed to make the two types of traffic play well can also be used to implement anticompetitive penalization of competitors' traffic.
And IMHO the solution is not to ban traffic management. The solution is to ban ANTICOMPETITIVE traffic management.
And that is not the job of the FCC. It can be done by more appropriate branches of the government, under antitrust, anti-fraud ("you sold 'internet access' and delivered WHAT?"), and consumer protection law.
Imagine what would happen to an ISP that had tried to shake down Google (and other "providers") if Google (etc.) throttled their traffic to that ISP's addresses until the ISP threw in the towel (or went belly-up) - while telling all who listened that the ISP was the reason their results were glacial. B-)
So if you want change... Real change with 3rd parties, you need to change the constitution.
Or you can do what Ron Paul and the Tea Party are attempting: Get into the primary process and rehack one of the existing parties to be more to the public's liking.
This has the advantage of sidestepping the third-party penalty and giving access to the incumbent party's machinery.
Further, while the internals of the parties themselves are largely not the subject of law and a ruling faction can be refractory rather than going along with the new recruits, their efforts to spike a large INternal popular movement exposes this ossification and, if the movement is popular enough, can lead to "dynastic succession" in one of the party slots.
The last time the latter happened was when the Republicans replaced the Whigs over the issues surrounding the North-South conflict (INCLUDING slavery - the new Rs were against it). The former happens far more often (as when the currently in-power Neocon faction took over the Republican party after Reagan.)
Gasoline is not the only thing derived from petroleum resources.. You will still depend heavily on OPEC for all of your plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, and thousands of other uses.
And, as with mobile energy production, oil is used as a feedstock for those because it's currently cheaper than the alternatives.
Virtually all of them, for example, could be fed from agricultural byproducts if it wasn't vastly cheaper to use leftovers from oil refineries.
Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.
As a historian of my acquaintance pointed out: If you kill enough people you have, for a little while, more stuff per head to distribute to the remainder. This works until production collapses due to perverse incentive structures (which happens well before it would have collapsed due to lack of workers).
how on earth do you plan to move all this energy to places that need it?
With inverters or DC-to-DC switching upconverters.
You need high voltage low current for long-distance power transmission and moderate voltages with high current at the load and in the generation machinery.
AC beat out DC with 19th century technology. With AC, transformers perform the up- and down-conversion cheaply and efficiently. For DC they needed rotary converters and that limited the voltage that could be produced. (The practical limit was around 600 volts due to commutator arc-over. Too low for cross-country transmission. So Tesla-Westinghouse beat out Edison-GE by bringing cheap hydropower from Niagra Falls to New York City.)
But by the middle of the 20th century, vacuum tube technology made DC power transmission competitive with AC for very long distances (to ammortize the cost of the voltage converters), and shortly afterward semiconductors made it advantageous. These days the solid-state electronics is so good that PC boards are designed with multiple stages of voltage conversion, because you lose less power in the extra voltage converter than in shipping 1.2V a few inches across the board in a pair of copper layers.
So getting DC from the panels converted to something shippable - either synchronized with the local AC grid or shifted to high-voltage DC - is no problem at all. EXACTLY the same technology - and the same Moore's Law - that took computers from rooms full of racks full of vacuum tubes to chips in every appliance and toy has performed the same improvement on the voltage conversion problem for power transmission.
... once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining,...
A number of fusion approaches are being investigated. All of them except perhaps laser ignition are not susceptible to easy conversion to a batch process.
The problem with fusion is to get it going on a big chunk of material using something short of a fission bomb. Farnsworth-Hirsch, Polywell, Dense Plasma Focus, and classical magnetic confinement devices such as Tokamak are dealing with applying extreme control to something very close to a vacuum. Muon-catalyzed fusion can't break even because the muons decay before they've caused enough fusion to pay the energy cost of their creation. Solid-state approaches (if they actually do work) apparently require stable large-scale order that breaks down by the melting-point temperature of the solid substrate. Laser-ignited approaches require a barn-size laser system to put the squeeze on a dust mote from all sides, and while the square-cube law says a factory-sized system might get you up to setting off nuclear party-poppers you're still a long way away from setting off pounds of fuel in a fusion bang.
You forget, even the very first census just 3 years after the Constitution was ratified asked questions about age, race, and gender, in addition to the required (at the time) question of whether they were slaves or free persons.
At the time the age and gender questions were appropriate as well, because women and children generally didn't have the vote but did count toward representation. While the federal elections were operated by the states primarily under their own rules, the information was appropriate for the federal government to have, to check for election fraud.
I agree that the race question argues for your point.
This guy lost me with the first thing on the list. Going directly to root is great - if you're a noob in mom's basement. Nobody who has ever run systems in a serious environment mucks around as root as an alternative to something like sudo.
Wrong-o.
You work as a user until you have to get into the guts. But then you go to full-bore root because most of what you do there takes more than one command, and qualifying every command breaks your concentration.
The only thing they got wrong was the solution of changing the root password and using su - from then on. My preference for riding the lightning on a sudo-based configuration (like baseline ubuntu) is the far less intrusive "sudo csh". The more hardcore would probably prefer "sudo bash".
When not using ed(1), Real Unix vets use Bostic's One True vi, not some fagged-up Vegas showplace of an editor like vim.
Indeed.
A particularly nasty vim change is that:
- In vi "u" undoes the last change - even if it was another "u". Hit "u" repeatedly and the screen flips between with and without the last change, making it blink. Useful if a multi-change command may have done something goofy.
- In vim "u" backs you through a history of changes. Handy sometimes. But to redo you have to "control-r". Forget about blinking the screen to use your eye's motion sensors to spot the trouble. Also watch out for accidentally undoing a bunch of changes just before you close and exit. Oops!
Geez, guys. If you want to add new stuff (like a history to go backward through), don't change the behavior of an existing command. Add another, or at least make it configurable - preferably with the default the old behavior.
That's because Android has been blessed by the Church of Open Source. It isn't held to the same standards. It's a religious thing, you know.;-)
No, it's a practical thing. With Open Source, if one of the clouds is missing from paradise you can add it. Or wait until some team of team of fanatics in their monastery do so and then import a copy.
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I think that GOTO wouldn't be so harmful if everyone adopted the non-aggression principle.
To be practical as a social organizing principle, it must do its work when not everyone signs on.
That's why the non-aggression principle only bans INITIATING coercion. "Never start a fight. Always finish one." is a "compatible license".
I think even just the willingness to contribute something to an open BIOS implementation is very commendable.
Additionally, it could be a smart move for AMD. A FOSS BIOS could give them a competitive advantage in sales, as the only/first manufacturer of modern high-end chipsets enabling personal computer products where a full code audit or replacement with user-trusted secure code would be practical.
Compare this to Intel, which includes support for remote administration in the chips, BIOS, and network adapter firmware - as a "feature". This runs under the OS, invisible to it if desired and unstoppable, and provides a hardware man-in-the-middle that can completely control the system - even "phoning home" when traveling or at an IP address not previously known to the "remote administrator".
Switzerland is very picky about the few it lets in.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing.
Depends on whether you're trying to get in or are already in. This was in response to suggestions for where to try.
If you're the multimillionaire founder of a high-tek company who cashed out in time to keep much of its value, you might try Switzerland. With years of legal work and some descent from families still in the country you might manage to be accepted. If you're Joe Upper Middle Class from Meltingpot, cashing out his dwindling home equity, Switzerland would be a very long shot.
Consumer-grade wearable x-ray dosimeter with alarm.
Don't know about the rest. But Switzerland is very picky about the few it lets in.
Only one I know of who made it is Autodesk co-fouder John Walker.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software.
The issue is NOT cost of the software, cost or difficulty of the training, or difficulty of operation.
The issue is whether bureaucrats, for their own convenience (or pocket-lining), can be allowed to lock up government documents and government interactions in the proprietary format of a US corporation.
Doing so puts the government and the people, from then on, at the mercy of the corporation. The entire population is faced with the choice of paying ongoing tribute to the corporation or suffering a severe impediment and competitive disadvantage when dealing with their own government or attempting to access its records. (They call certain licensing fees "royalties" for a reason.)
With open formats and FOSS tools there might be a learning curve and (if the corporations are to be believed) some reduced functionality or slightly increased difficulty of operation. But nobody is excluded or unnecessarily handicapped and all records stay accessible to all forever.
Are you honestly arguing for the ethical nature of the Khmer Rouge?
HELL no!
Just pointing out that some of the alleged (and rare) "benefits" claimed by Communist regimes are often transient fallout from their atrocities.
Similar to the one about the Italian Fascists: "At least they made the trains run on time". What they ACTUALLY did was make the media SAY they'd made the trains run on time.
"Truth is Treason in the empire of lies." -Ron Paul
(Sorry so late following up. Hope you spot this.)
... your professor will be disappointed if you don't. B-b
The real problem with CCSC is that, since it tends to be regional, not subject focussed, and not all that good in general, people who live close by will show up, give their talk, and go home.
On the other hand, this can be GOOD for a student. It means a broader range of subjects tangentially related to his current focus - which may provide inspiration either for a career midcourse-correction or a cross-discipline insight leading to a future breakthrough. And the contacts you DO make may be local enough that you can develop them into strong ones - good friends in your field.
I went to SIGGRAPH as an undergrad when I was vaguely interested in computer graphics (before starting grad school in the same field) and it was an awesome experience, both the technical presentations AND the social aspect
Hell, yeah. SIGGRAPH was my annual "Thousand dollar night at the movies", paid for out of my own pocket back when I was a starving student driving a beater held together by rust, car-pooling several similarly impoverished young techies halfway across the continent to attend. Contacts I made back then were important to my career, and contagiously to those of other of my contacts, from then on. (Even just last month.) Similarly with NCC.
To have been invited to present at a one while not yet out of school? That's adding solid-fuel boosters. If this conference is at least tangentially associated with your career path, whether academic or industry, I'd say go for it, and do your best on the paper. It might help you become one of "The Names" in your branch of the industry over the next couple decades.
It's become the norm for people to be treated like criminals.
A step up in the world. It's been the norm to treat them as domestic animals for some time. B-b
Why do we have a whole bunch of people taking money from us without our consent, deciding what we should or should not do, and then enforcing those rules upon us?
They don't. You're free to move to another country and denounce your original citizenship.
It's "renounce".
And (as of the last time I looked) it doesn't get you out of US income and death taxes for 10 years (unless you're completely up-to-date on income taxes for the previous five years and have both a low-to-moderate income and little accumulated property). And then you can't be in the US for more than 30 days a year (or 60 if working for a completely out-of-country company) without ending up back on the tax rolls again.
Ask John Walker, ex of Autodesk, about it. B-b
Back when the CD standard was promulgated I recall Steve Eberback (the designer of the excellent DCM loudspeakers) lamenting the quality.
Played through the flat-transient-response speakers his company produced, the 16-bit LINEAR encoding caused annoyingly audible artifacts on any program material with significant dynamic range (such as classical music), both in terms of distortion and bringing up the noise floor (which is acoustic-illusion killing). Meanwhile the too-close-in Nyquist frequency of 22.01 kHz required antialiasing filters which were normally far from phase-flat, time-smearing broadband percussive sounds and mushing-up the splendid crispness that the speakers were capable of reproducing.
They still did better than virtually all of the competition. But CD program material ate most of their advantage over even moderately-good competitive products.
I hope they not only raise the number of bits per sample but also raise the sampling rate. It would be nice to again experience some of the amazing effects these speakers could produce, but with new program material.
It is not impossible to build and deploy a nation-wide infrastructure capable of delivering high quality service to every part of this country.
It IS effectively impossible to build a network where the bandwidth of the interconnect is not mostly idle due to slow last-mile connections, TCP bulk transfers and streaming media play well together, AND the packets of the two are treated equally. This is because TCP works by increasing its speed until packets are dropped and THEN throttling back, while streaming has a much lower bandwidth requirement but performs poorly if some of its packets are dropped due to congstion. The two styles have to be treated differently to make the bulk of the backbone bandwidth available to the users.
The problem is that the same tools that are needed to make the two types of traffic play well can also be used to implement anticompetitive penalization of competitors' traffic.
And IMHO the solution is not to ban traffic management. The solution is to ban ANTICOMPETITIVE traffic management.
And that is not the job of the FCC. It can be done by more appropriate branches of the government, under antitrust, anti-fraud ("you sold 'internet access' and delivered WHAT?"), and consumer protection law.
Imagine what would happen to an ISP that had tried to shake down Google (and other "providers") if Google (etc.) throttled their traffic to that ISP's addresses until the ISP threw in the towel (or went belly-up) - while telling all who listened that the ISP was the reason their results were glacial. B-)
So if you want change... Real change with 3rd parties, you need to change the constitution.
Or you can do what Ron Paul and the Tea Party are attempting: Get into the primary process and rehack one of the existing parties to be more to the public's liking.
This has the advantage of sidestepping the third-party penalty and giving access to the incumbent party's machinery.
Further, while the internals of the parties themselves are largely not the subject of law and a ruling faction can be refractory rather than going along with the new recruits, their efforts to spike a large INternal popular movement exposes this ossification and, if the movement is popular enough, can lead to "dynastic succession" in one of the party slots.
The last time the latter happened was when the Republicans replaced the Whigs over the issues surrounding the North-South conflict (INCLUDING slavery - the new Rs were against it). The former happens far more often (as when the currently in-power Neocon faction took over the Republican party after Reagan.)
Gasoline is not the only thing derived from petroleum resources.. You will still depend heavily on OPEC for all of your plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, and thousands of other uses.
And, as with mobile energy production, oil is used as a feedstock for those because it's currently cheaper than the alternatives.
Virtually all of them, for example, could be fed from agricultural byproducts if it wasn't vastly cheaper to use leftovers from oil refineries.
Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.
As a historian of my acquaintance pointed out: If you kill enough people you have, for a little while, more stuff per head to distribute to the remainder. This works until production collapses due to perverse incentive structures (which happens well before it would have collapsed due to lack of workers).
how on earth do you plan to move all this energy to places that need it?
With inverters or DC-to-DC switching upconverters.
You need high voltage low current for long-distance power transmission and moderate voltages with high current at the load and in the generation machinery.
AC beat out DC with 19th century technology. With AC, transformers perform the up- and down-conversion cheaply and efficiently. For DC they needed rotary converters and that limited the voltage that could be produced. (The practical limit was around 600 volts due to commutator arc-over. Too low for cross-country transmission. So Tesla-Westinghouse beat out Edison-GE by bringing cheap hydropower from Niagra Falls to New York City.)
But by the middle of the 20th century, vacuum tube technology made DC power transmission competitive with AC for very long distances (to ammortize the cost of the voltage converters), and shortly afterward semiconductors made it advantageous. These days the solid-state electronics is so good that PC boards are designed with multiple stages of voltage conversion, because you lose less power in the extra voltage converter than in shipping 1.2V a few inches across the board in a pair of copper layers.
So getting DC from the panels converted to something shippable - either synchronized with the local AC grid or shifted to high-voltage DC - is no problem at all. EXACTLY the same technology - and the same Moore's Law - that took computers from rooms full of racks full of vacuum tubes to chips in every appliance and toy has performed the same improvement on the voltage conversion problem for power transmission.
... once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining, ...
A number of fusion approaches are being investigated. All of them except perhaps laser ignition are not susceptible to easy conversion to a batch process.
The problem with fusion is to get it going on a big chunk of material using something short of a fission bomb. Farnsworth-Hirsch, Polywell, Dense Plasma Focus, and classical magnetic confinement devices such as Tokamak are dealing with applying extreme control to something very close to a vacuum. Muon-catalyzed fusion can't break even because the muons decay before they've caused enough fusion to pay the energy cost of their creation. Solid-state approaches (if they actually do work) apparently require stable large-scale order that breaks down by the melting-point temperature of the solid substrate. Laser-ignited approaches require a barn-size laser system to put the squeeze on a dust mote from all sides, and while the square-cube law says a factory-sized system might get you up to setting off nuclear party-poppers you're still a long way away from setting off pounds of fuel in a fusion bang.
You forget, even the very first census just 3 years after the Constitution was ratified asked questions about age, race, and gender, in addition to the required (at the time) question of whether they were slaves or free persons.
At the time the age and gender questions were appropriate as well, because women and children generally didn't have the vote but did count toward representation. While the federal elections were operated by the states primarily under their own rules, the information was appropriate for the federal government to have, to check for election fraud.
I agree that the race question argues for your point.
Really? I'd of done it for a paltry $150 million.
I bet it would have worked on firefox 2.0.0.8, too.
Apparently $200,000,000 doesn't pay for testing on a range of browsers.
If I could display the government's map I'd take a look at how much stuff it downloaded. I bet it's so bloated it's only viewable over broadband.
This guy lost me with the first thing on the list. Going directly to root is great - if you're a noob in mom's basement. Nobody who has ever run systems in a serious environment mucks around as root as an alternative to something like sudo.
Wrong-o.
You work as a user until you have to get into the guts. But then you go to full-bore root because most of what you do there takes more than one command, and qualifying every command breaks your concentration.
The only thing they got wrong was the solution of changing the root password and using su - from then on. My preference for riding the lightning on a sudo-based configuration (like baseline ubuntu) is the far less intrusive "sudo csh". The more hardcore would probably prefer "sudo bash".
When not using ed(1), Real Unix vets use Bostic's One True vi, not some fagged-up Vegas showplace of an editor like vim.
Indeed.
A particularly nasty vim change is that:
- In vi "u" undoes the last change - even if it was another "u". Hit "u" repeatedly and the screen flips between with and without the last change, making it blink. Useful if a multi-change command may have done something goofy.
- In vim "u" backs you through a history of changes. Handy sometimes. But to redo you have to "control-r". Forget about blinking the screen to use your eye's motion sensors to spot the trouble. Also watch out for accidentally undoing a bunch of changes just before you close and exit. Oops!
Geez, guys. If you want to add new stuff (like a history to go backward through), don't change the behavior of an existing command. Add another, or at least make it configurable - preferably with the default the old behavior.
That's because Android has been blessed by the Church of Open Source. It isn't held to the same standards. It's a religious thing, you know. ;-)
No, it's a practical thing. With Open Source, if one of the clouds is missing from paradise you can add it. Or wait until some team of team of fanatics in their monastery do so and then import a copy.