It's pretty ironic that the "populist" tea party movement probably has a lot of people who would be well served by the kind of Progressive movement that existed 100 years ago. Instead, they're voting for more Corporatism.
It's the widespread adoption of socialist... sorry, 'progressive'... policies which has got us into this mess: imposing more of them is hardly going to fix it.
What will happen is that one party tries to get out of the financial crisis. The only way to do that is by raising taxes.
Raising taxes in a recession is just about the fastest possible way to turn it into a depression... it just sucks money out of the productive parts of the economy so that the government can waste it on unproductive makework scams or hand it to their big business cronies who are busy outsourcing jobs to India.
You know, Arafat would say one thing in English, and then another in Arabic.
The linked article quotes him speaking against outsourcing, and then he goes to India and speaks favorably of it. He's not using a different language; but it's the same idea.
I believe we have a word for this in English: it's called 'lying'.
Why can journalists not resist the temptation to exaggerate every damn thing they report on?
In journalism it's probably a good idea to never attribute to dishonesty something that can more readily be explained by ordinary everyday incompetence; my experience is that most journalists I've met couldn't tell a loop from a barrel roll even if they were sober at the time.
Just look at how many power hogging P4s are still in use, thanks partially to the fact that Intel paid off OEMs not to run the better at the time AMD chips.
Prior to the Athlon-64, P4s _were_ better than Athlons unless you wanted to run x87 floating point instructions. When I bought my last Windows PC I expected to go AMD but when I actually looked at the benchmarks the P4 was up to twice as fast as a similarly-priced Athlon at rendering in the 3D and video editing packages I was using at the time.
It was only in the final P4 space-heater era that choosing AMD became a no-brainer.
If Intel & AMD decided to offer GPUs linked by QPI & HT it would give their GPUs a big advantage with Nvidia unable to compete.
That would also kill Intel's high-end consumer products. Most high-end Intel CPUs are sold to gamers, who aren't going to be gaming on some crappy Intel integrated graphics chip.
At least for the forseeable future, Intel need Nvidia for the mid to high-end gaming market, because they're not going to be releasing GPUs in that arena any time soon.
They have no real motivation to do a good job because they could do a catastrophically bad job and they still wouldn't get fired.
I'd hate to work where you do if the only motivation you people have to do a good job is the fear of being fired.
But that's not really the problem anyway: the real problem is not that the 'crucial employees' start doing a bad job, but that once they realise they're going to be out of a job in two years the 'crucial employees' are the first ones out the door because they can easily get a new job elsewhere.
That's a very valid point, most people don't realize that there never will be any "magic" improvements in rocketry to bring the cost down to the point that we'll all be taking holidays on Mars. It's still a high-energy problem, and new technology doesn't necessarily make the hard problems much easier.
The ultimate limit on the cost of getting into orbit is the cost of rocket fuel, which is not a lot. What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.
If there are no people, nothing needs to be reused.
So we should build single-use container ships and sink them after they've crossed the ocean once?
Reusability is _the_ biggest cost-saver possible, so long as it doesn't require the massive maintenance that a shuttle does between flights (not to mention the cost and complexity of the external tank and boosters).
I'm not in disagreement with you, but I still am really interested in knowing how much of the "cost" of launching a shuttle is amortized into the space program's sunk costs, how much is in the market value of natural resources, how much is in salaries and real estate expenses and stuff, and how much is marginal costs...
It's a few years since I looked into this, but I believe at the time the variable cost of a shuttle flight was around $250,000,000 and the fixed costs of the program were over $3,000,000,000 a year. A lot of those fixed costs go into maintaining KSC and other NASA facilities; imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if you flew a mere six times a year and did so from your own multi-runway international airport with a staff of thousands.
Air-breathing engines are heavy and require you to fly... in air... which means very high drag and very high fuel consumption. Unless you can build some kind of dual-mode jet/rocket like Skylon, or build a jet-powered first stage and a rocket-powered second stage, you're better off just forgetting about them.
There's a reason why rockets go pretty much straight up at the beginning of a launch: they want to spend as little time as possible at high speed in the atmosphere to eliminate drag losses and make the engines more efficient.
Fundamentally why does Linux need to stick with using X11? After all, if you need X11 you could always run it as a server over wayland (this is how X11 runs on OS X or Windows).
Because many of us routinely run X11 programs on one system with the display on another? Switch to Wayland and you lose that capability, which is a massive benefit to professional Linux users.
And if you don't need X11, then the system benefits from a more streamlined graphical layer with all the compositing done in the display driver next to the kernel rather than being farmed out by X to an extension and back and forth several times with various hacks.
X11 is probably more efficient on a modern multi-core system since the rendering and display logic run in different processes.
Boeing, Arianespace and various other companies launch things into orbit on a regular basis. Putting a capsule on top is easy, finding people willing to pay for it is the hard part.
Don't forget the fact that Buran also had a working autonomous guidance system and was able to perform an entire mission unmanned.
To be fair, the shuttle could do that with some rewiring (e.g. the landing gear isn't connected to the computers) and reprogramming (e.g. to lower the landing gear before landing). It already flies the majority of the trajectory on most flights by itself.
That said, if they'd tried that on the first shuttle flight it would probably have burned up due to incorrect assumptions in the aerodynamic model that required John Young to fly manually for part of the reentry.
And part of the reason I don't trust private sector space exploration at this stage of space exploration..
Any private launch company who killed its passengers one time in fifty would be out of business very fast. As far as I remember Branson is planning over a hundred test flights before putting passengers on SS2.
And the main reason this is an issue is because a failure which caused an engine shutdown early in the flight would require an RTLS abort which is probably unsurvivable, and a failure later in the launch would require an ATO abort which would prevent them from getting to ISS.
Thus speaks someone who as never seen a launch and believes things like the Hubble telescope shouldn't be serviced.
But no telescope since Hubble has been designed for manned servicing because it's proven cheaper to launch a new one than to send astronauts there.
Servicing Hubble made sense when a shuttle flight was supposed to cost $10,000,000 (maybe $50,000,000 in today's money), but not now it's proven to cost over $1,000,000,000.
Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.
Microcomputer development had very little to do with NASA. At worst they might have appeared a few years later than they did because the AGC pushed IC production rates and quality up while pushing price down.
And that work was done by MIT and their hardware manufacturers, NASA just gave them the specs and the money.
Well, more seriously, the problem with Linux is the lack of a stable API.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run. The benefit of Linux is that most software is open source, so the developers can throw away crappy old APIs whenever they become too cruddy to continue to support.
Have fun as more and more software says "Fuck you" and you can't run it on your fancy-shmancy XP Pro any more, because you think using a decade-old OS is a great idea.
At that point it will presumably be a good time to upgrade to Linux.
He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
And how is your ISP going to do that? At best they could remove it if it's on a server on their network, otherwise you're SOL.
And in the case of the Daily Mail, what do you plan to do about all those evil people who have copies of the print version of the newspaper?
Why would I bother developing something just to keep it to myself?
Lots of companies develop software internally which will never be released outside the company. They don't have to make source available to anyone other than those who use it inside the company.
I would only develop something to sell myself, or something my employer could use. GPL doesn't let me do either without giving away how I did it by releasing the source code.
Which is only fair, because your code wouldn't work without all the code that others have contributed for free.
As mentioned, the only 'right' BSD gives that GPL doesn't is the right to prevent end users from getting access to the source. That's not 'freedom' in any sense I can imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
And before anyone tries to argue against that, notice we don't have laws limiting price gouging for digital products.
Actually, we have laws encouraging monopolist price gouging for digital products: it's called 'copyright'.
It's pretty ironic that the "populist" tea party movement probably has a lot
of people who would be well served by the kind of Progressive movement that existed
100 years ago. Instead, they're voting for more Corporatism.
It's the widespread adoption of socialist... sorry, 'progressive'... policies which has got us into this mess: imposing more of them is hardly going to fix it.
What will happen is that one party tries to get out of the financial crisis. The only way to do that is by raising taxes.
Raising taxes in a recession is just about the fastest possible way to turn it into a depression... it just sucks money out of the productive parts of the economy so that the government can waste it on unproductive makework scams or hand it to their big business cronies who are busy outsourcing jobs to India.
You know, Arafat would say one thing in English, and then
another in Arabic.
The linked article quotes him speaking against outsourcing,
and then he goes to India and speaks favorably of it. He's not
using a different language; but it's the same idea.
I believe we have a word for this in English: it's called 'lying'.
Logically if there is a future when robots do all our jobs, you'd be better off in the countries which treat their jobless well.
How long do you think the robots will 'treat their jobless well'?
Why can journalists not resist the temptation to exaggerate every damn thing they report on?
In journalism it's probably a good idea to never attribute to dishonesty something that can more readily be explained by ordinary everyday incompetence; my experience is that most journalists I've met couldn't tell a loop from a barrel roll even if they were sober at the time.
Just look at how many power hogging P4s are still in use, thanks partially to the fact that Intel paid off OEMs not to run the better at the time AMD chips.
Prior to the Athlon-64, P4s _were_ better than Athlons unless you wanted to run x87 floating point instructions. When I bought my last Windows PC I expected to go AMD but when I actually looked at the benchmarks the P4 was up to twice as fast as a similarly-priced Athlon at rendering in the 3D and video editing packages I was using at the time.
It was only in the final P4 space-heater era that choosing AMD became a no-brainer.
If Intel & AMD decided to offer GPUs linked by QPI & HT it would give their GPUs a big advantage with Nvidia unable to compete.
That would also kill Intel's high-end consumer products. Most high-end Intel CPUs are sold to gamers, who aren't going to be gaming on some crappy Intel integrated graphics chip.
At least for the forseeable future, Intel need Nvidia for the mid to high-end gaming market, because they're not going to be releasing GPUs in that arena any time soon.
They have no real motivation to do a good job because they could do a catastrophically bad job and they still wouldn't get fired.
I'd hate to work where you do if the only motivation you people have to do a good job is the fear of being fired.
But that's not really the problem anyway: the real problem is not that the 'crucial employees' start doing a bad job, but that once they realise they're going to be out of a job in two years the 'crucial employees' are the first ones out the door because they can easily get a new job elsewhere.
That's a very valid point, most people don't realize that there never will be any "magic" improvements in rocketry to bring the cost down to the point that we'll all be taking holidays on Mars. It's still a high-energy problem, and new technology doesn't necessarily make the hard problems much easier.
The ultimate limit on the cost of getting into orbit is the cost of rocket fuel, which is not a lot. What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.
If there are no people, nothing needs to be reused.
So we should build single-use container ships and sink them after they've crossed the ocean once?
Reusability is _the_ biggest cost-saver possible, so long as it doesn't require the massive maintenance that a shuttle does between flights (not to mention the cost and complexity of the external tank and boosters).
I'm not in disagreement with you, but I still am really interested in knowing how much of the "cost" of launching a shuttle is amortized into the space program's sunk costs, how much is in the market value of natural resources, how much is in salaries and real estate expenses and stuff, and how much is marginal costs...
It's a few years since I looked into this, but I believe at the time the variable cost of a shuttle flight was around $250,000,000 and the fixed costs of the program were over $3,000,000,000 a year. A lot of those fixed costs go into maintaining KSC and other NASA facilities; imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if you flew a mere six times a year and did so from your own multi-runway international airport with a staff of thousands.
Air-breathing engines are heavy and require you to fly... in air... which means very high drag and very high fuel consumption. Unless you can build some kind of dual-mode jet/rocket like Skylon, or build a jet-powered first stage and a rocket-powered second stage, you're better off just forgetting about them.
There's a reason why rockets go pretty much straight up at the beginning of a launch: they want to spend as little time as possible at high speed in the atmosphere to eliminate drag losses and make the engines more efficient.
Fundamentally why does Linux need to stick with using X11? After all, if you need X11 you could always run it as a server over wayland (this is how X11 runs on OS X or Windows).
Because many of us routinely run X11 programs on one system with the display on another? Switch to Wayland and you lose that capability, which is a massive benefit to professional Linux users.
And if you don't need X11, then the system benefits from a more streamlined graphical layer with all the compositing done in the display driver next to the kernel rather than being farmed out by X to an extension and back and forth several times with various hacks.
X11 is probably more efficient on a modern multi-core system since the rendering and display logic run in different processes.
Again, if that were true, *they would have*.
Why?
If that were true, Hubble would never ever have been serviced, as it would be "cheaper to launch a new one". And yet it has been, repeatedly.
How does the governent doing something prove that it's cost-effective?
can't even get INTO orbit.
So your comment is out of order.
Boeing, Arianespace and various other companies launch things into orbit on a regular basis. Putting a capsule on top is easy, finding people willing to pay for it is the hard part.
Don't forget the fact that Buran also had a working autonomous guidance system and was able to perform an entire mission unmanned.
To be fair, the shuttle could do that with some rewiring (e.g. the landing gear isn't connected to the computers) and reprogramming (e.g. to lower the landing gear before landing). It already flies the majority of the trajectory on most flights by itself.
That said, if they'd tried that on the first shuttle flight it would probably have burned up due to incorrect assumptions in the aerodynamic model that required John Young to fly manually for part of the reentry.
And part of the reason I don't trust private sector space exploration at this stage of space exploration..
Any private launch company who killed its passengers one time in fifty would be out of business very fast. As far as I remember Branson is planning over a hundred test flights before putting passengers on SS2.
And the main reason this is an issue is because a failure which caused an engine shutdown early in the flight would require an RTLS abort which is probably unsurvivable, and a failure later in the launch would require an ATO abort which would prevent them from getting to ISS.
Thus speaks someone who as never seen a launch and believes things like the Hubble telescope shouldn't be serviced.
But no telescope since Hubble has been designed for manned servicing because it's proven cheaper to launch a new one than to send astronauts there.
Servicing Hubble made sense when a shuttle flight was supposed to cost $10,000,000 (maybe $50,000,000 in today's money), but not now it's proven to cost over $1,000,000,000.
Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.
Microcomputer development had very little to do with NASA. At worst they might have appeared a few years later than they did because the AGC pushed IC production rates and quality up while pushing price down.
And that work was done by MIT and their hardware manufacturers, NASA just gave them the specs and the money.
Well, more seriously, the problem with Linux is the lack of a stable API.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run. The benefit of Linux is that most software is open source, so the developers can throw away crappy old APIs whenever they become too cruddy to continue to support.
Have fun as more and more software says "Fuck you" and you can't run it on your fancy-shmancy XP Pro any more, because you think using a decade-old OS is a great idea.
At that point it will presumably be a good time to upgrade to Linux.
He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
And how is your ISP going to do that? At best they could remove it if it's on a server on their network, otherwise you're SOL.
And in the case of the Daily Mail, what do you plan to do about all those evil people who have copies of the print version of the newspaper?
So, what are his ideas?
EBCDIC?
Why would I bother developing something just to keep it to myself?
Lots of companies develop software internally which will never be released outside the company. They don't have to make source available to anyone other than those who use it inside the company.
I would only develop something to sell myself, or something my employer could use. GPL doesn't let me do either without giving away how I did it by releasing the source code.
Which is only fair, because your code wouldn't work without all the code that others have contributed for free.
As mentioned, the only 'right' BSD gives that GPL doesn't is the right to prevent end users from getting access to the source. That's not 'freedom' in any sense I can imagine.