"I try to explain to my customers that they want a hardware firewall (the router) and don't really need a software firewall other than the one-way jobbie that ships inside Windoze."
I disagree. I most definitely want to know when some random program decides it's going to connect to the Internet and send information from my machine to some random server.
The problem is that so much cruddy software these days decides it wants to connect to the Internet for no good reason, even when I manually disable 'auto updating' and the like, that having the firewall turned on is a pain in the ass. It's apparently impossible to stop Acrobat Reader or Media Player trying to access the Internet every time I run them, for example... the only reason I haven't totally disabled them in the firewall is that I occasionally do want them to check for updates or new codecs or whatever. Who knows what the hell they're doing?
"It's because students (you kids can laugh all you want) view teachers as role models - thus if a kid gets on the net, goes 'Hey, miss so-and-so is a drunk!' it changes the perception in their mind slightly that 'drinking is a bad thing'. Hence the promoting-underage-drinking."
When I was at school our chemistry teacher used to swig pure alcohol from the science supplies, and our maths teacher took us to the pub when we were 16 or 17 to celebrate our exam results (legal age is 18 here). So the idea that kids will be irrevocably damaged by seeing a picture of their teacher drinking seems ludicrous to me.
I'm still amazed how puritanical America is compared to Britain (which has become puritanical enough itself in the last few years).
No, it's a contract violation and arguably immoral, but it's primarily a broken business model. As someone pointed out in another thread earlier, anyone trying to impose copyright on digital data is essentially arguing that they own _A NUMBER_; either implicitly in claiming that people can't be allowed to copy their file which is just a big number, or explicitly in this case by claiming that people aren't even allowed to tell each other a particular number.
How much more absurd can a law be than that? If I claimed I owned the number 23 and no-one else was allowed to use it or even tell it to anyone, people would think I was a lunatic. Why is this any different just because it has more digits?
The IP Barons simply have to realise that their business model is broken and restricting their customers in a vain attempt to maintain it is only making matters worse. Every single time I have to sit through two minutes of unskippable fucking anti-piracy ads on a DVD that I've paid for, I grow to hate them more.
I have no interest in copying HD DVDs, but I absolutely refuse to buy any while they have this stupid 'copy protection' crap that treat their customers like dirt. Until and unless it's irrevocably broken, I'll stick with DVDs instead, where I can at least play them on my PC without having to waste my time being lectured on not pirating the disks I've paid for.
From what I understand the British government have blown about $25,000,000,000 on a computer system for the National Health Service which doesn't work worth a damn and which the doctors didn't want in the first place.
Private incompetence pales in comparison to government incompetence.
"stingy and selfish people do not want to fund schools"
People who value education oppose schooling, because schooling does very little education. Modern schools are indoctrination and daycare centers which keep kids out of the way for fifteen years while their parents are working... any actual education is an unwanted side-product.
"All these problems of observers, and reality and whether it's really real all go away if we make one very simple assumption: some particles can travel faster than light (and therefore backwards in time)."
It's not even making that assumption: it's merely using the relativistic version of Schrodinger's Equation, where there are always two solutions, one of which goes backwards in time. It's basically a complicated mathematical way of saying 'we can't tell the state of a particle until we measure it, but it's been in that state since the last interaction with another particle'.
The odd thing is that most people use the non-relativistic version... and then seem puzzled that they end up with results that seem incompatible with relativity.
Except Apple explicitly said that they picked Intel because they had a better roadmap. They might have been lying, but I can't see them betting the company's future on a short-term financial deal.
Blame Apple for choosing the better manufacturer for their computers?
It's pretty clear that Apple would have had both Intel and AMD offering them a good deal on price and supply, and would have had detailed access to both company's road-maps... and they chose Intel. That was a good enough reason for me to assume that AMD's lead over Intel would be short-lived, which is precisely what we're seeing now.
"Intel got scared and made the P4 which tanked because it was slow, drew way too much power, etc."
I'd hardly say the P4 tanked. The last of the P4s were very hot and underpowered compared to equivalent AMD chips, but I believe you'll find most PCs made in that era had Intel CPUs, not AMD; certainly when I built my current PC a few years ago the 'equivalent' Athlon chip to the P4 I ended up buying was more expensive with similar power consumption and lower performance on the benchmarks that mattered to me (e.g. video compression and 3D rendering).
AMD briefly had the technology lead over Intel with the AMD64, and could run some games faster with the Athlon against equivalent P4s, but now they've lost the lead to Intel again. I'm hoping that can at least remain competitive and profitable, because I don't want Intel to run out of competition!
"Turns out it's harder for digital media than for contemporary analog"
The negatives of the original 'Wicker Man' movie were either burnt or buried under the M3 motorway. From what I remember, some of the original 'Babylon 5' negatives were eaten by rats. They're gone, nothing will ever bring them back, because they're analogue media which can't be copied without quality loss.
The problem is the whole idea of a 'master copy' of the movie on media that goes obsolete. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied any number of times without quality loss, so build a big RAID system and stick the movies on there. Over time it will be upgraded but the digital data will remain... the only time you'll put the data on tape will be for backups, though even then you'd probably be better copying it to other RAID servers at remote sites.
"Equal treatment would be allowing men to work the hours they need to be with their kids after divorce and vice versa."
Why should any company let their servers go down for hours because people with kids refuse to be on call to fix them?
It's really that simple: someone has to be on-call to fix things that break if you're providing 24/7 coverage. It's a part of the job that people are hired for. If they can't do their job, they should find another one, not try to offload the work they're paid to do onto others.
I don't get why anyone thinks that people should be able to arbitrarily refuse to do the job they're hired to do, and then complain about it.
"If it's the case that IT work schedules and conditions happen to have been designed by guys who didn't mind being on call, and the company could change its conditions to make it possible for women (or any employee who's a primary caregiver for kids) to have the job and be effective, then they should change."
Why should people who don't have kids be expected to work extra hard to cover for the pampering of people who do have kids?
Look, you're hired to do a job. If you can't or won't do it, find a different job... there are plenty of people who are willing to do the job that they're hired for.
The only 'special treatment' men get is in divorce courts where their wife is allowed to take the house, the kids, and most of their income for the rest of their life.
If a man and a woman both apply for the same job, but the woman refuses to be on call out of work hours, why would any sane company hire her?
Why would companies want to attract people who aren't willing to accept the conditions of the job? If men in the same job are expected to be on call out of work hours, why should women get a free pass?
I thought we were supposed to have sexual equality, not special treatment for women.
Yes, I even worked on one once. Of course I haven't seen one in over a decade, and I very much doubt that many companies are relying on custom applications running on NeXT machines.
"They can pretty much all be complied with Xcode on OS X, on powerPC or intel"
Good for you. Now try doing that when you don't have the source code.
And don't forget the 286 using the keyboard controller to reset the CPU to switch back to real mode to run real-mode drivers under Windows... man those days were horrid.
"I'd argue that the comparative ease with which the migration took place shows how weak processor lock in is becoming."
For Mac users.
Who generally aren't running antique custom applications for which the source code no longer exists and which probably wouldn't compile even if it did... plenty of companies are doing that on PCs.
IMHO AMD chose the best solution with the changes they made in the 64-bit transition... since old code won't be running 64-bit, they could do whatever they wanted to tidy up the instruction set while still running those crappy old applications in 32-bit mode.
"No, it costs millions to make movies because the rendering farms used by pixar arent cheap."
Very few companies make completely CG movies. Even with Pixar, I suspect you'll find they spend more money on actors' salaries than render farm time.
And, frankly, I'm tired of movies that put more effort into CG than story. So what if there are no more $200,000,000 FX blockbusters? Who'll really miss them?
"its a matter of making consumers realise that entertainment products cost serious money to make, and that investment needs to be recouped."
Most of the 'serious money' that goes into making a movie goes to pay tens of millions of dollars to actors, director, etc. The reason that movie companies can afford to pay that much money to people to work for a few weeks is because the copyright monopoly allows them to recoup their money from distribution.
If they're now going to get less money from distribution, the solution is simple: stop paying actors forty million dollars (or whatever) for a few weeks work.
"The graphics can use system memory without the performance penalty currently associated with sharing system ram for graphics."
Yeah, let's use a slow CPU to memory bus, shared by the CPU, peripherals and the video output, rather than a 30+GB/second GPU to memory bus on a typical graphics card these days.
Sticking the GPU in the same package as the CPU is a way to decrease costs for highly integrated systems, not performance. Unless you're going to stick a really fast memory interface on the CPU, anyway.
"If it has been useful after the crime, perhaps this approach may be more helpful in stopping crime."
I'm sure someone who's been violently mugged or raped will be really happy to know that the police caught them afterwards.
How about we go back to the way the police used to work, where they patrolled the streets and deterred or stopped crime in the first place? We don't even need to wonder whether that would be 'helpful in stopping crime', because we already know that crime rates were much lower when the police did that rather than eating donuts while watching TV.
"One of the biggest applications which is being looked in UK is to alart the CCTV operators when a car parks in the hard shoulder for more than say 5 minutes and automatically alert highway patrols."
Ah, so next time you stop for a pee in the bushes, better make it quick before you're charged with public indecency.
Slashdot Mirror
"I try to explain to my customers that they want a hardware firewall (the router) and don't really need a software firewall other than the one-way jobbie that ships inside Windoze."
I disagree. I most definitely want to know when some random program decides it's going to connect to the Internet and send information from my machine to some random server.
The problem is that so much cruddy software these days decides it wants to connect to the Internet for no good reason, even when I manually disable 'auto updating' and the like, that having the firewall turned on is a pain in the ass. It's apparently impossible to stop Acrobat Reader or Media Player trying to access the Internet every time I run them, for example... the only reason I haven't totally disabled them in the firewall is that I occasionally do want them to check for updates or new codecs or whatever. Who knows what the hell they're doing?
"This is especially a problem if you are using an unencrypted wireless connection such as at a coffee shop"
Surely anyone who logs onto their bank site from a wireless connection in a coffee shop is just asking to get owned?
"It's because students (you kids can laugh all you want) view teachers as role models - thus if a kid gets on the net, goes 'Hey, miss so-and-so is a drunk!' it changes the perception in their mind slightly that 'drinking is a bad thing'. Hence the promoting-underage-drinking."
When I was at school our chemistry teacher used to swig pure alcohol from the science supplies, and our maths teacher took us to the pub when we were 16 or 17 to celebrate our exam results (legal age is 18 here). So the idea that kids will be irrevocably damaged by seeing a picture of their teacher drinking seems ludicrous to me.
I'm still amazed how puritanical America is compared to Britain (which has become puritanical enough itself in the last few years).
"It's stealing, immoral, etc."
No, it's a contract violation and arguably immoral, but it's primarily a broken business model. As someone pointed out in another thread earlier, anyone trying to impose copyright on digital data is essentially arguing that they own _A NUMBER_; either implicitly in claiming that people can't be allowed to copy their file which is just a big number, or explicitly in this case by claiming that people aren't even allowed to tell each other a particular number.
How much more absurd can a law be than that? If I claimed I owned the number 23 and no-one else was allowed to use it or even tell it to anyone, people would think I was a lunatic. Why is this any different just because it has more digits?
The IP Barons simply have to realise that their business model is broken and restricting their customers in a vain attempt to maintain it is only making matters worse. Every single time I have to sit through two minutes of unskippable fucking anti-piracy ads on a DVD that I've paid for, I grow to hate them more.
I have no interest in copying HD DVDs, but I absolutely refuse to buy any while they have this stupid 'copy protection' crap that treat their customers like dirt. Until and unless it's irrevocably broken, I'll stick with DVDs instead, where I can at least play them on my PC without having to waste my time being lectured on not pirating the disks I've paid for.
From what I understand the British government have blown about $25,000,000,000 on a computer system for the National Health Service which doesn't work worth a damn and which the doctors didn't want in the first place.
Private incompetence pales in comparison to government incompetence.
"stingy and selfish people do not want to fund schools"
People who value education oppose schooling, because schooling does very little education. Modern schools are indoctrination and daycare centers which keep kids out of the way for fifteen years while their parents are working... any actual education is an unwanted side-product.
"All these problems of observers, and reality and whether it's really real all go away if we make one very simple assumption: some particles can travel faster than light (and therefore backwards in time)."
It's not even making that assumption: it's merely using the relativistic version of Schrodinger's Equation, where there are always two solutions, one of which goes backwards in time. It's basically a complicated mathematical way of saying 'we can't tell the state of a particle until we measure it, but it's been in that state since the last interaction with another particle'.
The odd thing is that most people use the non-relativistic version... and then seem puzzled that they end up with results that seem incompatible with relativity.
Except Apple explicitly said that they picked Intel because they had a better roadmap. They might have been lying, but I can't see them betting the company's future on a short-term financial deal.
Blame Apple for choosing the better manufacturer for their computers?
It's pretty clear that Apple would have had both Intel and AMD offering them a good deal on price and supply, and would have had detailed access to both company's road-maps... and they chose Intel. That was a good enough reason for me to assume that AMD's lead over Intel would be short-lived, which is precisely what we're seeing now.
"Intel got scared and made the P4 which tanked because it was slow, drew way too much power, etc."
I'd hardly say the P4 tanked. The last of the P4s were very hot and underpowered compared to equivalent AMD chips, but I believe you'll find most PCs made in that era had Intel CPUs, not AMD; certainly when I built my current PC a few years ago the 'equivalent' Athlon chip to the P4 I ended up buying was more expensive with similar power consumption and lower performance on the benchmarks that mattered to me (e.g. video compression and 3D rendering).
AMD briefly had the technology lead over Intel with the AMD64, and could run some games faster with the Athlon against equivalent P4s, but now they've lost the lead to Intel again. I'm hoping that can at least remain competitive and profitable, because I don't want Intel to run out of competition!
"Turns out it's harder for digital media than for contemporary analog"
The negatives of the original 'Wicker Man' movie were either burnt or buried under the M3 motorway. From what I remember, some of the original 'Babylon 5' negatives were eaten by rats. They're gone, nothing will ever bring them back, because they're analogue media which can't be copied without quality loss.
The problem is the whole idea of a 'master copy' of the movie on media that goes obsolete. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied any number of times without quality loss, so build a big RAID system and stick the movies on there. Over time it will be upgraded but the digital data will remain... the only time you'll put the data on tape will be for backups, though even then you'd probably be better copying it to other RAID servers at remote sites.
"Equal treatment would be allowing men to work the hours they need to be with their kids after divorce and vice versa."
Why should any company let their servers go down for hours because people with kids refuse to be on call to fix them?
It's really that simple: someone has to be on-call to fix things that break if you're providing 24/7 coverage. It's a part of the job that people are hired for. If they can't do their job, they should find another one, not try to offload the work they're paid to do onto others.
I don't get why anyone thinks that people should be able to arbitrarily refuse to do the job they're hired to do, and then complain about it.
"If it's the case that IT work schedules and conditions happen to have been designed by guys who didn't mind being on call, and the company could change its conditions to make it possible for women (or any employee who's a primary caregiver for kids) to have the job and be effective, then they should change."
Why should people who don't have kids be expected to work extra hard to cover for the pampering of people who do have kids?
Look, you're hired to do a job. If you can't or won't do it, find a different job... there are plenty of people who are willing to do the job that they're hired for.
So I don't see what the problem is.
The only 'special treatment' men get is in divorce courts where their wife is allowed to take the house, the kids, and most of their income for the rest of their life.
If a man and a woman both apply for the same job, but the woman refuses to be on call out of work hours, why would any sane company hire her?
Why would companies want to attract people who aren't willing to accept the conditions of the job? If men in the same job are expected to be on call out of work hours, why should women get a free pass?
I thought we were supposed to have sexual equality, not special treatment for women.
"I'm not justifying the .ANI feature, but recognize that IE is far more than a simple "web browser"."
But that's the whole problem.
It's not uncommon outside of the game industry: I've had one-year non-compete clauses in at least two of my programming jobs.
"Ever heard of NeXT?"
Yes, I even worked on one once. Of course I haven't seen one in over a decade, and I very much doubt that many companies are relying on custom applications running on NeXT machines.
"They can pretty much all be complied with Xcode on OS X, on powerPC or intel"
Good for you. Now try doing that when you don't have the source code.
And don't forget the 286 using the keyboard controller to reset the CPU to switch back to real mode to run real-mode drivers under Windows... man those days were horrid.
"I'd argue that the comparative ease with which the migration took place shows how weak processor lock in is becoming."
For Mac users.
Who generally aren't running antique custom applications for which the source code no longer exists and which probably wouldn't compile even if it did... plenty of companies are doing that on PCs.
IMHO AMD chose the best solution with the changes they made in the 64-bit transition... since old code won't be running 64-bit, they could do whatever they wanted to tidy up the instruction set while still running those crappy old applications in 32-bit mode.
"No, it costs millions to make movies because the rendering farms used by pixar arent cheap."
Very few companies make completely CG movies. Even with Pixar, I suspect you'll find they spend more money on actors' salaries than render farm time.
And, frankly, I'm tired of movies that put more effort into CG than story. So what if there are no more $200,000,000 FX blockbusters? Who'll really miss them?
"its a matter of making consumers realise that entertainment products cost serious money to make, and that investment needs to be recouped."
Most of the 'serious money' that goes into making a movie goes to pay tens of millions of dollars to actors, director, etc. The reason that movie companies can afford to pay that much money to people to work for a few weeks is because the copyright monopoly allows them to recoup their money from distribution.
If they're now going to get less money from distribution, the solution is simple: stop paying actors forty million dollars (or whatever) for a few weeks work.
"The graphics can use system memory without the performance penalty currently associated with sharing system ram for graphics."
Yeah, let's use a slow CPU to memory bus, shared by the CPU, peripherals and the video output, rather than a 30+GB/second GPU to memory bus on a typical graphics card these days.
Sticking the GPU in the same package as the CPU is a way to decrease costs for highly integrated systems, not performance. Unless you're going to stick a really fast memory interface on the CPU, anyway.
"If it has been useful after the crime, perhaps this approach may be more helpful in stopping crime."
I'm sure someone who's been violently mugged or raped will be really happy to know that the police caught them afterwards.
How about we go back to the way the police used to work, where they patrolled the streets and deterred or stopped crime in the first place? We don't even need to wonder whether that would be 'helpful in stopping crime', because we already know that crime rates were much lower when the police did that rather than eating donuts while watching TV.
"One of the biggest applications which is being looked in UK is to alart the CCTV operators when a car parks in the hard shoulder for more than say 5 minutes and automatically alert highway patrols."
Ah, so next time you stop for a pee in the bushes, better make it quick before you're charged with public indecency.