I wonder if Bioware couldn't help contribute to the Wine project, to make atleast the installer work. Pack up a subset of wine plus the installer as part of the Linux install package.
Wouldn't that be a solution if the InstallShield unpacker can't be ported?
And a point that many people seem to fail to correlate together...
Companies are driven by economics to drive down costs and make more profit. The same forces are at work in the IT world, with outsourcing, H1-B, India, China, etc.
Just as people cry for protection to save their jobs and job market, so does the RIAA want to protect the core companies and studies that produce and market the music.
Say what you will about their dinasaur age, but it's more than just fat cats at the top losing their grip on their business model... lots of average workers depend on the RIAA as well.
I generally agree that stone or somesuch high-tech durable (and probably expensive) material is probably necessary.
And do you just want a house that stands forever, or a house that is "resistant" to common forms of decay? A more interesting challenge would be designing the house and surrounding landscaping to be comfortable and yet make the home less attractive to pests and other natural intruders.
Something to consider... mentioning wireless... with all the concrete and stone that you'll have, maybe all the more reason to have carefully planned and placed conduits? If not for networks, atleast for other mundane stuff like future electric/optic/whatever cables and such.
It's also possible that the execs realize their demographic are the geeks and nerds, and are using this as a publicity stunt to get more geeks to watch. What better advertisement than getting this on Slashdot and having thousands of other geeks to start watching because of a Slashdot story?
- Fake cancellation - Get huge grassroots effort - Raise awareness in the very type of people that would want to watch this show (ie geeks and nerds) - Bring it back at the last minute, citing the grassroots effort - People cheer and watch even more avidly - People buy newly released merchandise to support the show even more - Profit
I can only speak for Farscape, which really is a good show. I have also seen "Birds of Prey"... and... meh... very mediocre and unimaginative.
I run Linux for 95% of the time, and do all my work in Linux. I've been using Mozilla for over a year now. I have used the free version of Opera, but I see no reason to put up with the ads or even pay when I could use Mozilla.
During the 5% of time that I want to play games, I reboot into W2k. Even in Windows, I've switched to using Mozilla. There is just no compelling reason for me to go to IE. I find that it has exactly the features I want, renders the pages I go to perfectly, and is fast.
I use the QuickLaunch option in W2k, but it doesn't add any significant overhead to the boot time. By the time my Instant Messanger signs in, QuickLaunch is loaded.
What are people complaining about? Honestly. And in case people are wondering, I'm using a PII-400 with 300megs of ram, on a 10kRPM Seagate Cheetah SCSI. I don't understand some people with gigahertz computers complaining about speed. Mozilla renders and runs faster than I can use it. How much faster can you want it?
Just my two cents in support of Mozilla and that team's hard work.
So is this $75.7 million worth of CD donations based on the price before or after the gouging?
In seriousness, it says in the article "consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997." I don't know what the other details are, but it seems that the penalty is just a slap on the wrist since it barely adds to $200 million. Isn't that half of what they gouged? They still made off with a ton of cash. Where's the hurt?
Kinda off-topic to the parent post, but I wanted to share this tidbit.
I used to be an intern at a research lab of a large technology company. Approximately six months ago, we hosted a large meeting between representatives of this company, and the technical advisors to congress-people regarding digital rights.
Anyways, I can't say much about the details, just in case I step over some confidentiality restrictions. But I will say this...
This group of advisors think that the V-Chip was a great success.
Several of them were excited about the idea of putting watermark signals in video, that camcorders would recognize and refuse to record.... to plug the "analog hole".
The tech company representative argued that there are existing laws to handle theft, and that theft is a social and educational problem, not a technological problem. But, judging from the faces of the advisors, I would guess that all of them dismissed the idea.
My question (which I'm sure others have also raised), is why it is a good thing if Microsoft doesn't make an Xbox2?
I'm not attacking neverkevin.... I'm just curious as to what people are thinking. Making Microsoft lose money on the XBox will only cause them to shut down the XBox unit. It's not really going to hurt their Windows or Office units.
Isn't competition a good thing? Even though I have no wish to see Microsoft dominate the set-top-box market, their huge budget and presence forces all others to continue with innovation.
I enjoy seeing boxes hacked, like the Dreamcast. I also like seeing Linux being used in creative locations. But I wouldn't go as far as to say we should somehow drive a potential competitor out of a market.
Re:Deep Blue = Unfair
on
Men vs. Machines
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I don't know if Deep Blue was altered during the match, but I do know that Deep Blue pretty much beat every other grand master on the planet getting to Kasparov. Deep Blue had to fight his way there like any other challenger.
I don't know what you consider to be appropriate for your children to view. But after seeing this film, here are the things I saw:
BTW, I thought the movie was good. Nice fantasy flic for little kids as well as big ones. But, I took my 11 year-old sister to see Saving Private Ryan (on her request), so YMMV. And yes, my sister is normal with no psychological damage a a result of the movie.
WARNING: MAY GIVE HINTS TO PLOT! PROCEED AT OWN RISK!
fighting. very little blood. like in the previews, there is a scene where spider-man gets cut on his forearm. But most fights (until then final one) are carton violence (punch and people fly back 20 feet). Hand to hand fings go relatively fast, and mostly spider-man kicking criminal ass.
scene where Kirsten Dunst is in a wet shirt in the rain. Scene goes by fast (bout 1~1.5 sconds) of nipping.
MaryJ and Spider-Man deep kiss scene. Passionate, but no tongue twisting shown. Lasts about 10 seconds.
Scene where spider-man must make difficult choice: he can only save one of two groups of individuals in peril.
Some death scenes as a result of Green Goblin. No blood, but death is shown in cartoony way (but may still be shoking, depending on your children).
Too bad I don't currently have any moderator points, but I agree with this statement.
It really helps to pre-plan what you're going to do with the STL (I guess that goes with everything else in software dev). It can get really ugly if you use them on-the-spot as you hack away at an implementation. But if you think it through, you can control the costs of using the STL. Pre-plan and take advantage of C++'s "pay only if you use it" philosophy.
I agree with you completely, and I think this raises an interesting point about people on the web in general.
I remember years ago, when the web was first booming into the average home, I saw a comic in the local newspaper describing how funny it was that grandma was flaming someone on the Net.
It raises the question of why people act so ugly on the web when hidden behind the anonymity of an alias. In real life, your identity is harder to disguise or change, and there is a real threat of some kind of meaningful retailation/consequence for how you behave socially. But it is usually not so online. I am against filters too, but maybe people in general really are incapable of acting civil without fear of consequence. I've seen plenty of cases of mature 14 year olds and immature 60 year olds. I don't think we can blame it all on the teen-kiddies.
Anyways, just my 2 cents tacked on to your good post.
Why would a "legitimate" user have a need to be able to use the same key on two different systems at the same time?
Because sometimes I find items from one D2 character that I would really like on my other D2 character. And it's easier to load up the second character on my other box and exchange *MY* items rather than dropping it in a game and hoping someone doesn't pick it up before me.
I don't know too much about the history of SMT, but I do know that there was quite a bit of research on it at UW's CSE department. My OS professor, Hank Levy, is working with Compaq on the SMT processor, I believe.
Since I'm not really qualified to say much about SMT, I recommend those that are interested to visit the link above and read some of the research. I attended Prof. Levy's lectures on SMT and it sounded very interesting.
One very interesting note I'd like to make is that SMT is a way of keeping today's superscalar out-of-order architecture, and pump it with the benefits of running multiple threads without a context switch. VLIW machines rely on the COMPILER to organize and arrange machine code to take advantage of the parallelism inside the VLIW architecture. Of course, the problem with VLIW is that you live and die by the compiler. Not only that, but because the scheduling is static for VLIW, subtle changes in the architecture could result in the code no longer running at optimal scheduling.
SMT allows the processor to execute multiple threads "simultaneously" (ie without requiring context switch). You allow maximum utilization of your functional units because a math hungry thread can run along-side a "light" thread, maximizing processor utilization simultaneously. As others have pointed out, this helps increase utilization especially with today's long latencies for a cache miss. And, because the processor does this dynamically, you can achieve close to optimal utilization across different running scenarios, and across multiple iterations of the architecture.
Please correct me if I made mistakes, either through mis-understanding or lack of proof-reading.
The University of Washington's Computer Science program used the Linux kernel this quarter for teaching the OS class. In previous quarters, we either used simple mini-programs or Nachos.
Check out some of the funky pictures of penguins.;)
> If something is scientifically possible, then it should automatically be moral and good.
I think that this case is perfectly ethical and moral, and I agree with Lita's oppinion on this. There is a difference between scientific possibility, and our application of that possiblity.
Someone mentioned the two nuclear bombs that the US dropped on Japan. No, it is not ethical and not moral to kill thousands of people. But yes, there is good that can come from nuclear physics. The scientific capability of splitting an atom to obtain energy is good. Using it to kill people is bad.
When primitive civilization realized the scientific capability of creating a sharp edge, that is good. It is the foundation of many of the manufacturing techniques we enjoy today. Driving that sharp edge into someone to harm them is bad.
The problem isn't science. The moral and ethical problems are in society and humanity as a whole. Science and discovery are always good. It is the amoral and unethical ways in which we obtain and utilize that science that is the problem. With or without science, the unethical and amoral problems of humanity still exist.
The University of Washington CSE department worked on a distributed memory system. The idea was to efficiently use all the excess fragments of ram across a cluster of high performance machines on a high performance network. Called GMS http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lev y/gms/
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if Bioware couldn't help contribute to the Wine project, to make atleast the installer work. Pack up a subset of wine plus the installer as part of the Linux install package.
Wouldn't that be a solution if the InstallShield unpacker can't be ported?
This is an example illustrating why textbooks SHOULD be facts, theories, proofs, and concepts.
The process of linking those things into ideas, relationships, and critical thinking skills is the job of the educators.
Narration always introduces bias, particularly when attempting to weave complex stories to fit within a shallow nutshell.
Yes.
And a point that many people seem to fail to correlate together...
Companies are driven by economics to drive down costs and make more profit. The same forces are at work in the IT world, with outsourcing, H1-B, India, China, etc.
Just as people cry for protection to save their jobs and job market, so does the RIAA want to protect the core companies and studies that produce and market the music.
Say what you will about their dinasaur age, but it's more than just fat cats at the top losing their grip on their business model... lots of average workers depend on the RIAA as well.
I generally agree that stone or somesuch high-tech durable (and probably expensive) material is probably necessary.
And do you just want a house that stands forever, or a house that is "resistant" to common forms of decay? A more interesting challenge would be designing the house and surrounding landscaping to be comfortable and yet make the home less attractive to pests and other natural intruders.
Something to consider... mentioning wireless... with all the concrete and stone that you'll have, maybe all the more reason to have carefully planned and placed conduits? If not for networks, atleast for other mundane stuff like future electric/optic/whatever cables and such.
So what's the deal between PCI Express and Infiniband?
This implies that Microsoft VOTES for the thousands it employs.
Which is incorrect. If Microsoft employees want to form into their own groups representing shared political views, then fine.
But just because Microsoft is a company of a thousand people does not automatically make it the representative of a thousand people.
Besides, I doubt Microsoft's private agendas match the agendas of the various employees.
It's also possible that the execs realize their demographic are the geeks and nerds, and are using this as a publicity stunt to get more geeks to watch. What better advertisement than getting this on Slashdot and having thousands of other geeks to start watching because of a Slashdot story?
- Fake cancellation
- Get huge grassroots effort
- Raise awareness in the very type of people that would want to watch this show (ie geeks and nerds)
- Bring it back at the last minute, citing the grassroots effort
- People cheer and watch even more avidly
- People buy newly released merchandise to support the show even more
- Profit
I can only speak for Farscape, which really is a good show. I have also seen "Birds of Prey"... and... meh... very mediocre and unimaginative.
I have to agree with this statement.
I run Linux for 95% of the time, and do all my work in Linux. I've been using Mozilla for over a year now. I have used the free version of Opera, but I see no reason to put up with the ads or even pay when I could use Mozilla.
During the 5% of time that I want to play games, I reboot into W2k. Even in Windows, I've switched to using Mozilla. There is just no compelling reason for me to go to IE. I find that it has exactly the features I want, renders the pages I go to perfectly, and is fast.
I use the QuickLaunch option in W2k, but it doesn't add any significant overhead to the boot time. By the time my Instant Messanger signs in, QuickLaunch is loaded.
What are people complaining about? Honestly.
And in case people are wondering, I'm using a PII-400 with 300megs of ram, on a 10kRPM Seagate Cheetah SCSI. I don't understand some people with gigahertz computers complaining about speed. Mozilla renders and runs faster than I can use it. How much faster can you want it?
Just my two cents in support of Mozilla and that team's hard work.
So is this $75.7 million worth of CD donations based on the price before or after the gouging?
In seriousness, it says in the article "consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997." I don't know what the other details are, but it seems that the penalty is just a slap on the wrist since it barely adds to $200 million. Isn't that half of what they gouged? They still made off with a ton of cash. Where's the hurt?
Kinda off-topic to the parent post, but I wanted to share this tidbit.
... to plug the "analog hole".
I used to be an intern at a research lab of a large technology company. Approximately six months ago, we hosted a large meeting between representatives of this company, and the technical advisors to congress-people regarding digital rights.
Anyways, I can't say much about the details, just in case I step over some confidentiality restrictions. But I will say this...
This group of advisors think that the V-Chip was a great success.
Several of them were excited about the idea of putting watermark signals in video, that camcorders would recognize and refuse to record.
The tech company representative argued that there are existing laws to handle theft, and that theft is a social and educational problem, not a technological problem. But, judging from the faces of the advisors, I would guess that all of them dismissed the idea.
Think about that. Discuss.
My question (which I'm sure others have also raised), is why it is a good thing if Microsoft doesn't make an Xbox2?
I'm not attacking neverkevin.... I'm just curious as to what people are thinking. Making Microsoft lose money on the XBox will only cause them to shut down the XBox unit. It's not really going to hurt their Windows or Office units.
Isn't competition a good thing? Even though I have no wish to see Microsoft dominate the set-top-box market, their huge budget and presence forces all others to continue with innovation.
I enjoy seeing boxes hacked, like the Dreamcast. I also like seeing Linux being used in creative locations. But I wouldn't go as far as to say we should somehow drive a potential competitor out of a market.
I don't know if Deep Blue was altered during the match, but I do know that Deep Blue pretty much beat every other grand master on the planet getting to Kasparov. Deep Blue had to fight his way there like any other challenger.
Maybe we can extend this problem and start an OpenSource effort to develop a high quality implementation of the OceanStore concept.
Securely access your data from anywhere. fault tolerant, secure, replicated, synchronized, pervasive.
I recommend you to take a look at the page and read their papers/presentations. An interesting idea.
I am in no way associated with the OceanStore project. Just an interesting research project I came across.
I don't know what you consider to be appropriate for your children to view. But after seeing this film, here are the things I saw:
BTW, I thought the movie was good. Nice fantasy flic for little kids as well as big ones. But, I took my 11 year-old sister to see Saving Private Ryan (on her request), so YMMV. And yes, my sister is normal with no psychological damage a a result of the movie.
WARNING: MAY GIVE HINTS TO PLOT! PROCEED AT OWN RISK!
fighting. very little blood. like in the previews, there is a scene where spider-man gets cut on his forearm. But most fights (until then final one) are carton violence (punch and people fly back 20 feet). Hand to hand fings go relatively fast, and mostly spider-man kicking criminal ass.
scene where Kirsten Dunst is in a wet shirt in the rain. Scene goes by fast (bout 1~1.5 sconds) of nipping.
MaryJ and Spider-Man deep kiss scene. Passionate, but no tongue twisting shown. Lasts about 10 seconds.
Scene where spider-man must make difficult choice: he can only save one of two groups of individuals in peril.
Some death scenes as a result of Green Goblin. No blood, but death is shown in cartoony way (but may still be shoking, depending on your children).
There, my 2 cents. hope it helps.
Too bad I don't currently have any moderator points, but I agree with this statement.
It really helps to pre-plan what you're going to do with the STL (I guess that goes with everything else in software dev). It can get really ugly if you use them on-the-spot as you hack away at an implementation. But if you think it through, you can control the costs of using the STL. Pre-plan and take advantage of C++'s "pay only if you use it" philosophy.
I agree with you completely, and I think this raises an interesting point about people on the web in general.
I remember years ago, when the web was first booming into the average home, I saw a comic in the local newspaper describing how funny it was that grandma was flaming someone on the Net.
It raises the question of why people act so ugly on the web when hidden behind the anonymity of an alias. In real life, your identity is harder to disguise or change, and there is a real threat of some kind of meaningful retailation/consequence for how you behave socially. But it is usually not so online. I am against filters too, but maybe people in general really are incapable of acting civil without fear of consequence. I've seen plenty of cases of mature 14 year olds and immature 60 year olds. I don't think we can blame it all on the teen-kiddies.
Anyways, just my 2 cents tacked on to your good post.
Because sometimes I find items from one D2 character that I would really like on my other D2 character. And it's easier to load up the second character on my other box and exchange *MY* items rather than dropping it in a game and hoping someone doesn't pick it up before me.
Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.
Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.
I must agree that the network performance has been terrible. I am in the Seattle area, and was on the Excite network.
On the other hand, I haven't gotten a bill for my cable modem in over 2 months now! Hmmm... makes me wonder.... and nervous...
A link to his SMT page is here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt
Since I'm not really qualified to say much about SMT, I recommend those that are interested to visit the link above and read some of the research. I attended Prof. Levy's lectures on SMT and it sounded very interesting.
One very interesting note I'd like to make is that SMT is a way of keeping today's superscalar out-of-order architecture, and pump it with the benefits of running multiple threads without a context switch. VLIW machines rely on the COMPILER to organize and arrange machine code to take advantage of the parallelism inside the VLIW architecture. Of course, the problem with VLIW is that you live and die by the compiler. Not only that, but because the scheduling is static for VLIW, subtle changes in the architecture could result in the code no longer running at optimal scheduling.
SMT allows the processor to execute multiple threads "simultaneously" (ie without requiring context switch). You allow maximum utilization of your functional units because a math hungry thread can run along-side a "light" thread, maximizing processor utilization simultaneously. As others have pointed out, this helps increase utilization especially with today's long latencies for a cache miss. And, because the processor does this dynamically, you can achieve close to optimal utilization across different running scenarios, and across multiple iterations of the architecture.
Please correct me if I made mistakes, either through mis-understanding or lack of proof-reading.
Um, John, sorry, but I can't remember which John you are. And you posted anonymously too.
Email me at slowping@yahoo.com.
Check out some of the funky pictures of penguins. ;)
http://www.cs.washington.edu/451
I think that this case is perfectly ethical and moral, and I agree with Lita's oppinion on this. There is a difference between scientific possibility, and our application of that possiblity.
Someone mentioned the two nuclear bombs that the US dropped on Japan. No, it is not ethical and not moral to kill thousands of people. But yes, there is good that can come from nuclear physics. The scientific capability of splitting an atom to obtain energy is good. Using it to kill people is bad.
When primitive civilization realized the scientific capability of creating a sharp edge, that is good. It is the foundation of many of the manufacturing techniques we enjoy today. Driving that sharp edge into someone to harm them is bad.
The problem isn't science. The moral and ethical problems are in society and humanity as a whole. Science and discovery are always good. It is the amoral and unethical ways in which we obtain and utilize that science that is the problem. With or without science, the unethical and amoral problems of humanity still exist.
My appologies for the previous empty post...
The University of Washington CSE department worked on a distributed memory system. The idea was to efficiently use all the excess fragments of ram across a cluster of high performance machines on a high performance network. Called GMS
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lev y/gms/