Someone should remind Jonathan Schwartz of a well-known truth: people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.
Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's.
The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development.
A prominent journalist asks, "Should the UN negotiate more with Iran, or impose sanctions because of its failure to comply?" The answer to the question hinges on the following assertion.
ASSERTION: If the Iranians build nuclear weapons, then the Iranians will use them without reservation.
If the above assertion is false, then the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) should proceed playing word games with the Iranians and allow them to continue using delaying tactics. Of course, the Iranian Muslims are offering false promises in order to buy the necessary time for building a nuclear bomb.
On the other hand, if the above assertion is true, then the Western nations (which includes Japan) must act immediately without waiting for the Chinese to manipulate the UNSC into playing more word games. One possibility is to arrange for unmarked German fighter-bombers to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. This military action should be synchronized with the bombing of North-Korean nuclear facilities by unmarked Japanese fighter-bombers.
So, is the assertion true? The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the assertion is true.
How do people behave if they are genuinely committed to peace and economic development? Consider Vietnam. Washington dropped tons of agent orange on Vietnamese farmlands and forests. Today, thousands of Vietnamese are suffering and dying from this poisoning. Yet, the Vietnamese are not spending every waking moment in plotting how to kill Americans. The Vietnamese government spends most of its budget on economic development and is not attempting, in any way, to build a nuclear bomb.
Consider the Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia was under Russian/Soviet oppression for more than 40 years. Yet, today, the Czechs are not spending every waking moment in plotting how to kill Russians. The Czech government spends most of its budget on economic development and is not attempting, in any way, to build a nuclear bomb.
Now, look at Iran. The Iranians spend every waking moment in plotting how to kill Americans, Iraqis, and Israelis. The Iranians give millions of dollars to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. The Iranians spend millions of dollars on building a nuclear bomb.
Is Iran committed to peace and economic development? You make the call.
An even better question is "What is the fastest way to de-capitate the Iranian government and Iranian society?"
In a recent article, "Businessweek" made some damning comments about Foxconn. According to the article, when a manager from HP demanded to inspect the working conditions in the Chinese factories run by the Chinese managers of Taiwan-based Foxconn, the Chinese managers resisted. Why would Foxconn resist if its management were treating its workers well?
The Chinese (in both mainland China and Taiwan province) simply do not care about workers' rights. Foxconn is a Chinese company based in Taiwan.
To understand how horribly Chinese (from Taiwan) treat their workers, read a shocking article by the "San Francisco Chronicle". According to the article, the Taiwanese managers beat up their Central American laborers when they could not produce their assigned quota of blue jeans.
What are these tasks? One task is locating anti-ship mines like those found in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
I highly doubt that a goldfish can perform these tasks.
Exotic Projects Capturing the Public's Imagination
on
ISS Construction Resumes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
My perception of NASA (and other space agences like JAXA) is that it focuses solely on run-of-the-mill projects seeking incremental but significant advances in technology.
That sort of research is useful but does not capture the imagination of young adults contemplating a career in science and engineering.
When President Kennedy pledged that Washington would put an American on the moon, the pledge captured our imagination. We Americans would do something that had never been done in the past. Further, putting an American on the moon was not an incremental advance in technology but was a huge leap that faced a high risk of failure.
NASA should go back to its adventurous roots by devoting 25% of its budget to exotic, high-risk projects. The remaining 75% would go to run-of-the-mill projects.
Iridigm Technology, a small company in San Francisco, developed the technology. Unfortunately, Qualcomm purchased the company in 2004. Since Qualcomm tends to charge high fees on its patents, televisions based on OIDs may not materialize any time soon.
Apple is already subscribed to the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC). When a 3rd-party brought the matter (of the gross abuse of Chinese workers at Foxconn, which Apple forced to commit to the EICC after revelations of this gross abuse), Apple management did something about the matter.
Let us be frank here. Western companies -- European, American, and (to a lesser extent) Japanese companies -- do treat their workers much better than Chinese companies.
Notice the total lack of Taiwanese system houses (like Acer) on the list of companies committed to the EICC. Taiwanese companies are far more likely to manufacture their products in China. Notice the total indifference (by Chinese from Taiwan) to worker abuse in China. When was the last time that you read a story about how Taiwanese companies corrected an incident of worker abuse? The Chinese (in Taiwan and elsewhere) just do not care. Hence, Taiwanese companies continue to condone -- and even -- commit worker abuse.
In an unusual twist, the working conditions in Japan are now actually better than the working conditions in the USA.
Prior to 2000, stories about death by overwork were not uncommon in Japan. The Japanese government recently enacted a law that effectively limits the amount of overtime that engineers may be forced to work. A recent article by the "New York Times" refers to the issue of limiting overtime.
Other articles commenting on this matter suggest that the law restricts overtime by requiring companies to pay engineers increased wages for each additional hour beyond 8 hours per day. According to one source, each hour of overtime must be paid 125% of standard pay.
Is there any chance that the California government will limit overtime in the same lucrative way (i.e., lucrative for the employees)?
In 2004, HP, Dell, and IBM developed the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) in cooperation with key component suppliers: Celestica, Flextronics, Jabil, Sanmina SCI, and Solectron. The EICC is a standard of corporate social responsibility (e.g., treating employees well) that IBM and other systems companies expect from their suppliers. In other words, IBM will do business with only those Vietnamese electronics suppliers which abide by the EICC.
Look carefully at the list. It is revealing. The only systems companies in that list are based in North America, Europe, and Japan. Acer (a Taiwanese systems house) and Samsung (a Korean systems house) are absent from that list. The only Taiwanese company on that list is Foxconn, a component supplier. Doubtless, tough pressure from IBM and other Western companies essentially "forced" Foxconn to comply with the EICC; otherwise, these Western companies would have dumped Foxconn as a supplier of PC connectors.
No one should be surprised over Apple management's commitment to investigating allegations of worker abuse in Apple's supply chain. Apple is committed to the EICC and demands that its suppliers treat their employees well.
If you had presented allegations of worker abuse to either Acer or Samsung, their managers would have arranged for security to throw you out of their offices.
These days, with laptops and desktops becoming indistinguishable commodities, I use corporate social responsiblity as the deciding factor in my purchases. I will also prefer an Apple laptop over an Acer laptop.
The problem with the infomercials is that if you switch television channels and land in the middle of the infomercial, you do not know that it is an infomercial. Many infomercials are set up so that they appear like a news report, and you could easily be fooled into believing the unsubstantiated claims made by the actors.
The only way to know that you are watching an infomercial, without consulting the online TV gude, is to wait until the end of the infomercial. At its conclusion, the television station will announce that "The previous broadcast is paid programming."
The obvious way to help the innocent TV viewer is to simply require all infomercials to prominently display the same distinguishing marker on the lower left of the TV screen. Given the content of some of these infomercials, I propose displaying an icon resembling Bozo the Clown.
We should be quite concerned about Grigori Perelman since he returned to Russia. During the last several years, democracy in Russia and human rights have begun to fade.
If Perelman is truly a genius on par with Albert Einstein, he faces two problems in Russia.
First, the Russian government will want to tap into his genius to improve its weapons systems. In the Russia of today, if he said, "no", then he would be faced with harrassment and, even, trumped-up charges leading to imprisonment.
Second, like Albert Einstein and Andrei Sakharov, I expect that Perelman would be a supporter of human rights and democracy. Their genius enables them to see that freedom fosters the growth of intellect, of which they have much. Unfortunately, in the Russia of today, too much talk about political change to removing the ruling party can cause a tax audit or worse.
Russia, today, is much better than the old Soviet Union, but saying that Russia is a democracy would be an exaggeration.
So, I hope that Mr. Grigori Perelman is okay. If he can read this message, then, I wish
that he would, at least, post a message on SlashDot so that we know that he is all right.
Perelman really should come to USA. Here, he can work on neat projects like the new hyperdrive for space travel. If this hyperdrive is ever to succeed, we will need the enormous intellect of Perelman to work out the hairy mathematics.
The article asks, "But do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?"
The second part of the question can be easily answered. Compile the computer program in two ways. First, set the compiler to not use the floating-point unit (FPU). Just generate the instructions for explicitly doing the floating-point computations in software. Run the compiled code and save the results.
Second, set the compiler to explicitly use the FPU. Generate FPU instructions to do the floating-point computations in hardware. Run the compiled code and save the results.
The results should be identical. If they are not identical, then either the compiler has a (software) bug or the FPU has a (hardware) bug. If you are using GCC without optimization, then the FPU probably has a hardware bug. GCC is quite reliable when it is used without any optimization.
Power adapters are low-tech, commodity devices. Since their profit margins are very low, Apple management probably subcontracted their design and assembly to a generic company in mainland China.
One thing that we know about China is that (1) it has few laws ensuring product safety and (2) that Beijing rarely enforces those laws. As a result, many products from China are just dangerous.
Here is the summary reduction. The price of a product imported from China is $X. The price of a product made in the USA is $Y. Generally, $X is much less than $Y. The difference in price represents the "cost" that you paying for tough, enforced regulations and for higher ethical standards. Most American consumers do not want to pay this cost directly, so Walmart (a.k.a. the clearinghouse for Chinese products) prospers. Still, most Americans do pay this cost indirectly via, e.g., higher medical bills.
The link at Toasty Tech is much better than the original link. The original link seems to be focused on the GUIs of operating systems (OSes) targeted at consumers, but the Toasty-Tech link presents the GUIs for all major OSes.
The original link notably omits OS/2.
Whereas Windows 3.1 was a cooperatively multitasked OS, OS/2 was a pre-emptively multitasked OS just like UNIX. OS/2 was rock solid. In opinion, it had only 2 problems. It was released just slightly ahead of its time: OS/2 needed, at least, an 80486 to be adequately fast even though most consumers were running computers that had an 80386, an 80286, or even an 8088.
The second problem was that IBM did not give it away for free. Windows 3.1 was, in general, inferior to OS/2 although Windows 3.1 was perfectly matched to the underpowered processors at the time. Windows 3.1 often crashed. Even when Windows did not crash, it often froze when an application neglected to cooperatively relinquish the processor. Windows 3.1 main advantage was that it had the Microsoft name on it. If IBM had open-sourced OS/2 or given it away for free, then IBM could have wrestled the entire OS market from Microsoft. Most consumers would have chosen a free, rock-solid OS over a more expensive, crappy OS. Being free is important since most consumers are cheapskates.
Also, Windows 3.1 was actually based on the core code on which IBM and Microsoft had collaborated. After they terminated the joint project, IBM continued development on the core code and turned it into OS/2. Meanwhile Microsoft gutted the parts (e.g., preemptive multitasking) that, in its opinion, the consumer would not value and morphed the result into Windows 3.1.
When you look at the APIs for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1, you can see the common heritage of both products. More than half of the APIs have identical or nearly identical names and arguments.
If the common ancestor of both products were called "Homo Erectus", then OS/2 is Cro-Magnon man, and Windows 3.1 is the chimp that preceded Homo Erectus.
We should not be surprised over the fact that these bacteria actually thrive on the radioactive uranium instead of being killed by it.
Look at how wildfire has actually thrived in the radioactive area contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. That radioactive area is called the Chernobyl zone and has been devoid of people for more than 20 years. The absense of people (who are known killers of wildlife) has enabled wildlife to re-populate the Chernobyl zone.
In the long run, the stupidity (also known as nuclear weapons and global warming) of man may exterminate mankind, but nature will survive. Heed the wisdom of the Native Americans: "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth."
The article at the top states, "...is there room for a new type of organization that throws away the archaic and monolithic organizational structure of today and from there form a company that has its direction dictated by all of the members that run it."
The lesson here is that sometimes employee-owned companies succeed. Sometimes, they fail. There is nothing magical about being open source or about being a company structured on the open-source process. Such software and such companies are subject to the whims of the marketplace and can succeed or fail -- as determined by the invisible hand of the free market.
In the opinion of Reporters without Borders, among major American companies in China, Yahoo is clearly the worst enemy of human rights. In April of 2006, a senior representative from Reporters without Borders linked up with an ABC News crew and showed up at the doorsteps of Yahoo. The representative demanded that Yahoo management explain the "justification" for its indifference to human rights in China.
Yahoo has not only censored information on its China-based web site but has also, actively, helped Beijing to arrest, imprison, and torture people who commit "thought crimes".
Yahoo's actions are understandable even if they cannot be condoned. Half of the team that established Yahoo is a Chinese from Taiwan. His name is Jerry Yang.
In Chinese society, people are mostly indifferent to human rights.
Yang simply steered his company along similar lines. He enthusiastically set up a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company, long before Yahoo's competitors entered China.
The working atmosphere inside Yahoo reflects, to a certain extent, Chinese values. We Slashdotters may be concerned about human rights, but most employees within the walls of Yahoo just do not care. To them, Yahoo = 8 hours of daily work = paycheck. Whether a victim of Chinese brutality rots in a Beijing prison matters not a wit to the Yahoo employees.
The IBM PC exerted a tremendous impact on the entire computer industry due to the confluence of 4 important factors.
1. The IBM PC was initially sold for about $1295. That was much cheaper than any other IBM computer. Apple and Commodore had cheaper computers, but small-business owners want the IBM name on their computers. Business people tended to view Apple computers and Commodore computers as toys.
2. The computer had the IBM label on it. These days, the IBM label does not carry the same cachet that the IBM name carried in the 1980s. At that time, IBM dominated the mindshare in the computer industry. People often said, "No one was ever fired for buying an IBM computer."
3. IBM encouraged other companies to build hardware and software for the IBM PC. It literally came with a full set of manuals documenting the entire BIOS and the internal wiring among the chips of the motherboard. Compare that open approach to, say, the typical Sony laptop. The plethora of software and hardware peripherals for the IBM PC enabled it to be adapted to a wide-range of useful applications: music synthesis, video games, desktop publishing, real-time intruder monitoring, etc.
4. Phoenix Technologies cloned the BIOS, enabling an army of companies to legally build functioning clones of the IBM PC. This army of cloners then spawned an entire universe of component suppliers. This intense competition among so many cloners and suppliers drastically lowered the price of the IBM PC and its clones. In turn, the lowered prices dramatically increased sales of the personal computers. Today, you can buy a Dell laptop for $500.
As prices dropped, more people bought computers; with more people owning computers, more companies building software and hardware for the computers appeared. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Among the four factors, item #4 is probably the most important factor in amplifying the impact of the IBM PC on the entire computer industry.
You can easily see the impact of #4 by comparing (1) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for IBM PCs (now known as Lenovo PCs) and their clones and (2) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for 68000 Macintoshes or PowerPC Macintoshes. Still more interesting, the enormous size and supercompetitive nature of the 1st ecosystem has swallowed even Apple: the new x86 Macintoshes are essentially (in a very general sense) an IBM clone. The x86 Macintoshes use the x86 (the central component of an IBM clone) and take advantage of the super-cheap VLSI chips from which IBM clones are built.
In 2001, the American Automobile Association did a study examining the interaction between distraction and automobile crashes. According to the study, "adjusting radio/cassette/CD" is the 3rd most common cause of distraction. Depending on the set of numbers that you use from this study, "adjusting radio/cassette/CD" causes between 1.5% and 3% of all automobile crashes.
Judging from the numerous articles (in this particular discussion) praising the fun of using an iPod within an automobile, I suspect that "adjusting radio/cassette/CD/iPod" will soon rise to become the 2nd most common cause of distraction, leading to even more automobile crashes.
If using an iPod causes a fatal automobile accident, will some victim of such an accident eventually try to sue Apple?
If the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enacts any financial penalty against Rambus, the penalty will hurt the people who are least responsible.
Allow me to explain. In the USA, the legal system views a public corporation as a person -- in, for example, a civil suit filed against the company. Civil penalties are generally levied against the company even if the management team which originally made the decision to commit corporate fraud have already left the company. The penalty will not be levied against the original management team. The corporation is a person, and that person is viewed to be responsible for the fraud.
Returning to Rambus, the FTC will likely levy a financial penalty against Rambus. Yet, the current employees may not be, in any way, affiliated with the managers who made the original decision to deceive JEDEC (the standards body defining electronic components like memory).
The only fair way for the FTC to levy the penalty is to file a civil suit against the original co-founders of the company. They are Professor Mark Horowitz (at Stanford University) and Dr . Michael Farmwald. The FTC should also insist on the immediate termination of royalty payments
from other companies to Rambus if those payments are for any of the disputed memory patents.
However, I doubt that the FTC will pursue this course of action. The co-founders reaped their billions of dollars in an IPO, and the current employees (who are likely unrelated to the original crime) will get the shaft.
The technical specifications of the flash memory in my USB drive says that it is guaranteed to work for, at most, 100000 (i.e., one followed by 5 zeros) writes. People do not talk about this limitation, but I have seen this limitation written into the technical specifications of the flash memory in many devices.
The hard drive in my Compaq x86 workstation has been humming nicely for more than 5 years. Due to the nature of my work at the institute, the number of writes to the hard drive have easily exceeded 100000 during that time.
Using flash memory as a fast cache for the hard drive will increase the performance of the drive but will decrease the overall life of the drive. Someone will be awfully upset when she makes a final save of her million-dollar PowerPoint presentation for the CEO and discovers that the save is the 100001st write to the hybrid drive.
Hopefully, the engineer who designed this hybrid drive has, at a minimum, integrated an LCD counter and a tiny speaker into the drive. The counter shall display the running total of the number of writes to the flash memory. The tiny speaker shall beep like crazy when the total exceeds 99900.
There are 2 aspects to the construction of the Big Dig. First is the obvious one: engineering, which includes research and development. Since this structure is city project, we can be certain that it was engineered by engineers who have been certified as professional engineers. Professional engineers must pass a professional engineering (PE) examination; this level of certification is needed to guarantee the quality of work. Several professional engineers must have examined, thoroughly checked, and signed off (with an actual signature) the design diagrams.
I have a hard time in believing that the screw-up happened in the actual design. A professional engineer knows that he can be sued for malpractice and can go to jail for signing off a design diagram that is faulty.
The second aspect of the construction is the actual assembly of the project. There could be a problem here. According to a reputable source, about 14% of the laborers in the construction industry are illegal aliens. In some segments (e.g., roofing workers), the percentage of illegal aliens can be as high as 29%.
Most illegal aliens are people who hail from Mexico and who cannot read, write, or speak English. Even if we assume that they are all honest, they can still make honest mistakes when they cannot comprehend English. The warnings on the construction material, the recommendations on the construction material and the construction equipment, the instructions for assembly, and the like are all likely to be written in English. If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high.
Watering lawns, trimming hedges, picking fruits, etc. do not require knowledge of English to do well. From a quality perspective, an illegal alien can do good work on such absolutely no-skill-required jobs.
However, welding a joint on a drawbridge, properly fastening a bolt to hold up a concrete ceiling, etc. might require some ability to comprehend English and might even require some minimal skills that a high-school education would provide. Most illegal aliens from Mexico do not have a high-school education. On any project that involves public safety, an English-speaking, literate, educated worker is much more preferable than a non-English-speaking, illiterate, uneducated worker.
The Iraq War is differs markedly from past wars in one critical aspect: while Washington sends a small minority (i.e., the soldiers) of Americans to Iraq to possibly die, the overwhelming majority of Americans has made no sacrifices whatsoever for this war. During World War II, the entire nation made sacrifices for the war. Yet, during the Iraq War, we Americans are not even paying extra taxes to finance the war. We are simply delaying the payment of the war to future generations.
The Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans.
Personally, I find such a situation to be gross and atrocious. If we demand that a minority (i.e., the soldiers) of Americans sacrifice their lives for a war, then the rest of America should endure, at a minimum, the sacrifice of paying extra taxes to finance the war. How can I, as an American, support sending another American to die in a foreign land yet refuse to make any sacrifice for the war?
Since the Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans, we Americans unconsciously view the war as a sort of remote thing that is happening "over there". The war becomes even more remote when we do not see the upfront carnage of the war. People in Iraq are bleeding and dying on the streets. Islamic thugs are blowing up the bodies of both Iraqi civilians and British soldiers. Yet, we see none of this carnage. It is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans as we stuff ourselves with hot dogs at the baseball stadium. Life is good, and we do not experience the suffering "over there".
I firmly agree with exposing the public to as much of the war as possible. I encourage American soldiers to upload as much of the videos of carnage (to YouTube and the like) as possible. We need to, at least, see the suffering to understand what war is.
I applaud the "News Hour" for broadcasting all the names and faces of the fallen American soldiers as their names are released by the Pentagon.
I also applaud Ted Koppel for devoting an entire episode of "Nightline" in 2004 to reading the names of the soldiers who had died in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They must not die in obscurity.
By the way, the prime political supporters of the Iraq War have tried to generate American "support" for the war by sanitizing it -- removing any sacrifice (i.e., delaying paying the cost of the war to future generations) and trying to stop reporters, like Ted Koppel, from broadcasting the names of the fallen soldiers. "Support" generated by such manipulative means does not equate to actual support for the war. If we Americans were forced to pay the actual cost of the war (through higher taxes) and were forced to know the daily carnage in Iraq, then this "support" might evaporate. I daresay that even most neo-conservatives would oppose this Iraq if they were forced to pay for it (through higher taxes).
If the majority of Americans refuse to genuinely support a war (by paying for the cost of the war and by facing squarely the carnage caused by the war), then we should never send our soldiers to die in that war. I believe that most Americans do not genuinely support the Iraq War.
The article by "USA Today" states, "An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say".
40 years ago, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek", already predicted the eventual discovery of space amoeba. Check out the episode (from "Star Trek: The Original Series") titled "The Immunity Syndrome." According to the synopsis by Wikipedia, "The huge expenditure of ship's energy attracts what appears to be an 11,000-mile (~17 700 km) wide amoeba, which appears on the main screen. Kirk launches another sensor probe which reveals the creature is protoplasmic in nature. McCoy believes it is a massive single-celled entity that feeds off raw energy but he needs more data to confirm this."
No discussion of AT&T Labs is complete without a reference to Microsoft Labs.
In 2005, Microsoft spent about $7 billion on research and development (R&D). By 2008, the R&D budget will grow to $8 billion. If my memory serves, no American company spends more money on R&D than Microsoft.
The research division at Microsoft is the #1 industrial laboratory in the United States. To understand the magnitude of the largesse, note that Microsoft succeeded in convincing several tenured/tenure-tracked professors at top-notch private universities (e.g. Stanford University) to quit the university and to join Microsoft.
Like the pre-breakup AT&T, Microsoft is funneling its monopolistic profits into a massive R&D budget. Microsoft laboratory has become the "Bell Labs" of the 21st century.
Slashdot Mirror
In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.
Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's.
The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development.
ASSERTION: If the Iranians build nuclear weapons, then the Iranians will use them without reservation.
If the above assertion is false, then the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) should proceed playing word games with the Iranians and allow them to continue using delaying tactics. Of course, the Iranian Muslims are offering false promises in order to buy the necessary time for building a nuclear bomb.
On the other hand, if the above assertion is true, then the Western nations (which includes Japan) must act immediately without waiting for the Chinese to manipulate the UNSC into playing more word games. One possibility is to arrange for unmarked German fighter-bombers to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. This military action should be synchronized with the bombing of North-Korean nuclear facilities by unmarked Japanese fighter-bombers.
So, is the assertion true? The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the assertion is true.
How do people behave if they are genuinely committed to peace and economic development? Consider Vietnam. Washington dropped tons of agent orange on Vietnamese farmlands and forests. Today, thousands of Vietnamese are suffering and dying from this poisoning. Yet, the Vietnamese are not spending every waking moment in plotting how to kill Americans. The Vietnamese government spends most of its budget on economic development and is not attempting, in any way, to build a nuclear bomb.
Consider the Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia was under Russian/Soviet oppression for more than 40 years. Yet, today, the Czechs are not spending every waking moment in plotting how to kill Russians. The Czech government spends most of its budget on economic development and is not attempting, in any way, to build a nuclear bomb.
Now, look at Iran. The Iranians spend every waking moment in plotting how to kill Americans, Iraqis, and Israelis. The Iranians give millions of dollars to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. The Iranians spend millions of dollars on building a nuclear bomb.
Is Iran committed to peace and economic development? You make the call.
An even better question is "What is the fastest way to de-capitate the Iranian government and Iranian society?"
The Chinese (in both mainland China and Taiwan province) simply do not care about workers' rights. Foxconn is a Chinese company based in Taiwan.
To understand how horribly Chinese (from Taiwan) treat their workers, read a shocking article by the "San Francisco Chronicle". According to the article, the Taiwanese managers beat up their Central American laborers when they could not produce their assigned quota of blue jeans.
What are these tasks? One task is locating anti-ship mines like those found in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
I highly doubt that a goldfish can perform these tasks.
When President Kennedy pledged that Washington would put an American on the moon, the pledge captured our imagination. We Americans would do something that had never been done in the past. Further, putting an American on the moon was not an incremental advance in technology but was a huge leap that faced a high risk of failure.
NASA should go back to its adventurous roots by devoting 25% of its budget to exotic, high-risk projects. The remaining 75% would go to run-of-the-mill projects.
NASA, not the American military, should be splurging money on building a prototype of a hyperdrive, enabling faster-than-light travel. Even if the prototype does not work, it would significantly facilitate the breakthroughs that will be necessary for a successful hyperdrive,.
Iridigm Technology, a small company in San Francisco, developed the technology. Unfortunately, Qualcomm purchased the company in 2004. Since Qualcomm tends to charge high fees on its patents, televisions based on OIDs may not materialize any time soon.
Let us be frank here. Western companies -- European, American, and (to a lesser extent) Japanese companies -- do treat their workers much better than Chinese companies.
Foxconn is a Chinese company headquartered in Taiwan. Most Chinese just do not care about the principles of the EICC. In this very forum (Slashdot), you see a Chinese condemning the 3rd-party who raised the matter (of the abuse) to Apple management.
Notice the total lack of Taiwanese system houses (like Acer) on the list of companies committed to the EICC. Taiwanese companies are far more likely to manufacture their products in China. Notice the total indifference (by Chinese from Taiwan) to worker abuse in China. When was the last time that you read a story about how Taiwanese companies corrected an incident of worker abuse? The Chinese (in Taiwan and elsewhere) just do not care. Hence, Taiwanese companies continue to condone -- and even -- commit worker abuse.
Check out a damning report by the "San Francisco Chronicle". It reported that Taiwanese companies subject their slaves to physical abuse if they do not meet their quota.
Prior to 2000, stories about death by overwork were not uncommon in Japan. The Japanese government recently enacted a law that effectively limits the amount of overtime that engineers may be forced to work. A recent article by the "New York Times" refers to the issue of limiting overtime.
Other articles commenting on this matter suggest that the law restricts overtime by requiring companies to pay engineers increased wages for each additional hour beyond 8 hours per day. According to one source, each hour of overtime must be paid 125% of standard pay.
Is there any chance that the California government will limit overtime in the same lucrative way (i.e., lucrative for the employees)?
The current list of companies subscribing to the EICC includes Apple.
Look carefully at the list. It is revealing. The only systems companies in that list are based in North America, Europe, and Japan. Acer (a Taiwanese systems house) and Samsung (a Korean systems house) are absent from that list. The only Taiwanese company on that list is Foxconn, a component supplier. Doubtless, tough pressure from IBM and other Western companies essentially "forced" Foxconn to comply with the EICC; otherwise, these Western companies would have dumped Foxconn as a supplier of PC connectors.
No one should be surprised over Apple management's commitment to investigating allegations of worker abuse in Apple's supply chain. Apple is committed to the EICC and demands that its suppliers treat their employees well.
If you had presented allegations of worker abuse to either Acer or Samsung, their managers would have arranged for security to throw you out of their offices.
These days, with laptops and desktops becoming indistinguishable commodities, I use corporate social responsiblity as the deciding factor in my purchases. I will also prefer an Apple laptop over an Acer laptop.
The only way to know that you are watching an infomercial, without consulting the online TV gude, is to wait until the end of the infomercial. At its conclusion, the television station will announce that "The previous broadcast is paid programming."
The obvious way to help the innocent TV viewer is to simply require all infomercials to prominently display the same distinguishing marker on the lower left of the TV screen. Given the content of some of these infomercials, I propose displaying an icon resembling Bozo the Clown.
If Perelman is truly a genius on par with Albert Einstein, he faces two problems in Russia.
First, the Russian government will want to tap into his genius to improve its weapons systems. In the Russia of today, if he said, "no", then he would be faced with harrassment and, even, trumped-up charges leading to imprisonment.
Second, like Albert Einstein and Andrei Sakharov, I expect that Perelman would be a supporter of human rights and democracy. Their genius enables them to see that freedom fosters the growth of intellect, of which they have much. Unfortunately, in the Russia of today, too much talk about political change to removing the ruling party can cause a tax audit or worse.
Russia, today, is much better than the old Soviet Union, but saying that Russia is a democracy would be an exaggeration.
So, I hope that Mr. Grigori Perelman is okay. If he can read this message, then, I wish that he would, at least, post a message on SlashDot so that we know that he is all right.
Perelman really should come to USA. Here, he can work on neat projects like the new hyperdrive for space travel. If this hyperdrive is ever to succeed, we will need the enormous intellect of Perelman to work out the hairy mathematics.
The second part of the question can be easily answered. Compile the computer program in two ways. First, set the compiler to not use the floating-point unit (FPU). Just generate the instructions for explicitly doing the floating-point computations in software. Run the compiled code and save the results.
Second, set the compiler to explicitly use the FPU. Generate FPU instructions to do the floating-point computations in hardware. Run the compiled code and save the results.
The results should be identical. If they are not identical, then either the compiler has a (software) bug or the FPU has a (hardware) bug. If you are using GCC without optimization, then the FPU probably has a hardware bug. GCC is quite reliable when it is used without any optimization.
One thing that we know about China is that (1) it has few laws ensuring product safety and (2) that Beijing rarely enforces those laws. As a result, many products from China are just dangerous.
Consider the recent case of lead contamination of children's toys. The toys had 5x the amount of lead that is considered safe.
Now, consider the case of a bracelet that was 99% lead. A Chinese company made the bracelets for Reebok. A child who accidentally ingested the bracelet died.
Now, consider Chinese honey that is contaminated with a dangerous antibiotic.
Here is the summary reduction. The price of a product imported from China is $X. The price of a product made in the USA is $Y. Generally, $X is much less than $Y. The difference in price represents the "cost" that you paying for tough, enforced regulations and for higher ethical standards. Most American consumers do not want to pay this cost directly, so Walmart (a.k.a. the clearinghouse for Chinese products) prospers. Still, most Americans do pay this cost indirectly via, e.g., higher medical bills.
The original link notably omits OS/2.
Whereas Windows 3.1 was a cooperatively multitasked OS, OS/2 was a pre-emptively multitasked OS just like UNIX. OS/2 was rock solid. In opinion, it had only 2 problems. It was released just slightly ahead of its time: OS/2 needed, at least, an 80486 to be adequately fast even though most consumers were running computers that had an 80386, an 80286, or even an 8088.
The second problem was that IBM did not give it away for free. Windows 3.1 was, in general, inferior to OS/2 although Windows 3.1 was perfectly matched to the underpowered processors at the time. Windows 3.1 often crashed. Even when Windows did not crash, it often froze when an application neglected to cooperatively relinquish the processor. Windows 3.1 main advantage was that it had the Microsoft name on it. If IBM had open-sourced OS/2 or given it away for free, then IBM could have wrestled the entire OS market from Microsoft. Most consumers would have chosen a free, rock-solid OS over a more expensive, crappy OS. Being free is important since most consumers are cheapskates.
Also, Windows 3.1 was actually based on the core code on which IBM and Microsoft had collaborated. After they terminated the joint project, IBM continued development on the core code and turned it into OS/2. Meanwhile Microsoft gutted the parts (e.g., preemptive multitasking) that, in its opinion, the consumer would not value and morphed the result into Windows 3.1.
When you look at the APIs for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1, you can see the common heritage of both products. More than half of the APIs have identical or nearly identical names and arguments.
If the common ancestor of both products were called "Homo Erectus", then OS/2 is Cro-Magnon man, and Windows 3.1 is the chimp that preceded Homo Erectus.
Look at how wildfire has actually thrived in the radioactive area contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. That radioactive area is called the Chernobyl zone and has been devoid of people for more than 20 years. The absense of people (who are known killers of wildlife) has enabled wildlife to re-populate the Chernobyl zone.
In the long run, the stupidity (also known as nuclear weapons and global warming) of man may exterminate mankind, but nature will survive. Heed the wisdom of the Native Americans: "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth."
Such an organization already exists. It is an employee-owned company, which often becomes employee-owned through an employee buyout. There are numerous examples of employee-owned companies.
The most famous example is United Airlines. It operated as an employee-owned corporation from 1994 until 2002.
The lesson here is that sometimes employee-owned companies succeed. Sometimes, they fail. There is nothing magical about being open source or about being a company structured on the open-source process. Such software and such companies are subject to the whims of the marketplace and can succeed or fail -- as determined by the invisible hand of the free market.
Yahoo has not only censored information on its China-based web site but has also, actively, helped Beijing to arrest, imprison, and torture people who commit "thought crimes".
Yahoo's actions are understandable even if they cannot be condoned. Half of the team that established Yahoo is a Chinese from Taiwan. His name is Jerry Yang.
In Chinese society, people are mostly indifferent to human rights.
Yang simply steered his company along similar lines. He enthusiastically set up a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company, long before Yahoo's competitors entered China.
The working atmosphere inside Yahoo reflects, to a certain extent, Chinese values. We Slashdotters may be concerned about human rights, but most employees within the walls of Yahoo just do not care. To them, Yahoo = 8 hours of daily work = paycheck. Whether a victim of Chinese brutality rots in a Beijing prison matters not a wit to the Yahoo employees.
1. The IBM PC was initially sold for about $1295. That was much cheaper than any other IBM computer. Apple and Commodore had cheaper computers, but small-business owners want the IBM name on their computers. Business people tended to view Apple computers and Commodore computers as toys.
2. The computer had the IBM label on it. These days, the IBM label does not carry the same cachet that the IBM name carried in the 1980s. At that time, IBM dominated the mindshare in the computer industry. People often said, "No one was ever fired for buying an IBM computer."
3. IBM encouraged other companies to build hardware and software for the IBM PC. It literally came with a full set of manuals documenting the entire BIOS and the internal wiring among the chips of the motherboard. Compare that open approach to, say, the typical Sony laptop. The plethora of software and hardware peripherals for the IBM PC enabled it to be adapted to a wide-range of useful applications: music synthesis, video games, desktop publishing, real-time intruder monitoring, etc.
4. Phoenix Technologies cloned the BIOS, enabling an army of companies to legally build functioning clones of the IBM PC. This army of cloners then spawned an entire universe of component suppliers. This intense competition among so many cloners and suppliers drastically lowered the price of the IBM PC and its clones. In turn, the lowered prices dramatically increased sales of the personal computers. Today, you can buy a Dell laptop for $500.
As prices dropped, more people bought computers; with more people owning computers, more companies building software and hardware for the computers appeared. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Among the four factors, item #4 is probably the most important factor in amplifying the impact of the IBM PC on the entire computer industry.
You can easily see the impact of #4 by comparing (1) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for IBM PCs (now known as Lenovo PCs) and their clones and (2) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for 68000 Macintoshes or PowerPC Macintoshes. Still more interesting, the enormous size and supercompetitive nature of the 1st ecosystem has swallowed even Apple: the new x86 Macintoshes are essentially (in a very general sense) an IBM clone. The x86 Macintoshes use the x86 (the central component of an IBM clone) and take advantage of the super-cheap VLSI chips from which IBM clones are built.
Judging from the numerous articles (in this particular discussion) praising the fun of using an iPod within an automobile, I suspect that "adjusting radio/cassette/CD/iPod" will soon rise to become the 2nd most common cause of distraction, leading to even more automobile crashes.
If using an iPod causes a fatal automobile accident, will some victim of such an accident eventually try to sue Apple?
Allow me to explain. In the USA, the legal system views a public corporation as a person -- in, for example, a civil suit filed against the company. Civil penalties are generally levied against the company even if the management team which originally made the decision to commit corporate fraud have already left the company. The penalty will not be levied against the original management team. The corporation is a person, and that person is viewed to be responsible for the fraud.
Returning to Rambus, the FTC will likely levy a financial penalty against Rambus. Yet, the current employees may not be, in any way, affiliated with the managers who made the original decision to deceive JEDEC (the standards body defining electronic components like memory).
The only fair way for the FTC to levy the penalty is to file a civil suit against the original co-founders of the company. They are Professor Mark Horowitz (at Stanford University) and Dr . Michael Farmwald. The FTC should also insist on the immediate termination of royalty payments from other companies to Rambus if those payments are for any of the disputed memory patents.
However, I doubt that the FTC will pursue this course of action. The co-founders reaped their billions of dollars in an IPO, and the current employees (who are likely unrelated to the original crime) will get the shaft.
The hard drive in my Compaq x86 workstation has been humming nicely for more than 5 years. Due to the nature of my work at the institute, the number of writes to the hard drive have easily exceeded 100000 during that time.
Using flash memory as a fast cache for the hard drive will increase the performance of the drive but will decrease the overall life of the drive. Someone will be awfully upset when she makes a final save of her million-dollar PowerPoint presentation for the CEO and discovers that the save is the 100001st write to the hybrid drive.
Hopefully, the engineer who designed this hybrid drive has, at a minimum, integrated an LCD counter and a tiny speaker into the drive. The counter shall display the running total of the number of writes to the flash memory. The tiny speaker shall beep like crazy when the total exceeds 99900.
I have a hard time in believing that the screw-up happened in the actual design. A professional engineer knows that he can be sued for malpractice and can go to jail for signing off a design diagram that is faulty.
The second aspect of the construction is the actual assembly of the project. There could be a problem here. According to a reputable source, about 14% of the laborers in the construction industry are illegal aliens. In some segments (e.g., roofing workers), the percentage of illegal aliens can be as high as 29%.
Most illegal aliens are people who hail from Mexico and who cannot read, write, or speak English. Even if we assume that they are all honest, they can still make honest mistakes when they cannot comprehend English. The warnings on the construction material, the recommendations on the construction material and the construction equipment, the instructions for assembly, and the like are all likely to be written in English. If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high.
Watering lawns, trimming hedges, picking fruits, etc. do not require knowledge of English to do well. From a quality perspective, an illegal alien can do good work on such absolutely no-skill-required jobs.
However, welding a joint on a drawbridge, properly fastening a bolt to hold up a concrete ceiling, etc. might require some ability to comprehend English and might even require some minimal skills that a high-school education would provide. Most illegal aliens from Mexico do not have a high-school education. On any project that involves public safety, an English-speaking, literate, educated worker is much more preferable than a non-English-speaking, illiterate, uneducated worker.
The Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans.
Personally, I find such a situation to be gross and atrocious. If we demand that a minority (i.e., the soldiers) of Americans sacrifice their lives for a war, then the rest of America should endure, at a minimum, the sacrifice of paying extra taxes to finance the war. How can I, as an American, support sending another American to die in a foreign land yet refuse to make any sacrifice for the war?
Since the Iraq War has not affected the lives of the majority of Americans, we Americans unconsciously view the war as a sort of remote thing that is happening "over there". The war becomes even more remote when we do not see the upfront carnage of the war. People in Iraq are bleeding and dying on the streets. Islamic thugs are blowing up the bodies of both Iraqi civilians and British soldiers. Yet, we see none of this carnage. It is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans as we stuff ourselves with hot dogs at the baseball stadium. Life is good, and we do not experience the suffering "over there".
I firmly agree with exposing the public to as much of the war as possible. I encourage American soldiers to upload as much of the videos of carnage (to YouTube and the like) as possible. We need to, at least, see the suffering to understand what war is.
I applaud the "News Hour" for broadcasting all the names and faces of the fallen American soldiers as their names are released by the Pentagon. I also applaud Ted Koppel for devoting an entire episode of "Nightline" in 2004 to reading the names of the soldiers who had died in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They must not die in obscurity.
By the way, the prime political supporters of the Iraq War have tried to generate American "support" for the war by sanitizing it -- removing any sacrifice (i.e., delaying paying the cost of the war to future generations) and trying to stop reporters, like Ted Koppel, from broadcasting the names of the fallen soldiers. "Support" generated by such manipulative means does not equate to actual support for the war. If we Americans were forced to pay the actual cost of the war (through higher taxes) and were forced to know the daily carnage in Iraq, then this "support" might evaporate. I daresay that even most neo-conservatives would oppose this Iraq if they were forced to pay for it (through higher taxes).
If the majority of Americans refuse to genuinely support a war (by paying for the cost of the war and by facing squarely the carnage caused by the war), then we should never send our soldiers to die in that war. I believe that most Americans do not genuinely support the Iraq War.
40 years ago, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek", already predicted the eventual discovery of space amoeba. Check out the episode (from "Star Trek: The Original Series") titled "The Immunity Syndrome." According to the synopsis by Wikipedia, "The huge expenditure of ship's energy attracts what appears to be an 11,000-mile (~17 700 km) wide amoeba, which appears on the main screen. Kirk launches another sensor probe which reveals the creature is protoplasmic in nature. McCoy believes it is a massive single-celled entity that feeds off raw energy but he needs more data to confirm this."
In 2005, Microsoft spent about $7 billion on research and development (R&D). By 2008, the R&D budget will grow to $8 billion. If my memory serves, no American company spends more money on R&D than Microsoft.
The research division at Microsoft is the #1 industrial laboratory in the United States. To understand the magnitude of the largesse, note that Microsoft succeeded in convincing several tenured/tenure-tracked professors at top-notch private universities (e.g. Stanford University) to quit the university and to join Microsoft.
Like the pre-breakup AT&T, Microsoft is funneling its monopolistic profits into a massive R&D budget. Microsoft laboratory has become the "Bell Labs" of the 21st century.