I just feel like in a corner with BSD's currently limited selection.
One of the benefits of that is you get to avoid pissing contests such as the particularly nasty one between the VM subsystem hackers and Reiser & co. on LKML. Talk about miscommunication...
Ah, but most OSes (with the notable exception of you-know-who's) adhere to certain standards, such as POSIX. By standardizing what can be standardized, and by carefully abstracting, it becomes easier to develop for a wider range of OSes.
Anyway, user share only matters (for us) to the extent that we do not want to be excluded from doing something simply because we haven't enough users to be relevant. The actual number doesn't matter, only the effect that number has on consideration of our OS as a "first-class citizen".
There is a Central American country that also has made VoIP illegal because of their interest in the state run/owned TelCo.
This is, of course, one big reason why state-run industry is bad for progress: it has an interest in squashing competition, and it has the force of law backing it to this end. In theory, a judiciary can protect the rights of the private sector, but how many nations have the constitution to prevent its legislature from taking such actions?
Of course, as we here assembled see every day, a corporation a with sufficiently-powerful lobby wields very similar powers to those of the state corporation, and no implementation of government has yet effectively addressed this problem.
The fear of having a traffic accident is one that many have faced successfully; the fear of being a victim of a terrorist attack is one that very few have faced.
Of course, once you realize that it's just as likely for somebody to walk down the street and gun you down for no reason, you get a little perspective.
The only way to beat fear is to confront the fear; hiding from the feared thing only makes it worse.
The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property.
Becoming bitstreams made copyrightable works act like the ideas they are in theory; "intellectual property" is therefore exposed as an awful misnomer, I assert, because ideas do not fit the property model very well.
If you notice, I did not say "surely the free exchange of ideas does trump the search for more money." These concepts need to coexist better.
But I completely agree with the rate of change argument. Things happen far too fast for exclusivity lasting easily over a century and a decade to be effective for copyright and patent, respectively. These lengths of time need to be decreasing, not increasing, in order to increase wealth and/or even its distribution.
I never questioned the validity of Microsoft seeking change to privacy laws.
It just seems that the headline and summary give too much extra credit to what amounts to not a call, but more of a "me-too" (if a substantial one). Why couldn't it have said "Microsoft Joins the Call for National Privacy Law"? It's arguably more descriptive, and certainly no less.
This is a corporation seeking reform; a publicly-held, for-profit corporation cannot have genuinely strong passion for privacy, as at best, the drives come from the desire of the stockholders, which (and I of course cannot directly prove this, but I find it likely) is for financial gain---anything else comes as a secondary, indirect goal. Therefore, why ought the headline feature language with such bold connotations as "call"?
This is the problem with thinking of the so-called "intellectual property" as property.
The whole point of copyright is that it's the idea that matters*; and yet, once we can finally decouple the idea from the carrier medium by making it into a stream of bits that can be sent across the world within fractions of a second, we see that trying to reapply the previous metaphor of the physical object requires that we impose such drastic controls, since the most natural thing to do is to spread information, unlike when the idea depended on the replication of the media as well---you can't click and drag a second copy of a book from the first one.
I think that the selling of ideas by copy cannot be done anymore, unless you impose this unnatural and invasive system onto the flow of information, and that it's going to be a painful process to widely come to this realization. Everyone struggles to find a replacement system to compensate for the loss of by-copy sale (a ransom system? a patronage system?), but surely the search for more money does not trump the free exchange of ideas.
* Yeah, that's probably not exactly right, but IANAL, and I need sleep, so it's the best I can do.
Besides, it's not as though we didn't want this to come about before they announced this. I wouldn't consider them any kind of leading authority on the importance of privacy. Sure, they're influential, but that's because they have lots of cash.
SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel's address space.
Would somebody care to explain why the two emphasized statements are not (nearly) mutually-exclusive? Or is security not included in the concept of stability? Or is there some restriction even on ring 0 that I am ignorant about?
It needs to be the large hardware vendors and game company devs push this, they are the only ones who can really crack it, it is NOT, repeat NOT, going to come primarily from the software side of the equation by some billion humans deciding one morning to "tryout this li-nux thing" they heard about. Ain't happenin'. Not any time soon, anyway. You aren't going to change human reality that people run what comes pre-installed. It just "is" is all.
You're falling into the same-old the-chicken-or-the-egg trap that we've been in for the past few years: the only way the hardware vendors and game devs widely accept Linux is if the demand is there from J. Sixpack. And as you mentioned, we aren't going to change human nature.
Wide acceptance for desktop Linux can only come about through the same back door that the PC came to the home, and this is acceptance in the office. It's going to be an even longer and harder process, but by that vector it is actually possible. And because the FOSS community often goes out of its way to provide portability, we lack powerful traditional pulls, that of lock-in and incompatability.
GPUs are highly parallel, far moreso than a CPU. This makes them even more suited to vector operations than CPUs with SIMD.
What I want to know is whether, given the new-found programmability of the GPU, more pressure will be applied for ATI and nVidia to open up the ISAs to their graphics chipsets.
There is much miscommunication happening w.r.t. Reiser4 on LKML and elsewhere. Until that is cleared up, don't expect Reiser4 in the mainline anytime soon without some kind of fallout.
My roommate is a perfect example of this. He is obsessed with poker, and I get the feeling it's not out of love for the game. He buys stuff and resells it on eBay---which is OK on its own, but sometimes he'll auction off things he doesn't have, then order them from Amazon, and make it so that they ship straight to the auction winner.
I have no doubt he would shill for money. The guy has nary a moral fiber in his body, at least when it comes to money.
Slashdot Mirror
Robert O'Brien called; he wants his plot device back.
"Hey, you got your Fark in my Slashdot!"
"Well you got your Slashdot in my Fark!"
Here's what I was thinking:
NIMH unavailable for comment.
I just feel like in a corner with BSD's currently limited selection.
One of the benefits of that is you get to avoid pissing contests such as the particularly nasty one between the VM subsystem hackers and Reiser & co. on LKML. Talk about miscommunication...
Ah, but most OSes (with the notable exception of you-know-who's) adhere to certain standards, such as POSIX. By standardizing what can be standardized, and by carefully abstracting, it becomes easier to develop for a wider range of OSes.
Anyway, user share only matters (for us) to the extent that we do not want to be excluded from doing something simply because we haven't enough users to be relevant. The actual number doesn't matter, only the effect that number has on consideration of our OS as a "first-class citizen".
There is a Central American country that also has made VoIP illegal because of their interest in the state run/owned TelCo.
This is, of course, one big reason why state-run industry is bad for progress: it has an interest in squashing competition, and it has the force of law backing it to this end. In theory, a judiciary can protect the rights of the private sector, but how many nations have the constitution to prevent its legislature from taking such actions?
Of course, as we here assembled see every day, a corporation a with sufficiently-powerful lobby wields very similar powers to those of the state corporation, and no implementation of government has yet effectively addressed this problem.
Stop spewing this fatalist shit. Now get back in there and fight!
Please, this is Slashdot. We ought only talk about the performance specifications of our e-penes here.
The fear of having a traffic accident is one that many have faced successfully; the fear of being a victim of a terrorist attack is one that very few have faced.
Of course, once you realize that it's just as likely for somebody to walk down the street and gun you down for no reason, you get a little perspective.
The only way to beat fear is to confront the fear; hiding from the feared thing only makes it worse.
The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property.
Becoming bitstreams made copyrightable works act like the ideas they are in theory; "intellectual property" is therefore exposed as an awful misnomer, I assert, because ideas do not fit the property model very well.
If you notice, I did not say "surely the free exchange of ideas does trump the search for more money." These concepts need to coexist better.
But I completely agree with the rate of change argument. Things happen far too fast for exclusivity lasting easily over a century and a decade to be effective for copyright and patent, respectively. These lengths of time need to be decreasing, not increasing, in order to increase wealth and/or even its distribution.
I never questioned the validity of Microsoft seeking change to privacy laws.
It just seems that the headline and summary give too much extra credit to what amounts to not a call, but more of a "me-too" (if a substantial one). Why couldn't it have said "Microsoft Joins the Call for National Privacy Law"? It's arguably more descriptive, and certainly no less.
This is a corporation seeking reform; a publicly-held, for-profit corporation cannot have genuinely strong passion for privacy, as at best, the drives come from the desire of the stockholders, which (and I of course cannot directly prove this, but I find it likely) is for financial gain---anything else comes as a secondary, indirect goal. Therefore, why ought the headline feature language with such bold connotations as "call"?
This is the problem with thinking of the so-called "intellectual property" as property.
The whole point of copyright is that it's the idea that matters*; and yet, once we can finally decouple the idea from the carrier medium by making it into a stream of bits that can be sent across the world within fractions of a second, we see that trying to reapply the previous metaphor of the physical object requires that we impose such drastic controls, since the most natural thing to do is to spread information, unlike when the idea depended on the replication of the media as well---you can't click and drag a second copy of a book from the first one.
I think that the selling of ideas by copy cannot be done anymore, unless you impose this unnatural and invasive system onto the flow of information, and that it's going to be a painful process to widely come to this realization. Everyone struggles to find a replacement system to compensate for the loss of by-copy sale (a ransom system? a patronage system?), but surely the search for more money does not trump the free exchange of ideas.
* Yeah, that's probably not exactly right, but IANAL, and I need sleep, so it's the best I can do.
Besides, it's not as though we didn't want this to come about before they announced this. I wouldn't consider them any kind of leading authority on the importance of privacy. Sure, they're influential, but that's because they have lots of cash.
SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel's address space.
Would somebody care to explain why the two emphasized statements are not (nearly) mutually-exclusive? Or is security not included in the concept of stability? Or is there some restriction even on ring 0 that I am ignorant about?
It needs to be the large hardware vendors and game company devs push this, they are the only ones who can really crack it, it is NOT, repeat NOT, going to come primarily from the software side of the equation by some billion humans deciding one morning to "tryout this li-nux thing" they heard about. Ain't happenin'. Not any time soon, anyway. You aren't going to change human reality that people run what comes pre-installed. It just "is" is all.
You're falling into the same-old the-chicken-or-the-egg trap that we've been in for the past few years: the only way the hardware vendors and game devs widely accept Linux is if the demand is there from J. Sixpack. And as you mentioned, we aren't going to change human nature.
Wide acceptance for desktop Linux can only come about through the same back door that the PC came to the home, and this is acceptance in the office. It's going to be an even longer and harder process, but by that vector it is actually possible. And because the FOSS community often goes out of its way to provide portability, we lack powerful traditional pulls, that of lock-in and incompatability.
Also, see this thread from the Anandtech forums.
GPUs are highly parallel, far moreso than a CPU. This makes them even more suited to vector operations than CPUs with SIMD.
What I want to know is whether, given the new-found programmability of the GPU, more pressure will be applied for ATI and nVidia to open up the ISAs to their graphics chipsets.
If a machine is compromised in the zombie/rootkit way, you cannot trust a single executable on the box.
There is much miscommunication happening w.r.t. Reiser4 on LKML and elsewhere. Until that is cleared up, don't expect Reiser4 in the mainline anytime soon without some kind of fallout.
My roommate is a perfect example of this. He is obsessed with poker, and I get the feeling it's not out of love for the game. He buys stuff and resells it on eBay---which is OK on its own, but sometimes he'll auction off things he doesn't have, then order them from Amazon, and make it so that they ship straight to the auction winner.
I have no doubt he would shill for money. The guy has nary a moral fiber in his body, at least when it comes to money.
Do you think that this is somehow not the norm for every society throughout history?
He made himself into a public figure by starting his little crusade. If he can't handle the heat, maybe he should get out of the kitchen.
He had the option of speaking out anonymously, but he chose not to.
You need ask yourself only one question:
What Would Raptor Jesus Do?
Depleted uranium is still toxic in the same manner as other heavy metals (lead, mercury, etc.), and it is still radioactive to a degree.