nah - the election of judges is another thing that seems to mostly happen in the US.
(BTW: don't take my comments here as necessarily a criticism - I'm more trying to point out cultural differences and how things seem different from other perspectives - I figure each country comes to it's own compromises on these things - and a long running stable democray's probably found a good compromise that works for them)
but wait - in a world where I get a laptop catalog in the mail from Dell addressed to me personally from just visiting their web site and looking at laptops (not giving away my name or address or anything obvious) - wont I be giving away something by just looking at their privacy page - "oooh interested customer... lets figure out who they are and send them some spam...".
I want an explicit privacy right - not just vague promises that are not enforceable
I don't think that they are necessary - in fact in the most of the rest of the western world such appointments are relatively rare - the whole idea of cabinet ministers ('Secretary's in the US) , or civil servants being appointed by the president from his friends for purely political reasons is considered rather corrupt - I know the Secretary of State is well respected world-wide - but she still doesn't represent the US in the way an elected official like for example British Home Sec. does
This is because many countries elect their cabinet ministers.
But I have no say on what information that's collected about my page viewing habbits, or what I buy, or who passes around my email address.... and who it's sent to - people are SELLING information about ME and making a profit off of it - I want a say in what happens to it..... and when it's sold I WANT A CUT!
> Praise Bob! You have no idea how happy I am to learn that other/. readers are > also engaged in the a.r.s. struggle. It's nice to know that there are other/. > readers who care about something besides the Linux v. Microsoft v. FreeBSD debate.
Oh you bet - by the way just to give/. readers some context - the Scientologists came and harassed my kids as they arrived home from school earlier this year - because I spoke out - I wasn't the only one - one local netzien was harrassed daily for over a month at home because she spoke out
Even having been through all this crap I still beleive - the only way to counter speech you don't like is NOT to censor it - but to speak out - free speech rules! let the Scientologists harass net-people as much as they like there will always be people here to speak out in favor of the truth
Same with the KKK who want to march in NY at the moment - the ACLU is right, the answer is not to ban their hoods - it's to go there and speak out and let the world know you oppose them and all they stand for
> A better analogy would be the immovable object and the irresistable force. > What the cult never imagined was that someday there'd be an irresistable > force that didn't have to move the object, but could just flow around it.
yeah - I kinda think of Scientology as this sort of '50s cold-war cult - stuck in a James-Bond spy mentality (with world wide conspiricies continually after them - in their case apparently it's an international conspriricy of psychiatrists - probably run by Freud from beyond the grave).
They have run their organisation for years with huge secrecy, covert operations (a number of leaders were sent to jail a while back for breaking into federal govt. files and stealling/altering records) - and have gone out of their way to shut up any critics by isolating them and trying to sue them out of existance.
This sort of organisation has the most to lose from an open, global, information revolution. Suddenly all those isolated ex-scientologists found each other and started sharing their horror stories - this is a wonderfull example of a community brought together by the net that would never have been possible otherwise.... and when Co$ tried to shut down their forum (by rmgrouping alt.religion.scientology) hundreds of free-speech people like me got involved.
As the saying goes "the internet sees censorship as an fault and routes around it"
I know that and you know that - but the clueless $cientology lawyers tried to get his real identity out of one of the people they were deposing.... the transcript makes great reading.... it goes in essence something like "deposee started to laugh..... deposee continued with uncontrolled laughter.... about 10 minutes later deposee reclaimed his composure enough to answer the question":-)
$cientology's been hammering the newgroup(s) where people have been gathering to criticize them for several years now - this was a big deal ago when they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology a few years back the followed up with US Marshalls to take away a couple of critic's computers - there was a lot of righteous net-indignation that blossomed into a free-speech (by Co$ critics) movement
What's followed has been a cat and mouse games through the courts and on the net including a couple of wonderfull moments when their lawyers tried in depositions to disvover the real identity of the mysterious person called 'Major Domo' who'd been running all those anti-scientology mailing lists.... and to find out who ran that FTP site at 127.0.0.1 which seemed to have a lot of their files on it....
What's not so well know is their most recent tactic which has become known as 'sporge' in which a roving band of spammers inject random garbage using real people's forged identies into alt.religion.scientology and related groups - moving from ISP to ISP burning accounts as they go they some days inject 2-3 thousand messages into the news group every day trying to drown out and meaningfull conversation.
If this doesn;t count as a distributed denial of service attack I don't know what does
(besides I'm pissed at people forging stuff in my name)
Currently we're actually seeing a mysterious respite from the sporge - probably they forgot to pay their bills - but I'm sure it will be back.... after all we wouldn't want the real world to know about Scientology's space alien fixation without paying $300k like the rest of the suckers.
For more info on Scientology vs. the Net check out www.xenu.net
> but my main complaint is his lack of knowing how to end his novels
Actually that's always been my complaint about Stephenson's books - I wasn't satisfied by the endings... but looking back I can't think what was so bad about them... maybe it was just that they were such a good read that I didn't want them to stop....
Um - I think my point WAS that the telcos are doing this to pad their bottom line:-)
where I live (the Bay Area) there are competing TV spots for DSL on at least every hour
Here at least I think they've realised that there's money to be made from data and if they don't the cable companies will - here there's even the spectre of other 3rd-party companies who are coming in and actually laying residential fibre - potentially competing in the phone, data and cable biz too - this competition can only be good for us - yesterday's announcements from the east coast of SBC spending big and putting in residential fibre so that DSL can reach more houses is yet another indicator of this same trend
In short the telcos are worried - and that's good for us comsumers!
I bet the phone companies are pushing this to get the modems off the voice network - statistically those modem connections use a lot more resources than a voice connection because they are up for much longer - but the telcos are limited to charging at the same rate.
After all all those coke machines with phone numbers need equal access too:-)
Now that DSL is becoming available (almost) everywhere they also have another incentive to move people off of those modems - they want a bigger piece of the pie - that $49 I pay for my DSL line goes largely to the telco - but tjey use the same phone line as my voive - that's right they get to charge twice for the same pair - pretty cool huh! - mind you in my case it's way cheaper than the frame realy line it replaces but I suspect I'm not the usual case.
no! do publish - and include lots of wonderfull examples of practical uses of your algorithm - by doing so you invalidate any future patents on the same idea
I suspect publishing is to patents as GPL is to copyrights:-)
I have been involved in the writing of a number of patents (probably too many) - to the point that I can almost bash one out by myself:-(
One thing I've noticed is that the patent lawyers come at the problem from almost an engineer's point of view - they are trying to solve a tricky problem in logic - they are programming it in their own programming language 'patentese' - it has the ability to create things that are almost variables (refer to something by a specific name then refere to it later with the exact same name preceded by 'the'), arrays 'the first XXX', 'the second XXX' etc etc and subroutine calls (refering to previous claims recursively). To make things worse some simple things like 'and' and 'or' seem to have mutated to their own meanings.
Of course it all belies that whole concept of patenting something which is in exchange for 'describing an invention to the public'. I wonder if anyone's ever tried to have a patent overturned because it wasn't described in a manner that the public (ie. the engineers who were supposed to read it in order to avoid it) could understand? A case like that would upset a lot of applecarts:-)
Finally, even though I have a bunch of patents, I think that this patent frenzy is crazy - it completely debases what a patent used to be - all of my patents together probably wouldn't come close to the equal of one patent of Edison's.
It can't be that bad, I think it's being a bit overblown.... paradoxically the chip proto I had in fab in Taiwan was hurried up by the quake.... I suspect they may have lost wafers that were in process when the quake hit but the ones that weren't actively being processed are probably OK - more likely their problems are more that their employees have a lot of other stuff on their minds and they're more worried about toxic spills
> Imagine when Apple releases MacOS X client, AND IT WORKS. Unix with the MacOS look and feel
run, do not walk, to your software archive, pull that old 68k Mac out from mothballs, load up A/UX 3.0..... you mean you want it like that? but you HAVE it like that already (ok so it's 10 years old and only runs on 68k macs - porting's easy these days - if they wanted A/UX on PPCs it would have happened in 6 months).... it's just that Apple threw it away and now seem to want to do it again from scratch.... oh well
oops you're right - my mistake - sorry - however my other points still stand - there are other advantages to rdrams in the future that have nothing to do with bandwidth or latency
> In other words, CPUs generally request small amounts of data with
>any given request, but it has to wait a long time for that request to get back.
Wrong - the DRAMS only see the traffic on the far side of the caches - with a modern CPU using a write-allocating cache (slot 1 or new amd-thingy) you're going to only see full cache-line transfers - that's 32+ bytes/transfer - no small amounts of data. The overwhelmingly majority (>99%) of memory transactions are going to be this size.
Instead consider the following:
time to transfer 32-bytes on an 800MHz 2-byte wide rambus - 32/2x1.25nS = 20nS
time to transfer 32-bytes on a 100MHz 4-byte SDRAMS = 80nS
with PC133 it's 60nS
with 100MHz DDR it's 40nS
(not all these solutions use approx the same pad space/pins)
On top of this add the DRAM access (RAS/sense) and precharge (if you can't hide it) times which are roughly constant for the different DRAMs (since they all tend to share roughly the same cores)
I know the current RamBus technology is being run slower than 800MHz - so take these number with the appropriate grain of salt
I suspect that Intel's suffering from bringing a first RamBus implementation to market - anything new takes a few attempts to get right:-) sadly "always plan to throw one away" isn't so practical in the silicon marketplace
There are two things that I think Intel probably has in mind with going to Rambus:
granularity - at the bottom end of the market we're going to hit the same sort of wall that framebuffers hit a while back - memory systems will only need so much memory - but chips will continue to get denser - eventually you only need 1/2 a DIMM's worth - so a smaller faster bus lets you play in this space more economically (of course M$'s code bloat may mean this never happens)
RamBus's many more multiple banks than other DRAMs should allow more parallelism in the memory subsystem, esp with the sort of mostly random accesses you see on the other side of a cache - but for this to win you need to see a lot of concurrent accesses at the memory controller - something that I'd guess is hard on the other side of slot1 (better for integrated DRAM controllers) - and better for CPU's like EPIC
Disclaimer: I've designed graphics systems based on both RamBus and traditional drams - I've never worked for RamBus or Intel
> Well thats a little extreme for something that wants to point up in the air.
well maybe not - just build it up the side a mountain somewhere - higher is better! (less air resistance) so is close to the equator - Kilamanjaro (sp?) would probably make a cool space port
Getting to LEO is hard.... you have to get above the atmosphere then go sideways real fast.
Don't start building that big accelerator in the basement just yet....
Most rockets that launch go straight up to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible (drag is the killer - taking off on an angle is a sure way to waste valuble energy) then take a roughly 90 degree turn to put them selves into orbit.
Since it stays on the ground all this does is does is give the payload a helping hand getting out of the atmosphere... it doesn't help it get into LEO (you still need reaction mass for that) - you aren't ever going to be shot off a big railgun directly into orbit (unless you have something to catch you up there).
Slashdot Mirror
(BTW: don't take my comments here as necessarily a criticism - I'm more trying to point out cultural differences and how things seem different from other perspectives - I figure each country comes to it's own compromises on these things - and a long running stable democray's probably found a good compromise that works for them)
I want an explicit privacy right - not just vague promises that are not enforceable
This is because many countries elect their cabinet ministers.
But I have no say on what information that's collected about my page viewing habbits, or what I buy, or who passes around my email address .... and who it's sent to - people are SELLING information about ME and making a profit off of it - I want a say in what happens to it ..... and when it's sold I WANT A CUT!
I want my privacy protected too .... how come only kids under 13 have to give permision first .... I want that right too .....
.... with your pockets sewn shut
alt.religion.scientology - the newsgroup where all this madness has gone down
the way to stop attracting geeks ..... is to stop talking about penguinss .....
> also engaged in the a.r.s. struggle. It's nice to know that there are other
> readers who care about something besides the Linux v. Microsoft v. FreeBSD debate.
Oh you bet - by the way just to give /. readers some context - the Scientologists came and harassed my kids as they arrived home from school earlier this year - because I spoke out - I wasn't the only one - one local netzien was harrassed daily for over a month at home because she spoke out
Even having been through all this crap I still beleive - the only way to counter speech you don't like is NOT to censor it - but to speak out - free speech rules! let the Scientologists harass net-people as much as they like there will always be people here to speak out in favor of the truth
Same with the KKK who want to march in NY at the moment - the ACLU is right, the answer is not to ban their hoods - it's to go there and speak out and let the world know you oppose them and all they stand for
http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/CoS/bi ased/biased.2.10.html#2
> What the cult never imagined was that someday there'd be an irresistable
> force that didn't have to move the object, but could just flow around it.
yeah - I kinda think of Scientology as this sort of '50s cold-war cult - stuck in a James-Bond spy mentality (with world wide conspiricies continually after them - in their case apparently it's an international conspriricy of psychiatrists - probably run by Freud from beyond the grave).
They have run their organisation for years with huge secrecy, covert operations (a number of leaders were sent to jail a while back for breaking into federal govt. files and stealling/altering records) - and have gone out of their way to shut up any critics by isolating them and trying to sue them out of existance.
This sort of organisation has the most to lose from an open, global, information revolution. Suddenly all those isolated ex-scientologists found each other and started sharing their horror stories - this is a wonderfull example of a community brought together by the net that would never have been possible otherwise .... and when Co$ tried to shut down their forum (by rmgrouping alt.religion.scientology) hundreds of free-speech people like me got involved.
As the saying goes "the internet sees censorship as an fault and routes around it"
What's followed has been a cat and mouse games through the courts and on the net including a couple of wonderfull moments when their lawyers tried in depositions to disvover the real identity of the mysterious person called 'Major Domo' who'd been running all those anti-scientology mailing lists .... and to find out who ran that FTP site at 127.0.0.1 which seemed to have a lot of their files on it ....
What's not so well know is their most recent tactic which has become known as 'sporge' in which a roving band of spammers inject random garbage using real people's forged identies into alt.religion.scientology and related groups - moving from ISP to ISP burning accounts as they go they some days inject 2-3 thousand messages into the news group every day trying to drown out and meaningfull conversation.
If this doesn;t count as a distributed denial of service attack I don't know what does
(besides I'm pissed at people forging stuff in my name)
Currently we're actually seeing a mysterious respite from the sporge - probably they forgot to pay their bills - but I'm sure it will be back .... after all we wouldn't want the real world to know about Scientology's space alien fixation without paying $300k like the rest of the suckers.
For more info on Scientology vs. the Net check out www.xenu.net
Actually that's always been my complaint about Stephenson's books - I wasn't satisfied by the endings ... but looking back I can't think what was so bad about them ... maybe it was just that they were such a good read that I didn't want them to stop ....
where I live (the Bay Area) there are competing TV spots for DSL on at least every hour
Here at least I think they've realised that there's money to be made from data and if they don't the cable companies will - here there's even the spectre of other 3rd-party companies who are coming in and actually laying residential fibre - potentially competing in the phone, data and cable biz too - this competition can only be good for us - yesterday's announcements from the east coast of SBC spending big and putting in residential fibre so that DSL can reach more houses is yet another indicator of this same trend
In short the telcos are worried - and that's good for us comsumers!
After all all those coke machines with phone numbers need equal access too :-)
Now that DSL is becoming available (almost) everywhere they also have another incentive to move people off of those modems - they want a bigger piece of the pie - that $49 I pay for my DSL line goes largely to the telco - but tjey use the same phone line as my voive - that's right they get to charge twice for the same pair - pretty cool huh! - mind you in my case it's way cheaper than the frame realy line it replaces but I suspect I'm not the usual case.
I suspect publishing is to patents as GPL is to copyrights :-)
One thing I've noticed is that the patent lawyers come at the problem from almost an engineer's point of view - they are trying to solve a tricky problem in logic - they are programming it in their own programming language 'patentese' - it has the ability to create things that are almost variables (refer to something by a specific name then refere to it later with the exact same name preceded by 'the'), arrays 'the first XXX', 'the second XXX' etc etc and subroutine calls (refering to previous claims recursively). To make things worse some simple things like 'and' and 'or' seem to have mutated to their own meanings.
Of course it all belies that whole concept of patenting something which is in exchange for 'describing an invention to the public'. I wonder if anyone's ever tried to have a patent overturned because it wasn't described in a manner that the public (ie. the engineers who were supposed to read it in order to avoid it) could understand? A case like that would upset a lot of applecarts :-)
Finally, even though I have a bunch of patents, I think that this patent frenzy is crazy - it completely debases what a patent used to be - all of my patents together probably wouldn't come close to the equal of one patent of Edison's.
It can't be that bad, I think it's being a bit overblown .... paradoxically the chip proto I had in fab in Taiwan was hurried up by the quake .... I suspect they may have lost wafers that were in process when the quake hit but the ones that weren't actively being processed are probably OK - more likely their problems are more that their employees have a lot of other stuff on their minds and they're more worried about toxic spills
"your honor opposing council's client is attempting to get the prosecuting attornys fired"
"what! - I find M$ in contempt .... bang that Gates guy's ass in jail untill he relents ...."
run, do not walk, to your software archive, pull that old 68k Mac out from mothballs, load up A/UX 3.0 ..... you mean you want it like that? but you HAVE it like that already (ok so it's 10 years old and only runs on 68k macs - porting's easy these days - if they wanted A/UX on PPCs it would have happened in 6 months) .... it's just that Apple threw it away and now seem to want to do it again from scratch .... oh well
oops you're right - my mistake - sorry - however my other points still stand - there are other advantages to rdrams in the future that have nothing to do with bandwidth or latency
>any given request, but it has to wait a long time for that request to get back.
Wrong - the DRAMS only see the traffic on the far side of the caches - with a modern CPU using a write-allocating cache (slot 1 or new amd-thingy) you're going to only see full cache-line transfers - that's 32+ bytes/transfer - no small amounts of data. The overwhelmingly majority (>99%) of memory transactions are going to be this size.
Instead consider the following:
- time to transfer 32-bytes on an 800MHz 2-byte wide rambus - 32/2x1.25nS = 20nS
- time to transfer 32-bytes on a 100MHz 4-byte SDRAMS = 80nS
- with PC133 it's 60nS
- with 100MHz DDR it's 40nS
(not all these solutions use approx the same pad space/pins)On top of this add the DRAM access (RAS/sense) and precharge (if you can't hide it) times which are roughly constant for the different DRAMs (since they all tend to share roughly the same cores)
I know the current RamBus technology is being run slower than 800MHz - so take these number with the appropriate grain of salt
I suspect that Intel's suffering from bringing a first RamBus implementation to market - anything new takes a few attempts to get right :-) sadly "always plan to throw one away" isn't so practical in the silicon marketplace
There are two things that I think Intel probably has in mind with going to Rambus:
- granularity - at the bottom end of the market we're going to hit the same sort of wall that framebuffers hit a while back - memory systems will only need so much memory - but chips will continue to get denser - eventually you only need 1/2 a DIMM's worth - so a smaller faster bus lets you play in this space more economically (of course M$'s code bloat may mean this never happens)
- RamBus's many more multiple banks than other DRAMs should allow more parallelism in the memory subsystem, esp with the sort of mostly random accesses you see on the other side of a cache - but for this to win you need to see a lot of concurrent accesses at the memory controller - something that I'd guess is hard on the other side of slot1 (better for integrated DRAM controllers) - and better for CPU's like EPIC
Disclaimer: I've designed graphics systems based on both RamBus and traditional drams - I've never worked for RamBus or Intel> Well thats a little extreme for something that wants to point up in the air.
well maybe not - just build it up the side a mountain somewhere - higher is better! (less air resistance) so is close to the equator - Kilamanjaro (sp?) would probably make a cool space port
Don't start building that big accelerator in the basement just yet ....
Most rockets that launch go straight up to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible (drag is the killer - taking off on an angle is a sure way to waste valuble energy) then take a roughly 90 degree turn to put them selves into orbit.
Since it stays on the ground all this does is does is give the payload a helping hand getting out of the atmosphere ... it doesn't help it get into LEO (you still need reaction mass for that) - you aren't ever going to be shot off a big railgun directly into orbit (unless you have something to catch you up there).