They are probably more concerned that they will be reported to the Party for fraternising with the enemy. Amongst their number will be a small percentage that DID drink the Kool Aid, and would happily turn them in for a bit of kudos.
How can Intel make a bunch of Core 2 chips then justify charging a premium for the ones that remain stable at higher clock rates, when both fast and slow chips cost the same amount to make? - They don't cost the same to make?
Nope, they all cost the same to make. They all come off the same die, produced by the same process. The only difference is that some work better than others. They test their frequencies, they test the cache segments. The suboptimal ones are put in the low frequency cheapie bin, the better ones are sold as the "Extreme" versions for 4x the price.
That only applies to the start of production though! As they go on, the process improves, error rates decrease. They find themselves having to put some perfectly good high-quality chips in the cheapie bin, just to keep up supply, which is why you can often get away with overclocking them.
Not that they can't justify the price difference - something that works better / faster obviously has more intrinsic value than that which doesn't, and the value they are provided is somewhat tied up in their ability to test their product and certify it for that level of performance.
The prices look pretty good to me though, with the new Wolfdale 0.45nm line coming out soon, with 50% more cache (4/6MB) and 15% (2.4/3.0GHz) faster clock speed with less thermal output ; at the same price I paid for the previous model.
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam This is presumably why you can download the Kings James Version of the bible for free, and also the New International Version.... oh, wait...
The problem is, if they're going to protect the competent ones, they have to protect everyone. Why? Surely part of the responsibility of being a union should be ensuring that your members are at least competent to do their job?
It only makes sense - unions exist to further the interests of their members. Their members are employed by corporations. The corporation only makes money to pay them if costs are lower than income ; which either means you want to keep cost down or income up.
The union probably doesn't want to focus on keeping cost down, which is to be expected - the largest cost in most production processes is the labour.
If you want to keep income up, you either increase productivity or increase the quality of production (so that the market will bear paying a higher price for the goods).
Part of that is making sure your labour is properly skilled, and doing so improves your bargaining power at the table with the corporation, so unions should be all for it - if Joe is letting the side down, then de-unionize him and make sure his employer knows it. The union can justifiably claim it's average productivity went up in the next pay negotiation.
Most of the road pricing schemes out there include a GPS unit in the car. Certainly proposals for the UK include compatibility for European systems.
Combine this with European insistence on a GPS system that works much better in urban areas (Galileo), and you are drawn to the conclusion that it's not just about relieving congestion, but there is a large component of wanting to track vehicle movements as well.
I love computers, but I think they have no place in the electoral process.
Transparency should be the order of the day. Computers will always tend to obfuscate things for the common man, because as far as he is concerned, anything that happens inside a computer system may as well be a form of arcane magic. There are a far higher number of people who understand the principles of "counting", given you a far greater pool of competent election officials to draw from.
Understanding cryptographic signatures and ensuring that some part of the chain of trust, including the toolchain, isn't compromised, is far harder than understanding that "here is a locked box containing paper votes, anyone tampering with the contents is a BAD man".
The only reasons for using computers in elections are
* Impatience
* Pork
* Making it easier to subvert the democratic process
A roomful of geezers inflated with civic pride is a counting device that is far harder to corrupt than a thumbnail of silicon which slavishly obeys every command it's given.
Given that socio-economic status has a strong correlation to both absolute and "healthy" life expectancy, each successful "life-ruining" lawsuit which results in a corresponding drop in socio-economic status could be interpreted as being some fraction of a murder.
I'm sure they have accumulated enough fractions by now to cover the members of the board, and maybe a few tiers of upper management too. Since they are the most compensated, they must be the most responsible, right?
I have the same worries about uploading ; to me, an upload is not the same as the person who was imaged to produce the data. Instead, I would prefer to have my brain gradually augmented, first with devices that learn to be "me", which are then slowly permitted feedback until they become a genuine part of my mind. Eventually, you would transition to a 100% non-biological substrate, but still have a mind that shared continuity of consciousness with that old soggy bit of grey matter that ceased to function last week. A copy that just instantaneously got uploaded to a new substrate and started running ; well, it wouldn't be *me* (even though it would think it was).
I presume they see his list of movies, realise that they've never seen any of them even screening locally, or on a video store shelf (or in the bargain bucket), and figure that the very worst that can happen if they take his money is that the film will slide into total obscurity and not affect their reputation in the slightest. The best would be that he got it right just once (by accident?) and a cult hit would propel them into franchise territory.
You'd almost feel sorry for the cast, but you get the feeling that every last one of them was professional enough to know that they should take the money and run.....
I sincerely hope that all the real natural history museums have the sense not to bid on this. Not only would they be funding an institution that opposes and mocks them, they'll be passing up the opportunity to buy the mastodon skull and everything else that this "museum" holds at bargain prices when it goes bankrupt.
Not only do they stock a nice wide range at reasonable prices, you stick it in the eye to the taxman because they are based on Jersey, and you don't pay VAT for small imports.
The license is the "Microsoft Reference License", their "look, but don't touch, and refrain from competing" license. They've loosened it a little - you are now allowed to use the licensed material to develop software that has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the.NET Framework ; as long as it's still on Windows.
Very obviously a "back off!" clause for Mono and dotgnu.
Previously, people referred to the source by using Reflector ; this of course, doesn't quite produce the same output as the original. My guess is that MS are more comfortable letting people see the original source than disassembling it - if people have seen the "real source", they are more vulnerable to accusations of copyright infringement.
Plus it means their IDE gains some of the advantages which Java IDEs have enjoyed for some time, at hardly any nasal skin cost to MS because people were looking at "the source" anyway.
Because the source is only cached within the VS session and has to be reloaded each session, and because it comes from an MS server, they maintain control, and keep tabs on who is looking. I bet their webmaster has a comprehensive list of all IP addresses suspected to be OSS sympathizers....
Has anyone looked at the instructions for using these sources in Visual Studio? It seems monstrously crippled compared to debugging third party sources in Eclipse.
* Each source file you debug into is dynamically downloaded once for each session and not retained.
* Setting breakpoints in the source is a multi-step process, because the source is different from the corresponding symbol files because the copyright banners they insert change the CRC. You have to tell the IDE to ignore that.
* You have to manually tell it to load symbols for each file.
* The symbols are also served up from an MS server (but they are cached beyond a single session).
* Some of these symbol files are 10MB, so VS "may be unresponsive" while you download them.
* "Go to Definition" doesn't work.
This in contrast to the same support in Eclipse, where all you have to do is
* Download the source
* Tell the IDE where to find the source
14) Can I point a web browser at the symbols URL and download the symbols directly?
No, you'll get an HTTP 400 (Bad Request) response. So in addition, you'll need a professional version of Visual Studio, because the Express versions don't support the Source Server feature.
Given that it all seems so inconvenient to use, I think I may be sticking to Reflector.
The Wii slot-loader was lauded as being remarkable for being able to load multiple disk sizes without a caddy or adapter ; I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo had patents covering it.
Instead of a hard bandwidth cap, the UBR is instructed to throttle the connection of anyone who exceeds a certain usage threshold during peak hours (1600-2100). Their connection is throttled for 5 hours from the trigger.
This means that your connection doesn't suddenly grind to a halt, it just slows down to 25-50% of your rated speed.
Yes, I agree that the solution that is ideal for geeks is to simply upgrade the infrastructure until we have all the bandwidth we can eat. This is not going to happen any time soon - P2P programs are just too good at eating all the available bandwidth (it is after all what they were designed to do). Even heroic measures would rapidly be offset by a ravening swarm of people downloading HD movies as the original ISO.
ISPs rely on the fact that the "masses" are usually not heavy users. Alas, P2P is now beloved of the masses. P2P is the application that changed the way the average Joe uses bandwidth. Why else is my ISP offering 10, 20, and soon, 50MBit/s packages? 10MBit is enough to stream a full, broadcast quality, digital TV channel (8Mbit/s is the most I've seen DVB-T channels use in the UK). It's more than enough to stream several movies at once, if they are compressed using something more efficient than MPEG-2. It's enough to download a Linux ISO in 10 minutes. In other words, 10MBit/s is fast enough for most personal uses. The marginal gains of upgrading to 20MBit/s are minimal, unless you are doing something that can eat the extra bandwidth - and the only (non-business) application that does is P2P. That goes quintuple for 50Mbit/s!
I'd be interested to see similar usage figures for urban Japan where they enjoy 100Mbit/s fibre to the home. I'd be willing to bet they are all P2Ping their asses off.
Battlestar Galactica.. effect driven IMHO, it's mostly character driven. The effects serve as a good backdrop, but for the new series they've played them down a good deal from the original. They seem to have learned the lesson that late-era Star Trek taught, and avoided solving problems with deus ex machina all the time. They've replaced the flashy particle weapons with projectile guns, and all the principal protagonists are played by human actors and not CGI or animatronics. The Cylons have been written with a more interesting personality than the standard "robot who says 'Destroy all Humans!'", and there are excellent parallels to the real world (particularly addressing religious fundamentalism).
I've seen both, Classic Galactica as a boy, and New Galactica as a man, and both shows were probably entirely appropriate to the ages I saw them at. Classic was thrilling and suspenseful and had very little in the way of story arc, New is a far more interesting show that probably wouldn't go over so well with the juvenile mind. Recommended.
I'd suggest graphite, which makes a reasonable dry lubricant where you don't want dust and guck accumulating. I'm not sure what the switch arrangement in that model is though - be aware that graphite is conductive (shouldn't be a problem in small quantities, like scribbling on the key shaft with a soft pencil.)
I have one of these at work, and a Model M at home. The Cherry is lighter (both weight and keyforce), quieter, and has shorter travel than the Model M. I liked the Cherry so much I bought one for my dear old mother who is a legal secretary and her arthritic fingers cleared up (professional typists should sue IT departments who stick them with those godawful $10 POS membrane keyboards that everything ships with these days).
The Cherry I've had for about 8 years, the Model M 2. I'm not sure which I like more, they both have their charms. The sheer volume of the Model M is an *advantage* because it keeps my Mother-in-law from disturbing me because, damn, it sounds like I am _working_ from quite a distance away. And if she does get too close, I can indeed expect to be able to bludgeon her to death with it. The Cherry is quieter which makes it more considerate in my open-plan office at work. The feedback quality is just as good (if not the same "flavour").
The Cherry is available at a far more reasonable price (local to the UK, via the likes of PC World Business) than the Model M is (I got mine via ebay and it cost a pretty penny). If you can get an "M" from a junk bucket, power to you.
Without doing objective measurements I'd find it hard to pick one over the other, but if my Model M ever drops dead and I can't find a replacement I'll be happy enough replacing it with another Cherry.
This is a project chosen for it's visibility. The perfect medical software just works, and the patient never sees it. But this doesn't win you any votes when you've been lambasted in the press for spending $12B of public money on IT projects.
Patients don't WANT a choice of specialist hospital or doctor. They just want to go to the best one, and they don't have the specialist knowledge to make that choice, so they will ask their doctor.
The proper implementation of C&B is therefore to give a client to GPs that they can book appointments with. The decision to expose it to the general public is purely to say "hey, look, we made something that works".
Slashdot Mirror
They are probably more concerned that they will be reported to the Party for fraternising with the enemy. Amongst their number will be a small percentage that DID drink the Kool Aid, and would happily turn them in for a bit of kudos.
- They don't cost the same to make? Nope, they all cost the same to make. They all come off the same die, produced by the same process. The only difference is that some work better than others. They test their frequencies, they test the cache segments. The suboptimal ones are put in the low frequency cheapie bin, the better ones are sold as the "Extreme" versions for 4x the price.
That only applies to the start of production though! As they go on, the process improves, error rates decrease. They find themselves having to put some perfectly good high-quality chips in the cheapie bin, just to keep up supply, which is why you can often get away with overclocking them.
Not that they can't justify the price difference - something that works better / faster obviously has more intrinsic value than that which doesn't, and the value they are provided is somewhat tied up in their ability to test their product and certify it for that level of performance.
The prices look pretty good to me though, with the new Wolfdale 0.45nm line coming out soon, with 50% more cache (4/6MB) and 15% (2.4/3.0GHz) faster clock speed with less thermal output ; at the same price I paid for the previous model.
And the ZX-80 couldn't even display the screen at the same time as processing a keypress. That was one highly-focussed computer!
It only makes sense - unions exist to further the interests of their members. Their members are employed by corporations. The corporation only makes money to pay them if costs are lower than income ; which either means you want to keep cost down or income up.
The union probably doesn't want to focus on keeping cost down, which is to be expected - the largest cost in most production processes is the labour.
If you want to keep income up, you either increase productivity or increase the quality of production (so that the market will bear paying a higher price for the goods).
Part of that is making sure your labour is properly skilled, and doing so improves your bargaining power at the table with the corporation, so unions should be all for it - if Joe is letting the side down, then de-unionize him and make sure his employer knows it. The union can justifiably claim it's average productivity went up in the next pay negotiation.
Most of the road pricing schemes out there include a GPS unit in the car. Certainly proposals for the UK include compatibility for European systems.
Combine this with European insistence on a GPS system that works much better in urban areas (Galileo), and you are drawn to the conclusion that it's not just about relieving congestion, but there is a large component of wanting to track vehicle movements as well.
I love computers, but I think they have no place in the electoral process.
Transparency should be the order of the day. Computers will always tend to obfuscate things for the common man, because as far as he is concerned, anything that happens inside a computer system may as well be a form of arcane magic. There are a far higher number of people who understand the principles of "counting", given you a far greater pool of competent election officials to draw from.
Understanding cryptographic signatures and ensuring that some part of the chain of trust, including the toolchain, isn't compromised, is far harder than understanding that "here is a locked box containing paper votes, anyone tampering with the contents is a BAD man".
The only reasons for using computers in elections are
* Impatience
* Pork
* Making it easier to subvert the democratic process
A roomful of geezers inflated with civic pride is a counting device that is far harder to corrupt than a thumbnail of silicon which slavishly obeys every command it's given.
Given that socio-economic status has a strong correlation to both absolute and "healthy" life expectancy, each successful "life-ruining" lawsuit which results in a corresponding drop in socio-economic status could be interpreted as being some fraction of a murder.
I'm sure they have accumulated enough fractions by now to cover the members of the board, and maybe a few tiers of upper management too. Since they are the most compensated, they must be the most responsible, right?
NB. Tongue is firmly in cheek.
I have the same worries about uploading ; to me, an upload is not the same as the person who was imaged to produce the data. Instead, I would prefer to have my brain gradually augmented, first with devices that learn to be "me", which are then slowly permitted feedback until they become a genuine part of my mind. Eventually, you would transition to a 100% non-biological substrate, but still have a mind that shared continuity of consciousness with that old soggy bit of grey matter that ceased to function last week. A copy that just instantaneously got uploaded to a new substrate and started running ; well, it wouldn't be *me* (even though it would think it was).
I presume they see his list of movies, realise that they've never seen any of them even screening locally, or on a video store shelf (or in the bargain bucket), and figure that the very worst that can happen if they take his money is that the film will slide into total obscurity and not affect their reputation in the slightest. The best would be that he got it right just once (by accident?) and a cult hit would propel them into franchise territory.
You'd almost feel sorry for the cast, but you get the feeling that every last one of them was professional enough to know that they should take the money and run.....
I sincerely hope that all the real natural history museums have the sense not to bid on this. Not only would they be funding an institution that opposes and mocks them, they'll be passing up the opportunity to buy the mastodon skull and everything else that this "museum" holds at bargain prices when it goes bankrupt.
Not only do they stock a nice wide range at reasonable prices, you stick it in the eye to the taxman because they are based on Jersey, and you don't pay VAT for small imports.
The license is the "Microsoft Reference License", their "look, but don't touch, and refrain from competing" license. They've loosened it a little - you are now allowed to use the licensed material to develop software that has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework ; as long as it's still on Windows.
Very obviously a "back off!" clause for Mono and dotgnu.
Previously, people referred to the source by using Reflector ; this of course, doesn't quite produce the same output as the original. My guess is that MS are more comfortable letting people see the original source than disassembling it - if people have seen the "real source", they are more vulnerable to accusations of copyright infringement.
Plus it means their IDE gains some of the advantages which Java IDEs have enjoyed for some time, at hardly any nasal skin cost to MS because people were looking at "the source" anyway.
Because the source is only cached within the VS session and has to be reloaded each session, and because it comes from an MS server, they maintain control, and keep tabs on who is looking. I bet their webmaster has a comprehensive list of all IP addresses suspected to be OSS sympathizers....
* Each source file you debug into is dynamically downloaded once for each session and not retained.
* Setting breakpoints in the source is a multi-step process, because the source is different from the corresponding symbol files because the copyright banners they insert change the CRC. You have to tell the IDE to ignore that.
* You have to manually tell it to load symbols for each file.
* The symbols are also served up from an MS server (but they are cached beyond a single session).
* Some of these symbol files are 10MB, so VS "may be unresponsive" while you download them.
* "Go to Definition" doesn't work.
This in contrast to the same support in Eclipse, where all you have to do is
* Download the source
* Tell the IDE where to find the source 14) Can I point a web browser at the symbols URL and download the symbols directly?
No, you'll get an HTTP 400 (Bad Request) response. So in addition, you'll need a professional version of Visual Studio, because the Express versions don't support the Source Server feature.
Given that it all seems so inconvenient to use, I think I may be sticking to Reflector.
The Wii slot-loader was lauded as being remarkable for being able to load multiple disk sizes without a caddy or adapter ; I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo had patents covering it.
Instead of a hard bandwidth cap, the UBR is instructed to throttle the connection of anyone who exceeds a certain usage threshold during peak hours (1600-2100). Their connection is throttled for 5 hours from the trigger.
This means that your connection doesn't suddenly grind to a halt, it just slows down to 25-50% of your rated speed.
Yes, I agree that the solution that is ideal for geeks is to simply upgrade the infrastructure until we have all the bandwidth we can eat. This is not going to happen any time soon - P2P programs are just too good at eating all the available bandwidth (it is after all what they were designed to do). Even heroic measures would rapidly be offset by a ravening swarm of people downloading HD movies as the original ISO.
ISPs rely on the fact that the "masses" are usually not heavy users. Alas, P2P is now beloved of the masses. P2P is the application that changed the way the average Joe uses bandwidth. Why else is my ISP offering 10, 20, and soon, 50MBit/s packages? 10MBit is enough to stream a full, broadcast quality, digital TV channel (8Mbit/s is the most I've seen DVB-T channels use in the UK). It's more than enough to stream several movies at once, if they are compressed using something more efficient than MPEG-2. It's enough to download a Linux ISO in 10 minutes. In other words, 10MBit/s is fast enough for most personal uses. The marginal gains of upgrading to 20MBit/s are minimal, unless you are doing something that can eat the extra bandwidth - and the only (non-business) application that does is P2P. That goes quintuple for 50Mbit/s!
I'd be interested to see similar usage figures for urban Japan where they enjoy 100Mbit/s fibre to the home. I'd be willing to bet they are all P2Ping their asses off.
I've seen both, Classic Galactica as a boy, and New Galactica as a man, and both shows were probably entirely appropriate to the ages I saw them at. Classic was thrilling and suspenseful and had very little in the way of story arc, New is a far more interesting show that probably wouldn't go over so well with the juvenile mind. Recommended.
I've seen a working Python interpreter on my Palm III, which has a 16 MHz processor and 2MB of RAM.
I'd suggest graphite, which makes a reasonable dry lubricant where you don't want dust and guck accumulating. I'm not sure what the switch arrangement in that model is though - be aware that graphite is conductive (shouldn't be a problem in small quantities, like scribbling on the key shaft with a soft pencil.)
The "Das" is essentially a rebadged Cherry G80-3000.
I have one of these at work, and a Model M at home. The Cherry is lighter (both weight and keyforce), quieter, and has shorter travel than the Model M. I liked the Cherry so much I bought one for my dear old mother who is a legal secretary and her arthritic fingers cleared up (professional typists should sue IT departments who stick them with those godawful $10 POS membrane keyboards that everything ships with these days).
The Cherry I've had for about 8 years, the Model M 2. I'm not sure which I like more, they both have their charms. The sheer volume of the Model M is an *advantage* because it keeps my Mother-in-law from disturbing me because, damn, it sounds like I am _working_ from quite a distance away. And if she does get too close, I can indeed expect to be able to bludgeon her to death with it. The Cherry is quieter which makes it more considerate in my open-plan office at work. The feedback quality is just as good (if not the same "flavour").
The Cherry is available at a far more reasonable price (local to the UK, via the likes of PC World Business) than the Model M is (I got mine via ebay and it cost a pretty penny). If you can get an "M" from a junk bucket, power to you.
Without doing objective measurements I'd find it hard to pick one over the other, but if my Model M ever drops dead and I can't find a replacement I'll be happy enough replacing it with another Cherry.
It seems to be working for me here..
wesuckdonkeypenis.com was instantly snapped up.
Perhaps you have to choose something they have a genuine interest in?
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx
This is a project chosen for it's visibility. The perfect medical software just works, and the patient never sees it. But this doesn't win you any votes when you've been lambasted in the press for spending $12B of public money on IT projects.
Patients don't WANT a choice of specialist hospital or doctor. They just want to go to the best one, and they don't have the specialist knowledge to make that choice, so they will ask their doctor.
The proper implementation of C&B is therefore to give a client to GPs that they can book appointments with. The decision to expose it to the general public is purely to say "hey, look, we made something that works".