You're deluded - this is the sort of rationalization confederacy loving southerners come up with to explain away the despicable foundation of the economy of the slave states. Sure, the confederate constitution allowed for greater state-level autonomy, but it also enshrined slavery, which was the crux of the document. Despite years of controversy, the South did not make any real efforts to move away from a slavery based economy - your equating of popcorn with slavery is laughable and morally outrageous.
The civil war was part of the process of civilizing the US - that's right, the Confederacy was not civilized by any metric known to man. This was the society that condoned and actively encouraged mutilation of slaves as a deterrent, forced feeding of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death to escape the daily horror of existence (namely rape, mutilation and habitual abuse).
You will also notice that South Carolina pre-emptively seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected - there were no efforts by the South to compromise at all on slavery, despite the controversy that had been raging for some 50 years. It was also the South who pre-emptively attacked Fort Sumter, again without any attempt to compromise. There was also a serious effort to resume the Atlantic slave trade, but luckily some degree of sense prevailed.
See
this link.
This was reported on foxnews.com as well, well after the "mystery" was solved with a teaser headline "What did kerry pull out of his pocket?" and at the end the story stated it was a pen.
Sheesh.
I don't know what sort of substance you're smoking, but that has to be the most ignorant comment I've come across, in a forum packed with 'em. Do you know anything at all about slavery, and the conditions under which slaves were forced to work under? Have you heard of the underground railroad, whereby slaves escaped to the North? Of forced feeding of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death in order to escape the daily horror of existence (habitual rape, beatings, mutilation as a deterrent)? I suggest you stop pontificating from your armchair, and rectify your ignorance. Human dignity calls for more than mere survival.
Are you affiliated with Infinium at all? Even after re-reading your posts, I'm not certain why you are such a vocal defender of this company, which seemed at least initially to be a sham, according to evidence gathered by HardOCP.
I've read the original HardOCP article, and they seem to have done a thorough job of investigating Infinium, and the evidence is overwhelming that at least at some point of time, the company was just a po box. From their evidence, tt is also quite plausible that the CEO is a dotcom era slash-and-burn artist, who went through VC funding for several companies and never delivered. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? I'm certain all of us would like to hear of it.
Is this related to Compton scattering (usually between an electron and a photon)? As I recall, there's a cos(Theta) term there, so the energy transfer could go either way between the electron and the photon. This also sounds a lot like how the bose-einstein condensate (a recently discovered "new state" of matter, and cause of a nobel) was created.
Wow, you are one seriously disturbed individual. I guess it's easy to see why MMORPGs like everquest can get people to kill themselves over some trivial in-game incident, when even some obsolete text based game inspires such hatred. Chill, dude.
Unfortunately the article is a little light on details. Presumably the IR signature is due to absorption and re-emission by the dust cloud, but I'm curious as to how they distinguish between a "normal" dust cloud and one that's due to an Earth sized planet. Interesting.
I think people would've identified better, and felt a sense of kinship with Bluetooth had it been called Yellowtooth. That said, bluetooth chipsets are embedded in millions of cellphones at the moment, and Metcalf's law will only serve to increase that unless a real replacement with sufficient momentum comes along. It's a protocol designed with low power reqs, and has good enough bandwidth for the sort of things that use it.
I liked Neuromancer, mostly for its rather surreal and atmospheric writing. For a deeper insight into the genesis of the "cyberpunk" genre, I suggest all of you go read "True Names", a brilliant novella by Vernor Vinge written ~4 years (1980?) before Neuromancer. Even today, it's an astonishing leap of the imagination, but you can expect no less from the author of Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (but I still think "True Names" was his best). Oh, you should also read Jack Vance:-)
Gibson used to maintain a fairly interesting blog, but he quit to work on his "day job", which is really too bad - I like looking in on the lives of the writers I read, although it feels a little voyeuristic at times (and that's when I stop). It's fascinating seeing the creative process in action.
I'll admit that I gave the Groklaw summary only a cursory glance, but it looks like SCO is claiming that the linux versions of the scatter gather i/o functions readv() and writev() (basically you pass in a vector of pointers to the syscall to perform multiple I/O operations with a single syscall) are derived from Dynix.
Now it's not clear if they're claiming it's the implementation that's infringing (it's not exactly a hard function to code), or the interface.
If it's the latter, they're clearly in the wrong since that interface dates back to 4.2 BSD. Much of their evidence seems rather circuitous, relying on things like individual contributors having worked on Dynix in the past. Also, for relatively simple stuff, there's only one optimal algorithm, so unless they can demonstrate things like identical variable names (above a certain length), they don't have a case (in an ideal world..).
Several interesting questions raised by the article:
The author asserts that transmetas CMS and microprocessors bear striking similarities to an IBM research project named DAISY. I quote:
While I will not give a full analysis here, it appears that much of Transmeta's work was actually invented by IBM Research in the early 1990s. IBM's Daisy (Dynamically Architected Instruction Set from Yorktown) project [6] is essentially CMS for the PowerPC architecture, and uses a strikingly similar design and implementation, including:
* Designing the morph host microarchitecture with the same semantics as the target instruction set (in IBM's case, PowerPC rather than x86)
* Translated page cache, using a T-bit buffer to track which user pages are dirty and need re-translation
* Explicit memory alias handling, using protected loads and checked stores
* Extensive profiling logic to aid in further optimization
* Handling of speculatively reordered loads and stores to I/O space
I wonder if this was just a question of similar approaches to similar problems, movement of engineers from IBM research to TMTA or something else.
He also states that CMS appears to have been compiled with a hacked up version of gcc and binutils. Isn't failure to release modifications to GPLed code against the license, or am I missing something? I doubt transmeta would've failed to foresee that, so perhaps they're using a different toolchain. Very interesting, all in all!
Hey, this has been an interesting discussion, but given the way you are untroubled by the self-contradictions strewn throughout the Bible, and the remarkable lengths you go to when attempting to justify the anachronistic and dangerous tenets adhered to by the Church, I doubt rational discourse will suffice to convince you of something you were raised to believe in.
I'm sure you're open minded enough when it comes to most things, but that faculty doesn't seem to extend to the blind spot that clouds your perception of organized religion. You've probably been helped by your membership in your Church (as someone else pointed out, it's free therapy of sorts, although it can go very awry when it comes to certain things), so I'm not surprised that you feel a certain reciprocal gratitude. I can accept that- to each his/her own:-)
As for my personal beliefs, I'm an agnostic. I'd love to believe in a Creator with some great purpose - not the vengeful, petty, childish god of the Old Testament espousing the cruelty evident throughout the bible, but a benevolent, intelligent entity who created this playground for the mind that is the remarkable universe we live in. But I have seen no evidence to suggest this, nor any way to explain the logical contradictions that arise when you suppose the existence of a God (starting with "who created God?").
Anyway, hope your belief helps you, and have a great life:-)
You are indeed out of touch with your own Church. The Pope has explicitly barred women from the priesthood, citing the very passage from Timothy that I quoted - see this for instance. I was the original poster, and I stated that the church's position on homosexuality was dangerous - your fine distinctions do nothing to convince me otherwise. It would also appear that you view the Bible as a book from which you can choose from selectively, which is remarkably self-delusional to say the least.
I haven't encountered a real, live Christian apologist in a while, so I'm curious to see how you reconcile things like these choice quotes from the Bible about slavery:
"If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever" (Exodus 21:2-6).
How about this, which condones selling your daughter into slavery, and polygamy as well?
"And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation, he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife: her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish"
I point these out, because they were used by southern Churches to justify slavery during the Civil war, and more recently, to justify apartheid.
You evaded the question of the church's position on birth control by responding with a non sequitur. When you have something to say on the subject, I'll be glad to respond.
Pseudoscience? While a biological basis for homosexuality is certainly not an established fact, there are several studies which strongly indicate that possibility. Read this summary, for instance. Please don't bother replying if all you have to offer is a proof by assertion. As for the Catholic church's position on homosexuals, I quote from the Catholic encyclopaedia:
"Homosexuality: Sexual activity between persons of the same sex. It is not a normal condition, the acts being against nature are objectively wrong." The Catholic Encyclopedia.
And this is the position of the APA
"The research on homosexuality is very clear. Homosexuality is neither mental illness nor moral depravity. It is simply the way a minority of our population expresses human love and sexuality. Study after study documents the mental health of gay men and lesbians. Studies of judgment, stability, reliability, and social and vocational adaptiveness all show that gay men and lesbians function every bit as well as heterosexuals." The American Psychological Association's Statement on Homosexuality, 1994-JUL.
Oh, and what do you have to say about the Bible's (often contradictory) position on women, which is largely the position of the Church today? I quote from Timothy:
12
I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet.
Regarding birth control and "Be fruitful and multiply" - you claim to be well read and not a religious nut, and yet you can't extrapolate the consequences of the supposed "word of God". If you really believe that the Bible, which is a haphazard collection of much-revised and edited documents chock full of fallacies and appalling misinformation from a time and place where mankind was a mostly irrational tribal society, is the word of God I'll stop arguing. It has a certain beauty (especially Ecclesiastes), and certainly the life and sayings of Christ (which are sometimes self-contradictory) make for a good moral foundation for the most part, but there's not much else.
It has very little to do with pre-marital sex, and everything to do with sex within the marriage in poor countries where missionaries use the threat of hell and damnation to intimidate people into following such edicts, and don't think about what happens when a family which can barely afford to feed itself has yet another addition. And the church's position on homosexuality is dangerous - some people are wired that way, and who are we or the Church to condemn them?
They run on Vxworks, a real-time operating system (RTOS) which has been used by NASA for several years now. You have to remember that these aren't run of the mill systems, but ones that need military grade radiation hardened components, and it's amazing what can be done even with a simple embedded system (I wrote a minimal TCP/IP stack and ethernet driver for an 8-bit processor once, the 8052, and while complex). It's mostly technology that has proven to be reliable time and time again, but not all codepaths can be explored even in a simple system. The problem with spirit was apparently in the flash filesystem implementation (sounded like they ran out of inodes, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis).
The tool you want is "otool" (with -l) - and sources are available, and it comes standard with the system (possibly with developer tools, but that comes in the standard package).
I believe the post was referring to the effect of actually storing the pointer values in the d-cache, not the efficiency of the cache hardware. Instead of storing say x 32-bit pointer values in a cache line, you can now only store x/2 pointer values.
The Falcon 4 Unified Team released several updates to the original Falcon 4.0, called "Superpaks", and additional theatres (the original game was set in the Korean theatre). The updates range from new textures and flight model improvements, to completely new aircraft and weaponry. An amazing accomplishment, all in all.
Of course, I didn't have the time to go out and equip myself with all the flight sim paraphernalia (rudder pedals, joysticks and so on), so I haven't really had a chance to explore the game in detail, but it looks really fun. I was more used to EF2000 (a EuroFighter 2000 sim from the UK, which was great fun) which had less steep entry requirements, but if I ever find the time to explore simming in detail, Falcon 4 + SP4 would be the way to go - judging from all the comments by real fighter pilots, it's the ultimate flight sim.
Thanks for the excerpt. I do appreciate the fact that in all likelihood, any connection to the RIAA honeypot isn't going to be from the user requesting the file - my point is that there have been near-precedents which seem to indicate that this does not matter. For instance, the RIAA took napster, grokster, Kazaa and so on to court for creating a network for file trading, even though none of those companies themselves were (well not as an aggregate) involved in copyright infringement - they merely enabled copyright infringement. Now, in the Freenet or MUTE model, there is no such centralized entity, so if either of those networks takes off, the RIAA will probably start with the scare tactics of issuing subpoenas to any network user they can get a hold of through things like the honeypot. All this is IMO of course, but I think it holds together as an extrapolation
Slashdot Mirror
You're deluded - this is the sort of rationalization confederacy loving southerners come up with to explain away the despicable foundation of the economy of the slave states. Sure, the confederate constitution allowed for greater state-level autonomy, but it also enshrined slavery, which was the crux of the document. Despite years of controversy, the South did not make any real efforts to move away from a slavery based economy - your equating of popcorn with slavery is laughable and morally outrageous. The civil war was part of the process of civilizing the US - that's right, the Confederacy was not civilized by any metric known to man. This was the society that condoned and actively encouraged mutilation of slaves as a deterrent, forced feeding of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death to escape the daily horror of existence (namely rape, mutilation and habitual abuse). You will also notice that South Carolina pre-emptively seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected - there were no efforts by the South to compromise at all on slavery, despite the controversy that had been raging for some 50 years. It was also the South who pre-emptively attacked Fort Sumter, again without any attempt to compromise. There was also a serious effort to resume the Atlantic slave trade, but luckily some degree of sense prevailed.
See this link. This was reported on foxnews.com as well, well after the "mystery" was solved with a teaser headline "What did kerry pull out of his pocket?" and at the end the story stated it was a pen. Sheesh.
I don't know what sort of substance you're smoking, but that has to be the most ignorant comment I've come across, in a forum packed with 'em. Do you know anything at all about slavery, and the conditions under which slaves were forced to work under? Have you heard of the underground railroad, whereby slaves escaped to the North? Of forced feeding of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death in order to escape the daily horror of existence (habitual rape, beatings, mutilation as a deterrent)? I suggest you stop pontificating from your armchair, and rectify your ignorance. Human dignity calls for more than mere survival.
Hmm, I don't remember Larry Niven's Chirpsithra building a shell around the solar system - are you sure you're not thinking of Greg Egan's quarantine?
Many projects follow the "make branch, fix bug in branch, test branch and then merge" cycle, which makes a lot of sense.
I've read the original HardOCP article, and they seem to have done a thorough job of investigating Infinium, and the evidence is overwhelming that at least at some point of time, the company was just a po box. From their evidence, tt is also quite plausible that the CEO is a dotcom era slash-and-burn artist, who went through VC funding for several companies and never delivered. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? I'm certain all of us would like to hear of it.
Is this related to Compton scattering (usually between an electron and a photon)? As I recall, there's a cos(Theta) term there, so the energy transfer could go either way between the electron and the photon. This also sounds a lot like how the bose-einstein condensate (a recently discovered "new state" of matter, and cause of a nobel) was created.
Wow, you are one seriously disturbed individual. I guess it's easy to see why MMORPGs like everquest can get people to kill themselves over some trivial in-game incident, when even some obsolete text based game inspires such hatred. Chill, dude.
Unfortunately the article is a little light on details. Presumably the IR signature is due to absorption and re-emission by the dust cloud, but I'm curious as to how they distinguish between a "normal" dust cloud and one that's due to an Earth sized planet. Interesting.
I think people would've identified better, and felt a sense of kinship with Bluetooth had it been called Yellowtooth. That said, bluetooth chipsets are embedded in millions of cellphones at the moment, and Metcalf's law will only serve to increase that unless a real replacement with sufficient momentum comes along. It's a protocol designed with low power reqs, and has good enough bandwidth for the sort of things that use it.
I liked Neuromancer, mostly for its rather surreal and atmospheric writing. For a deeper insight into the genesis of the "cyberpunk" genre, I suggest all of you go read "True Names", a brilliant novella by Vernor Vinge written ~4 years (1980?) before Neuromancer. Even today, it's an astonishing leap of the imagination, but you can expect no less from the author of Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (but I still think "True Names" was his best). Oh, you should also read Jack Vance :-)
Gibson used to maintain a fairly interesting blog, but he quit to work on his "day job", which is really too bad - I like looking in on the lives of the writers I read, although it feels a little voyeuristic at times (and that's when I stop). It's fascinating seeing the creative process in action.
Now it's not clear if they're claiming it's the implementation that's infringing (it's not exactly a hard function to code), or the interface.
If it's the latter, they're clearly in the wrong since that interface dates back to 4.2 BSD. Much of their evidence seems rather circuitous, relying on things like individual contributors having worked on Dynix in the past. Also, for relatively simple stuff, there's only one optimal algorithm, so unless they can demonstrate things like identical variable names (above a certain length), they don't have a case (in an ideal world..).
The author asserts that transmetas CMS and microprocessors bear striking similarities to an IBM research project named DAISY. I quote:
While I will not give a full analysis here, it appears that much of Transmeta's work was actually invented by IBM Research in the early 1990s. IBM's Daisy (Dynamically Architected Instruction Set from Yorktown) project [6] is essentially CMS for the PowerPC architecture, and uses a strikingly similar design and implementation, including: * Designing the morph host microarchitecture with the same semantics as the target instruction set (in IBM's case, PowerPC rather than x86) * Translated page cache, using a T-bit buffer to track which user pages are dirty and need re-translation * Explicit memory alias handling, using protected loads and checked stores * Extensive profiling logic to aid in further optimization * Handling of speculatively reordered loads and stores to I/O space
I wonder if this was just a question of similar approaches to similar problems, movement of engineers from IBM research to TMTA or something else.
He also states that CMS appears to have been compiled with a hacked up version of gcc and binutils. Isn't failure to release modifications to GPLed code against the license, or am I missing something? I doubt transmeta would've failed to foresee that, so perhaps they're using a different toolchain. Very interesting, all in all!
I'm sure you're open minded enough when it comes to most things, but that faculty doesn't seem to extend to the blind spot that clouds your perception of organized religion. You've probably been helped by your membership in your Church (as someone else pointed out, it's free therapy of sorts, although it can go very awry when it comes to certain things), so I'm not surprised that you feel a certain reciprocal gratitude. I can accept that- to each his/her own :-)
As for my personal beliefs, I'm an agnostic. I'd love to believe in a Creator with some great purpose - not the vengeful, petty, childish god of the Old Testament espousing the cruelty evident throughout the bible, but a benevolent, intelligent entity who created this playground for the mind that is the remarkable universe we live in. But I have seen no evidence to suggest this, nor any way to explain the logical contradictions that arise when you suppose the existence of a God (starting with "who created God?").
Anyway, hope your belief helps you, and have a great life :-)
You are indeed out of touch with your own Church. The Pope has explicitly barred women from the priesthood, citing the very passage from Timothy that I quoted - see this for instance. I was the original poster, and I stated that the church's position on homosexuality was dangerous - your fine distinctions do nothing to convince me otherwise. It would also appear that you view the Bible as a book from which you can choose from selectively, which is remarkably self-delusional to say the least.
"If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever" (Exodus 21:2-6).
How about this, which condones selling your daughter into slavery, and polygamy as well?
"And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation, he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife: her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish"
I point these out, because they were used by southern Churches to justify slavery during the Civil war, and more recently, to justify apartheid.
Pseudoscience? While a biological basis for homosexuality is certainly not an established fact, there are several studies which strongly indicate that possibility. Read this summary, for instance. Please don't bother replying if all you have to offer is a proof by assertion. As for the Catholic church's position on homosexuals, I quote from the Catholic encyclopaedia:
"Homosexuality: Sexual activity between persons of the same sex. It is not a normal condition, the acts being against nature are objectively wrong." The Catholic Encyclopedia.
And this is the position of the APA
"The research on homosexuality is very clear. Homosexuality is neither mental illness nor moral depravity. It is simply the way a minority of our population expresses human love and sexuality. Study after study documents the mental health of gay men and lesbians. Studies of judgment, stability, reliability, and social and vocational adaptiveness all show that gay men and lesbians function every bit as well as heterosexuals." The American Psychological Association's Statement on Homosexuality, 1994-JUL.
Oh, and what do you have to say about the Bible's (often contradictory) position on women, which is largely the position of the Church today? I quote from Timothy:
12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet.
Regarding birth control and "Be fruitful and multiply" - you claim to be well read and not a religious nut, and yet you can't extrapolate the consequences of the supposed "word of God". If you really believe that the Bible, which is a haphazard collection of much-revised and edited documents chock full of fallacies and appalling misinformation from a time and place where mankind was a mostly irrational tribal society, is the word of God I'll stop arguing. It has a certain beauty (especially Ecclesiastes), and certainly the life and sayings of Christ (which are sometimes self-contradictory) make for a good moral foundation for the most part, but there's not much else. It has very little to do with pre-marital sex, and everything to do with sex within the marriage in poor countries where missionaries use the threat of hell and damnation to intimidate people into following such edicts, and don't think about what happens when a family which can barely afford to feed itself has yet another addition. And the church's position on homosexuality is dangerous - some people are wired that way, and who are we or the Church to condemn them?
They run on Vxworks, a real-time operating system (RTOS) which has been used by NASA for several years now. You have to remember that these aren't run of the mill systems, but ones that need military grade radiation hardened components, and it's amazing what can be done even with a simple embedded system (I wrote a minimal TCP/IP stack and ethernet driver for an 8-bit processor once, the 8052, and while complex). It's mostly technology that has proven to be reliable time and time again, but not all codepaths can be explored even in a simple system. The problem with spirit was apparently in the flash filesystem implementation (sounded like they ran out of inodes, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis).
I've found this site very informative, with frequent rover status updates, links to images, NASA press releases and details of rover activities.
The tool you want is "otool" (with -l) - and sources are available, and it comes standard with the system (possibly with developer tools, but that comes in the standard package).
I believe the post was referring to the effect of actually storing the pointer values in the d-cache, not the efficiency of the cache hardware. Instead of storing say x 32-bit pointer values in a cache line, you can now only store x/2 pointer values.
Of course, I didn't have the time to go out and equip myself with all the flight sim paraphernalia (rudder pedals, joysticks and so on), so I haven't really had a chance to explore the game in detail, but it looks really fun. I was more used to EF2000 (a EuroFighter 2000 sim from the UK, which was great fun) which had less steep entry requirements, but if I ever find the time to explore simming in detail, Falcon 4 + SP4 would be the way to go - judging from all the comments by real fighter pilots, it's the ultimate flight sim.
Thanks for the excerpt. I do appreciate the fact that in all likelihood, any connection to the RIAA honeypot isn't going to be from the user requesting the file - my point is that there have been near-precedents which seem to indicate that this does not matter. For instance, the RIAA took napster, grokster, Kazaa and so on to court for creating a network for file trading, even though none of those companies themselves were (well not as an aggregate) involved in copyright infringement - they merely enabled copyright infringement. Now, in the Freenet or MUTE model, there is no such centralized entity, so if either of those networks takes off, the RIAA will probably start with the scare tactics of issuing subpoenas to any network user they can get a hold of through things like the honeypot. All this is IMO of course, but I think it holds together as an extrapolation