I did not "miss" any of those points - I was thinking along the lines of a honeypot, where an RIAA minion sets up a server with lots of britney tracks, and watches for connections. I don't know if this is entrapment or not, but probably not. I doubt ignorance of the traffic hosted by your machine will be perceived as a valid excuse by the RIAA or indeed the legal system when the node has voluntarily joined a network primarily used for copyright infringement..but IANAL. If they can threaten an ISP and make them cave in, they can certainly intimidate enough MUTE users to cause a ripple effect.
From what I can gather from the project page (which is almost entirely presented in the ant colony analogy), this is an interesting idea to ensure anonymity - essentially a routing protocol at the TCP or UDP level, using a probabilistic mechanism to determine reasonably shortest paths. However, I'm not certain what implications this has for bandwidth efficiency, especially for relatively isolated nodes which may have high bandwidth connections to certain NAPs but not others. Might be workable in conjunction with a bittorrent like model with sections of a file downloaded from multiple peers, but keeping track of upload credits might be harder in this case. I doubt this will be much of a barrier to the RIAA however, as they might just decide to go after the machines that are routing the file to their ultimate destination, as this is different from the ISP case (which is still being tried in the courts).
I disagree with most of his post, but there's nothing wrong with quoting "President", when the title is applied to Bush the Second. Face it, Bush stole the election through the connivance of the conservative dominated Supreme court (which has psychos like Scalia on it - he's really crazy, just read some of his arguments). Oh, and apparently a not-insignificant portion of the ignorant electorate voted for him on the assumption that he was his father (the father was a man whom I respected for his long service to the nation and his expertise).
No, you're the one who is confused, I am afraid. Those "weirdos" you speak of were highly influential architectures from the history of computing (I'm 22 but I know my history:-) 8-bit bytes are standard on most architectures today, but there are still certain embedded platforms and the like which have non 8-bit bytes. The machine word size is typically the size of the data bus on the machine, and it is the "natural" unit of data storage on a machine - typically the amount of data it is possible to read and write in a single instruction (although, for example, i386 has vector instructions that can operate on multiple words, and likewise, FP units). So, when you term a machine a 32-bit machine, it almost invariably means that the machine word size is 32 bits. This, however, *can* differ from address sizes (i.e. pointer widths) etc.
"It all depends" - a bit is the only constant here across platforms - a binary digit that can hold one of two possible values. There have been machines with 9-bit bytes (DEC PDPs), 16-bit words, 36-bit words and so on. Some obscure languages have been devised around base 3 representation ("trits"?) and people experimented with trinary logic in the early days of computing.
I don't know where you got that "fact", but it's far from true. I believe South Korea holds that distinction (most number of doctorates per capita), with Seoul being the city with the densest PhD population. New Zealand is another country which ranks high in that statistic. I wouldn't be surprised if India was nowhere in the top 50, given the billion+ population and the low literacy rate. Oh, I'd try and preview posts if I were you - it's hard to take someone who spells plane "plain" and per capita with an 'l'.
Classic example of a bad analogy. The sabre-toothed tiger wasn't an intelligent tool using globally dominant species, and it certainly did not have the capability to extrapolate the consequences of its actions. Today, we are in a position to exterminate every other species if we chose to act like a mindless predator, but we also (well, some of us) have the capacity to extrapolate what would happen if we did that. We don't need to kill deer to ensure our survival, as you seem to present, but we do need to preserve ecological diversity to do so.
From the "above nature" comment, I'm guessing you're speaking from a religious standpoint, and I'm not going to bother presenting a counter-argument to that. Yes, there are certainly dangers involved in reintroducing a species without calculating the consequences of that reintroduction on the ecosystem, but the people working on this sort of thing are smart, and have probably modeled everything as best as possible.
This appears to be the joint press release referred to in the space.com article. It diplomatically states that NASA believes that the features detected by the NIMA analysis could be noise in the camera system (don't they have multiple images to use? seems unlikely that there could be a recurring noise pattern over the same pixels).
Yes, and no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke found them interesting enough to comment on. Symmetry of any sort is interesting, and yes that sort of radial symmetry could easily be a geological formation, but what if it isn't? And it certainly doesn't have to be a single "plant", in the unlikely event that it is not a geologic formation.
Well, they definitely seem to be infected with Extreme Kookiness, but I don't see any fake pictures purporting to be authentic images of Mars, so I'm still interested in learning what exactly there is at that site:-)
The "conspiracy theories" link has an interesting picture at the very bottom, of a site near the martian polar ice cap. It does look a lot like plant life, but I suppose it could also be some sort of striated rock formation. Does anyone know if that site or something nearby is going to be investigated by any of the landers approaching Mars this month?
Setting aside the other inaccuracies in your comment, I don't know where you got the "power dissipation is proportional to the square of the switching frequency" idea, but it's wrong. It's a linear relation, roughly P= 0.5CV^2
Do you think repeating your inane mantra in several threads lends legitimacy to your argument? If the Chinese independently discovered the process to create this alloy, sure I'd agree that it would be unethical to claim that as theft. But if they infiltrated this company's network or otherwise obtained knowledge of this process from the company (read the article), they are stealing (yes "pirating") years of hard work.
I think the greater risk involved in widespread availability of WINE is the possibility that developers will feel even less need to code natively for linux - a necessary evil, I suppose. Also, wine doesn't require you to run as root (IIRC). Of course, non-privilege elevation exploits like outlook virus email spam will be possibilities - why do you even have cause to think differently? You can use mozilla instead of outlook, or implement filtering at your mail server. Just don't execute attachments, apply the MS patches and so on.
The CNN article states that former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta is a party to this lawsuit, and I find that very intriguing. The White House Chief of Staff is one of the most important positions in the executive, effectively a cabinet level position in terms of power wielded - surely this man must have been privy to a lot of information which lead him to believe that there was something to this Kecksburg incident. Now I'm *really* curious...
Had nothing to do with the processor architecture they chose to go with; that was nearly invisible to the end user, and the only things switching to x86 could possibly have helped with was possible binary compatibility with dos/windows, and better a better perception of performance in the mid to late 90s. Apple's key error (in hindsight) was the failure to commoditize their hardware at the right time, probably in the mid '80s, when apple had a reasonably useful graphical OS far more advanced than dos, an "OS" which could've been put together in a week by a competent hacker. Commoditization would've led to multiple manufacturers competing (and enlarging the market, with their advertising dollars) on costs and hardware features, rather than a lone company trying to maintain multiple product lines and losing focus in the process. Apple could've emerged as a really viable alternative to Microsoft, and could in fact be in the same position MS is in today (but with fewer security holes along the way, and a saner platform;-). But I prefer apple the way it is now, fairly lean and mean and focused. I think there's a non-zero probability that the apple culture would've led to complete self-destruction beyond a certain company size. Sculley did an okay job considering his background, but he's a hypocrite (as is SJ) who has no real clue about technology, although he had a better grasp than Gil Amelio (read his autobiography, his "tech" comments are hilarious).
I'm quite aware that Gearbox did the PC port of Halo - did I ever assert otherwise? Sure, the xbox is a static target, whereas PCs are both moving and amorphous targets, but that's why there's this programming concept called "abstraction", and the many application programming interfaces that help isolate hardware specific details. It certainly doesn't explain why a game developed for the xbox fails to run well on systems a year or two newer that should deliver vastly improved performance. Plus MS claimed that Halo for the PC ought to run well at 1600x1200, when a dual xeon 3 Ghz with a 9800 pro doesn't manage to deliver seamless gameplay at that resolution, at least according to a friend of a friend (and comments on gamespot tend to corroborate this).
I'll definitely agree with you about the official NWN campaign..it was rather like a fractal pattern in that most chapters had some quest that required you to find 4 objects or explore 4 areas etc. Very unoriginal and repetitive. But the impression I had was that the single player campaign had been tacked on as an afterthought, and that the true focus was "bringing the pen and paper experience to online gaming", with the toolset and module support. Given the number of popular modules out there, I think they succeeded. My memories of MDK are hazy, but I remember liking it a lot..it was pretty innovative for its time.
From what I've noticed, they seem to develop the core game, its mechanics and initial contents, and then often let other studios develop sequels and add-ons. For example, with neverwinter nights, the expansion pack "Shadows of Undrentide" was developed by Floodgate entertainment (and while I haven't really played it, the reviews make it out to be more interesting than the initial single player campaign, which was repetitive and linear), and now it's rumored that Obsidian is doing the KOTOR sequel. I wonder if this strategy lets them focus more on all-new titles, which are presumably more profitable, although I would've thought that the return-on-investment for an expansion would be higher.
Bioware has always been a purveyor of quality games (unlike Black Isle, which broke its trend with Lionheart), and I can't wait for KOTOR/PC to come out. Most Star wars games I've played have been dreck.This also raises the question: why did the Halo PC port take two years to complete? And it's (from most accounts) poorly optimized for the PC, with a two year old engine dropping frames on today's high end PCs. Hopefully this will play smoothly, given that the xbox sports a 700 Mhz celeron and a mid-range nvidia card (as I recall)..
I have come to the conclusion that most moderators are fools. This post was made well in advance of (and was probably the cause of) the troll moderation on the parent post, and then some johnny-come-lately moderates it as redundant. Given that this site is a mecca for script kiddies and other brain-damaged induhviduals, I suppose I can expect no less.
You seem to have subscribed to the myth that similarly configured Mac and PC systems exhibit a vast price delta. It has been proven time and again that while Apple does not compete with the lowest end of the PC market, they are quite competitive in terms of price in the mid-range and upper tier desktop and server systems. The new dual G5s for instance are on par in terms of price (though superior in performance) to Xeon systems from Dell, and the Xserve is a very attractively price rack mount system.
Why would you want to run operating systems besides OS X on a mac? If you're someone who does nothing but run iApps on your mac, sure, it doesn't make a great deal of sense. But there are plenty of applications tailored towards linux+KDE/Gnome environment which would be a hassle to port (and a pain to use after porting), and if you're familiar with the linux environments, it makes no sense to move.
The scheduler and working set management code in linux is superior to that of OS X (although OS X is slowly improving), and if you're using an OS X box in a server environment it makes a lot more sense to run linux on it.
If you're a government agency, linux is further along on the security certification road. Also, if you're an aspiring device driver writer, who is working to support interesting new devices, it's easier to write a driver for linux than wade through the intricacies of the IOKit APIs for OS X, and/or Mach client/server messaging and the MIG glue generator.
Apple's hardware is superior to (but doesn't scale quite as well in terms of CPUs) intel based stuff, so running linux on it is more attractive than running linux on intel. And those reasons are just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure people can think of many more. In other words, while you as a so-called "power" user may not see reasons to run linux on a mac, developers, server administrators and kernel hackers can.
This thread arose because of vague fears that a Microsoft/BIOS manufacturer union could result in hardware on which free OSes like linux would be at a disadvantage. Someone pointed to Apple saying oh look why don't you care if Apple does it? The answer is that Apple hasn't taken active measures to lock other operating systems out of their hardware.
You, sir, are an ignoramus. Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that anyone with more than 2 neurons to knock around in their skulls can install linux or netbsd or may other free OSes of their choice on Apple hardware. Additionally, OpenFirmware, which is the "BIOS" equivalent (although it has been more advanced since day one of its existence), is an open specification, based on a Forth like interpreter. Sun firmware conforms to the open firmware specification as well. Perhaps reading this may lead to some enlightenment, although the possibility of that ever occurring in your case seems remote.
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I did not "miss" any of those points - I was thinking along the lines of a honeypot, where an RIAA minion sets up a server with lots of britney tracks, and watches for connections. I don't know if this is entrapment or not, but probably not. I doubt ignorance of the traffic hosted by your machine will be perceived as a valid excuse by the RIAA or indeed the legal system when the node has voluntarily joined a network primarily used for copyright infringement..but IANAL. If they can threaten an ISP and make them cave in, they can certainly intimidate enough MUTE users to cause a ripple effect.
From what I can gather from the project page (which is almost entirely presented in the ant colony analogy), this is an interesting idea to ensure anonymity - essentially a routing protocol at the TCP or UDP level, using a probabilistic mechanism to determine reasonably shortest paths. However, I'm not certain what implications this has for bandwidth efficiency, especially for relatively isolated nodes which may have high bandwidth connections to certain NAPs but not others. Might be workable in conjunction with a bittorrent like model with sections of a file downloaded from multiple peers, but keeping track of upload credits might be harder in this case. I doubt this will be much of a barrier to the RIAA however, as they might just decide to go after the machines that are routing the file to their ultimate destination, as this is different from the ISP case (which is still being tried in the courts).
I disagree with most of his post, but there's nothing wrong with quoting "President", when the title is applied to Bush the Second. Face it, Bush stole the election through the connivance of the conservative dominated Supreme court (which has psychos like Scalia on it - he's really crazy, just read some of his arguments). Oh, and apparently a not-insignificant portion of the ignorant electorate voted for him on the assumption that he was his father (the father was a man whom I respected for his long service to the nation and his expertise).
No, you're the one who is confused, I am afraid. Those "weirdos" you speak of were highly influential architectures from the history of computing (I'm 22 but I know my history :-) 8-bit bytes are standard on most architectures today, but there are still certain embedded platforms and the like which have non 8-bit bytes. The machine word size is typically the size of the data bus on the machine, and it is the "natural" unit of data storage on a machine - typically the amount of data it is possible to read and write in a single instruction (although, for example, i386 has vector instructions that can operate on multiple words, and likewise, FP units). So, when you term a machine a 32-bit machine, it almost invariably means that the machine word size is 32 bits. This, however, *can* differ from address sizes (i.e. pointer widths) etc.
"It all depends" - a bit is the only constant here across platforms - a binary digit that can hold one of two possible values. There have been machines with 9-bit bytes (DEC PDPs), 16-bit words, 36-bit words and so on. Some obscure languages have been devised around base 3 representation ("trits"?) and people experimented with trinary logic in the early days of computing.
I don't know where you got that "fact", but it's far from true. I believe South Korea holds that distinction (most number of doctorates per capita), with Seoul being the city with the densest PhD population. New Zealand is another country which ranks high in that statistic. I wouldn't be surprised if India was nowhere in the top 50, given the billion+ population and the low literacy rate. Oh, I'd try and preview posts if I were you - it's hard to take someone who spells plane "plain" and per capita with an 'l'.
From the "above nature" comment, I'm guessing you're speaking from a religious standpoint, and I'm not going to bother presenting a counter-argument to that. Yes, there are certainly dangers involved in reintroducing a species without calculating the consequences of that reintroduction on the ecosystem, but the people working on this sort of thing are smart, and have probably modeled everything as best as possible.
This appears to be the joint press release referred to in the space.com article. It diplomatically states that NASA believes that the features detected by the NIMA analysis could be noise in the camera system (don't they have multiple images to use? seems unlikely that there could be a recurring noise pattern over the same pixels).
Yes, and no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke found them interesting enough to comment on. Symmetry of any sort is interesting, and yes that sort of radial symmetry could easily be a geological formation, but what if it isn't? And it certainly doesn't have to be a single "plant", in the unlikely event that it is not a geologic formation.
Well, they definitely seem to be infected with Extreme Kookiness, but I don't see any fake pictures purporting to be authentic images of Mars, so I'm still interested in learning what exactly there is at that site :-)
The "conspiracy theories" link has an interesting picture at the very bottom, of a site near the martian polar ice cap. It does look a lot like plant life, but I suppose it could also be some sort of striated rock formation. Does anyone know if that site or something nearby is going to be investigated by any of the landers approaching Mars this month?
Setting aside the other inaccuracies in your comment, I don't know where you got the "power dissipation is proportional to the square of the switching frequency" idea, but it's wrong. It's a linear relation, roughly P= 0.5CV^2
What is this mysterious "Turing-complete code self-checker" you speak of? Are you talking about gcc's bounds checking feature?
Do you think repeating your inane mantra in several threads lends legitimacy to your argument? If the Chinese independently discovered the process to create this alloy, sure I'd agree that it would be unethical to claim that as theft. But if they infiltrated this company's network or otherwise obtained knowledge of this process from the company (read the article), they are stealing (yes "pirating") years of hard work.
I think the greater risk involved in widespread availability of WINE is the possibility that developers will feel even less need to code natively for linux - a necessary evil, I suppose. Also, wine doesn't require you to run as root (IIRC). Of course, non-privilege elevation exploits like outlook virus email spam will be possibilities - why do you even have cause to think differently? You can use mozilla instead of outlook, or implement filtering at your mail server. Just don't execute attachments, apply the MS patches and so on.
The CNN article states that former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta is a party to this lawsuit, and I find that very intriguing. The White House Chief of Staff is one of the most important positions in the executive, effectively a cabinet level position in terms of power wielded - surely this man must have been privy to a lot of information which lead him to believe that there was something to this Kecksburg incident. Now I'm *really* curious...
Had nothing to do with the processor architecture they chose to go with; that was nearly invisible to the end user, and the only things switching to x86 could possibly have helped with was possible binary compatibility with dos/windows, and better a better perception of performance in the mid to late 90s. Apple's key error (in hindsight) was the failure to commoditize their hardware at the right time, probably in the mid '80s, when apple had a reasonably useful graphical OS far more advanced than dos, an "OS" which could've been put together in a week by a competent hacker. Commoditization would've led to multiple manufacturers competing (and enlarging the market, with their advertising dollars) on costs and hardware features, rather than a lone company trying to maintain multiple product lines and losing focus in the process. Apple could've emerged as a really viable alternative to Microsoft, and could in fact be in the same position MS is in today (but with fewer security holes along the way, and a saner platform ;-). But I prefer apple the way it is now, fairly lean and mean and focused. I think there's a non-zero probability that the apple culture would've led to complete self-destruction beyond a certain company size. Sculley did an okay job considering his background, but he's a hypocrite (as is SJ) who has no real clue about technology, although he had a better grasp than Gil Amelio (read his autobiography, his "tech" comments are hilarious).
I'm quite aware that Gearbox did the PC port of Halo - did I ever assert otherwise? Sure, the xbox is a static target, whereas PCs are both moving and amorphous targets, but that's why there's this programming concept called "abstraction", and the many application programming interfaces that help isolate hardware specific details. It certainly doesn't explain why a game developed for the xbox fails to run well on systems a year or two newer that should deliver vastly improved performance. Plus MS claimed that Halo for the PC ought to run well at 1600x1200, when a dual xeon 3 Ghz with a 9800 pro doesn't manage to deliver seamless gameplay at that resolution, at least according to a friend of a friend (and comments on gamespot tend to corroborate this).
I'll definitely agree with you about the official NWN campaign..it was rather like a fractal pattern in that most chapters had some quest that required you to find 4 objects or explore 4 areas etc. Very unoriginal and repetitive. But the impression I had was that the single player campaign had been tacked on as an afterthought, and that the true focus was "bringing the pen and paper experience to online gaming", with the toolset and module support. Given the number of popular modules out there, I think they succeeded. My memories of MDK are hazy, but I remember liking it a lot..it was pretty innovative for its time.
From what I've noticed, they seem to develop the core game, its mechanics and initial contents, and then often let other studios develop sequels and add-ons. For example, with neverwinter nights, the expansion pack "Shadows of Undrentide" was developed by Floodgate entertainment (and while I haven't really played it, the reviews make it out to be more interesting than the initial single player campaign, which was repetitive and linear), and now it's rumored that Obsidian is doing the KOTOR sequel. I wonder if this strategy lets them focus more on all-new titles, which are presumably more profitable, although I would've thought that the return-on-investment for an expansion would be higher.
Bioware has always been a purveyor of quality games (unlike Black Isle, which broke its trend with Lionheart), and I can't wait for KOTOR/PC to come out. Most Star wars games I've played have been dreck.This also raises the question: why did the Halo PC port take two years to complete? And it's (from most accounts) poorly optimized for the PC, with a two year old engine dropping frames on today's high end PCs. Hopefully this will play smoothly, given that the xbox sports a 700 Mhz celeron and a mid-range nvidia card (as I recall)..
That was hilarious..however it doesn't really ring true, you should polish it up a bit :-)
I have come to the conclusion that most moderators are fools. This post was made well in advance of (and was probably the cause of) the troll moderation on the parent post, and then some johnny-come-lately moderates it as redundant. Given that this site is a mecca for script kiddies and other brain-damaged induhviduals, I suppose I can expect no less.
Why would you want to run operating systems besides OS X on a mac? If you're someone who does nothing but run iApps on your mac, sure, it doesn't make a great deal of sense. But there are plenty of applications tailored towards linux+KDE/Gnome environment which would be a hassle to port (and a pain to use after porting), and if you're familiar with the linux environments, it makes no sense to move.
The scheduler and working set management code in linux is superior to that of OS X (although OS X is slowly improving), and if you're using an OS X box in a server environment it makes a lot more sense to run linux on it.
If you're a government agency, linux is further along on the security certification road. Also, if you're an aspiring device driver writer, who is working to support interesting new devices, it's easier to write a driver for linux than wade through the intricacies of the IOKit APIs for OS X, and/or Mach client/server messaging and the MIG glue generator.
Apple's hardware is superior to (but doesn't scale quite as well in terms of CPUs) intel based stuff, so running linux on it is more attractive than running linux on intel. And those reasons are just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure people can think of many more. In other words, while you as a so-called "power" user may not see reasons to run linux on a mac, developers, server administrators and kernel hackers can.
This thread arose because of vague fears that a Microsoft/BIOS manufacturer union could result in hardware on which free OSes like linux would be at a disadvantage. Someone pointed to Apple saying oh look why don't you care if Apple does it? The answer is that Apple hasn't taken active measures to lock other operating systems out of their hardware.
You, sir, are an ignoramus. Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that anyone with more than 2 neurons to knock around in their skulls can install linux or netbsd or may other free OSes of their choice on Apple hardware. Additionally, OpenFirmware, which is the "BIOS" equivalent (although it has been more advanced since day one of its existence), is an open specification, based on a Forth like interpreter. Sun firmware conforms to the open firmware specification as well. Perhaps reading this may lead to some enlightenment, although the possibility of that ever occurring in your case seems remote.