robyannetta:Lucent claims that Microsoft has violated their MPEG2 patents which they claim they patented in 1993.
TubeSteak:Licensing is like mana from heaven for companies. It represents a long term income stream that can only add to the value of the company and the value of their patent.
In this case, "long term" would be about four more years?
Also, nothing infuriated me more than having to sit through insufferably boring finance meetings.
I'm giving up mod points to reply here, but you're the first person I've seen mention the question of boredom.
Business people do the boring stuff: Schedule, organize, alphabetize, prioritize, distribute, beg, plead, cajole, backslap, laugh at stupid jokes, kiss ass - in general all the crap you have to do to make the trains run on time.
Did I mention paperwork? Federal income tax. Federal FICA & Medicare. State income tax. State unemployment tax. State corporate report. Sarbanes-Oxley. Blah blah blah blah blah...
And this stuff is boring. Tediously boring. Mind-numbingly boring. Possibly even suicidally boring.
The payoff, of course, is that the boring stuff is what leads to the big bucks. Nobody ever got rich doing interesting work. NOBODY.
My advice: Keep your 50% stock. Accept a job with a title like "Executive VP for Strategy" or "Chief Technology Officer" or some similar drivel. Make the finance guy the CEO. Give HIM the LARGER salary. Make him feel important. Give him the incentive to do all that boring-ass trains-on-time bullshit that would drive you insane. Take the smaller salary, give yourself a nice big office with lots of bookshelves and big desks and a comfy chair, close the door, unplug the phone, and spend all day doing the fun stuff.
Let your partner get the glory; as long as you've got your 50%, the money will take care of itself.
Lancey: Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential.
san: Yes! and good riddens. Do you remember having to re-code for every single machine? Because they were such specialized machines, they tended to be extremely fickle: one wrong operation and performance would go down the drain.
If this architecture of theirs is at all novel, and if this is a one-time build of a machine with that architecture [i.e. not the first of many generations of backwards-compatible machines with that architecture], and if the developers and "scientists" don't know how to program for the architecture a priori, THEN THE MACHINE WILL BE OBSOLETE BEFORE THE SOFTWARE HAS BEEN WRITTEN!!!
It takes developers [especially compiler writers] two to three years [or more - witness the disaster that is Itanic] to learn a hardware architecture and begin writing clean, stable code for it.
Which is just about exactly the amount of time it takes for the hardware to become obsolete.
[Parenthetically: Can I call this Mosel-Saar-Ruwer's Law?]
By the way, I predict that this may very well be the fate of the new IBM cell processor & the PlayStation III - we're just now getting the compilers that can write to the architecture, and they want to release the thing sometime in this decade?!? Consider:
I knew as soon as we got the Octopiler news that there would be serious problems for Cell & the PS-III - if it's February/March, and we're just now getting new compilers for the architecture, then it'll be a couple of years before games are ported to it - if ever - and a launch of the product by Christmas [to be accompanied by third-party titles] strikes me as an utter fantasy.
You know,/.-ers may hate Steve Ballmer, but he got one thing right: "Developers, Developers, Developers!!!" 'Cause the greatest hardware in the world isn't worth a damn if there aren't any developers writing for it.
TheRaven64:or researches doing GPUPU things. To people in the second category, it's not a graphics card it's a very fast vector co-processor (think SSE/AltiVec, only a lot more so)
Traditionally, ATi floating point numbers were only 24-bits wide [i.e. only "three-quarters" of single precision, which is 32-bits].
nVidia, IBM Sony Cell, and Altivec support only 32-bit floats.
MMX supported no floats whatsoever. SSE supported 32-bit floats.
SSE2 & SSE3 support 64-bit floats. x86 supports 80-bit floats.
So what is this 128-bit stuff all about?
I don't suppose there's a chance in hell that these could be quad-precision floats, could they?
To really get clustered stability out of Oracle you really need a third party clustered filesystem.
What exactly do you envision as a stable Oracle cluster? Specifically, what is the host OS, and what is the third-party clustered filesystem for that OS?
What ever happened to the hype about dedicated physics chips?
The original article appears to be slashdotted.
So could somebody tell me how wide the floats are in this "SLI" engine? [I don't even know what "SLI" stands for.]
AFAIK, nVidia [like IBM/Sony "cell"] uses only 32-bit single-precision floats [and, as bad as that is, ATi uses only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floats].
What math/physics/chemistry/engineering types need is as much precision as possible - preferably 128 bits.
Why? Because the stuff they are modelling tends to be highly non-linear and the calculations tend to be highly unstable.
32-bits isn't even enough to give integer granularity up to 16 million:
1) You're a l33t gamer, and you install a PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool® 1KW PSU, drawing 15 Amps @ 115V, and
2) You're a l33t gamer, and you install a Sapphire Graphics Water Cooled Radeon X1900, and
3) Your water-cooled Radeon springs a leak.
Okay, now do like Sponge Bob and Patrick in the box, and use your I-M-A-G-I-N-A-T-I-O-N, keeping in mind how Death was stalking Chad Donella's character in Final Destination I:
INT. WAGGNER HOUSEHOLD. BATHROOM. NIGHT.
Tod picks up a razor and puts it to his face to shave. The water begins to leak from the toilet and slowly makes its way to where Tod is standing. He puts the razor to his face and instantly cuts himself. In the mirror?s reflection, a black mist floats across. Tod spins around. Nothing there. The water edged closer. Tod puts the razor down and picks up scissors instead and begins to cut the hairs from his nose. He then picks up a plug, thinking it?s the electric razor but it turns out to be the radio. The water edges closer to Tod?s feet. He?s unaware but pulls the radio plug out in time. He moves away from the mirror but the leak follows him.
A reasonable option in this situation is to give the experts who will use the industry specific software their own subnet; and save all files to a shared server that then backs up to a server on the regular LAN.
If this financial software package is as expensive as "Darlok" makes it out to be, then just go to your local Microsoft rep and purchase a bunch of seats for a new Domain - the cost of the new seats would probably pale in comparison to the cost of the financial software package.
Then let their secondary accounts all be Admins within their own little domain, but with no special rights to the larger Active Directory tree.
Or do that old thing with NT 4.0 Domains, where Domain A trusts Domain B, but Domain B doesn't trust Domain A.
Or create two separate domains entirely [with no ambient Active Directory tree and no trust relationships], and just make everyone memorize two different user names and two different passwords.
You misunderstand his question. He's not looking to slave the clocks together on his network.. as you say, NTP does that just fine (and more than just fine) right now. He's looking to enforce a restriction on login capabilities according to the time of day, using LDAP and Kerberos. It's easy to represent such constraints in LDAP, the question is whether any of his systems will know what he's talking about if he does.
Right, but you have to tie it all together: Kerberos, LDAP, NTP, Login Restrictions by Time of Day.
That's what an IMPLEMENTATION like NDS/eDirectory does for you.
And, believe it or not, IMPLEMENTATIONS are not trivial. Trying to roll your own - from scratch - could take from now until forever.
Look, back in May of 2000, LDAP folks were fantasizing about some hypothetical "Access Control Factors" they might implement someday:
Authentication Methods for LDAP
3.2. Access Control Factors
A request, when it is being processed by a server, may be associated
with a wide variety of security-related factors (section 4.2 of [1]).
The server uses these factors to determine whether and how to process
the request. These are called access control factors (ACFs). They
might include source IP address, encryption strength, the type of
operation being requested, time of day, etc. Some factors may be
specific to the request itself, others may be associated with the
connection via which the request is transmitted, others (e.g. time of
day) may be "environmental".
Access control policies are expressed in terms of access control
factors. E.g., a request having ACFs i,j,k can perform operation Y
on resource Z. The set of ACFs that a server makes available for such
expressions is implementation-specific.
At that point, Novell already had a directory IMPLEMENTATION that had about seven years worth of stress testing & debugging in the real world, and about 100 Million licenses sold and installed in the field.
Now again: Obviously everyone is free to try to roll their own implementations, but, gee whiz, it's really hard to imagine that you'd beat the price of NDS/eDirectory licenses, much less match NDS/eDirectory reliability & stability.
With PAM, time-of-day is easily arranged in a flat file:/etc/security/time.conf using pam_time.so. Unfortunately, this is a single host-based answer, and the complex collection of systems in use means this isn't feasible.
What you need is for your directory servers to be tied together with NTP [Network Time Protocol].
Novell has used NTP since the version of NDS that shipped with NetWare 4.00 way back in about 1993/1994.
So Novell would give you the time synchronization, with a good 12 to 13 years' worth of debugging of the algorithms and the implementations.
But trying to wing your own Kerberos + LDAP + NTP - gee whiz, that sounds like something at about the level of a Masters's Thesis, and probably the better part of a year's worth of work. The RFC for NTP is about the most challenging reading I've ever encountered in networking theory - to really understand what's going on, you need about a thousand pages' worth of background in the theory of stochastic processes & its application to a bunch of old AT&T switching standards.
I'd say "Screw that," and give the local Novell Rep a call - see what kind of a deal he can quote you.
I work in animation. Believe me, Family Guy is not cheap to produce. The animation is actually good quality for television. I don't know the exact numbers, but a show like that costs upwards of a half million an episode at the very least - and my guess is it costs a lot more than that because of creators fees and voice talent.
The awesomest show on TV [with the possible exception of SG1] has gotta be Survivorman.
Dude has zero production costs [hell, he films the whole thing himself] and his "producers" won't buy him a rifle or even a fishing pole.
Well, there was the time when they made him take a rifle to the arctic circle on account of the polar bears - but then he caught a ride back to town with an eskimo seal hunter, so he saved on transportation right there...
Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.
Kinda like an Obfuscated C contest for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only here the objective would to be include as many possible layers of emulation and still have a working final product.
Actually sounds like it would be kinda fun - God, am I a nerd, or what?
No. I can't provide a link to the numbers for two reasons: first, my source is one that I can't release, and the second is that the DoD hasn't had a good track record with their accounting of the "nation building" stuff in Iraq... I know for a fact that many classified things are getting cut due precisely to the war effort. And I know for a fact that the Air Force has been scrambling to figure out how to come out okay with a several-billion dollar shortfall. (I think it's 6 billion, but I'm not exactly sure.)
Well, if you can think of anything "on the record", please keep me updated.
Actually, fuel is one of the big costs. The next is food and water. After that it's salaries and small arms ammunition. The nation-building stuff comes from a separate budget item that is approved by Congress. There will be some retirements out of the Air Force inventory in the near future due to budget reasons.
Do you have any links to - ah - how could I say it, more or less non-partisan studies of how the money is being spent?
I'm not talking the raving lunatic KOS/Moveon nonsense, but a serious, bean-counterish comparison of how the money is being spent now vis-a-vis how it might have been spent in a more traditional peacetime era? [Granted, this is not a particularly traditional time...]
E.g. you mention "fuel": Are you saying that the amount of money spent on fuel for Humvees in Iraq is something significant? Or that jet fuel for aerial reconnaissance is significantly greater than it would be in "peacetime"?
Or "food and water": Are you saying that the difference here is that soldiers purchase their own "food and water" in peacetime but have it provided for free in combat zones?
Look, even if you assume the DOD is providing 100% of each soldier's rations for free every day, and you assume 125,000 soldiers, and $10/day for the rations, you only get:
(125,000) X ($10/day) X (365 days/year)
= $456,250,000
= $0.5B
Even if you double that twice, to 250,000 soldiers and $20/day, you only get to
(250,000) X ($20/day) X (365 days/year)
= $1,825,000,000
= $1.8B
From the point of view of the DOD and the Congress, that doesn't even qualify as chump change.
Mod parent up. It's also a violation, IMHO, of the First, Fourth (right to privacy) and 14th Ammendmants to the Constitution, and the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).
I have long been of the opinion that we need to add an explicit right to anonymity to the constitution, to include both intellectual anonymity [e.g. the right to post anonymously on the internet, or the right to send anonymous SMTP traffic, or the right to publish books or other works under a pseudonym], but also to include a right to practical anonymity: The right to cross state borders anonymously, the right to drive a car anonymously [without e.g mandated big-brother toll-road RFID shiznat], the right to a non-traceable currency [such as classical, NON-RFID'ed paper bills and metal coins, as opposed to traceable VISA/Mastercard/Discover transactions], the right to send mail [or packages] anonymously, etc etc etc.
Hell, I'd go so far as a right to give birth anonymously: Did you know that nowadays little newborn babies "have" to get SSID#s? What the fuck does a newborn baby need an SSID# for?
It's enough to make you want to move to the wilds of Montana and go completely off-grid. Just disappear from "mainstream" society altogether. Give birth to little babies and never even register them with the state. Homeschool. Conveniently forget to file income taxes. Tell the state to go fuck itself.
Hell, that's basically what all these Mexican illegals are doing, and if 40 million of them can do it, then why can't I?
All that jet fuel for the war effort and that ordnance are expensive. I have heard confirmation that government contractors will be cut from several bases; civilians and military are getting RIF'ed too.
My guess would be that at this point, three years into the game, most of the $300B? $400B? however much we have spent [and are spending] on Iraq is going to schools, hospitals, the power grid, water treatment plants, sewage treatment facilities, etc etc etc.
Most of what the DOD is paying on traditional stuff - e.g. salaries and spare parts purchases - would still be going on even if all the soldiers were back home twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do on a US base.
Again, my guess would be that the percentage of the total that is specifically combat-related [e.g. combat pay, surgery costs, ammunition replacement for weapons fired in combat - as opposed to weapons fired in training exercises - etc etc etc] is a vanishingly small percentage of the total Iraqi bill.
Our problem is not that the WAR is expensive [the WAR having lasted all of about three weeks in the spring of 2003]: Our problem is that the post-war NATION BUILDING is just fantastically expensive.
But Dubyah has bet his presidency on a dream of introducing civilization to the Muslim world, and history will be the judge of whether he bet correctly.
What benefit does increasing the precision of floats to 128bits bring? 64bits are more than enough for 99.9999% and the remaining cases can be handled in sw emulation. You can still not solve (without massive growth of the error terms) an equation system described by a Hilbert-matrix using Gaussean-elimination no matter how many bits you make the mantissa.
Check out some of Professor Kahan's shiznat at UC-Berkeley:
As I understand it, the "wrong" pictures are computed using Java's strict 64-bit requirement; the "right" pictures are computed by embedding the 64-bit calculation within Intel/AMD 80-bit extended doubles, performing the calculations in 80-bits worth of hardware, and then rounding back down to 64-bits to present the final answer.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Precision matters. You can never have enough of it.
I sent some email back and forth with one of the dudes on the Sparc design team, and he said that Sparc's 128-bit quad-precision double is a purely software implementation.
'Cell's greatest strength is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. And Cell's greatest weakness is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip.
Sadly, there's almost no FPU hardware to speak of: 32-bit single precision floats in hardware; 64-bit double precision floats are [somehow?] implemented in software and bring the chip to its knees.
Why can't someone invent a chip for math geeks? With 128-bit hardware doubles? Are we really that tiny a proportion of the world's population?
Personally, I don't see how anyone can reasonably expect to avoid becoming a criminal with more laws on the books than can possibly be read in a human lifespan. I am completely unacquainted with 99% of the laws in this country, and for all I know I may have unwittingly violated a fair portion of those.
This is a really BIG picture issue.
Not some trivial idiotic shit, like do we build a windmill farm on Ted Kennedy's Hyannisport compound, or how do we save the snail darter by driving the Klamath Farmers out of bidness?
This question of "just what the hell is in our God-damned federal code, anyway?" could in and of itself be the basis for the next civil war.
And the truth of the matter is that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT'S IN THERE. If you sat down to read all umpteen thousand pages of the federal code from beginning to end, you'd barely be a few hundred pages through it before Congress & the Executive had altered it, and you'd have to start over at the beginning to see what had changed.
Seriously, this question of the DC elites using umpteen gazillion pages of legalistic nonsense to turn us into their 21st century serfs could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
From mucho experience posting code to the Slashdot filter, you also need to use an "& l t;" ["left tag escape character" or whatever - oh, and lose the spaces] so that your less-than sign "<" doesn't get mis-interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag and thereby deleted:
If only I had some mod points... and maybe an account. It's so true. Though to be honest, it seems even split around here for political alignment in that type of person.
Second that - and I had some mod points a few days ago.
Just Damn on this one: Which explains all the old unsafe at any speed horribly polluting cars at the weekend cruise nights owned by the upper middle class people who typically vote Democrat and are in favor of those laws against unsafe and polluting cars. As long as they aren't theirs. They also tend to drive huge honkin SUVs during the week. In that attrocious color known as Hunter Green..
Slashdot Mirror
robyannetta: Lucent claims that Microsoft has violated their MPEG2 patents which they claim they patented in 1993.
TubeSteak: Licensing is like mana from heaven for companies. It represents a long term income stream that can only add to the value of the company and the value of their patent.
In this case, "long term" would be about four more years?
Also, nothing infuriated me more than having to sit through insufferably boring finance meetings.
I'm giving up mod points to reply here, but you're the first person I've seen mention the question of boredom.
Business people do the boring stuff: Schedule, organize, alphabetize, prioritize, distribute, beg, plead, cajole, backslap, laugh at stupid jokes, kiss ass - in general all the crap you have to do to make the trains run on time.
Did I mention paperwork? Federal income tax. Federal FICA & Medicare. State income tax. State unemployment tax. State corporate report. Sarbanes-Oxley. Blah blah blah blah blah...
And this stuff is boring. Tediously boring. Mind-numbingly boring. Possibly even suicidally boring.
The payoff, of course, is that the boring stuff is what leads to the big bucks. Nobody ever got rich doing interesting work. NOBODY.
My advice: Keep your 50% stock. Accept a job with a title like "Executive VP for Strategy" or "Chief Technology Officer" or some similar drivel. Make the finance guy the CEO. Give HIM the LARGER salary. Make him feel important. Give him the incentive to do all that boring-ass trains-on-time bullshit that would drive you insane. Take the smaller salary, give yourself a nice big office with lots of bookshelves and big desks and a comfy chair, close the door, unplug the phone, and spend all day doing the fun stuff.
Let your partner get the glory; as long as you've got your 50%, the money will take care of itself.
Lancey: Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential.
san: Yes! and good riddens. Do you remember having to re-code for every single machine? Because they were such specialized machines, they tended to be extremely fickle: one wrong operation and performance would go down the drain.
If this architecture of theirs is at all novel, and if this is a one-time build of a machine with that architecture [i.e. not the first of many generations of backwards-compatible machines with that architecture], and if the developers and "scientists" don't know how to program for the architecture a priori, THEN THE MACHINE WILL BE OBSOLETE BEFORE THE SOFTWARE HAS BEEN WRITTEN!!!
It takes developers [especially compiler writers] two to three years [or more - witness the disaster that is Itanic] to learn a hardware architecture and begin writing clean, stable code for it.
Which is just about exactly the amount of time it takes for the hardware to become obsolete.
[Parenthetically: Can I call this Mosel-Saar-Ruwer's Law?]
By the way, I predict that this may very well be the fate of the new IBM cell processor & the PlayStation III - we're just now getting the compilers that can write to the architecture, and they want to release the thing sometime in this decade?!? Consider:
I knew as soon as we got the Octopiler news that there would be serious problems for Cell & the PS-III - if it's February/March, and we're just now getting new compilers for the architecture, then it'll be a couple of years before games are ported to it - if ever - and a launch of the product by Christmas [to be accompanied by third-party titles] strikes me as an utter fantasy.You know, /.-ers may hate Steve Ballmer, but he got one thing right: "Developers, Developers, Developers!!!" 'Cause the greatest hardware in the world isn't worth a damn if there aren't any developers writing for it.
Years ago they were unhappy with the results of their builds, so they wrote their own compiler.
You got any more info on this "compiler" of theirs?
Thanks!
And its notions of data connectivity (and PivotTables) were something Microsoft pretty much introduced to the market.
Legend has it that Lotus Improv for NeXTSTEP was the cat's meow, circa 1990.
Yes, they are 128-bit floats. They're needed for doing HDR.
PLEASE don't joke about this.
Do you have any idea how many math/physics/chem/engineering geeks would just kill for 128-bits in hardware?
It would be very, very cruel to get their hopes up like that, only to find out that you were being sarcastic...
Signify: full 128-bit precision
TheRaven64: or researches doing GPUPU things. To people in the second category, it's not a graphics card it's a very fast vector co-processor (think SSE/AltiVec, only a lot more so)
Traditionally, ATi floating point numbers were only 24-bits wide [i.e. only "three-quarters" of single precision, which is 32-bits].
nVidia, IBM Sony Cell, and Altivec support only 32-bit floats.
MMX supported no floats whatsoever. SSE supported 32-bit floats. SSE2 & SSE3 support 64-bit floats. x86 supports 80-bit floats.
So what is this 128-bit stuff all about?
I don't suppose there's a chance in hell that these could be quad-precision floats, could they?
To really get clustered stability out of Oracle you really need a third party clustered filesystem.
What exactly do you envision as a stable Oracle cluster? Specifically, what is the host OS, and what is the third-party clustered filesystem for that OS?
Thanks!
What ever happened to the hype about dedicated physics chips?
The original article appears to be slashdotted.
So could somebody tell me how wide the floats are in this "SLI" engine? [I don't even know what "SLI" stands for.]
AFAIK, nVidia [like IBM/Sony "cell"] uses only 32-bit single-precision floats [and, as bad as that is, ATi uses only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floats].
What math/physics/chemistry/engineering types need is as much precision as possible - preferably 128 bits.
Why? Because the stuff they are modelling tends to be highly non-linear and the calculations tend to be highly unstable.
32-bits isn't even enough to give integer granularity up to 16 million:
Remember that spate of stories we were getting about the new 1000W = 1KW power supply units [PSUs]?
Here are a few of them:
Now consider, for example, the specs on the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool® 1KW PSU: Now suppose three things: Okay, now do like Sponge Bob and Patrick in the box, and use your I-M-A-G-I-N-A-T-I-O-N, keeping in mind how Death was stalking Chad Donella's character in Final Destination I: PS: I assume the folks at "Sapphire Graphics" have never heard of this thing called The Association of Trial Lawyers of America...A reasonable option in this situation is to give the experts who will use the industry specific software their own subnet; and save all files to a shared server that then backs up to a server on the regular LAN.
If this financial software package is as expensive as "Darlok" makes it out to be, then just go to your local Microsoft rep and purchase a bunch of seats for a new Domain - the cost of the new seats would probably pale in comparison to the cost of the financial software package.
Then let their secondary accounts all be Admins within their own little domain, but with no special rights to the larger Active Directory tree.
Or do that old thing with NT 4.0 Domains, where Domain A trusts Domain B, but Domain B doesn't trust Domain A.
Or create two separate domains entirely [with no ambient Active Directory tree and no trust relationships], and just make everyone memorize two different user names and two different passwords.
That'll get management's attention.
You misunderstand his question. He's not looking to slave the clocks together on his network.. as you say, NTP does that just fine (and more than just fine) right now. He's looking to enforce a restriction on login capabilities according to the time of day, using LDAP and Kerberos. It's easy to represent such constraints in LDAP, the question is whether any of his systems will know what he's talking about if he does.
Right, but you have to tie it all together: Kerberos, LDAP, NTP, Login Restrictions by Time of Day.
That's what an IMPLEMENTATION like NDS/eDirectory does for you.
And, believe it or not, IMPLEMENTATIONS are not trivial. Trying to roll your own - from scratch - could take from now until forever.
Look, back in May of 2000, LDAP folks were fantasizing about some hypothetical "Access Control Factors" they might implement someday:
At that point, Novell already had a directory IMPLEMENTATION that had about seven years worth of stress testing & debugging in the real world, and about 100 Million licenses sold and installed in the field.Now again: Obviously everyone is free to try to roll their own implementations, but, gee whiz, it's really hard to imagine that you'd beat the price of NDS/eDirectory licenses, much less match NDS/eDirectory reliability & stability.
The original poster ["David"] said: What you need is for your directory servers to be tied together with NTP [Network Time Protocol].
Novell has used NTP since the version of NDS that shipped with NetWare 4.00 way back in about 1993/1994.
So Novell would give you the time synchronization, with a good 12 to 13 years' worth of debugging of the algorithms and the implementations.
But trying to wing your own Kerberos + LDAP + NTP - gee whiz, that sounds like something at about the level of a Masters's Thesis, and probably the better part of a year's worth of work. The RFC for NTP is about the most challenging reading I've ever encountered in networking theory - to really understand what's going on, you need about a thousand pages' worth of background in the theory of stochastic processes & its application to a bunch of old AT&T switching standards.
I'd say "Screw that," and give the local Novell Rep a call - see what kind of a deal he can quote you.
I work in animation. Believe me, Family Guy is not cheap to produce. The animation is actually good quality for television. I don't know the exact numbers, but a show like that costs upwards of a half million an episode at the very least - and my guess is it costs a lot more than that because of creators fees and voice talent.
The awesomest show on TV [with the possible exception of SG1] has gotta be Survivorman.
Dude has zero production costs [hell, he films the whole thing himself] and his "producers" won't buy him a rifle or even a fishing pole.
Well, there was the time when they made him take a rifle to the arctic circle on account of the polar bears - but then he caught a ride back to town with an eskimo seal hunter, so he saved on transportation right there...
Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.
Kinda like an Obfuscated C contest for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only here the objective would to be include as many possible layers of emulation and still have a working final product.
Actually sounds like it would be kinda fun - God, am I a nerd, or what?
No. I can't provide a link to the numbers for two reasons: first, my source is one that I can't release, and the second is that the DoD hasn't had a good track record with their accounting of the "nation building" stuff in Iraq... I know for a fact that many classified things are getting cut due precisely to the war effort. And I know for a fact that the Air Force has been scrambling to figure out how to come out okay with a several-billion dollar shortfall. (I think it's 6 billion, but I'm not exactly sure.)
Well, if you can think of anything "on the record", please keep me updated.
Thanks, and good luck!
Actually, fuel is one of the big costs. The next is food and water. After that it's salaries and small arms ammunition. The nation-building stuff comes from a separate budget item that is approved by Congress. There will be some retirements out of the Air Force inventory in the near future due to budget reasons.
Do you have any links to - ah - how could I say it, more or less non-partisan studies of how the money is being spent?
I'm not talking the raving lunatic KOS/Moveon nonsense, but a serious, bean-counterish comparison of how the money is being spent now vis-a-vis how it might have been spent in a more traditional peacetime era? [Granted, this is not a particularly traditional time...]
E.g. you mention "fuel": Are you saying that the amount of money spent on fuel for Humvees in Iraq is something significant? Or that jet fuel for aerial reconnaissance is significantly greater than it would be in "peacetime"?
Or "food and water": Are you saying that the difference here is that soldiers purchase their own "food and water" in peacetime but have it provided for free in combat zones?
Look, even if you assume the DOD is providing 100% of each soldier's rations for free every day, and you assume 125,000 soldiers, and $10/day for the rations, you only get:
Even if you double that twice, to 250,000 soldiers and $20/day, you only get to From the point of view of the DOD and the Congress, that doesn't even qualify as chump change.Mod parent up. It's also a violation, IMHO, of the First, Fourth (right to privacy) and 14th Ammendmants to the Constitution, and the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).
I have long been of the opinion that we need to add an explicit right to anonymity to the constitution, to include both intellectual anonymity [e.g. the right to post anonymously on the internet, or the right to send anonymous SMTP traffic, or the right to publish books or other works under a pseudonym], but also to include a right to practical anonymity: The right to cross state borders anonymously, the right to drive a car anonymously [without e.g mandated big-brother toll-road RFID shiznat], the right to a non-traceable currency [such as classical, NON-RFID'ed paper bills and metal coins, as opposed to traceable VISA/Mastercard/Discover transactions], the right to send mail [or packages] anonymously, etc etc etc.
Hell, I'd go so far as a right to give birth anonymously: Did you know that nowadays little newborn babies "have" to get SSID#s? What the fuck does a newborn baby need an SSID# for?
It's enough to make you want to move to the wilds of Montana and go completely off-grid. Just disappear from "mainstream" society altogether. Give birth to little babies and never even register them with the state. Homeschool. Conveniently forget to file income taxes. Tell the state to go fuck itself.
Hell, that's basically what all these Mexican illegals are doing, and if 40 million of them can do it, then why can't I?
All that jet fuel for the war effort and that ordnance are expensive. I have heard confirmation that government contractors will be cut from several bases; civilians and military are getting RIF'ed too.
My guess would be that at this point, three years into the game, most of the $300B? $400B? however much we have spent [and are spending] on Iraq is going to schools, hospitals, the power grid, water treatment plants, sewage treatment facilities, etc etc etc.
Most of what the DOD is paying on traditional stuff - e.g. salaries and spare parts purchases - would still be going on even if all the soldiers were back home twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do on a US base.
Again, my guess would be that the percentage of the total that is specifically combat-related [e.g. combat pay, surgery costs, ammunition replacement for weapons fired in combat - as opposed to weapons fired in training exercises - etc etc etc] is a vanishingly small percentage of the total Iraqi bill.
Our problem is not that the WAR is expensive [the WAR having lasted all of about three weeks in the spring of 2003]: Our problem is that the post-war NATION BUILDING is just fantastically expensive.
But Dubyah has bet his presidency on a dream of introducing civilization to the Muslim world, and history will be the judge of whether he bet correctly.
What benefit does increasing the precision of floats to 128bits bring? 64bits are more than enough for 99.9999% and the remaining cases can be handled in sw emulation. You can still not solve (without massive growth of the error terms) an equation system described by a Hilbert-matrix using Gaussean-elimination no matter how many bits you make the mantissa.
Check out some of Professor Kahan's shiznat at UC-Berkeley:
In particular, look at the pictures of "Borda's Mouthpiece" [page 13] or "Joukowski's Aerofoil" [page 14] in the following PDF document: As I understand it, the "wrong" pictures are computed using Java's strict 64-bit requirement; the "right" pictures are computed by embedding the 64-bit calculation within Intel/AMD 80-bit extended doubles, performing the calculations in 80-bits worth of hardware, and then rounding back down to 64-bits to present the final answer.MORAL OF THE STORY: Precision matters. You can never have enough of it.
I corresponded with the Sparc designer about this very question, because LabVIEW supports a 128-bit "quad-precision" double for Sparc platforms: I sent some email back and forth with one of the dudes on the Sparc design team, and he said that Sparc's 128-bit quad-precision double is a purely software implementation.
Compare e.g.
'Cell's greatest strength is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. And Cell's greatest weakness is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip.
Sadly, there's almost no FPU hardware to speak of: 32-bit single precision floats in hardware; 64-bit double precision floats are [somehow?] implemented in software and bring the chip to its knees.
Why can't someone invent a chip for math geeks? With 128-bit hardware doubles? Are we really that tiny a proportion of the world's population?
Personally, I don't see how anyone can reasonably expect to avoid becoming a criminal with more laws on the books than can possibly be read in a human lifespan. I am completely unacquainted with 99% of the laws in this country, and for all I know I may have unwittingly violated a fair portion of those.
This is a really BIG picture issue.
Not some trivial idiotic shit, like do we build a windmill farm on Ted Kennedy's Hyannisport compound, or how do we save the snail darter by driving the Klamath Farmers out of bidness?
This question of "just what the hell is in our God-damned federal code, anyway?" could in and of itself be the basis for the next civil war.
And the truth of the matter is that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT'S IN THERE. If you sat down to read all umpteen thousand pages of the federal code from beginning to end, you'd barely be a few hundred pages through it before Congress & the Executive had altered it, and you'd have to start over at the beginning to see what had changed.
Google Sisyphus and Rock.
Seriously, this question of the DC elites using umpteen gazillion pages of legalistic nonsense to turn us into their 21st century serfs could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Tabs were killed by the compression filter
From mucho experience posting code to the Slashdot filter, you also need to use an " & l t ; " ["left tag escape character" or whatever - oh, and lose the spaces] so that your less-than sign " < " doesn't get mis-interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag and thereby deleted:
If only I had some mod points... and maybe an account. It's so true. Though to be honest, it seems even split around here for political alignment in that type of person.
Second that - and I had some mod points a few days ago.
Just Damn on this one: Which explains all the old unsafe at any speed horribly polluting cars at the weekend cruise nights owned by the upper middle class people who typically vote Democrat and are in favor of those laws against unsafe and polluting cars. As long as they aren't theirs. They also tend to drive huge honkin SUVs during the week. In that attrocious color known as Hunter Green..