vandon: Apparently the mere existence of some type of policy -- regardless of what that policy actually is -- is now enough for companies to eschew any liability for leaking consumers' data."
geekoid: The number one reason companies loose lawsuits is a failure to follow policy.
Lawyers deal in paper trails - that's their currency.
If it's written down on paper [or saved as 0's and 1's on a computer hard drive somewhere], then it can be introduced in court.
If it was never written down, then it can't be introduced in court. [Why do you think Bill "Yale Law School" Clinton never used email? Because he didn't want to leave an electronic paper trail of his day to day behavior.]
If a lawyer can find a piece of paper that instructs an employee [or a group of employees] to behave in a certain manner, and if he can show that they subsequently failed to behave in that manner, then he wins. Conversely, if the employees behaved in the manner that the paperwork instructed them to behave, then the lawyer loses.
Doesn't matter whether the instructions were sage advise or insanity - all that matters was that the instructions were written down on a piece of paper.
Leverage the GPUs in the more recent AGP 3D offerings and use it for something...uh....usefull:)
ATi has 24-bit floating point calculations [i.e. 8 bits less than "single precision"]; nVidia & even the new IBM/Sony Playstation Cell processors have only 32-bit floating point calculations [i.e. "single precision"].
Single precision floats are utterly worthless for real-world ["usefull"] calculations; they even lose their integer granularity at 2 ^ 24:
The selected government and university will be required to install open-source software as a main operating infrastructure, for which the MIC will support with funds and technologies.
I thought the spirit of FOSS [or at least of/.] was supposed to be: USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB!!!
So what if M$FT Windows and M$FT Office ARE the right tools for the job? [Gasp! Horrors!! Oh the Humanity!!!]
How then would it be helping people to shove the wrong tool down their throats?
Yeah, yeah, bring it on: -1 Troll/Flamebait blah blah blah...
But the problem is, someone needs to implement it. And that someone needs to also have a compiler that they can modify in terrible, terrible ways. It also would help to be an expert in designing thread-safe, interruptable heap compaction algorithms. Now, if you were in a position to do that, would you bolt this on to C++, or would you put that effort into a different language?
Isn't this why we have operating systems? To give us things like "thread-safe, interruptable heap compaction algorithms"?
The way you're describing it, what you've got is essentially an operating system within an operating system.
Of course, large software programs [like an Oracle database] tend to become operating systems within operating systems, and, of course, that's why their performance is so atrocious. [Oracle ought to just write their own OS for Intel/AMD and say to hell with Windows & Linux].
And what if a program computed the distance between two objects, and later on used that distance to get from one object to the other?
PLEASE don't tell me people are using hacks like that in this day and age.
MAYBE if you were working in an embedded space, and you were programming very close to the hardware [VxWorks/QNX/whatnot], and you had to use a very slow processor to conserve on energy usage/heat consumption, and every fraction of a millisecond you could squeeze out of the software was vital...
But even then, I wouldn't want those kinds of hacks in anything that came within a country mile of a "Medical Device" or a "Nuclear Power Plant" or whatever else it was that they used to exclude in the old Java license.
That has to be one of the most ill informed comments that I have seen on this site in the past 6 months.
The bulk of the post is approximately three sentences; there's a further addendum which asserts that transistor counts on FPUs do not double as the bit count on the floats doubles [rather, the transistor count increases at a much larger rate].
If anything asserted here is factually false, then please take the time to correct it:
1) Computer colors are [8 bits for Red] X [8 bits for Green] X [8 bits for Blue] = 24 bits total.
2) Graphics chipset makers believe that high bit-counts in FPU calculations are a waste of transistors.
3) ATi has 24-bit FPUs; nVidia has 32-bit FPUs; Cell-Playstation has 32-bit FPUs.
4) When you double the bit count on an FPU, the transistor count does not double, but increases at a much higher rate [hence the relative paucity of true 128-bit hardware FPUs; by comparison, Sun's "quad precision" 128-bit double is a software fiction that is essentially useless for real-world calculations].
Again, if any of this is false, please correct it.
Actually, the bigger difference is in how the architecture changed. Cell processor is more along the lines of multi-core DSPs.
Standard computer graphics are RGB color at 24-bits per pixel [2^24 = 16777216], i.e. about 16 million colors.
Standard thinking in the graphics bidness is that: If our triangles will only be displayed in 24-bits worth of color, then why do we need to perform triangle-arithmetic in anything higher than maybe 32-bits worth of floating points?
Hence floating point calculations are 24-bit in the ATi world, and 32-bit in the nVidia and Playstation3/Cell world.
Boy, I hope they're upping that floating point number for these "server" chipsets, cause 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for even something as trivial as computing interest on a bank statement.
On the other hand, a "Cell" server CPU with a 128-bit FPU would be something to drool over. The problem, though, is that transistor counts on FPU's tend to increase as n^2, so each time you double the FPU bit-count [to 64-bits, then to 128-bits], your transistor count goes through the roof.
What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?
To the best of my knowledge, Novell is the only major OS vendor that never supplied its own IDE/Compiler to its developer channel [which, to this day, I believe to be the primary reason their channel vanished to basically nothing, at least prior to the Mono/SuSE purchases].
Back in the day, you had to hack the Watcom compiler to death [using a bunch of undocumented, semi-mythical hacks that only the wizards had access to] just to get it to build a NetWare VLM/NLM. And that was the preferred method of developing for the platform.
Boy, I tell you, Novell, with Directory Services, a SuSE kernel, and Mono Web Apps, all brought together for the developer in a single, integrated Borland or Metrowerks IDE, would start to resemble a serious platform.
Or at least a platform that [finally] deserved to be taken seriously.
The article, and most of the posters here, are missing an even more important point. There are very few viruses that just delete all your files anymore. The two major threats the PCs these days are spyware (a threat Linux has greater resistance to, because modifying plugins and such usually requires root permissions (with some exceptions, such as Firefox plugins - you're down to app level security there, on both platforms) and zombies to add your PC to a botnet, which Linux is more resistant to, again, because of not running as root. Yes, you have roughly the same level of resistance to "delete all your files" viruses, which are rare these days relative to the amount of "take over your machine as a botnet" viruses.
All that, of course, is ignoring practical differences in the security history of the platforms and common applications, as well as the lower profile of Linux in terms of automated threats. Direct attacks (ie, someone is specifically attacking you) are just as much of a threat, and many distros are vulnerable to attacks in an unpatched state. Linux is *not* a panacea against threats (and only idiots portray it as such), but it is a very different threat profile than a Windows machine.
[PARENTHETICALLY: I'm giving up Mod Points to reply to you because no one else seems to want to make this point...]
Every single thing you wrote would be true if you were to exchange the word "Windows" for the word "Linux" [and vice-versa].
In fact, Windows has a vastly, almost prohibitively more elegant security infrastructure than "Linux": File rights of "Full Control, Modify, Read & Execute, Read, Write," file attributes of "Read-Only, Archive, System, Hidden," very finely-grained ACL-based system security "Policies", a global Kerberos-based directory authentication scheme in Active Directory, etc etc etc.
"Linux" has rwx-rwx-rwx. That's it. [Now Linux combined with Novell Directory Services and a Novell File System would be an entirely different cup of tea, but that's a whole 'nother discussion. Although, I'd ask: Does Novell even have a "Policies" ACL-based security infrastructure for KDE or GNOME yet? Are they working on such a thing?]
The reason that "people" [the great unwashed masses of the bell curve ten or twenty or thirty IQ points below geniuses like yourself] don't use Windows security is because SECURE SYSTEMS ARE A PAIN IN THE ASS and no one wants to be bothered.
If Linux had 95% market share and you had retards surfing the web as "root" [just like the Windows retards surf the web as "Administrator"], then you'd be seeing the same damned thing with Linux that you see now with Windows.
It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent).
There is one and only one reason for the littany of nonsense you've catalogued in your post: RENT CONTROL. [You could throw in Rent Control's bastard half-brothers, zoning laws and zoning regulations, but they're all just slightly different incarnations of the same abomination.]
Rent Control artificially restricts the supply of housing, hence endows unnatural potency to the landed gentry and their agents.
I.e. socialism INVARIABLY benefits the Powers-That-Be at the expense of the serfs. Hence its [otherwise inexplicable] popularity with the high-IQ crowd that dominates our universities, non-profits, and "knowledge-based" industries.
That's the way it's always been, and the way it will always be.
But I can't for the life of me tell what this operating system is supposed to be.
Is it Digital VMS? Is it Digital OSF/1-Tru64? [OSF/1 is mentioned on page 9 of the PDF document.] Is it some flavor of HPUX?
Or is it something else entirely?
And, parenthetically, I'd ask: Why do the droids in Sales-N-Marketing insist on publishing this crap that doesn't even begin to answer the most fundamental questions their customers might have?
People have ALWAYS had the opportunity to "just say no" to whatever Hollywood produces. You can't blame them if people decide to say "yes".
But that's what's so bizarre about it; people most emphatically say "no," and yet Hollyweird keeps pursuing the same damned agenda with a dogged determination that can only be described as religious [or, more accurately, as pagan]:
ABC NOW FEARING A MASS TUNEOUT
By DON KAPLAN
February 1, 2006
Brokeback Mountain" and a slew of other arty, less-widely seen Oscar-nominated flicks are expected to take the polish off ABC's ratings for the Academy Awards this year.
With no big-budget films like "Titanic," "Gladiator" or "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" in this season's crop of nominees, ABC may be staring down the barrel of one of the lowest-rated Oscar telecasts in recent memory when it airs on March 5, say TV-industry analysts.
I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools.
We're just a few years from the point that people can make distribution-quality movies [with distribution-quality soundtracks] from the comfort of their own garages.
Then we can forget once and for all about Hollyweird & the over-arching agenda they try to shove down our throats [Heath Fudger eating pudding, Filthy Seymour Hoffman eating Andy Warhol, etc etc etc].
Sending the 'magic packet' is not difficult, and there is a variety of tools that can do this, including a ready made perl script, on a gentoo system, type 'emerge wakeonlan'.
The packet in question requires access to Layer 2 of the OSDI model, i.e. the ability to send raw ethernet packets. By way of an example, the Java security model traditionally forbade this sort of thing [Java doesn't even let you send ICMP packets at Layer 3, so there's no such thing as "PING" or "TRACERT" in Java].
If there is a vanilla plain-jane non-souped-up installation of a Perl interpreter that allows you access to Layer 2, then it's going against the Java security model.
Of course, obviously Perl != Java, but it's something to think about.
Along those lines, you might consider this recent discussion at/.:
Anonymous Coward:Is there a way for a java app to trap keypresses when the java app is out of focus, without using a native interface?
AKAImBatman:No. This is a huge security issue, and is unlikely to ever be included in Java...
Just like keyboard sniffing, if a Perl app has the ability to send a packet at Layer 2, then it's easy to surmise that it might be able to receive a packet at Layer 2, and from that it's easy to fear that it might be able to receive all packets at Layer 2, i.e. it's not so difficult to imagine that a Perl app could function as an ethernet sniffer.
No, it's no different from electromagnetism in that regard. A test charge will respond to another source of charge instantly, no matter how far away it is, despite the fact that electromagnetism is limited to the speed of light. That's because the electromagnetic field of the source charge is present everywhere.
Again, I would ask: Why is this [your theory of electromagnetism] not a violation of "No Action at a Distance"?
You've got proposed the existence of some thingamabob called a "field" and it sure does sound like it's doing stuff instantaneously.
The post makes it sound like suggesting that gravitons exist is outlandish... but this is rather accepted.
IANAP [or a Cosmologist], but Pioneer 10 is pretty damned far out there at this point. So far, in fact, that it must take, what - several hours? several days? - for something travelling very, very fast [as in "The Speed of Light"] to get from here [that big fat gravity source called "our sun"] to there [the Kuiper belt, or wherever the hell Pioneer 10 finds itself these days].
Is not one of the big problems with "gravitons" that gravity appears to act more or less instantaneously at great distances? And isn't that a little troubling from the "Action at a Distance is Big No-No" point of view?
Or does the theory of "gravitons" come with some fancy-schmantzy geometric/topological intricacies which allow for the possibility that Pioneer 10 isn't quite as far away as we think it is?
OpenSSL is one of those cool projects that would be so much cooler if it weren't for the stupid license that makes it a PITA to actually employ in a product. OpenSSL essentially uses the BSD license w/attribution, which makes it difficult to use with GPLd projects, unless you use the version provided by your distro -- which isn't always desireable.
Okay, maybe this is a question of semantics, but since when did a non-viral open source license qualify as "annoying"?
And yet every time I play Final Fantasy X (to name a particularly bad example) I get motion sickness watching, in a static shot, the edges of the polygons swim around.
Exactly - the market has determined that all you need for games & TV is 32-bits of accuracy; anything more is superfluous.
By contrast [at least as far as I can tell], the Emotion Engine, with 128-bits of hardware support, is PRECISELY [-er- pun intended] what a scientist or an engineer wants in his platform. Compare:
Cell is not, and never will be a general-purpose CPU. The 8 SPE units that make it shine are basically useless for most computing tasks, and don't use the same ISA as AltiVec (which would mean a switch just as big as the switch to Intel for vectorized code). Maybe, maybe, they would use Cell for Xserve cluster nodes, but that's a stretch.
Everything I've read indicates that the "Cell" chipset can only perform 32-bit ["single precision"] floating point calculations in hardware:
Cell (microprocessor)
Due to the nature of its applications, Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation. The SPEs are capable of performing double precision calculations, albeit with an order of magnitude performance penalty. More general purpose computing tasks can be done on the PPE... Additionally, IBM has included a VMX (AltiVec) unit in the Cell PPE...
So while there may be the ability to perform double [quad?] precision floating point calculations on the Altivec unit, the primary purpose of the Cell is to preform EXTREMELY INACCURATE but extremely fast calculations for the purpose of rendering [very sloppy, very inaccurate, very lazy, hazy] triangles on something like an HDTV.
Compare the similar approach of recent nVidia [32-bit] & ATi [24-bit] architectures:
Bazman: CPU? Use the GPU! ...Nowadays you can run numerical calculations on the graphics card's processor...
pkhuong: No IEEE floats GPUs don't do IEE floats. That might be bad for his purpose...
Anonymous Coward: nvida is pretty close AFAIK Nvidia's GeforceFX5xxxx and Geforce6xxx GPUs have 32-bit IEEE-like floats (no denormals or signalling NaNs), but for many numerical simulations, they're close enough... On the other hand, Ati can get fp, but only up to 24-bit. Unfortunatly, that's probably not quite single precision...
By contrast, the Toshiba-Sony "Emotion Engine" at the heart of the Playstation-2 performs true 128-bit ["quad" precision] floating point calculations in hardware:
Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine
...As was noted in the bullet list, the VU can be further divided into two independent, 128-bit SIMD/VLIW vector processing units, VU0 and VU1...
So if you care about these things, what we want at the workstation/server level is something akin to the Emotion Engine, whereas the Cell is targetted at the very specific market of multimedia devices [HDTV, Sony Playstation-3, etc] where accuracy is unimportant.
And boy, do I wish there were a venture capitalist out there [with a few spare billions of dollars] who could purchase the Emotion Engine and keep it alive for those of us who care about precision in our calculations.
Not to be snide, but if you have a bit-vector of truth values, can't you just use ints?
Obviously, but now you're embedding "machine code" in an abstract software language.
The purpose of a language is to abstract the "machine code" to the point that a maintainer of the code can glance at the code, and, without too much thought, realize more or less what it is that is transpiring within the code.
PS: A priori apologies if "abstract" is forbidden to function as a transitive verb.
FORTRAN has a vector data type, which makes it a lot easier to optimise certain types of code for AltiVec, SSE, etc. If you write the code in C, you have to translate it into scalar intrinsics, and the compiler has to work backwards to attempt to determine the vector operations you meant.
Has ANYONE produced a language with vector-based switch statements?
A pseudo-example might look like
BooleanThingAMaBob theZerothBooleanThingAMaBob = new BooleanThingAMaBob(INSERT_BOOLEAN_VALUE_HERE);
BooleanThingAMaBob theOnethBooleanThingAMaBob = new BooleanThingAMaBob(INSERT_BOOLEAN_VALUE_HERE);
Vector theLogicVector = new Vector(theZerothBooleanThingAMaBob, theOnethBooleanThingAMaBob);
switch(theLogicVector)
{
case [false, false]:
blahBlah();
break;
case [false, true]:
blahYada();
break;
case [true, false]:
yadaBlah();
break;
case [true, true]:
yadaYada();
break;
default:
ickyIckyIckyFatangFatangReee();
break;
}
I would do evil things to cute, charming, cuddly [& utterly innocent] little kittens if I thought it would give me this functionality in a language.
Slashdot Mirror
vandon: Apparently the mere existence of some type of policy -- regardless of what that policy actually is -- is now enough for companies to eschew any liability for leaking consumers' data."
geekoid: The number one reason companies loose lawsuits is a failure to follow policy.
Lawyers deal in paper trails - that's their currency.
If it's written down on paper [or saved as 0's and 1's on a computer hard drive somewhere], then it can be introduced in court.
If it was never written down, then it can't be introduced in court. [Why do you think Bill "Yale Law School" Clinton never used email? Because he didn't want to leave an electronic paper trail of his day to day behavior.]
If a lawyer can find a piece of paper that instructs an employee [or a group of employees] to behave in a certain manner, and if he can show that they subsequently failed to behave in that manner, then he wins. Conversely, if the employees behaved in the manner that the paperwork instructed them to behave, then the lawyer loses.
Doesn't matter whether the instructions were sage advise or insanity - all that matters was that the instructions were written down on a piece of paper.
Terry Gilliam's 1981 Time Bandits & 1985 Brazil were both lots of fun.
Well, Time Bandits was fun; <SPOILER>Brazil is something of a tragedy.</SPOILER>
And of course there was John Cleese's 1988 classic, A Fish Called Wanda.
Leverage the GPUs in the more recent AGP 3D offerings and use it for something...uh....usefull
ATi has 24-bit floating point calculations [i.e. 8 bits less than "single precision"]; nVidia & even the new IBM/Sony Playstation Cell processors have only 32-bit floating point calculations [i.e. "single precision"].
Single precision floats are utterly worthless for real-world ["usefull"] calculations; they even lose their integer granularity at 2 ^ 24:
In other words, if you are even moderately wealthy, then graphics FPUs can't keep track of your bank account to the nearest dollar.The selected government and university will be required to install open-source software as a main operating infrastructure, for which the MIC will support with funds and technologies.
I thought the spirit of FOSS [or at least of /.] was supposed to be: USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB!!!
So what if M$FT Windows and M$FT Office ARE the right tools for the job? [Gasp! Horrors!! Oh the Humanity!!!]
How then would it be helping people to shove the wrong tool down their throats?
Yeah, yeah, bring it on: -1 Troll/Flamebait blah blah blah...
But the problem is, someone needs to implement it. And that someone needs to also have a compiler that they can modify in terrible, terrible ways. It also would help to be an expert in designing thread-safe, interruptable heap compaction algorithms. Now, if you were in a position to do that, would you bolt this on to C++, or would you put that effort into a different language?
Isn't this why we have operating systems? To give us things like "thread-safe, interruptable heap compaction algorithms"?
The way you're describing it, what you've got is essentially an operating system within an operating system.
Of course, large software programs [like an Oracle database] tend to become operating systems within operating systems, and, of course, that's why their performance is so atrocious. [Oracle ought to just write their own OS for Intel/AMD and say to hell with Windows & Linux].
And what if a program computed the distance between two objects, and later on used that distance to get from one object to the other?
PLEASE don't tell me people are using hacks like that in this day and age.
MAYBE if you were working in an embedded space, and you were programming very close to the hardware [VxWorks/QNX/whatnot], and you had to use a very slow processor to conserve on energy usage/heat consumption, and every fraction of a millisecond you could squeeze out of the software was vital...
But even then, I wouldn't want those kinds of hacks in anything that came within a country mile of a "Medical Device" or a "Nuclear Power Plant" or whatever else it was that they used to exclude in the old Java license.
A team of New York physicists has confirmed that a tabletop contraption made at UCLA does in fact generate nuclear fusion at room temperatures...
If the New York physicists have confirmed it, then it has to be true. Has to be.
That has to be one of the most ill informed comments that I have seen on this site in the past 6 months.
The bulk of the post is approximately three sentences; there's a further addendum which asserts that transistor counts on FPUs do not double as the bit count on the floats doubles [rather, the transistor count increases at a much larger rate].
If anything asserted here is factually false, then please take the time to correct it:
Again, if any of this is false, please correct it.SGI gave us whizbang graphics, spiffy NUMA stuff, and XFS (and more, let the list begin here). Some of the people there are obviously clever.
Don't forget the Standard Template Library.
Might wanna download all the docs before the bankruptcy court pulls the plug on the servers.
Actually, the bigger difference is in how the architecture changed. Cell processor is more along the lines of multi-core DSPs.
Standard computer graphics are RGB color at 24-bits per pixel [2^24 = 16777216], i.e. about 16 million colors.
Standard thinking in the graphics bidness is that: If our triangles will only be displayed in 24-bits worth of color, then why do we need to perform triangle-arithmetic in anything higher than maybe 32-bits worth of floating points?
Hence floating point calculations are 24-bit in the ATi world, and 32-bit in the nVidia and Playstation3/Cell world.
Boy, I hope they're upping that floating point number for these "server" chipsets, cause 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for even something as trivial as computing interest on a bank statement.
On the other hand, a "Cell" server CPU with a 128-bit FPU would be something to drool over. The problem, though, is that transistor counts on FPU's tend to increase as n^2, so each time you double the FPU bit-count [to 64-bits, then to 128-bits], your transistor count goes through the roof.
What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?
To the best of my knowledge, Novell is the only major OS vendor that never supplied its own IDE/Compiler to its developer channel [which, to this day, I believe to be the primary reason their channel vanished to basically nothing, at least prior to the Mono/SuSE purchases].
Back in the day, you had to hack the Watcom compiler to death [using a bunch of undocumented, semi-mythical hacks that only the wizards had access to] just to get it to build a NetWare VLM/NLM. And that was the preferred method of developing for the platform.
Boy, I tell you, Novell, with Directory Services, a SuSE kernel, and Mono Web Apps, all brought together for the developer in a single, integrated Borland or Metrowerks IDE, would start to resemble a serious platform.
Or at least a platform that [finally] deserved to be taken seriously.
Kawolski: Compensation: $15/hr
mwheeler01: From the original posting:
Compensation: $15/hr for first 2 - 4 weeks: Likely leads to $30K - $35K annual compensation + benefits and 401K
While not great, the job isn't quite as bad as misquoting by ommision.
Uhhh: Let's assume 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.
Hence:
So who's supposed to be the moron: The employer who posted the ad, or the job seekers who thought that it was some kind of a deal?
Or maybe somebody at Slashdot who can't do 15 X 2K in his head?
The article, and most of the posters here, are missing an even more important point. There are very few viruses that just delete all your files anymore. The two major threats the PCs these days are spyware (a threat Linux has greater resistance to, because modifying plugins and such usually requires root permissions (with some exceptions, such as Firefox plugins - you're down to app level security there, on both platforms) and zombies to add your PC to a botnet, which Linux is more resistant to, again, because of not running as root. Yes, you have roughly the same level of resistance to "delete all your files" viruses, which are rare these days relative to the amount of "take over your machine as a botnet" viruses.
All that, of course, is ignoring practical differences in the security history of the platforms and common applications, as well as the lower profile of Linux in terms of automated threats. Direct attacks (ie, someone is specifically attacking you) are just as much of a threat, and many distros are vulnerable to attacks in an unpatched state. Linux is *not* a panacea against threats (and only idiots portray it as such), but it is a very different threat profile than a Windows machine.
[PARENTHETICALLY: I'm giving up Mod Points to reply to you because no one else seems to want to make this point...]
Every single thing you wrote would be true if you were to exchange the word "Windows" for the word "Linux" [and vice-versa].
In fact, Windows has a vastly, almost prohibitively more elegant security infrastructure than "Linux": File rights of "Full Control, Modify, Read & Execute, Read, Write," file attributes of "Read-Only, Archive, System, Hidden," very finely-grained ACL-based system security "Policies", a global Kerberos-based directory authentication scheme in Active Directory, etc etc etc.
"Linux" has rwx-rwx-rwx. That's it. [Now Linux combined with Novell Directory Services and a Novell File System would be an entirely different cup of tea, but that's a whole 'nother discussion. Although, I'd ask: Does Novell even have a "Policies" ACL-based security infrastructure for KDE or GNOME yet? Are they working on such a thing?]
The reason that "people" [the great unwashed masses of the bell curve ten or twenty or thirty IQ points below geniuses like yourself] don't use Windows security is because SECURE SYSTEMS ARE A PAIN IN THE ASS and no one wants to be bothered.
If Linux had 95% market share and you had retards surfing the web as "root" [just like the Windows retards surf the web as "Administrator"], then you'd be seeing the same damned thing with Linux that you see now with Windows.
Maybe even worse.
It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent).
There is one and only one reason for the littany of nonsense you've catalogued in your post: RENT CONTROL. [You could throw in Rent Control's bastard half-brothers, zoning laws and zoning regulations, but they're all just slightly different incarnations of the same abomination.]
Rent Control artificially restricts the supply of housing, hence endows unnatural potency to the landed gentry and their agents.
I.e. socialism INVARIABLY benefits the Powers-That-Be at the expense of the serfs. Hence its [otherwise inexplicable] popularity with the high-IQ crowd that dominates our universities, non-profits, and "knowledge-based" industries.
That's the way it's always been, and the way it will always be.
I googled a little, and came to this page: which in turn led me to this old PDF DOCUMENT from 2002: But I can't for the life of me tell what this operating system is supposed to be.
Is it Digital VMS? Is it Digital OSF/1-Tru64? [OSF/1 is mentioned on page 9 of the PDF document.] Is it some flavor of HPUX?
Or is it something else entirely?
And, parenthetically, I'd ask: Why do the droids in Sales-N-Marketing insist on publishing this crap that doesn't even begin to answer the most fundamental questions their customers might have?
People have ALWAYS had the opportunity to "just say no" to whatever Hollywood produces. You can't blame them if people decide to say "yes".
But that's what's so bizarre about it; people most emphatically say "no," and yet Hollyweird keeps pursuing the same damned agenda with a dogged determination that can only be described as religious [or, more accurately, as pagan]:
I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools.
We're just a few years from the point that people can make distribution-quality movies [with distribution-quality soundtracks] from the comfort of their own garages.
Then we can forget once and for all about Hollyweird & the over-arching agenda they try to shove down our throats [Heath Fudger eating pudding, Filthy Seymour Hoffman eating Andy Warhol, etc etc etc].
Sending the 'magic packet' is not difficult, and there is a variety of tools that can do this, including a ready made perl script, on a gentoo system, type 'emerge wakeonlan'.
The packet in question requires access to Layer 2 of the OSDI model, i.e. the ability to send raw ethernet packets. By way of an example, the Java security model traditionally forbade this sort of thing [Java doesn't even let you send ICMP packets at Layer 3, so there's no such thing as "PING" or "TRACERT" in Java].
If there is a vanilla plain-jane non-souped-up installation of a Perl interpreter that allows you access to Layer 2, then it's going against the Java security model.
Of course, obviously Perl != Java, but it's something to think about.
Along those lines, you might consider this recent discussion at /.:
Just like keyboard sniffing, if a Perl app has the ability to send a packet at Layer 2, then it's easy to surmise that it might be able to receive a packet at Layer 2, and from that it's easy to fear that it might be able to receive all packets at Layer 2, i.e. it's not so difficult to imagine that a Perl app could function as an ethernet sniffer.Anyway, just something to think about.
No, it's no different from electromagnetism in that regard. A test charge will respond to another source of charge instantly, no matter how far away it is, despite the fact that electromagnetism is limited to the speed of light. That's because the electromagnetic field of the source charge is present everywhere.
Again, I would ask: Why is this [your theory of electromagnetism] not a violation of "No Action at a Distance"?
You've got proposed the existence of some thingamabob called a "field" and it sure does sound like it's doing stuff instantaneously.
The post makes it sound like suggesting that gravitons exist is outlandish... but this is rather accepted.
IANAP [or a Cosmologist], but Pioneer 10 is pretty damned far out there at this point. So far, in fact, that it must take, what - several hours? several days? - for something travelling very, very fast [as in "The Speed of Light"] to get from here [that big fat gravity source called "our sun"] to there [the Kuiper belt, or wherever the hell Pioneer 10 finds itself these days].
Is not one of the big problems with "gravitons" that gravity appears to act more or less instantaneously at great distances? And isn't that a little troubling from the "Action at a Distance is Big No-No" point of view?
Or does the theory of "gravitons" come with some fancy-schmantzy geometric/topological intricacies which allow for the possibility that Pioneer 10 isn't quite as far away as we think it is?
OpenSSL is one of those cool projects that would be so much cooler if it weren't for the stupid license that makes it a PITA to actually employ in a product. OpenSSL essentially uses the BSD license w/attribution, which makes it difficult to use with GPLd projects, unless you use the version provided by your distro -- which isn't always desireable.
Okay, maybe this is a question of semantics, but since when did a non-viral open source license qualify as "annoying"?
And yet every time I play Final Fantasy X (to name a particularly bad example) I get motion sickness watching, in a static shot, the edges of the polygons swim around.
Exactly - the market has determined that all you need for games & TV is 32-bits of accuracy; anything more is superfluous.
By contrast [at least as far as I can tell], the Emotion Engine, with 128-bits of hardware support, is PRECISELY [-er- pun intended] what a scientist or an engineer wants in his platform. Compare:
The Emotion Engine is an absolutely wonderful platform, but [again, as far as I can tell] it was targetted at exactly the wrong market.
Cell is not, and never will be a general-purpose CPU. The 8 SPE units that make it shine are basically useless for most computing tasks, and don't use the same ISA as AltiVec (which would mean a switch just as big as the switch to Intel for vectorized code). Maybe, maybe, they would use Cell for Xserve cluster nodes, but that's a stretch.
Everything I've read indicates that the "Cell" chipset can only perform 32-bit ["single precision"] floating point calculations in hardware:
So while there may be the ability to perform double [quad?] precision floating point calculations on the Altivec unit, the primary purpose of the Cell is to preform EXTREMELY INACCURATE but extremely fast calculations for the purpose of rendering [very sloppy, very inaccurate, very lazy, hazy] triangles on something like an HDTV.Compare the similar approach of recent nVidia [32-bit] & ATi [24-bit] architectures:
By contrast, the Toshiba-Sony "Emotion Engine" at the heart of the Playstation-2 performs true 128-bit ["quad" precision] floating point calculations in hardware: So if you care about these things, what we want at the workstation/server level is something akin to the Emotion Engine, whereas the Cell is targetted at the very specific market of multimedia devices [HDTV, Sony Playstation-3, etc] where accuracy is unimportant.And boy, do I wish there were a venture capitalist out there [with a few spare billions of dollars] who could purchase the Emotion Engine and keep it alive for those of us who care about precision in our calculations.
Not to be snide, but if you have a bit-vector of truth values, can't you just use ints?
Obviously, but now you're embedding "machine code" in an abstract software language.
The purpose of a language is to abstract the "machine code" to the point that a maintainer of the code can glance at the code, and, without too much thought, realize more or less what it is that is transpiring within the code.
PS: A priori apologies if "abstract" is forbidden to function as a transitive verb.
FORTRAN has a vector data type, which makes it a lot easier to optimise certain types of code for AltiVec, SSE, etc. If you write the code in C, you have to translate it into scalar intrinsics, and the compiler has to work backwards to attempt to determine the vector operations you meant.
Has ANYONE produced a language with vector-based switch statements?
A pseudo-example might look like
I would do evil things to cute, charming, cuddly [& utterly innocent] little kittens if I thought it would give me this functionality in a language.