"I doubt Congress would step in because most congressmen are or were lawyers."
This makes no sense in the context of the current actions of the legislature. The Congress just approved a measure, which has been signed into law by the President, that will limit class action lawsuits. They have also said that they want to limit medical malpractice, tobacco, and asbestos suits. These basis of these actions is a clause in the Constitution (Article III) that grants the legislature power to limit the Court's jurisdiction. This power is very, very, rarely used, and these actions would represent a large shift in the use of this power.
In short, the Congress has shown that it is more than willing; it is eager to step in, as long as it will help the great god Business.
I am embarassingly ignorant of the details of the legislation you cite, but as you yourself point out, with all things politics, it's not that simple. For example, big business really isn't losing due to medical malpractice suits. In fact, insurance companies love it, because they can raise doctors' premiums to such a level that a good surgeon in the wrong jurisdiction might be netting less than an average sysadmin after malpractice insurance and school loans. For this very reason, some insurance companies lobby against medical review boards, thereby lobbying for unsafe doctors!
The situation is similar with class action lawsuits: they're really a good deal for negligent companies and big-shot lawyers, but often not so much so for the individuals comprising the class. If you're party to a class action law suit, you can't file further complaints against the defendent on those grounds -- when it's resolved, you're considered to be fully paid-up. Moreover, typical compensation for the individuals is very small (like $5, or sometimes even just worthless coupons for more products that may suffer from similar flaws!). This is because the lawyers in charge of the class action suit are able to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy -- almost like the original company would were there no class action suits at all!
Of course, everything I said does not apply in all situations, though it does apply significantly often.
" Gosling that Java is inherently insecure, as it is written in C."
Not necessarily true -- IBM's Jikes/Jalapeno Java VMs are written in Java. The way you build them is (1) run them under another VM until they sufficiently JIT compile themselves to be self-hosting, (2) dump the JIT-compiled memory image, and (3) load the image whenever you need to run the VM.
"Liberal ideology encourages making snap judgements on an emotional basis. (Notice the substution of "I feel..." for "I think..." in their rhetoric.) Their policies (when they think about them at all) are based on either direct action to solve perceived problems by pushing in the desired direction, or indirect action to suppress something that is conceptually associated with the problem. And they treat people as members of classes - dealing with all the members of the class on the bases of the steretypical member's behavior. All of these approaches have a common thread: "Damn the side effects."
Conservative ideology, on the other hand, promotes thought about problems. The targets are largely the same. But the solutions take into account the unintended consequences of directly attacking the problem - which are often a cure far worse than the disease.
Conservatives are often people who were liberal in their younger years. They TRIED the simple solutions and found out that they made things worked. Then they thought about THAT, and came up with (or signed on to) other approaches - that were counter-intuitive but actually made things better rather than worse."
I agree that this is one common characterization, but it does not accurately reflect the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. today, nor does it accurately reflect the original notion of post-enlightenment western liberalism (i.e., not being limited to traditional viewpoints). In effect, you are comparing neo-liberals to classical conservatives, while the so-called neo-"conservatives" we have today much more closely follow the unthinking (neo-)liberal ideology which you describe.
"'Indeed, the United States of America, self-proclaimed "melting pot of cultures" is, percentagewise, more Christian than India is Hindu!'
Really? Less than 49% of India is Hindu? I thought it would be higher than that."
Where do you get that 49% number? People who voted for Bush? Last I checked, the U.S. was 84% Christian, while India was 81.3% Hindu. Upon re-checking the CIA World Fact Book, the new U.S. estimate is 76% or 78% (depending on whether you count Mormons as Christians) -- which makes my original claim wrong, but is still nowhere near your claim of 49%. Of course, this varies by region; where I live, it's probably more like 90-95% Christian (and they mostly voted for Democrats). If you want to go on an ethnic rather than religious basis, the largest group in India is Indo-Aryan, at 72%, while the largest group in the U.S. is white at 77.1%.
All of this is not to say that any one place or group is better than another, but rather that they have more in common than one would like to think. If only we could understand this better, I think we could all be much better off. But until then, keep your guard up to avoid fervent irrationality in the name of race, religion or nationality.
"I have done exactly what you say you've done for your wintel, stuck a a 120GB drive in, took me 20 minutes to clone the old drive into the new one"
I specifically said ADD a hard drive, not change it. You added and SUBTRACTED a hard drive. Thus if you had one 120GB hard drive and wanted to get 240GB of space, you'd have to buy a new 240GB drive instead of just another 120GB drive.
"As for the laptops lacking separate page up/page down/home/end keys, I'm not sure what these page up/page down/home/end keys are doing on my "Mac laptop", hmmm, better tell them to go away, they mustn't belong there."
Again, I said SEPARATE page up/down/home/end keys; on the current models, those are shared with the arrow keys -- perhaps older models had them, but given the topic of the Mac Mini, I assumed we're talking about new machines.
"The majority of users I know of who complain about Macs are really only complaining about two things: Games, and 'upgradeability'."
But PCs are more upgradeable when it comes to certain parts. For example, say I want to add another hard drive. With my $700 Dell, I can just buy a 120GB internal drive for $60 or whatever and put it in. With a Mac, either I have a highly-integrated machine like the Mini or an iMac, in which case I have to buy a more expensive external drive, or I had to pay twice as much in the first place for the original computer. Similarly for upgrading the CD-RW to a DVD-RW or adding a PCI card. I agree these aren't huge things, they're little things you can do to keep your computer up-to-date, and it's more cost-effective when you have a PC. Seeing as how I'd run the same software on either a Mac or a PC (fvwm2 + xterm), the PC has the edge.
Oh, and Mac laptops don't have a trackpoint and their touchpad only has one button and they don't have separate page up/page down/home/end keys. So that's a non-starter. Of course, most PC laptops suck, too.
Dude, the point is that India isn't just Hindus. We all know and admit that the Taj Mahal was comissioned by Shah Jahan in memoriam of his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The India that we talk about today is a secular state with a hugely diverse population coming from all sorts of different cultural and religious backgrounds. Indeed, the United States of America, self-proclaimed "melting pot of cultures" is, percentagewise, more Christian than India is Hindu!
I remember an "Illinois Bell" before "Ameritech" came along, but I don't know whether Illinois Bell was ever a totally separate company or if it was always federated with its Ameritech peers. Here is some interesting information on the old Bell system and where they went after the break-up.
"And yes, I do have a problem with people who write documents like the ones found in eros-os.org, who think that being so tecnical (perhaps to disguise how dumb their designs are?) makes them 'smarter' than the rest of us."
Please don't take it so personally, they're just trying to get their point across as precisely as they can. Some people just write like that.
Agreed on laptops, but A/V equipment that actually has a detachable power cord, like game consoles and boomboxes, usually use the same sort of ungrounded power cord/connector. For example, the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and this old Radio Shack tape recorder from my TRS-80 all use compatible power cords.
"But AIX was never billed as being UNIX. It's a UNIXlike OS."
Actually, I have this free mouse pad from IBM that says "AIX: UNIX at its best." I always used to ask people if that was true, but I couldn't find anyone who'd ever really used AIX except for web browsing and e-mail on an old PowerPC 601-based workstation.
That's a good question. I strongly doubt Kerry would be nominated again, because the fact that he lost this time makes him look weak to the public. Fundamnetally, people want a loving parent for the country: a good person who doesn't always listen to people because he or she already knows them well. Anyone up for it?
"Not every decision on right and wrong is a moral one. There are many frameworks you can use to decide right and wrong. Morality is using religion as a framework.
In philosophy a distinction is made between mores and morality. Mores being a rationally arrived at set of right and wrong actions and morality being a religiously dictated set.
...
the laws should be based on a rational process and not handed down by god."
Now this is an interesting viewpoint, because I consider myself a moral person, but not a religious person. Perhaps different people in this discussion are using slightly different definitions of the word?
Anyhow, I think you will also find that your (and my) interest in rationality has a distinctly religious element to it. For any system of reasoning, you need a set of basic assumptions and rules, e.g., true != false, modus ponens, 1+1=2. In the end, whether thinking religiously or rationally, we have to make some assumptions, and we generally base these on experience. To say that making fewer base assumptions and building up from those generally results in better conclusions is, again, based on experience and what one defines as "better."
In conclusion, right and wrong, good and bad are relative conditions which depend upon one's point of view; the degree to which we can agree, or at least compromise upon these strongly affects our success as a society. Therefore all legislation is, fundamentally, moral.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Moreover, in today's social climate, there are many major group dichotomies which do not fall along state boundaries. For example, urban vs. rural: a voter in Chicago often has a lot more in common with one in New York than one in Decatur (IL). But you can't even draw the line there, because it gets more complicated. As people of all stripes have picked up their bags and dispersed throughout the U.S.A. in the 217 years since the Constitution was framed, it's become a lot harder to corral the different interest groups. Whereas old, established communities with equally well-established interests and problems persist to this day in other parts of the world, the U.S. is overrun with McDonalds-SUV-strip mall-powered suburbs where no one really knows or cares about anyone. While on the surface Americans appear very open and mobile, we have indeed succeeded in developing an extreme form of provinciality where just going over to the neighbors' house is unthinkable, especially when your favorite TV show is on at home. At the lowest levels, we suffer from a deep and growing disunity which will serve as a major challenge in the continuance of this once-great nation.
That's almost exactly the same program as I wrote:-) I was just pointing out that programming it (non-tail) recursively would be making a copy of the list on the stack, and programming it tail-recursively would, in this case, would result in a program that looks essentially identical to the iterative version.
"You can also use them to upload free Java games and applications, without paying $$$ to your provider."
Wait, you can run Java on LG VX-series (Verizon) phones? Do you have a link describing how to do that? I know that with T-Mobile Nokia phones, you can just download J2ME JARs over IR or bluetooth, but I didn't know there was a way to do it for the VX's.
"- write a loop that tries to walk through the list and "switch" pointers (doable, but rarely done correctly, also lots of temp vars and pain involved)"
Just wondering, how else would you do it without making a copy of the list? The recursive solution makes a temporary copy on the stack. Here's what I came up with, please tell me if I messed up (also please excuse the Slashdot misformatting):
// Reverse the contents of a linked list. Assumptions: // - List is not circular. // - Last item's next element is NULL (0). ListItem *reverse(ListItem *item) { ListItem *prev = null; while (item) { ListItem *next = item->next; item->next = prev; prev = item; item = next; } return prev; }
"On the whole you're right, but just a small clarification: the syncing isn't a job for the memory access 'protocol,' it is a low-level BIOS setting. It's not so much a matter of syncing between chips, but just making sure that each chip can complete its task in the demanded time.
Thus, if you increase the memory bus speed (making each cycle shorter in wall clock time), you have to loosen up the latencies (allow more cycles to each stage of the access so that the RAM chips have enough wall clock time to physically cope)."
Yes, latency would be the more appropriate term here. I was referring to the fact that with more memory sticks or chips, you'll have more clock paths, so there is a possibility that there will be more variation in the latencies between the slowest and fastest responders. I doubt this is anything significant in a typical PC.
"(Beside all this, dual-channel systems of course get a boost from populating both channels; and some consumer grade motherboards get flaky if you populate the third and fourth slot... but other than that, adding memory should have no negative impact whatsoever on performance. The more the merrier.)"
"The noted problems with flash (sram) is that it has limited numbers of writes. But it retains the data when it is powered down.
And so if you design a drive that has a continuous source of power, then you could use cheeper dram for a solid state drive."
Flash memory and SRAM are actually very different. Flash is relatively cheap and does not require power, but has a limited number of writes, slow access times and generally uses block erase. SRAM is pretty expensive (4-6 transistors per bit, like a register), can be fast, does not need refresh cycles, and requires a little bit of power to stay charged (old SRAM memory cards typically included a button-cell battery). DRAM is somewhere in between. There have been DRAM-based battery-backed solid state "disk" products for servers.
"I thought that if you get too much RAM it can slow your system down as it takes longer to search for the data that you need. But I'm not 100% show that is true or whether the speed decrease is noticeable."
That doesn't make sense -- typical PCs don't have associative memory, so the hardware is not "searching for the data". Perhaps clock cycles need to be made a little longer to make sure all the RAM chips are in sync, but that should already be taken care of in the protocol; as far as I know, PC motherboards don't decrease the memory bus speed as you add more memory.
The only concrete example I can think of that you might be referring to is the old (1997) Intel 430TX chipset, in which L2 cache was disabled for memory above 64MB. I think it was the case that if you had 128MB of RAM, lines from the upper 64MB would not be cached in L2, while the lower 64MB would be. In particular, since Windows (at least in those days) allocated memory from the highest physical address on down, it sometimes seemed slower with more memory.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but I'll have to concur with the other posters here and say that my 2.5-year-old 100GB Maxtor drive is doing just fine in my Dell. I think it's 5400RPM. You might want to check on your heat and/or power situation.
"Deciding the value of an OS based on the needs of a particular application can be misleading."
Indeed, I suppose for someone like you, XP Pro would be a must, while obviously, for others, it would not. In the end, it is the utility you get out of a product that matters, not the number of features it presents. Just for kicks, here's the groups of others I thought of who wouldn't need to buy XP Pro:
modest home users (those who don't need NT domain support and a few other advanced features)
script kiddies/31337 h@x0rz -- they'll just pirate XP Pro (or more likely, a Longhorn beta)
Linux users (they'll try to get a refund on XP Home, and probably fail)
people who work for a large organization which has a site license for XP Pro and need its features to bring work home
Slashdot Mirror
This makes no sense in the context of the current actions of the legislature. The Congress just approved a measure, which has been signed into law by the President, that will limit class action lawsuits. They have also said that they want to limit medical malpractice, tobacco, and asbestos suits. These basis of these actions is a clause in the Constitution (Article III) that grants the legislature power to limit the Court's jurisdiction. This power is very, very, rarely used, and these actions would represent a large shift in the use of this power.
In short, the Congress has shown that it is more than willing; it is eager to step in, as long as it will help the great god Business.
I am embarassingly ignorant of the details of the legislation you cite, but as you yourself point out, with all things politics, it's not that simple. For example, big business really isn't losing due to medical malpractice suits. In fact, insurance companies love it, because they can raise doctors' premiums to such a level that a good surgeon in the wrong jurisdiction might be netting less than an average sysadmin after malpractice insurance and school loans. For this very reason, some insurance companies lobby against medical review boards, thereby lobbying for unsafe doctors!
The situation is similar with class action lawsuits: they're really a good deal for negligent companies and big-shot lawyers, but often not so much so for the individuals comprising the class. If you're party to a class action law suit, you can't file further complaints against the defendent on those grounds -- when it's resolved, you're considered to be fully paid-up. Moreover, typical compensation for the individuals is very small (like $5, or sometimes even just worthless coupons for more products that may suffer from similar flaws!). This is because the lawyers in charge of the class action suit are able to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy -- almost like the original company would were there no class action suits at all!
Of course, everything I said does not apply in all situations, though it does apply significantly often.
Not necessarily true -- IBM's Jikes/Jalapeno Java VMs are written in Java. The way you build them is (1) run them under another VM until they sufficiently JIT compile themselves to be self-hosting, (2) dump the JIT-compiled memory image, and (3) load the image whenever you need to run the VM.
Conservative ideology, on the other hand, promotes thought about problems. The targets are largely the same. But the solutions take into account the unintended consequences of directly attacking the problem - which are often a cure far worse than the disease.
Conservatives are often people who were liberal in their younger years. They TRIED the simple solutions and found out that they made things worked. Then they thought about THAT, and came up with (or signed on to) other approaches - that were counter-intuitive but actually made things better rather than worse."
I agree that this is one common characterization, but it does not accurately reflect the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. today, nor does it accurately reflect the original notion of post-enlightenment western liberalism (i.e., not being limited to traditional viewpoints). In effect, you are comparing neo-liberals to classical conservatives, while the so-called neo-"conservatives" we have today much more closely follow the unthinking (neo-)liberal ideology which you describe.
Really? Less than 49% of India is Hindu? I thought it would be higher than that."
Where do you get that 49% number? People who voted for Bush? Last I checked, the U.S. was 84% Christian, while India was 81.3% Hindu. Upon re-checking the CIA World Fact Book, the new U.S. estimate is 76% or 78% (depending on whether you count Mormons as Christians) -- which makes my original claim wrong, but is still nowhere near your claim of 49%. Of course, this varies by region; where I live, it's probably more like 90-95% Christian (and they mostly voted for Democrats). If you want to go on an ethnic rather than religious basis, the largest group in India is Indo-Aryan, at 72%, while the largest group in the U.S. is white at 77.1%.
All of this is not to say that any one place or group is better than another, but rather that they have more in common than one would like to think. If only we could understand this better, I think we could all be much better off. But until then, keep your guard up to avoid fervent irrationality in the name of race, religion or nationality.
I specifically said ADD a hard drive, not change it. You added and SUBTRACTED a hard drive. Thus if you had one 120GB hard drive and wanted to get 240GB of space, you'd have to buy a new 240GB drive instead of just another 120GB drive.
"As for the laptops lacking separate page up/page down/home/end keys, I'm not sure what these page up/page down/home/end keys are doing on my "Mac laptop", hmmm, better tell them to go away, they mustn't belong there."
Again, I said SEPARATE page up/down/home/end keys; on the current models, those are shared with the arrow keys -- perhaps older models had them, but given the topic of the Mac Mini, I assumed we're talking about new machines.
But PCs are more upgradeable when it comes to certain parts. For example, say I want to add another hard drive. With my $700 Dell, I can just buy a 120GB internal drive for $60 or whatever and put it in. With a Mac, either I have a highly-integrated machine like the Mini or an iMac, in which case I have to buy a more expensive external drive, or I had to pay twice as much in the first place for the original computer. Similarly for upgrading the CD-RW to a DVD-RW or adding a PCI card. I agree these aren't huge things, they're little things you can do to keep your computer up-to-date, and it's more cost-effective when you have a PC. Seeing as how I'd run the same software on either a Mac or a PC (fvwm2 + xterm), the PC has the edge.
Oh, and Mac laptops don't have a trackpoint and their touchpad only has one button and they don't have separate page up/page down/home/end keys. So that's a non-starter. Of course, most PC laptops suck, too.
Dude, the point is that India isn't just Hindus. We all know and admit that the Taj Mahal was comissioned by Shah Jahan in memoriam of his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The India that we talk about today is a secular state with a hugely diverse population coming from all sorts of different cultural and religious backgrounds. Indeed, the United States of America, self-proclaimed "melting pot of cultures" is, percentagewise, more Christian than India is Hindu!
The "NA" in "NASA" stands for "National Aeronautics [and]," not "North America."
haha, that thing like totally sucks!
I remember an "Illinois Bell" before "Ameritech" came along, but I don't know whether Illinois Bell was ever a totally separate company or if it was always federated with its Ameritech peers. Here is some interesting information on the old Bell system and where they went after the break-up.
Please don't take it so personally, they're just trying to get their point across as precisely as they can. Some people just write like that.
Agreed on laptops, but A/V equipment that actually has a detachable power cord, like game consoles and boomboxes, usually use the same sort of ungrounded power cord/connector. For example, the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and this old Radio Shack tape recorder from my TRS-80 all use compatible power cords.
Actually, I have this free mouse pad from IBM that says "AIX: UNIX at its best." I always used to ask people if that was true, but I couldn't find anyone who'd ever really used AIX except for web browsing and e-mail on an old PowerPC 601-based workstation.
That's a good question. I strongly doubt Kerry would be nominated again, because the fact that he lost this time makes him look weak to the public. Fundamnetally, people want a loving parent for the country: a good person who doesn't always listen to people because he or she already knows them well. Anyone up for it?
In philosophy a distinction is made between mores and morality. Mores being a rationally arrived at set of right and wrong actions and morality being a religiously dictated set.
...
the laws should be based on a rational process and not handed down by god."
Now this is an interesting viewpoint, because I consider myself a moral person, but not a religious person. Perhaps different people in this discussion are using slightly different definitions of the word?
Anyhow, I think you will also find that your (and my) interest in rationality has a distinctly religious element to it. For any system of reasoning, you need a set of basic assumptions and rules, e.g., true != false, modus ponens, 1+1=2. In the end, whether thinking religiously or rationally, we have to make some assumptions, and we generally base these on experience. To say that making fewer base assumptions and building up from those generally results in better conclusions is, again, based on experience and what one defines as "better."
In conclusion, right and wrong, good and bad are relative conditions which depend upon one's point of view; the degree to which we can agree, or at least compromise upon these strongly affects our success as a society. Therefore all legislation is, fundamentally, moral.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Moreover, in today's social climate, there are many major group dichotomies which do not fall along state boundaries. For example, urban vs. rural: a voter in Chicago often has a lot more in common with one in New York than one in Decatur (IL). But you can't even draw the line there, because it gets more complicated. As people of all stripes have picked up their bags and dispersed throughout the U.S.A. in the 217 years since the Constitution was framed, it's become a lot harder to corral the different interest groups. Whereas old, established communities with equally well-established interests and problems persist to this day in other parts of the world, the U.S. is overrun with McDonalds-SUV-strip mall-powered suburbs where no one really knows or cares about anyone. While on the surface Americans appear very open and mobile, we have indeed succeeded in developing an extreme form of provinciality where just going over to the neighbors' house is unthinkable, especially when your favorite TV show is on at home. At the lowest levels, we suffer from a deep and growing disunity which will serve as a major challenge in the continuance of this once-great nation.
Have you tried GNU TeXmacs? It's heavily LaTeX-inspired, but WYSIWYG, and also supports scripting in Scheme. Unfortunately, it's pretty slow.
That's almost exactly the same program as I wrote :-) I was just pointing out that programming it (non-tail) recursively would be making a copy of the list on the stack, and programming it tail-recursively would, in this case, would result in a program that looks essentially identical to the iterative version.
Wait, you can run Java on LG VX-series (Verizon) phones? Do you have a link describing how to do that? I know that with T-Mobile Nokia phones, you can just download J2ME JARs over IR or bluetooth, but I didn't know there was a way to do it for the VX's.
Just wondering, how else would you do it without making a copy of the list? The recursive solution makes a temporary copy on the stack. Here's what I came up with, please tell me if I messed up (also please excuse the Slashdot misformatting):
Thus, if you increase the memory bus speed (making each cycle shorter in wall clock time), you have to loosen up the latencies (allow more cycles to each stage of the access so that the RAM chips have enough wall clock time to physically cope)."
Yes, latency would be the more appropriate term here. I was referring to the fact that with more memory sticks or chips, you'll have more clock paths, so there is a possibility that there will be more variation in the latencies between the slowest and fastest responders. I doubt this is anything significant in a typical PC.
"(Beside all this, dual-channel systems of course get a boost from populating both channels; and some consumer grade motherboards get flaky if you populate the third and fourth slot... but other than that, adding memory should have no negative impact whatsoever on performance. The more the merrier.)"
Agreed.
And so if you design a drive that has a continuous source of power, then you could use cheeper dram for a solid state drive."
Flash memory and SRAM are actually very different. Flash is relatively cheap and does not require power, but has a limited number of writes, slow access times and generally uses block erase. SRAM is pretty expensive (4-6 transistors per bit, like a register), can be fast, does not need refresh cycles, and requires a little bit of power to stay charged (old SRAM memory cards typically included a button-cell battery). DRAM is somewhere in between. There have been DRAM-based battery-backed solid state "disk" products for servers.
That doesn't make sense -- typical PCs don't have associative memory, so the hardware is not "searching for the data". Perhaps clock cycles need to be made a little longer to make sure all the RAM chips are in sync, but that should already be taken care of in the protocol; as far as I know, PC motherboards don't decrease the memory bus speed as you add more memory.
The only concrete example I can think of that you might be referring to is the old (1997) Intel 430TX chipset, in which L2 cache was disabled for memory above 64MB. I think it was the case that if you had 128MB of RAM, lines from the upper 64MB would not be cached in L2, while the lower 64MB would be. In particular, since Windows (at least in those days) allocated memory from the highest physical address on down, it sometimes seemed slower with more memory.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but I'll have to concur with the other posters here and say that my 2.5-year-old 100GB Maxtor drive is doing just fine in my Dell. I think it's 5400RPM. You might want to check on your heat and/or power situation.
Indeed, I suppose for someone like you, XP Pro would be a must, while obviously, for others, it would not. In the end, it is the utility you get out of a product that matters, not the number of features it presents. Just for kicks, here's the groups of others I thought of who wouldn't need to buy XP Pro: