Imagine that someone has a pile of kiddie porn in their house. There's no way to prove that they have ever looked at it. The thing that's provable is whether it's physically in their house.
Look at the laws: people are charged with possession of kiddie porn, not looking at it; possession of controlled substances, not getting high, etc. That's why the definitions are so important here: if someone can effectively place illegal images or documents in your "possession" without any cooperation from you, then these laws are meaningless.
If you RTFA you'll see that this is a very serious question with broad implications. Many laws are written in terms of possession, and there isn't a good definition of possession that works for things like browser caches.
Whether what this guy did is morally or ethically wrong is a different issue than whether what he did is illegal. If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it? In either case, planting evidence that could get someone serious jail time suddenly becomes trivial! I could put a link to an obscene photo on my home page and with a small amount of effort make it invisible to you but trick your browser into downloading (and possibly caching) it. Or I could wait until the Google crawler comes by, and then extort a little cash out of Google because now I can show that they possess this photo, etc. (The links don't point to my site; there's no evidence that I've ever possessed the photo.)
Sun has been working on OpenSolaris for a long time. This is not a reaction to Apple.
You could make a more convincing case that Apple is going to x86 to counter OpenSolaris (since OpenSolaris came first). Note that I said more convincing, not convincing. Give the wacky Sun theories a day off, please.
If your workload consists of one thread, this does you no good. If your workload has eight threads, you're golden. If the processor speed is 1.4GHz then this is on the order of 11.2GHz. If your workload has more than eight threads, you'll get more than eight CPU's worth of speed if there's something to do in between memory accesses.
Well, before you say a post is vague and useless, you should at least read it.
The Niagara chip has 8 cores, each of which runs as many as 4 threads. There's not one ALU, there are 8, so there's an improvement. Can they keep 4 threads busy per ALU? Maybe, depending on how often each thread must go to memory. Every time one thread stalls on a load or store, the other threads have an opportunity to execute a bunch of ops.
If your workload consists of one thread, this does you no good. If your
We need to remove the need for Exchange and Active Directory servers.
I wish I had mod points so I could mod this up.
The vast majority of sizeable businesses are wired
into Exchange. There's no suitable replacement in
the OSS world, much less a drop-in replacement.
Without this, it's next to impossible to get into
this space.
The reason that there can be free implementations of these
things is because the vendors (who spent their own money
to develop them) released their specs, IP, and in some cases
reference implementations, to the community. So, for example,
nobody has to worry about licensing or patents or anything else
in order to reimplement, use, or distribute code for NFS. As
another example, who paid the people who spent many, many
years writing the POSIX spec?
As far as the everything-should-run-Linux argument, I didn't
express myself clearly. It's possible to run the same OS on all
of those platforms, but it's a silly, stupid, short-sighted idea.
People who believe that one OS is right for everything are only
an iota better than the one-language-for-everything folk.
Perhaps they just look at it and ask themselves "if I was Chinese, would I say something like that?"
Seriously, given the profound differences between Chinese and English, and each languages' complexity, I'd be very impressed it did a decent job. Until I see it working, however, I remain skeptical. After all, the field of machine translation has been
around longer than most Google employees have been alive,
and it's still got a long way to go.
Users don't care about 90% of the users. They
care about themselves. Why should they spend
money to buy a new PC just because other people
can't take the time to think ahead in their designs?
Also, I hope you don't think 90% is a good
cut-off. If you're happy with assumptions that only hold
90% of the time, I sure hope none of your software
is running on my system.
Besides, if you're talking about assumptions
that cover "90% of the users", you certainly
aren't talking about Linux!
Hypocrite... (software should be free! So I'm
holding mine hostage until you release yours!)
And let's imagine what would happen if the vendors
of those proprietary OS's decided to play the same
way...
Say goodbye to NFS, NIS, Rendezvous, Mono. Perhaps Sun would close Java (which would make the conspiracy theorists happy, but nobody else.) Goodbye to the largess of many large vendors (where
do you think organizations like FSF get their
funding?).
And that crack about "ideally to one". Linux is
a nice OS and all, but believing that it is the
one for all purposes from PDAs to supercomputer
clusters, data warehousing to real-time control
is silly.
ISP accounts can be used for nefarious purposes... yes, I guess.
On the other hand, this is the same administration
that thinks it's perfectly OK for its citizens to
own assault rifles!
ISP accounts are usually used for legal purposes. It's hard to imagine what non-nefarious
uses assault weapons have. They're not much good
for anything except, well, assault.
Most of the bugs that I've seen that are "platform-specific" are not actually due to bugs
in that platform -- they're just ordinary bugs that were there all along, unnoticed due to poor assumptions. (Back in my day, we called this the
"all the world's a VAX" assumption -- now it's the
"all the world's x86") Finding these bugs and removing them make the code better.
The bugs due to platform bugs -- well, knowing about
them helps improve the platform.
If you think fixing these bugs is a pain in
the neck, fine. If you think it's a waste of
time, however, think again.
What do you think that they thought they
were doing? They didn't get a message from Stanford
saying "here's how you check your admission status";
they got a message from their friends saying "here's how you craft a URL that let's you sneak in to the web site and check your admission status before the official date."
Imagine if the email from their friends had said "Your admission status is kept in the filing cabinet in room 306 of the admissions office, and the guy who works in that office leaves the door unlocked when he eats lunch at noon every day."
Walking into an unlocked office and looking in the filing cabinet versus cobbling together a URL that
obviously circumvents the system. Tell me the difference.
It depends on the publication. Most conference papers are written and edited by the authors (with help from reviewers and shepherds, who are more or less volunteers). Most journals, in contrast, employ copy editors to clean up the English, make sure that everything is formatted just so, make sure that all the citations are complete and in the correct format, etc. This is a non-trivial amount of work, and requires professionals.
Taking Harvard to court could be classified as a form of self-destructive behavior... I'm sure that the Business School consulted with their lawyers before doing this. I'm fairly confident that part of the application process requires that the applicants sign a box that says "we can reject you for any reason we like, and nothing is officially decided until you get the letter from us, so even if someone thought they saw that they'd been admitted, it means nothing whatsoever.
Harvard gets sued all the time. They expect it, they prepare for it, and they don't lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine that someone has a pile of kiddie porn in their house. There's no way to prove that they have ever looked at it. The thing that's provable is whether it's physically in their house.
Look at the laws: people are charged with possession of kiddie porn, not looking at it; possession of controlled substances, not getting high, etc. That's why the definitions are so important here: if someone can effectively place illegal images or documents in your "possession" without any cooperation from you, then these laws are meaningless.
Whether what this guy did is morally or ethically wrong is a different issue than whether what he did is illegal. If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it? In either case, planting evidence that could get someone serious jail time suddenly becomes trivial! I could put a link to an obscene photo on my home page and with a small amount of effort make it invisible to you but trick your browser into downloading (and possibly caching) it. Or I could wait until the Google crawler comes by, and then extort a little cash out of Google because now I can show that they possess this photo, etc. (The links don't point to my site; there's no evidence that I've ever possessed the photo.)
This is far from simple.
You could make a more convincing case that Apple is going to x86 to counter OpenSolaris (since OpenSolaris came first). Note that I said more convincing, not convincing. Give the wacky Sun theories a day off, please.
Justing reading the stuff that is released, however, is a joy.
Anyway, the last paragraph should be:
If your workload consists of one thread, this does you no good. If your workload has eight threads, you're golden. If the processor speed is 1.4GHz then this is on the order of 11.2GHz. If your workload has more than eight threads, you'll get more than eight CPU's worth of speed if there's something to do in between memory accesses.
you should at least read it.
The Niagara chip has 8 cores, each of which runs as
many as 4 threads. There's not one ALU, there are 8, so there's an improvement. Can they keep 4 threads busy per ALU? Maybe, depending on how often
each thread must go to memory. Every time one thread stalls on a load or store, the other threads have an opportunity to execute a bunch of ops.
If your workload consists of one thread, this does you no good. If your
I wish I had mod points so I could mod this up.
The vast majority of sizeable businesses are wired into Exchange. There's no suitable replacement in the OSS world, much less a drop-in replacement. Without this, it's next to impossible to get into this space.
As far as the everything-should-run-Linux argument, I didn't express myself clearly. It's possible to run the same OS on all of those platforms, but it's a silly, stupid, short-sighted idea. People who believe that one OS is right for everything are only an iota better than the one-language-for-everything folk.
Seriously, given the profound differences between Chinese and English, and each languages' complexity, I'd be very impressed it did a decent job. Until I see it working, however, I remain skeptical. After all, the field of machine translation has been around longer than most Google employees have been alive, and it's still got a long way to go.
Users don't care about 90% of the users. They care about themselves. Why should they spend money to buy a new PC just because other people can't take the time to think ahead in their designs?
Also, I hope you don't think 90% is a good cut-off. If you're happy with assumptions that only hold 90% of the time, I sure hope none of your software is running on my system.
Besides, if you're talking about assumptions that cover "90% of the users", you certainly aren't talking about Linux!
Hypocrite... (software should be free! So I'm holding mine hostage until you release yours!)
And let's imagine what would happen if the vendors of those proprietary OS's decided to play the same way...
Say goodbye to NFS, NIS, Rendezvous, Mono. Perhaps Sun would close Java (which would make the conspiracy theorists happy, but nobody else.) Goodbye to the largess of many large vendors (where do you think organizations like FSF get their funding?).
And that crack about "ideally to one". Linux is a nice OS and all, but believing that it is the one for all purposes from PDAs to supercomputer clusters, data warehousing to real-time control is silly.
On the other hand, this is the same administration that thinks it's perfectly OK for its citizens to own assault rifles!
ISP accounts are usually used for legal purposes. It's hard to imagine what non-nefarious uses assault weapons have. They're not much good for anything except, well, assault.
The bugs due to platform bugs -- well, knowing about them helps improve the platform.
If you think fixing these bugs is a pain in the neck, fine. If you think it's a waste of time, however, think again.
The web site is "their property"? I rather think that the applicants are paying guests, not owners, of the web site.
Good lord, I thought we'd made more progress than that!
(In truth, we have. Linux is running lots of critical systems, and people know this.)
What do you think that they thought they were doing? They didn't get a message from Stanford saying "here's how you check your admission status"; they got a message from their friends saying "here's how you craft a URL that let's you sneak in to the web site and check your admission status before the official date."
Imagine if the email from their friends had said "Your admission status is kept in the filing cabinet in room 306 of the admissions office, and the guy who works in that office leaves the door unlocked when he eats lunch at noon every day."
Walking into an unlocked office and looking in the filing cabinet versus cobbling together a URL that obviously circumvents the system. Tell me the difference.
If you're using MS word 2000 anyway, you must have a platform that will run OO.o.
Let me get back to you after the next election.
At least it's better than the nightmare world of "The Color Purple" as envisioned by Margaret Atwood!
And terms like "megayear", "kiloday"; well it's hard to see why they need defining at all. Even though I'm a pedantic bore, it still seems overgeekly.
Harvard gets sued all the time. They expect it, they prepare for it, and they don't lose.