While the Athlon is far and away a better deal than the P4, there's one thing the P4 has in spades over the Athlon: it does exactly the right thing when it overheats -- it steps down its speed.
Now, most people aren't going to care about this but those who are trying to build a quiet PC are -- if you put a P4 in your system you could conceivably cool it passively and take the performance hit. I don't know how much of a performance hit you'd get by cooling passively versus actively but the video on Tom's Hardware about what happens when you remove the heatsink from various processors shows the framerate of Quake III returning to something close to the original just by reattaching the heatsink to the P4...and the fan isn't running on it at the time. Of course, that's probably because the heatsink itself is cool and will warm up significantly after being attached to the CPU for a while.
My question is this: what heatsinks exist out there that are designed for passive cooling purposes? I'm sure the design of such heatsinks differs significantly from those designed to accomodate a fan.
The silver lining? Corporate PHB's, the holy grail of Microsoft marketing, will lose confidence in any of Mr.Bill's claims of reliability and security, once and for all. XP was supposed to be the one-size-fits-all OS, from palmtops to corporate web front-ends to data warehouses. (not that it was the first attempt at this unification by Microsoft, or even their competitors.) Even the golf-buddy execs are going to remember the day when the FBI started pushing patches to the monopolist's holey flagship.
Methinks you have far too much faith in corporate PHBs. Why should they lose confidence in Microsoft for these security blunders when they didn't lose faith over things like the countless Outlook viruses, or the IIS vulnerabilities, or the MS-SQL problems? No, just like every other time, they won't blame Microsoft -- they'll blame their own IS guys.
And I'll tell you why: because they know that they can't sue Microsoft, and they have to "successfully" place the blame somewhere.
Microsoft is popular with them not because it can be sued, but because the PHBs are sheep that follow the herd wherever it goes. They'll think Microsoft is the greatest thing until enough others think otherwise. In short, it's a self-perpetuating problem that will only be fixed when the economics of going with another solution instead of Microsoft means the difference between surviving as a business and failing as a business.
If Microsoft does things right, the PHBs won't have that kind of economic incentive until it's too late and they really don't have any choice of where to go anymore.
Think about it: the U.S. government is unwilling to do a damned thing to Microsoft, so Microsoft can make as many exclusive deals with hardware manufacturers as it wants and do so with impunity.
Imagine how long Linux would remain even remotely competitive if it couldn't run on any modern commodity hardware...
However, they couldn't regulate any private manned space venture, as space isn't theirs. If I didn't live in the US and wanted to go into space using my own stuff, I'm not entirely sure how they could regulate that at all.
That's if you don't live in the U.S. Or in any country that acts as the U.S.'s bitch.
So let's say you're trying to start a private manned space venture. You need all sorts of relatively exotic and high-tech equipment (the space suits, for one thing). Where exactly are you going to get this stuff from? Any place you might get it from will receive strong "suggestions" from the U.S. government that they refrain from selling it. A few governments on the planet will tell the U.S. where to stick it but most/all of those don't have the tech to sell you anyway.
Basically, I'd say that any country that has an advanced enough tech base to make your venture possible also has a power-hungry paranoid government running it, or one which likes to kiss the ass of such a government.
IMHO, it's that in Clarke's "2001", humans have a permanent manned presence in space near Earth and are starting to expand a bit.
In the real 2001, we don't have shit for a manned presence in space. Let's face it, compared with the vision in "2001", the ISS is a complete joke, and we've basically just been sitting on our asses for the past 30 years when it comes to space.
But the real bummer of it all is that I don't think we'll have a permanent, independent manned presence in space for at least the next thousand years. Why? Because such a group of people represents a greater threat to the U.S. (or any large, power-greedy government) than any other country on Earth. Think about it: such a group of people could literally drop rocks the size of a football field on any place on the planet, and do so with relative immunity. Such a group would be more or less untouchable, and no government on the face of this planet that cares anything about power could handle that.
That's why I think the government will regulate any private manned space venture out of existence.
...though the open source roots of many products are not likely to be widely known.
There are probably countless "hardware" boxes that use FreeBSD or some other BSD derivative as a base. The company takes that base and adds their own code to do whatever it is that would be unique to the box, then sells the result as a hardware solution. The box itself might have a lot of proprietary hardware in it, or it might not. That'll just depend on the box.
But either way, open source probably powers a lot more of the hardware (routers, proxies, firewalls, etc.) than the average PHB would expect.
I thought you weren't allowed to use a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another area?
It used to be the case that this was so. Not any longer. Today, if you're a wealthy monopoly in the United States, you can do any damned thing you please, because it's only a matter of who you have to pay off.
When you look at how most companies operate and how the users behave, one thing should become clear: quality of support doesn't really matter.
Let me explain.
You see, companies that use software aren't truly interested in the quality of the support they get. Rather, what they're really interested in is the appearance of support. That is, all they really care about is that they know that there is someone they theoretically could call for help if they need it. For these people, it's much more important for them to be able to easily identify who that entity is than it is for them to actually be able to get decent support from that entity.
So the reason that software from Microsoft and other larger software providers is more palatable to the average PHB than open source software is that they immediately know who to call for help, while the same isn't true of some piece of open source software.
This is true of the users as well. It doesn't matter if the support they get from their IT department sucks. What matters to them is that they know who to call for help, even if the "help" they get is essentially useless.
So like almost everything else in this world, appearance is much more important than substance.
allow me to be a crank about something that always bothered me: i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. it seems out of line with the trend of what humanity has been learning from science over the last thousand years: that the universe is random, trivial, makes little sense, and we are not anywhere near the center of it.
it doesn't all boil down to an equation on a t-shirt? woop-de-friggin'-doo. just because us humans are reductionist thinkers and anal-retentive "everything in my world has to make sense" psychological types doesn't mean the universe has to fit that template. there does not have to be a theory of everything for the universe to work. it doesn't need a beginning, it doesn't need an end. the universe can be timeless, static, and random. what's wrong with that?
That's fine, except for one thing: it's our reductionist thinking (along with our ability to make tools) that got us to the top of the food chain to begin with. So in that sense, the universe has validated our reductionism.
If the universe truly behaved randomly, then we wouldn't even have science. In fact, I'd argue that we probably wouldn't even have life.
Now, there may indeed be limits to how much the rules can be reduced, and we may indeed have hit them already, but there isn't any way to truly know. This stuff takes time. It took 150 years to go from Newton's laws of motion to special relativity. Computers may be subject to Moore's law but I doubt science is. For one thing, science relies on discovery and original thinking more than just about any other branch of human endeavor. People who truly think outside of the box, so to speak, are very rare, and that's why it took so long to get from Newton's laws to special relativity.
So don't blame us for being reductionist. It's because the universe has rewarded us handsomely for it that we're that way.
Act like a cheezy salesdroid. Promise to implement everything the "customer" (usually some other department of the company) requests and tell them that it will be done in a very short period of time like, say, a month or two. Mutually exclusive features are really good here. Say and do whatever it takes to "sell" them on the project.
Talk with the "customer" on a regular basis. Promise to make all changes that they request, especially the ones that would normally be far outside of the scope of the project -- the ones that any sane engineer would insist requires a redesign. Promise that it won't be a problem to make these changes and that it'll only take a couple of weeks at most.
Push your developers hard. I mean really hard. They'll have to work 20 hour days for weeks at a stretch in order to meet the design goals and the target release date, after all, and they do work for you, after all, and you did promise the "customer" it would be done on time, after all. When the project gets behind schedule, fire the team lead(s) to provide "motivation" for the rest of the developers and to show everyone that you mean business. They were just getting in the way anyway. It doesn't matter that they had the most knowledge about the project, because we all know that software is easy.
When you near completion of the project (assuming your developers haven't bailed out on you already, but hey, the economy sucks right now so they'll be happy to be your bitches), hold another meeting with the "customer". You're almost sure to discover that they didn't really need what you're building that much anyway. Oh, well, at least it was good exercise for your developers! At least, for those that are still around. Hold a meeting with your developers, declare victory, and retreat (um, I mean "advance in the opposite direction").
And the system (now an Tbird-1.33) is still slower than Windows 2K (ex., the mouse gets jerky when my apps thrash the disk).
The mouse jerkiness probably happens because your system isn't using DMA to talk to the disks.
This is easy to fix from the command line (until the next reboot) but really should be something that the OS installer just gets right the first time.
To turn on DMA to your hard drive, do this as root:
# hdparm -d 1/dev/hda
Now, that presupposes that your hard drive is/dev/hda. The following command, while rather a bit more complicated, will turn DMA on all of your currently mounted drives:
The output of the command between the backticks is substituted for the backticked portion of the command. The command between the backticks does the following:
df gets a list of all of the filesystems that are currently mounted. The output consists of the device name, the size of the device, the amount of space used on it, the amount of free space, the percentage of space used, and where the device is mounted. This output is handed to...
awk, which gives us the contents of the first column (hence the $1) and hands that to...
grep, which gives us only those entries that begin with/dev/hd, which are IDE hard drives, and hands it to...
sed, which removes any trailing numbers from the input it was handed. So now/dev/hda3 becomes/dev/hda. Anyway, the output is then handed to...
sort, which has a -u option which tells it to produce only unique results. So if the input consists of multiple lines that are/dev/hda, sort will give us only one such line.
Now, the output from this is in the form of a list of hard disk device specifiers, which are the devices we want to turn on DMA to.
hdparm -d 1 turns on DMA to the devices that are listed. The command in the backticks gave us those devices.
Whether it's the bondholders or Excite@home doesn't make any difference: Excite@home is a tool of its investors and will therefore act accordingly.
Even if Excite@home stood to lose money by accepting AT&T's deal, their valuation will now likely be a fraction of what it was before they turned off their subscribers, because the primary value of Excite@home wasn't their hardware, it was their subscribers -- who aren't likely to be around anymore after this. They will lose all of the subscribers they have turned off unless they turn them back on fast, because those subscribers will either drop the service entirely in favor of something else or AT&T will transition them to an independent infrastructure.
And the end result is that Excite@home will end up getting pennies on the dollar for their equipment and nothing else, since they will then have nothing else of value. They may claim that their assets are worth more than the $307 million that was offered, but I doubt that's the case when their equipment is valued at pennies on the dollar. Remember: equipment these days is going for dirt cheap because of all the businesses that are failing, and the prices you see at places like eBay are as high as they get. Excite@home will probably get a lot less money than that because they have so much equipment that they'll probably go through a liquidator -- and get pennies on the dollar as a result.
So like I said, by doing this Excite@home (or their investors. Same thing as far as I'm concerned) has essentially managed to slit its own throat.
I have to congratulate them. I don't think they could have come up with a more boneheaded move, one which both causes it to lose its primary assets (its subscriber base) and pisses off its buyer in one stroke.
By turning off all their subscribers, Excite@home has effectively made an enemy of AT&T. Now that they've done this, I see one of two outcomes:
Excite@home will turn the services back on and take the offer they were given (if that's even possible!)
or
AT&T will finish transitioning their customers to their own internal network and tell Excite@home to go fsck themselves.
So if Excite doesn't turn their network back on VERY soon, like in the next day or so, they're toast: AT&T has the cash and resources to manage their cablemodem subscribers themselves. Once Excite@home no longer has anyone hooked up to their network, their value will drop through the floor.
In short, even though the offer they were given probably wasn't very good (it was probably really bad, actually), now that they've shut down their customers they're dead. And if I were AT&T, I'd see to it that the floor was wiped with Excite@home in retaliation for screwing over my customers.
The only variable I know of here that can affect the outcome is the rate at which cablemodem subscribers bail out and go with some other service, for those that can. Since it takes at least a couple of weeks for most DSL connections to be provisioned and configured, the only immediate competition that AT&T will lose customers to is dialup, which isn't terribly comparable. So I think AT&T is pretty safe when it comes to keeping their customers for the next couple of weeks. As long as they can transition the vast majority of their customers in that amount of time, they're safe, and that means that Excite@home has managed to fsck themselves good with this idiotic move.
The space race might start up again, and that might be a good thing, but don't let it get your hopes up. The goal I (and many others) would like to see achieved is a permanent, independant manned presence in space, because only then will we as a race truly be able to survive whatever happens to our planet.
But there's a reason for the opposition to private manned space missions expressed by the government: the government opposes an independent manned presence in space. The reason is that such an independent group would wield much more power than the U.S. government does, because it could (if it wished) threaten to drop small asteroids anywhere on earth with relatively high precision. It's only when the U.S. government has an adequate defense against such an attack that it will truly allow a manned presence in space.
Another cold war might be good for the United States, in terms of freedom and such. Didn't anyone here notice how quickly our freedoms started to erode once the cold war with the Soviet Union ended? Without an "enemy" that exemplifies traits that are in direct opposition to the ones the U.S. ostensibly stands for (liberty, justice, etc.), it seems we move quickly away from what we stand for -- we forget who and what we are. If we get into another cold war, we might get some of our freedoms back. Because it would not do at all for us to look so much like the enemy.
Of course, that's probably wishful thinking: we'll probably wind up in another cold war and lose more freedom all at the same time, and in the name of that cold war to boot!
Sigh... The world seems like such a hopeless place right now, because there's no place left on earth that I know of where real liberty isn't on its deathbed.
1. I code something.
2. I have all rights to that something.
3. I allow you to use my something.
4. Stop sniggering at the back.
Where have I denied you freedom?
I have, in actual fact, given to you by allowing you to use the result of my effort.
This is true only if you require nothing in return.
But in the commercial sector, you allow me to use your something only under a very specific condition, namely that I pay for it.
But if I'm going to pay for it, then once I have a copy of it in my possession that copy is mine, not yours, and I should be able to do any damned thing I please with it, because I paid for it. In essence, I exchanged some amount of my labor for some amount of yours.
Now, it's reasonable for me as the buyer to come to some agreement with you as the seller as to what things I can do with the software in exchange for a lower price. But it is not reasonable for you to expect to get anything you want and to restrict me in any way you want simply because you are the originator of the software in question.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their work with the understanding that it will fall into the public domain after some limited period of time. IT IS NOT A PROPERTY RIGHT. It is an understanding between publishers and the public, an agreement that a limited monopoly is a reasonable payment (by the public) for the work if it falls into the public domain after a limited period of time.
Now, because copyright is such an understanding, it follows that the public has certain rights with respect to copyrighted items during the monopoly period: it may make personal backups, take excerpts, etc., and in general may do whatever it pleases with the work in private, as long as it is not copied in whole and distributed to others. These exceptions to your absolute monopoly are reasonable.
As the author of the work, you have a choice: you can exercise complete control over the work until it falls into the hands of someone else (perhaps even after, via contract), or you can exercise limited control over it and accept the protections and privileges afforded you by copyright law. YOU CANNOT DO BOTH. Nor is it, in my opinion, reasonable for you to expect to.
The reason people here are complaining about the loss of civil liberties, privacy, etc., here in the U.S. is that they do not want the U.S. to turn into what China is today. And yet, that's exactly where we're headed, and it's only a matter of time.
Think on this: the Constitution grants freedom of speech, but does not grant the freedom to hear what you want. So it would be legal for the U.S. government to require that everyone in the U.S. (or their ISPs, at any rate) block all content which isn't "approved" for consumption by the public. People would still be able to "publish" whatever they like on the internet, but nobody will ever be able to see it.
That's just one example of what they can do if they want. Maybe it'll be thrown out by the Supreme Court. But then again, maybe it won't.
No, it's not happening right now. But what makes you think it won't, or can't, happen here?
You might note that few would say American industry has exploited Japan and its workers, infact American industry has been damaged by competition. The idea that globalization has anything to do with exploitation should take note of this.
I'm sure there are some who equate globalization with exploitation, but anyone with any brains will be more discerning than that.
In particular, whether you get exploitation with globalization depends on the approach used.
In the case of Japan, it's not clear to me that U.S. corporations had a large hand in its reconstruction and economic prosperity. I doubt very much that U.S. industry attempted to install and/or maintain a brutal dictatorship in Japan in order to keep labor prices down there, if they used Japan as a source of cheap labor at all.
What many people seem to object to the most is the exploitation of people who live under brutal, despotic governments by way of greasing the palms of individuals within those governments such that the people have no chance of improving their situation. Certainly the CIA
has helped these American corporations do just that. What makes you believe that things are really any different now?
Point being that I don't believe Japan is a terribly good example to use to support the way many believe globalization will be implemented. Quite the opposite, in fact, in large part because I have little reason to believe that the U.S. will exercise its considerable might to implement democracy -- doing so will make it harder for our corporations to exploit cheap labor in the long run, just as it did in Japan. You can bet they won't make that mistake again.
I really don't see a future for VA. Look for them to sell off unprofitable assets (likely including Slashdot, unless the changes Rob discussed can make it profitable).
I hate to think of who would end up buying Slashdot. Perhaps the RIAA or Microsoft. Ouch. Either way, if Slashdot gets sold, expect things like the "Your Rights Online" section to disappear.
"In order to be subject to a special administrative measure the attorney general has to have a certification from the head of a law enforcement or intelligence agency that reasonable suspicion exists to believe that a particular inmate may use communication with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of terrorism," the statement said. [Emphasis added.]
From: John Ashcroft, Attorney General
To: George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence
Subject: Need a favor...
Hi, George. Seems we have a guy in custody who we might have a little trouble winning our case against. We need some evidence against him (we'll anonymize it, of course) so that we can nail him for something, and want to listen in to his conversations with his lawyer to get it. But we can't do that without a certification that a reasonable suspicion exists that he may use these conversations for terrorism purposes. Could you send me another one of those?
I know I keep asking for these but you know we have a quota to keep.
Thanks in advance, George. Lunch is on me next time. And if there's anything you need, anything at all, just let me know.
At any point in time the ground your skyscraper stands on can crumble into nothingness. [Operating System bugs]
Yep. But, worse, parts of the ground can literally disappear while others are rock-solid, and you won't know ahead of time which is which.
Your skyscraper can be required to stand on slightly different types of ground. [Operating System types and versions]
Not just "slightly", either, but types of ground that could have completely different characteristics.
Also half-way through building the skyscraper you find out that the plant has been changed and it's now supposed to have a Shopping Mall on the ground floor.[Creeping Requirements]
Worse, the requirements of the shopping mall are such that you'll have to completely redesign your building.
Couldn't IBM claim to have a viable business plan for which it needs these docs, to use on its open source? They write free software to help them to sell profitable hardware and connect in an open way closed source software. That would be sweet, to see IBM get some serious revenge on MS after all these year!
Won't happen. Microsoft will just claim that any business plan that involves competing with Microsoft is ipso facto nonviable because, after all, Microsoft is a monopoly!
The DOJ thing did a very important thing - it showed that Microsoft is fallable
No, it only showed that Microsoft will change its practices slightly (but only slightly) when under the harsh scrutiny of law.
But that's no longer the case. If anything, this result shows that Microsoft is infallible -- they've won, after all.
The only thing that's left now is death by thousands of cuts from lawsuits. I have no idea how likely that is, or how effective it may be.
If I remember correctly, the DOJ and attorney generals for the states told the people to not sue Microsoft until they'd worked the problem. Well, they have, and have shown themselves to be corporate shills for Microsoft.
I'm happy - I'm Microsoft's customer again, not thier biatch-yesman-mouthpeice to my companys upper management. I have a choice again - and more choices coming with each passing day, when new code gets posted on myriad CVS servers across the Internet. More choices coming with companies that were heartened enough by the DOJ case to actually develop new, great products that don't require Windows and in some cases directly compete with Windows.
Yes, it was nice when you could do that. But Microsoft has won now, the government has bent over, and soon you will have to, as well. Microsoft now has at least 7 years in which to make you and everyone else their bitch, and after that 7 years they'll just buy the DOJ's masters a nice new reelection again in order to keep the harsh light of antitrust law from glaring down at them again.
I hope you didn't dislike being Microsoft's yes-man too much, because that's what you're going to get to do again. And mark my words: this time, Microsoft will make sure that the government won't bother coming after them again, by making it too sweet for them to cooperate and too painful to resist.
It used to be that the government had the cojones to stand up to monopolists. Those times are now past, since the corporations now 0wn the government completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, most people aren't going to care about this but those who are trying to build a quiet PC are -- if you put a P4 in your system you could conceivably cool it passively and take the performance hit. I don't know how much of a performance hit you'd get by cooling passively versus actively but the video on Tom's Hardware about what happens when you remove the heatsink from various processors shows the framerate of Quake III returning to something close to the original just by reattaching the heatsink to the P4...and the fan isn't running on it at the time. Of course, that's probably because the heatsink itself is cool and will warm up significantly after being attached to the CPU for a while.
My question is this: what heatsinks exist out there that are designed for passive cooling purposes? I'm sure the design of such heatsinks differs significantly from those designed to accomodate a fan.
Methinks you have far too much faith in corporate PHBs. Why should they lose confidence in Microsoft for these security blunders when they didn't lose faith over things like the countless Outlook viruses, or the IIS vulnerabilities, or the MS-SQL problems? No, just like every other time, they won't blame Microsoft -- they'll blame their own IS guys.
And I'll tell you why: because they know that they can't sue Microsoft, and they have to "successfully" place the blame somewhere.
Microsoft is popular with them not because it can be sued, but because the PHBs are sheep that follow the herd wherever it goes. They'll think Microsoft is the greatest thing until enough others think otherwise. In short, it's a self-perpetuating problem that will only be fixed when the economics of going with another solution instead of Microsoft means the difference between surviving as a business and failing as a business.
If Microsoft does things right, the PHBs won't have that kind of economic incentive until it's too late and they really don't have any choice of where to go anymore.
Think about it: the U.S. government is unwilling to do a damned thing to Microsoft, so Microsoft can make as many exclusive deals with hardware manufacturers as it wants and do so with impunity.
Imagine how long Linux would remain even remotely competitive if it couldn't run on any modern commodity hardware...
That's if you don't live in the U.S. Or in any country that acts as the U.S.'s bitch.
So let's say you're trying to start a private manned space venture. You need all sorts of relatively exotic and high-tech equipment (the space suits, for one thing). Where exactly are you going to get this stuff from? Any place you might get it from will receive strong "suggestions" from the U.S. government that they refrain from selling it. A few governments on the planet will tell the U.S. where to stick it but most/all of those don't have the tech to sell you anyway.
Basically, I'd say that any country that has an advanced enough tech base to make your venture possible also has a power-hungry paranoid government running it, or one which likes to kiss the ass of such a government.
In the real 2001, we don't have shit for a manned presence in space. Let's face it, compared with the vision in "2001", the ISS is a complete joke, and we've basically just been sitting on our asses for the past 30 years when it comes to space.
But the real bummer of it all is that I don't think we'll have a permanent, independent manned presence in space for at least the next thousand years. Why? Because such a group of people represents a greater threat to the U.S. (or any large, power-greedy government) than any other country on Earth. Think about it: such a group of people could literally drop rocks the size of a football field on any place on the planet, and do so with relative immunity. Such a group would be more or less untouchable, and no government on the face of this planet that cares anything about power could handle that.
That's why I think the government will regulate any private manned space venture out of existence.
But either way I have to get back to coding.
There are probably countless "hardware" boxes that use FreeBSD or some other BSD derivative as a base. The company takes that base and adds their own code to do whatever it is that would be unique to the box, then sells the result as a hardware solution. The box itself might have a lot of proprietary hardware in it, or it might not. That'll just depend on the box.
But either way, open source probably powers a lot more of the hardware (routers, proxies, firewalls, etc.) than the average PHB would expect.
It used to be the case that this was so. Not any longer. Today, if you're a wealthy monopoly in the United States, you can do any damned thing you please, because it's only a matter of who you have to pay off.
Let me explain.
You see, companies that use software aren't truly interested in the quality of the support they get. Rather, what they're really interested in is the appearance of support. That is, all they really care about is that they know that there is someone they theoretically could call for help if they need it. For these people, it's much more important for them to be able to easily identify who that entity is than it is for them to actually be able to get decent support from that entity.
So the reason that software from Microsoft and other larger software providers is more palatable to the average PHB than open source software is that they immediately know who to call for help, while the same isn't true of some piece of open source software.
This is true of the users as well. It doesn't matter if the support they get from their IT department sucks. What matters to them is that they know who to call for help, even if the "help" they get is essentially useless.
So like almost everything else in this world, appearance is much more important than substance.
That's fine, except for one thing: it's our reductionist thinking (along with our ability to make tools) that got us to the top of the food chain to begin with. So in that sense, the universe has validated our reductionism.
If the universe truly behaved randomly, then we wouldn't even have science. In fact, I'd argue that we probably wouldn't even have life.
Now, there may indeed be limits to how much the rules can be reduced, and we may indeed have hit them already, but there isn't any way to truly know. This stuff takes time. It took 150 years to go from Newton's laws of motion to special relativity. Computers may be subject to Moore's law but I doubt science is. For one thing, science relies on discovery and original thinking more than just about any other branch of human endeavor. People who truly think outside of the box, so to speak, are very rare, and that's why it took so long to get from Newton's laws to special relativity.
So don't blame us for being reductionist. It's because the universe has rewarded us handsomely for it that we're that way.
No, I'm not cynical. Honest.
The mouse jerkiness probably happens because your system isn't using DMA to talk to the disks.
This is easy to fix from the command line (until the next reboot) but really should be something that the OS installer just gets right the first time.
To turn on DMA to your hard drive, do this as root:
Now, that presupposes that your hard drive is /dev/hda. The following command, while rather a bit more complicated, will turn DMA on all of your currently mounted drives:
A brief explanation of the latter command:
Now, the output from this is in the form of a list of hard disk device specifiers, which are the devices we want to turn on DMA to.
Even if Excite@home stood to lose money by accepting AT&T's deal, their valuation will now likely be a fraction of what it was before they turned off their subscribers, because the primary value of Excite@home wasn't their hardware, it was their subscribers -- who aren't likely to be around anymore after this. They will lose all of the subscribers they have turned off unless they turn them back on fast, because those subscribers will either drop the service entirely in favor of something else or AT&T will transition them to an independent infrastructure.
And the end result is that Excite@home will end up getting pennies on the dollar for their equipment and nothing else, since they will then have nothing else of value. They may claim that their assets are worth more than the $307 million that was offered, but I doubt that's the case when their equipment is valued at pennies on the dollar. Remember: equipment these days is going for dirt cheap because of all the businesses that are failing, and the prices you see at places like eBay are as high as they get. Excite@home will probably get a lot less money than that because they have so much equipment that they'll probably go through a liquidator -- and get pennies on the dollar as a result.
So like I said, by doing this Excite@home (or their investors. Same thing as far as I'm concerned) has essentially managed to slit its own throat.
I have to congratulate them. I don't think they could have come up with a more boneheaded move, one which both causes it to lose its primary assets (its subscriber base) and pisses off its buyer in one stroke.
or
So if Excite doesn't turn their network back on VERY soon, like in the next day or so, they're toast: AT&T has the cash and resources to manage their cablemodem subscribers themselves. Once Excite@home no longer has anyone hooked up to their network, their value will drop through the floor.
In short, even though the offer they were given probably wasn't very good (it was probably really bad, actually), now that they've shut down their customers they're dead. And if I were AT&T, I'd see to it that the floor was wiped with Excite@home in retaliation for screwing over my customers.
The only variable I know of here that can affect the outcome is the rate at which cablemodem subscribers bail out and go with some other service, for those that can. Since it takes at least a couple of weeks for most DSL connections to be provisioned and configured, the only immediate competition that AT&T will lose customers to is dialup, which isn't terribly comparable. So I think AT&T is pretty safe when it comes to keeping their customers for the next couple of weeks. As long as they can transition the vast majority of their customers in that amount of time, they're safe, and that means that Excite@home has managed to fsck themselves good with this idiotic move.
Why the hell didn't his lawyers advise him of this likely outcome, or why the hell didn't he follow their advice?
But there's a reason for the opposition to private manned space missions expressed by the government: the government opposes an independent manned presence in space. The reason is that such an independent group would wield much more power than the U.S. government does, because it could (if it wished) threaten to drop small asteroids anywhere on earth with relatively high precision. It's only when the U.S. government has an adequate defense against such an attack that it will truly allow a manned presence in space.
Of course, that's probably wishful thinking: we'll probably wind up in another cold war and lose more freedom all at the same time, and in the name of that cold war to boot!
Sigh... The world seems like such a hopeless place right now, because there's no place left on earth that I know of where real liberty isn't on its deathbed.
But in the commercial sector, you allow me to use your something only under a very specific condition, namely that I pay for it.
But if I'm going to pay for it, then once I have a copy of it in my possession that copy is mine, not yours, and I should be able to do any damned thing I please with it, because I paid for it. In essence, I exchanged some amount of my labor for some amount of yours.
Now, it's reasonable for me as the buyer to come to some agreement with you as the seller as to what things I can do with the software in exchange for a lower price. But it is not reasonable for you to expect to get anything you want and to restrict me in any way you want simply because you are the originator of the software in question.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their work with the understanding that it will fall into the public domain after some limited period of time. IT IS NOT A PROPERTY RIGHT. It is an understanding between publishers and the public, an agreement that a limited monopoly is a reasonable payment (by the public) for the work if it falls into the public domain after a limited period of time.
Now, because copyright is such an understanding, it follows that the public has certain rights with respect to copyrighted items during the monopoly period: it may make personal backups, take excerpts, etc., and in general may do whatever it pleases with the work in private, as long as it is not copied in whole and distributed to others. These exceptions to your absolute monopoly are reasonable.
As the author of the work, you have a choice: you can exercise complete control over the work until it falls into the hands of someone else (perhaps even after, via contract), or you can exercise limited control over it and accept the protections and privileges afforded you by copyright law. YOU CANNOT DO BOTH. Nor is it, in my opinion, reasonable for you to expect to.
Think on this: the Constitution grants freedom of speech, but does not grant the freedom to hear what you want. So it would be legal for the U.S. government to require that everyone in the U.S. (or their ISPs, at any rate) block all content which isn't "approved" for consumption by the public. People would still be able to "publish" whatever they like on the internet, but nobody will ever be able to see it.
That's just one example of what they can do if they want. Maybe it'll be thrown out by the Supreme Court. But then again, maybe it won't.
No, it's not happening right now. But what makes you think it won't, or can't, happen here?
I'm sure there are some who equate globalization with exploitation, but anyone with any brains will be more discerning than that.
In particular, whether you get exploitation with globalization depends on the approach used.
In the case of Japan, it's not clear to me that U.S. corporations had a large hand in its reconstruction and economic prosperity. I doubt very much that U.S. industry attempted to install and/or maintain a brutal dictatorship in Japan in order to keep labor prices down there, if they used Japan as a source of cheap labor at all.
What many people seem to object to the most is the exploitation of people who live under brutal, despotic governments by way of greasing the palms of individuals within those governments such that the people have no chance of improving their situation. Certainly the CIA has helped these American corporations do just that. What makes you believe that things are really any different now?
Point being that I don't believe Japan is a terribly good example to use to support the way many believe globalization will be implemented. Quite the opposite, in fact, in large part because I have little reason to believe that the U.S. will exercise its considerable might to implement democracy -- doing so will make it harder for our corporations to exploit cheap labor in the long run, just as it did in Japan. You can bet they won't make that mistake again.
I hate to think of who would end up buying Slashdot. Perhaps the RIAA or Microsoft. Ouch. Either way, if Slashdot gets sold, expect things like the "Your Rights Online" section to disappear.
From: John Ashcroft, Attorney General
To: George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence
Subject: Need a favor...
Hi, George. Seems we have a guy in custody who we might have a little trouble winning our case against. We need some evidence against him (we'll anonymize it, of course) so that we can nail him for something, and want to listen in to his conversations with his lawyer to get it. But we can't do that without a certification that a reasonable suspicion exists that he may use these conversations for terrorism purposes. Could you send me another one of those?
I know I keep asking for these but you know we have a quota to keep.
Thanks in advance, George. Lunch is on me next time. And if there's anything you need, anything at all, just let me know.
-- John
Yep. But, worse, parts of the ground can literally disappear while others are rock-solid, and you won't know ahead of time which is which.
Not just "slightly", either, but types of ground that could have completely different characteristics.
Worse, the requirements of the shopping mall are such that you'll have to completely redesign your building.
Won't happen. Microsoft will just claim that any business plan that involves competing with Microsoft is ipso facto nonviable because, after all, Microsoft is a monopoly!
No, it only showed that Microsoft will change its practices slightly (but only slightly) when under the harsh scrutiny of law.
But that's no longer the case. If anything, this result shows that Microsoft is infallible -- they've won, after all.
The only thing that's left now is death by thousands of cuts from lawsuits. I have no idea how likely that is, or how effective it may be.
If I remember correctly, the DOJ and attorney generals for the states told the people to not sue Microsoft until they'd worked the problem. Well, they have, and have shown themselves to be corporate shills for Microsoft.
Yes, it was nice when you could do that. But Microsoft has won now, the government has bent over, and soon you will have to, as well. Microsoft now has at least 7 years in which to make you and everyone else their bitch, and after that 7 years they'll just buy the DOJ's masters a nice new reelection again in order to keep the harsh light of antitrust law from glaring down at them again.
I hope you didn't dislike being Microsoft's yes-man too much, because that's what you're going to get to do again. And mark my words: this time, Microsoft will make sure that the government won't bother coming after them again, by making it too sweet for them to cooperate and too painful to resist.
It used to be that the government had the cojones to stand up to monopolists. Those times are now past, since the corporations now 0wn the government completely.