Nor is it being used as a currency right now. A currency is something people hold, spend, get paid in, etc. Bitcoin is basically used only for three things:
And you base this on....
What exactly?
No, really. I mean, with a traditional currency you have a variety of financial sources you can draw stats from, but with Bitcoin? Given the nature of Bitcoin, there's only one place you could have pulled that figure...
On a related note, I think the FCC should make Caller ID both required and un-forgeable. (An individual could still choose to not have his Caller ID revealed, and that would be indicated on your Caller ID display.)
Or just nix it, use ANI, and make sure that ANI data's sent for all calls.
Yes, much better that we remain isolationist. After all, market distortions only improve the longer you leave them in place!
Kidding aside, the silver lining here -- and it is a substantial one -- is that the follow-up story should be (and is): "Aging IT Workers Returning as Higher-Paid Consultants to Fix Fuck-Ups of H-1B Visa Workers".
Don't you get the irony of Phoenix? It's a small and light version of Firefox which was a small and light version of Mozilla. It's turtles all the way down man.
Uh... I think he does. Firefox used to be called Firebird. You know why? Because hey had to change the original name: Phoenix.
No. That's never been the model, actually, since there's no business model. It's an open source project. That said, like any free software project, it's easier to motivate people to fix the bugs that you care about if you show up with patches or donations -- but neither is necessary.
Now if you're referring to Codeweavers, then yes, actually, that is part of their business model.
I thought that anyone could run anything on 8. I know my Win8 laptop runs lots of things that aren't in any app store. I think it's an optional walled garden. There are plenty of problems with MS, you don't need to make up any more.
For the developers, not the users.
If you want to write a "Metro" (Windows Store) app, you must get a special license from Microsoft and must ship via the Windows Store or you'll be locked out of at least some of the Windows 8 devices (since they'll need to have sideloading enabled -- and not everything will).
Yes, for now it's a minor restriction, but when has Microsoft ever tried to *loosen* its control in subsequent generations?
If they weren't on your website, (or if they don't provide the header, an act to be widely discouraged)
Excuse me?
No, actually, it's not an act to be "widely discouraged". Why? Because I don't trust you. Shit, I run several large sites and I wouldn't want my users to trust me with that sort of thing. Ok, I can at least see a case for providing it for intra-site requests, but it's absolutely a bad thing from a privacy standpoint to tell every site where you were previously.
Plus, you know, what with Google serving their results over HTTPS, there's not going to be a ref. header for the subsequent request to your site.:)
Seriously though, HTTP_REFERRER should burn in a fire. It's right up there with SMTP: a vestige from a time when networks consisted of admins and users who generally could be trusted to do the right thing. Those days are over. Sorry.
Now sending a User Agent header... that's at least a *little* more defensible (though not much...)
You'd point to data denying global warming or the link between smoking and cancer as being from an industry source, why are you so quick to accept data from the sugar industry?
You know why this is different?
Because in those cases, there's good data from neutral parties that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer and that the earth is getting warmer.
But that HFCS is worse, measure-for-measure, than sucrose when in food consumed by healthy adults?
The data just ain't there. Sorry. It's just not. And no, that Princeton study that you're trying to find the link for right now doesn't count.;)
Are there any laws in the US that allow you to break contract for free if you don't agree with the newly enforced 'contract', that you didn't sign?
Yes. Or rather, since the US has a "default allow" policy with regards to rights: no, there are no laws forcing you to stick with a contract which has changed substantially.
Furthermore, AT&T's practices (in this case) extend to pre-paid and month-to-month service as well, for which there is no contract.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
That's actually a pretty good idea, and while it would require a little bit of carrier cooperation (though not more than they already do, since toll-free numbers are still a thing) it seems like simply allowing people the option of filtering calls where ANI != CID would cut out a lot of the call spam. It wouldn't catch it all, but it would at least get the low-hanging fruit...
It seems to me a general truth that people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior by way of their own good fortune. The line your advocating is equivalent to "Just say no to drugs" or abstinence-only sex education.
Then this will probably be a real mindfuck then:
I'm a rather hardcore liberal, and I believe that the focus should in fact be on "personal responsibility" and "willpower".
Further, we should work on teaching not only how to apply those concepts, but the best ways to do so as part of public health education and (in schools) home ec. and PE (you know, those things that we've slowly worked on purging in favor of bland, guaranteed-not-to-anger-parents "replacements".)
Yes, you can't teach "willpower", but you can teach personal responsibility, and you can give people the tools to help better themselves and support throughout the process. And as a liberal, that's exactly what I think we should do.
I'm glad you mentioned sex and drugs. Because you know what is most effective at preventing pregnancy? Not fucking. And that's one of the things that we can teach in sex ed. But because I'm not a far-right idiot, I *also* believe in providing additional lines of defense (condom distribution, better public health support, Planned Parenthood clinics, etc.)
It's the same thing with food. You know what's most effective? Eating less. And yeah, like not fucking it can be pretty hard when the temptation's staring you in the face. And some people will fail at that, which is why in addition to trying to teach restraint we should also provide additional lines of defense (reduce corn subsidies, continue improving food science, require truth in advertising for fast food, fix school lunches, etc.)
Think about taking a phone call where the problem is that their video driver needs to be reinstalled. Under windows, this is merely painful and requires a couple reboots -- 15 minute call. Under Linux, it could require a kernel recompilation, editing files in/etc, and downloading and installing dozens of dependent packages ahead of that. That's two hours of work.
Ok. No problem. Here's how it will go:
Blizzard Support: Can you please tell me what version of Ubuntu you're running?
User: I don't think I'm running Ubuntu. My friend installed this thing called Fedora for me.
Blizzard: I'm sorry sir, but we only support Ubuntu. If you have problems getting $GAME to run under that please feel free to call back.
Status: Resolved
Ok, so how about for Ubuntu. Well funny enough, but the support procedures for Debian and Ubuntu for reinstalling one's drivers (i.e. re-installing the NVIDIA drivers, 'cause the scenario you posed is only really an issue with the NVIDIA ones...) is pretty straightforward, even if it does involve the big scary package manager.
We do know that it's a POWER-based CPU, almost definitely POWER7, but it could be single-core for all we know (although the rumors seem to have settled on quad-core, with some level of SMT, with a clock speed in the 3GHz range).
There's no way that IBM is shipping a high-end POWER7 CPU in a consumer console. Not unless the Wii U comes with pre-approval for a new line of credit...
My money's on a high-end PowerPC variant. Maybe it takes some "inspiration" from POWER7, but that's about all I'd be willing to bet on.
Or maybe, the cost of a mis-predicted branch causing a 8000 cycle CPU stall, made worse by the fact there was no branch predictor, which meant every line of existing code had to be re-written without branches?
Ok, this confused me. What do you mean "no branch predictor"? I mean... it's either doing speculative execution or it's not -- and if it's not, how the hell do you have a "mis-predicted branch"? And if it is, how do you do that without branch prediction? Or does it just treat bne as a jump and beq as a nop? (aka. static prediction?)
All of the POWER and PowerPC chips I've heard of definitely have branch prediction (and mostly quite good prediction at that), and while I don't know the first thing about the Cell and how dumbed-down it is/isn't, what you described seemed.... odd.
Also, 8000 cycles? A mis-prediction takes out the SPE for 8000 cycles?!? Holy shit. That makes Prescott look downright thrifty...
That was a neat troll! You did a very good job with the BSD is dying, even throwing in references to Netcraft for confirmation.
But I figured that -- you know, since people might otherwise make the mistake of believing you -- that we should clear up a few things:
1) FreeBSD is less widely used in some areas now not because it sucks more, but because Linux sucks less. Linux getting better is a good thing for all of us (BSD and Linux users alike.) And FreeBSD has never (AFAIK) been about a mad dash to get as much marketshare as possible -- so who cares how many machines it's installed on?
2) FreeBSD is workstation/server oriented. Suspend/hibernate support isn't crucial for these machines. Sorry. It's just not a high priority. FreeBSD doesn't prioritize supporting laptops, and AFAIK and as far as I've been using it (10+ years) never has. OSs have their specialties: FreeBSD is good on things like a high-end file server, Linux is a better choice for laptops. That's all there is to it, mate.
3) Interesting theory about Apple. They must be stingy though: I, and others, are still waiting for my MacBook! Perhaps we should e-mail Tim! What you were referencing is that Apple did exactly the sort of thing that RedHat's done: hired developers of a project to improve the aspects of the project that are important to them. Most of Apple's contributions have even made it back into the OSS world, despite the BSD license not forcing them to. (Take a look at Grand Central Dispatch sometime.)
4) We in the FreeBSD world don't see binary blobs as the great Satan that must be destroyed. Sorry. In fact, part of the reason that we spend so much time providing stable interfaces and working on backwards compatibility is it makes it less like that we'll alienate companies that might otherwise help us. NVIDIA's a good example. So they don't provide an open source driver. And? So what? They ship drivers that work, and they support new hardware very quickly.
5) HAL was deprecated in the Linux world because udev, DeviceKit, etc. looked sexier. FreeBSD uses HAL because it works, is well-documented, well-tested, and now well-understood. Sorry that we haven't adopted the API flavor-of-the-week, but the game's not always played that way.
I'm pleased that you like Linux. By all means, use it. Diversity is good. I'll continue to make sure that the software I write is portable to both the BSDs and Linux. But please don't try to spread FUD about other OSs, no matter how satisfying it may be to build yourself up by knocking others down.
Appendectomy and cholecystectomy. I'd say both are pretty invasive. Of course in the hospital right after the surgery they gave me dilaudid or something similar (still bad, but highly limited in use).
So in other words, you refused the "bad" opioid oxycodone by instead being given hydromorphone.
Uh... right.
Well just so long as you stand up for your principles I suppose.
Ok, then; how about "Good luck finding a laptop that you can upgrade anything but the main drive and perhaps the RAM. And even the SSD in the MBPwRD is theoretically upgradeable, since it is on a subassembly with a connector.
The T and W-series ThinkPads have socketed CPUs.
And the displays can be upgraded.
And the drive is removable, so you can add Blu-Ray or whatever you'd like.
And Lenovo publishes complete manuals with step-by-step instructions detailing how to disassemble everything and how to replace pretty much any part (along with a list of the FRU numbers for said parts.)
And they let you order individual parts (or you can just get them from any number of third party suppliers.)
All the old stuff is better. They just don't make it like they used to. Why back in $YEAR, they were durable and built to last, now $COMPANY's really gone down the drain...
Or maybe that's just nostalgia... I always get those things confused.
The "did the Model M quality drop" issue has been covered in depth at Geekhack and other places, and apart from a reduction of the metal back plate by (IIRC) a couple hundred grams, there aren't any substantial differences. (There was also a change in plastic makeup, for what people speculated to be regulatory reasons, but that's about it.) The reduction in weight corresponded in some people's minds -- yours included, apparently -- to a "reduction" in durability, but that's psychological. People perceive heavier things as being sturdier; it's the same reason why some audiophile companies add weights to their products.
For me the reason to get a Unicomp board in addition to my used Ms was simple:
Unicomp 0) still makes durable, reliable keyboards 1) actively employs people in the US 2) offers a warranty and repairs any Model M you bring them. None of those things are true if you buy a used Model M.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of those, actually, in both code and cash (and some in both). Which you'd know if you actually followed BSD development.
Nor is it being used as a currency right now. A currency is something people hold, spend, get paid in, etc. Bitcoin is basically used only for three things:
And you base this on....
What exactly?
No, really. I mean, with a traditional currency you have a variety of financial sources you can draw stats from, but with Bitcoin? Given the nature of Bitcoin, there's only one place you could have pulled that figure...
Yeah, well... I still use the US dollar despite that.
Kidding aside, I have to wonder why people such as yourself like to sling mud at the idea? If I didn't know better I'd suspect jealousy.
On a related note, I think the FCC should make Caller ID both required and un-forgeable. (An individual could still choose to not have his Caller ID revealed, and that would be indicated on your Caller ID display.)
Or just nix it, use ANI, and make sure that ANI data's sent for all calls.
Yes, much better that we remain isolationist. After all, market distortions only improve the longer you leave them in place!
Kidding aside, the silver lining here -- and it is a substantial one -- is that the follow-up story should be (and is): "Aging IT Workers Returning as Higher-Paid Consultants to Fix Fuck-Ups of H-1B Visa Workers".
Don't you get the irony of Phoenix? It's a small and light version of Firefox which was a small and light version of Mozilla. It's turtles all the way down man.
Uh... I think he does. Firefox used to be called Firebird. You know why? Because hey had to change the original name: Phoenix.
"They" who?
The WINE project?
No. That's never been the model, actually, since there's no business model. It's an open source project. That said, like any free software project, it's easier to motivate people to fix the bugs that you care about if you show up with patches or donations -- but neither is necessary.
Now if you're referring to Codeweavers, then yes, actually, that is part of their business model.
I thought that anyone could run anything on 8. I know my Win8 laptop runs lots of things that aren't in any app store. I think it's an optional walled garden. There are plenty of problems with MS, you don't need to make up any more.
For the developers, not the users.
If you want to write a "Metro" (Windows Store) app, you must get a special license from Microsoft and must ship via the Windows Store or you'll be locked out of at least some of the Windows 8 devices (since they'll need to have sideloading enabled -- and not everything will).
Yes, for now it's a minor restriction, but when has Microsoft ever tried to *loosen* its control in subsequent generations?
Outside of Metro, what's different between 8 and 7 (especially in tablet form)?
Providing support for a walled garden design which restricts developers who don't play the "app store" game.
If they weren't on your website, (or if they don't provide the header, an act to be widely discouraged)
Excuse me?
No, actually, it's not an act to be "widely discouraged". Why? Because I don't trust you. Shit, I run several large sites and I wouldn't want my users to trust me with that sort of thing. Ok, I can at least see a case for providing it for intra-site requests, but it's absolutely a bad thing from a privacy standpoint to tell every site where you were previously.
Plus, you know, what with Google serving their results over HTTPS, there's not going to be a ref. header for the subsequent request to your site. :)
Seriously though, HTTP_REFERRER should burn in a fire. It's right up there with SMTP: a vestige from a time when networks consisted of admins and users who generally could be trusted to do the right thing. Those days are over. Sorry.
Now sending a User Agent header... that's at least a *little* more defensible (though not much...)
You know why this is different?
Because in those cases, there's good data from neutral parties that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer and that the earth is getting warmer.
But that HFCS is worse, measure-for-measure, than sucrose when in food consumed by healthy adults?
The data just ain't there. Sorry. It's just not. And no, that Princeton study that you're trying to find the link for right now doesn't count. ;)
Are there any laws in the US that allow you to break contract for free if you don't agree with the newly enforced 'contract', that you didn't sign?
Yes. Or rather, since the US has a "default allow" policy with regards to rights: no, there are no laws forcing you to stick with a contract which has changed substantially.
Furthermore, AT&T's practices (in this case) extend to pre-paid and month-to-month service as well, for which there is no contract.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
That's actually a pretty good idea, and while it would require a little bit of carrier cooperation (though not more than they already do, since toll-free numbers are still a thing) it seems like simply allowing people the option of filtering calls where ANI != CID would cut out a lot of the call spam. It wouldn't catch it all, but it would at least get the low-hanging fruit...
It seems to me a general truth that people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior by way of their own good fortune. The line your advocating is equivalent to "Just say no to drugs" or abstinence-only sex education.
Then this will probably be a real mindfuck then:
I'm a rather hardcore liberal, and I believe that the focus should in fact be on "personal responsibility" and "willpower".
Further, we should work on teaching not only how to apply those concepts, but the best ways to do so as part of public health education and (in schools) home ec. and PE (you know, those things that we've slowly worked on purging in favor of bland, guaranteed-not-to-anger-parents "replacements".)
Yes, you can't teach "willpower", but you can teach personal responsibility, and you can give people the tools to help better themselves and support throughout the process. And as a liberal, that's exactly what I think we should do.
I'm glad you mentioned sex and drugs. Because you know what is most effective at preventing pregnancy? Not fucking. And that's one of the things that we can teach in sex ed. But because I'm not a far-right idiot, I *also* believe in providing additional lines of defense (condom distribution, better public health support, Planned Parenthood clinics, etc.)
It's the same thing with food. You know what's most effective? Eating less. And yeah, like not fucking it can be pretty hard when the temptation's staring you in the face. And some people will fail at that, which is why in addition to trying to teach restraint we should also provide additional lines of defense (reduce corn subsidies, continue improving food science, require truth in advertising for fast food, fix school lunches, etc.)
Think about taking a phone call where the problem is that their video driver needs to be reinstalled. Under windows, this is merely painful and requires a couple reboots -- 15 minute call. Under Linux, it could require a kernel recompilation, editing files in /etc, and downloading and installing dozens of dependent packages ahead of that. That's two hours of work.
Ok. No problem. Here's how it will go:
Blizzard Support: Can you please tell me what version of Ubuntu you're running?
User: I don't think I'm running Ubuntu. My friend installed this thing called Fedora for me.
Blizzard: I'm sorry sir, but we only support Ubuntu. If you have problems getting $GAME to run under that please feel free to call back.
Status: Resolved
Ok, so how about for Ubuntu. Well funny enough, but the support procedures for Debian and Ubuntu for reinstalling one's drivers (i.e. re-installing the NVIDIA drivers, 'cause the scenario you posed is only really an issue with the NVIDIA ones...) is pretty straightforward, even if it does involve the big scary package manager.
Motif with its 3D chiselled look was actually quite nice. IRIX was cooler though.
Maybe my memory's faulty, but didn't IRIX use Motif for the Indigo Magic Desktop?
Considering that the "Assembled in USA" text is on the machine itself, no, it's not.
Also, the FTC takes a very harsh attitude towards the approach outlined in the GP's post. IIRC they actually discuss that very thing on their site.
But hey, let's not let that stop the anti-USA snark!
Why bother labeling it at all? Apple's not the only one to design machines in the US. But they are, AFAIK, the only ones to label them accordingly.
We do know that it's a POWER-based CPU, almost definitely POWER7, but it could be single-core for all we know (although the rumors seem to have settled on quad-core, with some level of SMT, with a clock speed in the 3GHz range).
There's no way that IBM is shipping a high-end POWER7 CPU in a consumer console. Not unless the Wii U comes with pre-approval for a new line of credit...
My money's on a high-end PowerPC variant. Maybe it takes some "inspiration" from POWER7, but that's about all I'd be willing to bet on.
Or maybe, the cost of a mis-predicted branch causing a 8000 cycle CPU stall, made worse by the fact there was no branch predictor, which meant every line of existing code had to be re-written without branches?
Ok, this confused me. What do you mean "no branch predictor"? I mean... it's either doing speculative execution or it's not -- and if it's not, how the hell do you have a "mis-predicted branch"? And if it is, how do you do that without branch prediction? Or does it just treat bne as a jump and beq as a nop? (aka. static prediction?)
All of the POWER and PowerPC chips I've heard of definitely have branch prediction (and mostly quite good prediction at that), and while I don't know the first thing about the Cell and how dumbed-down it is/isn't, what you described seemed.... odd.
Also, 8000 cycles? A mis-prediction takes out the SPE for 8000 cycles?!? Holy shit. That makes Prescott look downright thrifty...
That platform sounds nightmarish. Best of luck.
That was a neat troll! You did a very good job with the BSD is dying, even throwing in references to Netcraft for confirmation.
But I figured that -- you know, since people might otherwise make the mistake of believing you -- that we should clear up a few things:
1) FreeBSD is less widely used in some areas now not because it sucks more, but because Linux sucks less. Linux getting better is a good thing for all of us (BSD and Linux users alike.) And FreeBSD has never (AFAIK) been about a mad dash to get as much marketshare as possible -- so who cares how many machines it's installed on?
2) FreeBSD is workstation/server oriented. Suspend/hibernate support isn't crucial for these machines. Sorry. It's just not a high priority. FreeBSD doesn't prioritize supporting laptops, and AFAIK and as far as I've been using it (10+ years) never has. OSs have their specialties: FreeBSD is good on things like a high-end file server, Linux is a better choice for laptops. That's all there is to it, mate.
3) Interesting theory about Apple. They must be stingy though: I, and others, are still waiting for my MacBook! Perhaps we should e-mail Tim! What you were referencing is that Apple did exactly the sort of thing that RedHat's done: hired developers of a project to improve the aspects of the project that are important to them. Most of Apple's contributions have even made it back into the OSS world, despite the BSD license not forcing them to. (Take a look at Grand Central Dispatch sometime.)
4) We in the FreeBSD world don't see binary blobs as the great Satan that must be destroyed. Sorry. In fact, part of the reason that we spend so much time providing stable interfaces and working on backwards compatibility is it makes it less like that we'll alienate companies that might otherwise help us. NVIDIA's a good example. So they don't provide an open source driver. And? So what? They ship drivers that work, and they support new hardware very quickly.
5) HAL was deprecated in the Linux world because udev, DeviceKit, etc. looked sexier. FreeBSD uses HAL because it works, is well-documented, well-tested, and now well-understood. Sorry that we haven't adopted the API flavor-of-the-week, but the game's not always played that way.
I'm pleased that you like Linux. By all means, use it. Diversity is good. I'll continue to make sure that the software I write is portable to both the BSDs and Linux. But please don't try to spread FUD about other OSs, no matter how satisfying it may be to build yourself up by knocking others down.
Hear the story direct from Backblaze (bonus: goes into more detail).
Appendectomy and cholecystectomy. I'd say both are pretty invasive. Of course in the hospital right after the surgery they gave me dilaudid or something similar (still bad, but highly limited in use).
So in other words, you refused the "bad" opioid oxycodone by instead being given hydromorphone.
Uh... right.
Well just so long as you stand up for your principles I suppose.
The T and W-series ThinkPads have socketed CPUs.
And the displays can be upgraded.
And the drive is removable, so you can add Blu-Ray or whatever you'd like.
And Lenovo publishes complete manuals with step-by-step instructions detailing how to disassemble everything and how to replace pretty much any part (along with a list of the FRU numbers for said parts.)
And they let you order individual parts (or you can just get them from any number of third party suppliers.)
And replacing CRUs doesn't void the warranty.
Your turn.
All the old stuff is better. They just don't make it like they used to. Why back in $YEAR, they were durable and built to last, now $COMPANY's really gone down the drain...
Or maybe that's just nostalgia... I always get those things confused.
The "did the Model M quality drop" issue has been covered in depth at Geekhack and other places, and apart from a reduction of the metal back plate by (IIRC) a couple hundred grams, there aren't any substantial differences. (There was also a change in plastic makeup, for what people speculated to be regulatory reasons, but that's about it.) The reduction in weight corresponded in some people's minds -- yours included, apparently -- to a "reduction" in durability, but that's psychological. People perceive heavier things as being sturdier; it's the same reason why some audiophile companies add weights to their products.
For me the reason to get a Unicomp board in addition to my used Ms was simple:
Unicomp 0) still makes durable, reliable keyboards 1) actively employs people in the US 2) offers a warranty and repairs any Model M you bring them. None of those things are true if you buy a used Model M.