*laugh*. Nice explanation. I do think it is pretty clear that he built the damn dam himself. In the widest possible sense of the word "himself" of course - just like Alexander the Great himself beat the Persians.
Actually I feel that Saruman is the one getting screwed in both movies so far. He is reduced to being a puppet of Sauron.
Also, for a wise guy he acts really stupidly. For one thing he makes a big dam, but places all his manufacturing and even his tower below a dam he built.
If I own a CD, I think it is legal to download a copy of that CD from Gnutella.
Of course you are free to think whatever you want. However if you live in the US or Denmark, it is not legal to download a copy of that CD from Gnutella (unless it is in the public domain or you have the permission of the copyright holder.)
Perhaps you should have said "moral" instead of "legal". This seems to be a common mistake.
I'm in a band, and we give our music away for free, but that should be the choice of the copyright holder, and nobody else.
Yes, you as the creator of creative works should definitely decide under which circumstances the work is given or sold by you. The question is whether you get to decide what I do with it after I received/bought it. Some argue that you as the creator should get absolute power to decide that. Copyright does not go that far, even today. You get to regulate one of many possible activities, copying. This regulation is only for a limited time, and there are exceptions where I get to copy even if you explicitly state that you do not want to allow me to.
I agree that downloading CD quality music I did not buy is and should be illegal.
Even if it was recorded 50 years ago? Or 200? Is the public domain gone for good?
Personally I consider the current copyright laws a bad bargain that do not "promote progress". I respect laws when doing so makes society a better place.
You should not necessarily be surprised that the Germans accept blocking of neo-nazi sites without much discussion. I may be wrong since I am not from Germany but from Denmark, but anything related to nazism seems to be almost as offensive to a German as child pornography is. Imagine that there were sites with child-pornography operating openly in some other country. Do you think the US providers would be told by the government to block access to those sites? And do you think any civil rights group would raise more than a murmur over this, apart from perhaps issuing a report about how badly the blocking is implemented?
In any case, such blocking is interesting from a technical viewpoint. Doing it in DNS is easy and it scales well, but it is also easy to circumvent. Doing it by inserting a black hole route in BGP is easy for the first couple, but routers will not be able to handle an unlimited number of/32 blackhole routes. As long as the router does not melt, it is a pretty effective method. There are other methods, but they all suck in at least one way.
And then someone invented Freenet. Practically impossible to block. It will be interesting to see which country that will be the first to make it illegal.
Ok, if the term move the Earth in the posting I replied to actually was intended to mean change Earth's rotation then it makes a little sense. I highly doubt any appreciable amount of energy would be spent on that in any realistic collision, but I do not feel like actually doing the calculations.
Note that in the comet-hits-pole scenario, a lot of energy is released as heat anyway. Hmm, I am getting tempted. The physics I learned in high school did not deal much with non-central collisions.
Destroying the comet so close to earth actually will do MORE damage to earth than letting hit earth, since it increases the efficiency of transferring the kinetic energy into heat energy. If they have let the comet hit earth as a whole, some of the energy may be used to "move earth" a little, i.e. increase the velocity of earth instead of changing it to destructive heat energy.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. In both cases you have a collision between two objects that end up sticking and becoming one. A completely inelastic collision. You move the Earth equally much whether you push the atmosphere or the ground. Of course observers with a sentimental interest in, say, the shape of either object may care, but for the astrophysicist it really should not matter.
They will not replace the CPU's. The CPU will still be there. It will just not be a performance critical part, and as such its price will fall. Look at C3 prices for an example of how cheap a CPU can be if performance is less important.
Eventually the CPU will be so small and unimportant that the GPU will swallow it and stick it in some corner. Or maybe the CPU will be integrated into the motherboard chipset instead.
I find WinZip to be hugely bloated and I do not find its interface at all intuitive. Pretty icons though. Fortunately I do not use Windows much, but once in a while I need to unzip something on a Windows machine. I really think that (the GUI for) archive handling belongs in the file manager. Besides, I tend to be helping someone else when I need to open archives. Buying licenses for all of them is not an option, and neither is putting up with the nag screen. Ah well, at least there are good free command-line archivers.
This brings me to a larger point. Everyone who scratches an itch on Windows releases the corresponding tool for $25 as shareware. Then they discover that noone buys their product. Just take a look at the archiver section of TUCOWS. A million different GUI's for zip, all shareware. What exactly do the authors expect? They cannot compete with WinZip on features and generally their user interface is even worse. If I had to buy an archiver, I would buy WinZip. A $10 saving over WinZip is not going to make me buy something with no reputation whatsoever.
Most software today except games is shareware anyway. You can get time-limited demos for pretty much anything that does not come from Microsoft. So what does "shareware" offer that regular commercial software does not? All I see is having to go through 20 crappy programs on TUCOWS to find one that may be slightly useful. And then having the author abandon it a month later.
Give me proprietary software or Free Software anytime.
What you say used to be true. However, the latest graphics chipsets are basically vector-FPU's. The only annoying limitation right now is that they only do single precision floating point. Hopefully this will be remedied in coming generations.
Now you may say that integer performance matters. Personally I do not think it does. The only time I run the integer units flat out is when compiling or encrypting/compressing. Compilation is a niche market, Intel or AMD cannot survive off of that. Encryption and compression is already being pushed to vector units in the CPU. Soon it will make sense to push it all the way to the GPU.
If you can fit it into my notebook and actually make it work, the deal is on. I would have bought a PIII-based machine at the time, but I could not get the same graphics and the same screen.
The top end of today's processors have plenty of power for what 95% of people use them to do.
This has been true for me since the Pentium 100MHz or so. However, demands change. My current computer has a 1.8GHz PIV. While I would gladly trade that for a 1GHz PIII, I would not go for anything less. In a few years this computer too will seem impossibly slow and useless.
The only thing that is new is that high-end gamers now spend more on their graphics cards than on their CPUs. That is truly a change, and it would scare me a lot if I was Intel or AMD. The inside joke at nVidia is that GPU is short for General Processor Unit, while CPU is short for Compatible Processor Unit. Imagine a day when all performance critical software runs on the GPU, while the CPU is reduced to handling I/O and legacy applications...
"Old" Europe, as George Bush II put it, is currently trying to build up the domestic military industry. If you expect lots of purchases of US military technology from there, you may be in for a surprise.
I only have one printer at home. Even for that one printer, I love CUPS. And I do add printers for places I go with my laptop. Very convenient. Windows can (somewhat) easily print to IPP too. Besides, lpr is a festering pile of old code. LPRNG was intended to replace it, but managed to only switch the security holes around a bit.
I have had no end of trouble getting non-postscript printers set up with plain lpd. Then you add the trouble that a whole lot of printers really do not like getting jobs from more than one host via the lpr protocol. For me, the IPP protocol and the www-based setup of CUPS has been a godsend. It gets better every day, as more and more printers get native IPP support. No more walking to the printer to try to interpret its display or blinkenlichts.
Quantum computers are perfectly general purpose. They can do everything a normal Turing computer can do, with at most constant slowdown. At some problems they show exponential speedup. Quantum computers are great. If only we could build them.
Imagine that you gave regular users permission to mount file systems. Then I, the evil user, mount my own/lib and invoke a suid dynamically linked program, say/bin/passwd. The program load libc.so, which happens to be a link to libevil.so. *Poof*, root for me.
Even if you only allow the user to mount in specially secured areas of the file system you would still have problems. Right now the Linux VFS places a lot of trust in the individual filesystems. A user-mounted file system could contain deliberate errors designed to confuse the Linux VFS. A thorough audit would be needed.
The cell phone manufacturers are the only ones that can hit the mass market within a couple of years. Nokia could sell a phone with cordless telephone profile implemented without changing hardware at all.
As to Spectralink and Cisco, let me quote from Spectralink's press release: "The NetLink e340 is priced starting at $399". They are targeted at enterprises and they do not have a chance at the mass market.
For BlueTooth, the cell phones and headsets alone can keep that standard alive and chipsets cheap. I am pretty sure that (cell phone) handsets with hardware capable of VoIP over BlueTooth will hit a $150 price point within a year or two. The big question is whether any manufacturer will deliver the software. Personally my guess is that the software will be made available, but only on certain high-end models targeted at the enterprise market.
Still, eventually someone with the right resources at their disposal will discover the untapped market. Perhaps an established handset manufacturer will discover that there is more money in catering to the consumer than in catering to the network operators. Or perhaps someone else with no ties to the network operators will enter the market. I really doubt it will be Cisco, Spectralink or for that matter Nortel. Those players have no idea how to make money in a low-margin market.
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*laugh*. Nice explanation. I do think it is pretty clear that he built the damn dam himself. In the widest possible sense of the word "himself" of course - just like Alexander the Great himself beat the Persians.
Also, for a wise guy he acts really stupidly. For one thing he makes a big dam, but places all his manufacturing and even his tower below a dam he built.
So much for being the wisest. The only redeeming feature about TTT is Gollum.
I find the decision to migrate to 16 symbolic of the merger.
This is wrong. There is no presumption of innocense in civil cases.
Of course you are free to think whatever you want. However if you live in the US or Denmark, it is not legal to download a copy of that CD from Gnutella (unless it is in the public domain or you have the permission of the copyright holder.)
Perhaps you should have said "moral" instead of "legal". This seems to be a common mistake.
Yes, you as the creator of creative works should definitely decide under which circumstances the work is given or sold by you. The question is whether you get to decide what I do with it after I received/bought it. Some argue that you as the creator should get absolute power to decide that. Copyright does not go that far, even today. You get to regulate one of many possible activities, copying. This regulation is only for a limited time, and there are exceptions where I get to copy even if you explicitly state that you do not want to allow me to.
I agree that downloading CD quality music I did not buy is and should be illegal.
Even if it was recorded 50 years ago? Or 200? Is the public domain gone for good?
Personally I consider the current copyright laws a bad bargain that do not "promote progress". I respect laws when doing so makes society a better place.
Yes. I would love to. I see no reason not to, assuming solar cells were cheap and could be produced without polluting much.
In any case, such blocking is interesting from a technical viewpoint. Doing it in DNS is easy and it scales well, but it is also easy to circumvent. Doing it by inserting a black hole route in BGP is easy for the first couple, but routers will not be able to handle an unlimited number of /32 blackhole routes. As long as the router does not melt, it is a pretty effective method. There are other methods, but they all suck in at least one way.
And then someone invented Freenet. Practically impossible to block. It will be interesting to see which country that will be the first to make it illegal.
Note that in the comet-hits-pole scenario, a lot of energy is released as heat anyway. Hmm, I am getting tempted. The physics I learned in high school did not deal much with non-central collisions.
Your assumption of "no drag" is not very realistic.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. In both cases you have a collision between two objects that end up sticking and becoming one. A completely inelastic collision. You move the Earth equally much whether you push the atmosphere or the ground. Of course observers with a sentimental interest in, say, the shape of either object may care, but for the astrophysicist it really should not matter.
Eventually the CPU will be so small and unimportant that the GPU will swallow it and stick it in some corner. Or maybe the CPU will be integrated into the motherboard chipset instead.
This brings me to a larger point. Everyone who scratches an itch on Windows releases the corresponding tool for $25 as shareware. Then they discover that noone buys their product. Just take a look at the archiver section of TUCOWS. A million different GUI's for zip, all shareware. What exactly do the authors expect? They cannot compete with WinZip on features and generally their user interface is even worse. If I had to buy an archiver, I would buy WinZip. A $10 saving over WinZip is not going to make me buy something with no reputation whatsoever.
Most software today except games is shareware anyway. You can get time-limited demos for pretty much anything that does not come from Microsoft. So what does "shareware" offer that regular commercial software does not? All I see is having to go through 20 crappy programs on TUCOWS to find one that may be slightly useful. And then having the author abandon it a month later.
Give me proprietary software or Free Software anytime.
Now you may say that integer performance matters. Personally I do not think it does. The only time I run the integer units flat out is when compiling or encrypting/compressing. Compilation is a niche market, Intel or AMD cannot survive off of that. Encryption and compression is already being pushed to vector units in the CPU. Soon it will make sense to push it all the way to the GPU.
If you can fit it into my notebook and actually make it work, the deal is on. I would have bought a PIII-based machine at the time, but I could not get the same graphics and the same screen.
...for letting you override that abysmal colour scheme.
This has been true for me since the Pentium 100MHz or so. However, demands change. My current computer has a 1.8GHz PIV. While I would gladly trade that for a 1GHz PIII, I would not go for anything less. In a few years this computer too will seem impossibly slow and useless.
The only thing that is new is that high-end gamers now spend more on their graphics cards than on their CPUs. That is truly a change, and it would scare me a lot if I was Intel or AMD. The inside joke at nVidia is that GPU is short for General Processor Unit, while CPU is short for Compatible Processor Unit. Imagine a day when all performance critical software runs on the GPU, while the CPU is reduced to handling I/O and legacy applications...
"Old" Europe, as George Bush II put it, is currently trying to build up the domestic military industry. If you expect lots of purchases of US military technology from there, you may be in for a surprise.
I only have one printer at home. Even for that one printer, I love CUPS. And I do add printers for places I go with my laptop. Very convenient. Windows can (somewhat) easily print to IPP too. Besides, lpr is a festering pile of old code. LPRNG was intended to replace it, but managed to only switch the security holes around a bit.
I have had no end of trouble getting non-postscript printers set up with plain lpd. Then you add the trouble that a whole lot of printers really do not like getting jobs from more than one host via the lpr protocol. For me, the IPP protocol and the www-based setup of CUPS has been a godsend. It gets better every day, as more and more printers get native IPP support. No more walking to the printer to try to interpret its display or blinkenlichts.
Quantum computers are perfectly general purpose. They can do everything a normal Turing computer can do, with at most constant slowdown. At some problems they show exponential speedup. Quantum computers are great. If only we could build them.
LD_PRELOAD is not honoured by suid programs. /usr/bin/passwd is dynamically linked on RedHat 9.
Even if you only allow the user to mount in specially secured areas of the file system you would still have problems. Right now the Linux VFS places a lot of trust in the individual filesystems. A user-mounted file system could contain deliberate errors designed to confuse the Linux VFS. A thorough audit would be needed.
As to Spectralink and Cisco, let me quote from Spectralink's press release: "The NetLink e340 is priced starting at $399". They are targeted at enterprises and they do not have a chance at the mass market.
For BlueTooth, the cell phones and headsets alone can keep that standard alive and chipsets cheap. I am pretty sure that (cell phone) handsets with hardware capable of VoIP over BlueTooth will hit a $150 price point within a year or two. The big question is whether any manufacturer will deliver the software. Personally my guess is that the software will be made available, but only on certain high-end models targeted at the enterprise market.
Still, eventually someone with the right resources at their disposal will discover the untapped market. Perhaps an established handset manufacturer will discover that there is more money in catering to the consumer than in catering to the network operators. Or perhaps someone else with no ties to the network operators will enter the market. I really doubt it will be Cisco, Spectralink or for that matter Nortel. Those players have no idea how to make money in a low-margin market.