POSIX signals themselves are a bit of a horror. Like C++ exceptions (as Google correctly points out) they have implications for `other' code, the worst case being code that has not be written to cope with interrupted system calls. Also, signal dispatch has portability problems; signals did not anticipate threads and POSIX was slow and iterative in its promulgation the standard solution, so many subtleties have appeared among implementations.
However, I think you have the right instinct. I personally find myself working in explicitly event driven environments frequently. Node and TCL for example. Here you can not indulge the illusion of absolute control over the fate of the instruction pointer. Any time you `yield' to the runtime you wind up entering your code at some other point as the runtime dispatches events.
Using the event model to cope with errors and exceptions would mean that anything that would traditionally throw an exception or return a error code would instead be a yield point and may generate an error event. You would then provide a handler to receive these events with enough context to cope with the problem.
I've come to the believe the event driven model is a far better model for the actual conditions one assumes when implementing logic. The moment you write main(){...} you are subject to signals that are handled by a collection of default handlers. One day the system becomes non-trivial and you must 'fix' these handlers. Perhaps you have no business writing main(){...} and adopting a naive, linear model in the first place. Instead, you're supposed to implement (the moral equivalent of) a signal handler instead.
Down at the bottom, where CPUs process machine code, hardware interrupts are endemic. The hardware itself imposes the event model. It may be the case that most machine/assembly code still written by humans today are simply event handlers; logic servicing hardware interrupts.
I don't see any indication that a) this has any relation to the size of the directory
The cited bug points out a problem with readdir(). This manifests itself as failures with other software, including dovecot (where maildir is used) and bonnie++. Some of those other bugs were reported and marked as duplicates, some weren't.
Never in years has it given me one problem, but hey, that's just me.
Yeah, that's just you. Me? I've been watching hapless administrators discover NFS flaws since the 90's and I have long since abandoned NFS as a serious tool for production operations. It's fine in most cases as a file share for interactive use (/home and ad hoc shares) and not much else. Under certain conditions with extremely good NFS implementations (netapp, for example) you can pull it off. The other 99% of the time it's just a mistake.
As recently as Redhat/CentOS 6.2 the NFS kernel client choked on large NFS directories (11 months ago,) breaking Maildir among other things. NFS, particularly on Linux, has always been a flaky POS. Please stop inflicting NFS on people. NFS is for/home and not much else.
Yeah, I know there aren't any good alternatives. That doesn't mean using NFS isn't a mistake.
Node.js uses Google's V8 Javascript engine which is too fast for some applications. Also, it doesn't use enough memory, a problem the JVM is likely to correct. You can't expect much from an app that fails to allocate 900MB of virtual space and an 60MB working set on start-up.
start a business that sells user-customized soldered motherboard/cpu combos
Or maybe do something a lot more straightforward and just solder the surface mount BGA CPUs to an adaptor... Most of the `chips' you buy today are so-called Multi-Chip Modules, small pinned-out PCBs with surface mount CPUs+GPUs soldered on at the foundry. A lot of 'enthusiasts' didn't hesitate to buy surface mount chips in the form of SECC cartridge enclosed Pentium IIs and IIIs.
If the DIY enthusiast market is still healthy then it will have little difficulty solving this non-problem. The aftermarket is large enough to create a standardised socket and supply adapted CPUs with or without Intel's cooperation. Back in the day ASUS (and others) actually made Socket 478 to 479 adaptors to mount Pentium M's in desktop boards because Prescott was sucking so hard this combination actually became appealing.
Anyhow, stop hyperventilating. Broadwell is the die shrink iteration of Haswell. Haswell won't be available be until mid-2013. They are speculating on packaging for components that probably won't be available until late 2014 at the earliest. The claims being made aren't credible. They are interpreting the earliest available packaging details from Intel (which unsurprising prioritizes surface mount packages due to the demand for laptops and tablets,) and behaving as though no other packages will be offered.
QE3 is $40E+9 per month. Helicopter Ben is monetizing (printing) about 37% of our deficit. This eventuality has been predicted for the US for decades. Buy gold with cash and hide it.
However, that's probably not the reason for the pricing histogram in the linked story. The prices of some models have fallen while others have remained high. That differential wouldn't exist if it were exclusively due to currency; exchange rates make no distinction between popular 2.5" disks and everything else.
The models where prices have fallen are the high volume models that OEMs install in laptops and DVRs. Everything else remains expensive.
That actually makes a lot of sense. OEMS buy those 2.5" drives under contract in large quantities. These are the lines that got highest priority to recover after the flood, so the supply of these parts recovered quicker and prices have fallen faster.
Basically the flood caused a realignment of resources and this is reflected in the prices we see now.
Rust is not biodegradation. Rust may be just as effective wrt sustainability, and this may all be superfluous greeny nonsense, but oxidization is not a biological process.
Bob has it all over you. You can make a brilliant case and Bob will quietly pigeonhole enough support to get his way. In the meantime you'll squander whatever little political capital you have squabbling with Bob. Don't squabble with Bob.
convince Bob
Bzzt. Wrong. Bob is not the guy you need to convince. You need to convince everyone else. Here are some ideas on how to do that.
First, demonstrate the weaknesses. Place legitimate demands on Bob's system that you know it can't handle (revision control, secure remote access, ACL, etc.) Make him squirm and come up with excuses. Don't offer an alternative because that just leads to squabbling. Don't squabble with Bob. Just make the system and Bob's advocacy of it look bad.
Do something "new" in your prefered alternative system. It has to be something that does not require or even suggest that it belongs in Bob's baby, because otherwise you're back to squabbling. Don't squabble with Bob. This is where you show how inadequate Bob's system is. This has been how middle managers sneak solutions into institutions for decades; go around IT. If the system is really as bad as you say it is then this is already happening anyhow. Look carefully for those cases. You may be able to adopt them.
Wait. Eventually some happy user of your alternative system, armed with knowledge and frustration with the inadequacies of Bob's system you carefully surfaced, will begin to argue for your solution. "XYZ can do it, why shouldn't we use that instead?"
Wait. Eventually Bob's system will crumble a bit because Bob doesn't scale (medical problems, boredom, incompetence, whatever) and you're there ready to go with a proven solution, advocates and everything.
Your specific question (if robots, why China?) was answered directly a few years ago by Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn. According to Terry, the US has "too many lawyers." Linky here.
– Limited revisions, with history. Correcting grammar or spelling mistakes would be nice, but posters can't be allowed to game the conversation. Do something novel like enforcing a maximum hamming distance.
– Mobile site; slashdot has not adapted to portable screens and touch.
– Do Not Remove Anonymous Posting. Auto-mod it into the basement, whatever, but there is an element of mod-point armed group-think around here that needs to be countered.
– Faster accept/reject of story submissions... it takes days sometimes.
– Moderation fix: only early replies are likely to get moderated. Mixing in new replies with the early replies might help, particularly if they are from those with worthy karma.
– Interviews and Q&A with significant people in OSS.
– Fix the paid subscribers feature. Either remove it or give it a reason to exist.
This site jumped the shark when it was renamed Slashdot from Dips and Chips:P
Chips & Dips supposedly... I wouldn't know as I have no memory of it.
A lot of low UIDs replying to this story. Grow or die, as they say. Problem is I'm not sure Slashdot scales. I know it is really easy to upset the user base. It won't take many blunders to kill off what is still here.
It's up to you Dice. You're definitely the bull in the proverbial China Shop now. Someone with more vision than I might find a way to build on the Slashdot brand without wrecking it, but that will take talent beyond anything we've seen so far.
Hard day for loyal western customers that would rather um... pay more for their gadgets than exploit young workers. In the mean time we may find it useful to review the Slashdot poster rationalizations collected from recent responses to similar stories.
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[ ] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[ ] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[ ] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[ ] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[ ] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[ ] It's just capitalism at work
[ ] It's just communism at work
[ ] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[ ] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[ ] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[ ] Your Android is Foxconn too
[ ] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[ ] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[ ] Apple designers are in the US
[ ] The US did the same thing to the British
[ ] The US had slaves once too
[ ] The US has prison labor today
[ ] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[ ] There are lines of willing workers outside Foxconn factories
[ ] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[ ] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[ ] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[ ] Foxconn worker suicides are lower than Chicago's murder rate
[ ] We can't pollute the whole world!
[ ] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[ ] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
Stop alienating power users. We're not the problem. We're the beginning.
If I and hundreds or thousands of others tell you that your desktop doesn't provide the configuration capabilities we need then listen and provide the configurability we're asking for. If we tell you your crazy bloated akonadi/nepomuck/whatevertheflip is too big (a mysql instance in my home directory??) then listen and rethink your design. When we complain that your latest major release is a fabulously buggy mess (KDE 4.0) then listen and don't do that to us again. When you hear from people that want a regular orthodox file manager then listen, provide one and don't deprecate it in favor of some granny-safe photo album browser.
It's not hard, really. It just isn't a lot of fun. Which is why it doesn't happen.
I was left to wonder who cared about what CPU EMC storage arrays use. Is there some EMC hacker culture with its own open source storage OS running on EMC devices? Where can I get one??
Big storage needs lots of RAM. Intel has been providing 64 bit x86 CPUs, chipsets, memory controllers, etc. since 2004. I suppose EMC could license ARMv8 (the 64 bit extension of ARM that became available to licensees only about 12 months ago,) sign a contract with some foundry and design a system around 64 bit ARM. They certainly have the capital. If they did they would be the very first — there are no 64 bit ARMs being manufactured in volume anywhere yet.
One can imagine ARM having some success in big storage. ARM cores can be extended with custom silicon to integrate important algorithms and they can achieve very high core density. Much of storage is embarrassingly parallel so peak performance of CPU cores isn't terribly important.
Frankly I just don't think it matters much to big storage customers. They're paying for throughput, reliability, features and support, not an ISA. EMC could use 43 bit LISP processors soldered together by Taiwanese gnomes for all they care, as long as they can afford it and it performs.
I understood the rational behind two movies; the Hobbit is pretty condensed and there is no lack of fans that will appreciate the depths explored with sufficient screen time. Three movies seems excessive but Peter did right by LOTR so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
It could be good if the net result is three reasonably sized movies instead of a pair of 235 minute blood clotting epics. We humans are really not meant to stare at screens that long.
We should ask why this story is summarized with sociological mumbo-jumbo. I've been here a while now and I can't recall ever seeing a submission quite like that. This same story has been written in a comprehensible manner by many others. Some examples:
Most everyone else managed to express the central point clearly; the claim that AGW sceptics are comparatively ignorant is false. Yet, here we are at Slashdot with a paragraph full of obtuse weasel words that manages to avoid conveying much of anything.
Perhaps it's just that certain folks aren't happy with the otherwise obvious conclusion and can't bring themselves to expose it. Better to have not posted the story at all.
Perhaps the following can help those dealing with the more general issue of buying products manufactured in China, et. al. These are the collected rationalizations that typically appear when discussing Apple and Foxconn.
Why I'm ok with my Chinese manufactured iPhone/Pad
- or -
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[ ] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[ ] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[ ] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[ ] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[ ] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[ ] It's just capitalism at work
[ ] It's just communism at work
[ ] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[ ] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[ ] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[ ] Your Android is Foxconn too
[ ] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[ ] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[ ] Apple designers are in the US
[ ] The US did the same thing to the British
[ ] The US had slaves once too
[ ] The US has prison labor today
[ ] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[ ] There are lines of willing workers outside Foxconn factories
[ ] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[ ] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[ ] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[ ] Foxconn worker suicides are lower than Chicago's murder rate
[ ] We can't pollute the whole world!
[ ] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[ ] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem
Prepare to engage the Concern Drive!
3...
2...
1...
Engage!
kLanK! Whirrrrrr....
***** CONCERN DRIVE FAILURE *****
Oh dear. I appear to be unconcerned about the, um, "fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." Even my broadcast television based parody has ironically failed to create any detectable degree of concern.
A house committee watched while Jaczko's four fellow NRC board members, two of which were appointed by Obama, publicly condemned him while sitting to his immediate left and right. In recent congressional history, that scene is only trumped by Vollmer claiming executive privilege.
Understand that their world, political appointees near the very top of regulatory bureaucracy, is one of connections. You don't do dramatic things in public unless you really, really mean it, because whatever you do will be with you forever. Jaczko has to be some kind of way over-the-top SOB to wind up in that situation before Congress.
He's never offered one genuine, unqualified note of concession about any of it. Everyone else is wrong. "I believe strongly in safety" is as close as he's ever gotten to an explanation. Turning the NRC board of commissioners into a snake pit is somehow supposed to promote safety.
You-know-who will just foist another anti-energy extremist on the NRC after the election, so don't bet on any improvement.
At the moment I write this there are 297 comments mostly debating the merits of LLVM/Clang vs. GCC. There is not one mention of EGCS.
Fifteen years ago GCC was forked. A group of people we're frustrated with GCC and its leadership because they had contributions to make and talent to offer that was not welcome. They called their fork EGCS.
Why are we doing this? It's become increasingly clear in the course
of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
improvment [sic] over the years.
The GCC you use today is EGCS. A few years later EGCS was adopted as GCC 2.95 after the merits of EGCS became undeniable.
Looks like we've come full circle. The cool kids are off in the weeds making cool stuff. Better stuff, and the `Powers That Be' are not interested. The `needs' of the FSF today are no longer in sync with the `needs' of the developers of today.
The bottom line is that GCC as it is with it's leadership, code base and license agenda doesn't cut it for those who have the talent, motivation and capital to create a tool chain that does cut it. You don't get to impede that, however righteous you think you are.
Slashdot Mirror
POSIX signals themselves are a bit of a horror. Like C++ exceptions (as Google correctly points out) they have implications for `other' code, the worst case being code that has not be written to cope with interrupted system calls. Also, signal dispatch has portability problems; signals did not anticipate threads and POSIX was slow and iterative in its promulgation the standard solution, so many subtleties have appeared among implementations.
However, I think you have the right instinct. I personally find myself working in explicitly event driven environments frequently. Node and TCL for example. Here you can not indulge the illusion of absolute control over the fate of the instruction pointer. Any time you `yield' to the runtime you wind up entering your code at some other point as the runtime dispatches events.
Using the event model to cope with errors and exceptions would mean that anything that would traditionally throw an exception or return a error code would instead be a yield point and may generate an error event. You would then provide a handler to receive these events with enough context to cope with the problem.
I've come to the believe the event driven model is a far better model for the actual conditions one assumes when implementing logic. The moment you write main(){...} you are subject to signals that are handled by a collection of default handlers. One day the system becomes non-trivial and you must 'fix' these handlers. Perhaps you have no business writing main(){...} and adopting a naive, linear model in the first place. Instead, you're supposed to implement (the moral equivalent of) a signal handler instead.
Down at the bottom, where CPUs process machine code, hardware interrupts are endemic. The hardware itself imposes the event model. It may be the case that most machine/assembly code still written by humans today are simply event handlers; logic servicing hardware interrupts.
Don't jack up rates to pay those Disney people. We'll just move elsewhere.
— Your customers
I don't see any indication that a) this has any relation to the size of the directory
The cited bug points out a problem with readdir(). This manifests itself as failures with other software, including dovecot (where maildir is used) and bonnie++. Some of those other bugs were reported and marked as duplicates, some weren't.
Ultimately it boiled down to a flaw in Linux NFS that was fixed by Trond Myklebust and was still perculating through distributions over a year later.
Never in years has it given me one problem, but hey, that's just me.
Yeah, that's just you. Me? I've been watching hapless administrators discover NFS flaws since the 90's and I have long since abandoned NFS as a serious tool for production operations. It's fine in most cases as a file share for interactive use (/home and ad hoc shares) and not much else. Under certain conditions with extremely good NFS implementations (netapp, for example) you can pull it off. The other 99% of the time it's just a mistake.
As recently as Redhat/CentOS 6.2 the NFS kernel client choked on large NFS directories (11 months ago,) breaking Maildir among other things. NFS, particularly on Linux, has always been a flaky POS. Please stop inflicting NFS on people. NFS is for /home and not much else.
Yeah, I know there aren't any good alternatives. That doesn't mean using NFS isn't a mistake.
Node.js uses Google's V8 Javascript engine which is too fast for some applications. Also, it doesn't use enough memory, a problem the JVM is likely to correct. You can't expect much from an app that fails to allocate 900MB of virtual space and an 60MB working set on start-up.
start a business that sells user-customized soldered motherboard/cpu combos
Or maybe do something a lot more straightforward and just solder the surface mount BGA CPUs to an adaptor... Most of the `chips' you buy today are so-called Multi-Chip Modules, small pinned-out PCBs with surface mount CPUs+GPUs soldered on at the foundry. A lot of 'enthusiasts' didn't hesitate to buy surface mount chips in the form of SECC cartridge enclosed Pentium IIs and IIIs.
If the DIY enthusiast market is still healthy then it will have little difficulty solving this non-problem. The aftermarket is large enough to create a standardised socket and supply adapted CPUs with or without Intel's cooperation. Back in the day ASUS (and others) actually made Socket 478 to 479 adaptors to mount Pentium M's in desktop boards because Prescott was sucking so hard this combination actually became appealing.
Anyhow, stop hyperventilating. Broadwell is the die shrink iteration of Haswell. Haswell won't be available be until mid-2013. They are speculating on packaging for components that probably won't be available until late 2014 at the earliest. The claims being made aren't credible. They are interpreting the earliest available packaging details from Intel (which unsurprising prioritizes surface mount packages due to the demand for laptops and tablets,) and behaving as though no other packages will be offered.
QE3 is $40E+9 per month. Helicopter Ben is monetizing (printing) about 37% of our deficit. This eventuality has been predicted for the US for decades. Buy gold with cash and hide it.
However, that's probably not the reason for the pricing histogram in the linked story. The prices of some models have fallen while others have remained high. That differential wouldn't exist if it were exclusively due to currency; exchange rates make no distinction between popular 2.5" disks and everything else.
The models where prices have fallen are the high volume models that OEMs install in laptops and DVRs. Everything else remains expensive.
That actually makes a lot of sense. OEMS buy those 2.5" drives under contract in large quantities. These are the lines that got highest priority to recover after the flood, so the supply of these parts recovered quicker and prices have fallen faster.
Basically the flood caused a realignment of resources and this is reflected in the prices we see now.
Rust is not biodegradation. Rust may be just as effective wrt sustainability, and this may all be superfluous greeny nonsense, but oxidization is not a biological process.
new member
Bob has it all over you. You can make a brilliant case and Bob will quietly pigeonhole enough support to get his way. In the meantime you'll squander whatever little political capital you have squabbling with Bob. Don't squabble with Bob.
convince Bob
Bzzt. Wrong. Bob is not the guy you need to convince. You need to convince everyone else. Here are some ideas on how to do that.
First, demonstrate the weaknesses. Place legitimate demands on Bob's system that you know it can't handle (revision control, secure remote access, ACL, etc.) Make him squirm and come up with excuses. Don't offer an alternative because that just leads to squabbling. Don't squabble with Bob. Just make the system and Bob's advocacy of it look bad.
Do something "new" in your prefered alternative system. It has to be something that does not require or even suggest that it belongs in Bob's baby, because otherwise you're back to squabbling. Don't squabble with Bob. This is where you show how inadequate Bob's system is. This has been how middle managers sneak solutions into institutions for decades; go around IT. If the system is really as bad as you say it is then this is already happening anyhow. Look carefully for those cases. You may be able to adopt them.
Wait. Eventually some happy user of your alternative system, armed with knowledge and frustration with the inadequacies of Bob's system you carefully surfaced, will begin to argue for your solution. "XYZ can do it, why shouldn't we use that instead?"
Wait. Eventually Bob's system will crumble a bit because Bob doesn't scale (medical problems, boredom, incompetence, whatever) and you're there ready to go with a proven solution, advocates and everything.
Your specific question (if robots, why China?) was answered directly a few years ago by Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn. According to Terry, the US has "too many lawyers." Linky here.
– Limited revisions, with history. Correcting grammar or spelling mistakes would be nice, but posters can't be allowed to game the conversation. Do something novel like enforcing a maximum hamming distance.
– Mobile site; slashdot has not adapted to portable screens and touch.
– Do Not Remove Anonymous Posting. Auto-mod it into the basement, whatever, but there is an element of mod-point armed group-think around here that needs to be countered.
– Faster accept/reject of story submissions... it takes days sometimes.
– Moderation fix: only early replies are likely to get moderated. Mixing in new replies with the early replies might help, particularly if they are from those with worthy karma.
– Interviews and Q&A with significant people in OSS.
– Fix the paid subscribers feature. Either remove it or give it a reason to exist.
This site jumped the shark when it was renamed Slashdot from Dips and Chips :P
Chips & Dips supposedly... I wouldn't know as I have no memory of it.
A lot of low UIDs replying to this story. Grow or die, as they say. Problem is I'm not sure Slashdot scales. I know it is really easy to upset the user base. It won't take many blunders to kill off what is still here.
It's up to you Dice. You're definitely the bull in the proverbial China Shop now. Someone with more vision than I might find a way to build on the Slashdot brand without wrecking it, but that will take talent beyond anything we've seen so far.
Hard day for loyal western customers that would rather um... pay more for their gadgets than exploit young workers. In the mean time we may find it useful to review the Slashdot poster rationalizations collected from recent responses to similar stories.
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[ ] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[ ] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[ ] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[ ] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[ ] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[ ] It's just capitalism at work
[ ] It's just communism at work
[ ] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[ ] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[ ] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[ ] Your Android is Foxconn too
[ ] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[ ] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[ ] Apple designers are in the US
[ ] The US did the same thing to the British
[ ] The US had slaves once too
[ ] The US has prison labor today
[ ] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[ ] There are lines of willing workers outside Foxconn factories
[ ] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[ ] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[ ] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[ ] Foxconn worker suicides are lower than Chicago's murder rate
[ ] We can't pollute the whole world!
[ ] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[ ] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
Stop alienating power users. We're not the problem. We're the beginning.
If I and hundreds or thousands of others tell you that your desktop doesn't provide the configuration capabilities we need then listen and provide the configurability we're asking for. If we tell you your crazy bloated akonadi/nepomuck/whatevertheflip is too big (a mysql instance in my home directory??) then listen and rethink your design. When we complain that your latest major release is a fabulously buggy mess (KDE 4.0) then listen and don't do that to us again. When you hear from people that want a regular orthodox file manager then listen, provide one and don't deprecate it in favor of some granny-safe photo album browser.
It's not hard, really. It just isn't a lot of fun. Which is why it doesn't happen.
I was left to wonder who cared about what CPU EMC storage arrays use. Is there some EMC hacker culture with its own open source storage OS running on EMC devices? Where can I get one??
Big storage needs lots of RAM. Intel has been providing 64 bit x86 CPUs, chipsets, memory controllers, etc. since 2004. I suppose EMC could license ARMv8 (the 64 bit extension of ARM that became available to licensees only about 12 months ago,) sign a contract with some foundry and design a system around 64 bit ARM. They certainly have the capital. If they did they would be the very first — there are no 64 bit ARMs being manufactured in volume anywhere yet.
One can imagine ARM having some success in big storage. ARM cores can be extended with custom silicon to integrate important algorithms and they can achieve very high core density. Much of storage is embarrassingly parallel so peak performance of CPU cores isn't terribly important.
Frankly I just don't think it matters much to big storage customers. They're paying for throughput, reliability, features and support, not an ISA. EMC could use 43 bit LISP processors soldered together by Taiwanese gnomes for all they care, as long as they can afford it and it performs.
Not sure why the 'gizmag' photos-only link is offered when you can watch video of it over here.
The think actually springs a leak in the video. I'd like to see the longer version were it catches fire. :)
Robert L. Forward. An actual physicist.
To those evolved on the surface of a neutron star, you are mere smoke.
I understood the rational behind two movies; the Hobbit is pretty condensed and there is no lack of fans that will appreciate the depths explored with sufficient screen time. Three movies seems excessive but Peter did right by LOTR so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
It could be good if the net result is three reasonably sized movies instead of a pair of 235 minute blood clotting epics. We humans are really not meant to stare at screens that long.
He's a registered hard money 'bundler' ($132,813 on '08) for Obama.
Happy Friday.
We should ask why this story is summarized with sociological mumbo-jumbo. I've been here a while now and I can't recall ever seeing a submission quite like that. This same story has been written in a comprehensible manner by many others. Some examples:
Public Apathy Over Climate Change Unrelated To Scientific Literacy
Culture splits climate views, not science smarts
Climate skeptics know their stuff
Most everyone else managed to express the central point clearly; the claim that AGW sceptics are comparatively ignorant is false. Yet, here we are at Slashdot with a paragraph full of obtuse weasel words that manages to avoid conveying much of anything.
Perhaps it's just that certain folks aren't happy with the otherwise obvious conclusion and can't bring themselves to expose it. Better to have not posted the story at all.
Perhaps the following can help those dealing with the more general issue of buying products manufactured in China, et. al. These are the collected rationalizations that typically appear when discussing Apple and Foxconn.
Why I'm ok with my Chinese manufactured iPhone/Pad
- or -
Apple/Foxconn worker and environmental exploitation rationalization worksheet
Check all that apply
[ ] Making iPhones in a Chinese factory is better than being a Chinese peasant
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much if I had to pay my fellow citizens to make them
[ ] iPhones/Pads would cost too much given environmental regulations I vehemently insist on for myself
[ ] All the other manufacturers are doing it too
[ ] Some/Many/Most Chinese workers appreciate 70 hour weeks and breathing my aluminum dust
[ ] It's not Apple, it's Foxconn
[ ] It's not Apple, it's the Chinese government
[ ] It's just capitalism at work
[ ] It's just communism at work
[ ] Apple's disposable workers are paid better than non-Apple disposable workers
[ ] Apple's auditors didn't find any serious issues
[ ] Some day the Chinese will be too wealthy to exploit
[ ] Your Android is Foxconn too
[ ] You're an Apple hater using Apple as a scapegoat
[ ] I also work 60/80/100/120 hour weeks at my IT job
[ ] Apple designers are in the US
[ ] The US did the same thing to the British
[ ] The US had slaves once too
[ ] The US has prison labor today
[ ] It's up to the Chinese to stand up to their oppressive government
[ ] There are lines of willing workers outside Foxconn factories
[ ] If any company were to stop the exploitation, I really think it'll be Apple
[ ] Your free Linux runs on Chinese hardware too
[ ] Foxconn workers think they have it great, so it's ok!
[ ] Foxconn worker suicides are lower than Chicago's murder rate
[ ] We can't pollute the whole world!
[ ] Half of all US households have an Apple product
[ ] If we don't exploit them they'll never develop
destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem
Prepare to engage the Concern Drive!
3...
2...
1...
Engage!
kLanK! Whirrrrrr....
***** CONCERN DRIVE FAILURE *****
Oh dear. I appear to be unconcerned about the, um, "fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." Even my broadcast television based parody has ironically failed to create any detectable degree of concern.
Enjoy your pay cut.
If I express sceptisism about the EFSA and its science based conclusions does that make me an antiscience bible thumper?
A house committee watched while Jaczko's four fellow NRC board members, two of which were appointed by Obama, publicly condemned him while sitting to his immediate left and right. In recent congressional history, that scene is only trumped by Vollmer claiming executive privilege.
Understand that their world, political appointees near the very top of regulatory bureaucracy, is one of connections. You don't do dramatic things in public unless you really, really mean it, because whatever you do will be with you forever. Jaczko has to be some kind of way over-the-top SOB to wind up in that situation before Congress.
He's never offered one genuine, unqualified note of concession about any of it. Everyone else is wrong. "I believe strongly in safety" is as close as he's ever gotten to an explanation. Turning the NRC board of commissioners into a snake pit is somehow supposed to promote safety.
You-know-who will just foist another anti-energy extremist on the NRC after the election, so don't bet on any improvement.
At the moment I write this there are 297 comments mostly debating the merits of LLVM/Clang vs. GCC. There is not one mention of EGCS.
Fifteen years ago GCC was forked. A group of people we're frustrated with GCC and its leadership because they had contributions to make and talent to offer that was not welcome. They called their fork EGCS.
Why are we doing this? It's become increasingly clear in the course of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and improvment [sic] over the years.
The GCC you use today is EGCS. A few years later EGCS was adopted as GCC 2.95 after the merits of EGCS became undeniable.
Looks like we've come full circle. The cool kids are off in the weeds making cool stuff. Better stuff, and the `Powers That Be' are not interested. The `needs' of the FSF today are no longer in sync with the `needs' of the developers of today.
The bottom line is that GCC as it is with it's leadership, code base and license agenda doesn't cut it for those who have the talent, motivation and capital to create a tool chain that does cut it. You don't get to impede that, however righteous you think you are.
Freedom. Deal with it.