No, it really is true. With non-linear PDE's the parallelization falls apart. You say, "ok smarty-pants, when modeling the copressible fluid around a car (ie, the air), how much can the flow around the bumper depend on the flow arond the mirror?" The answer is not much, but when you discretize the problem into a fine mesh, there are a gazillion boundary points between the mirror region and the bumper region, so the communication links between parallel processors bog down. It is faster to solve all the points with the same, really fast, processor.
GPL is different though. GPL grants a license to copy, albeit limited by certain conditions. The customer gains rights without giving anything in return. It only comes into play when someone who does not have copyright starts distributing copies. Without GPL distributing such copies would be illegal anyhow.
EULAS are a trade-this-for-that arrangement: in exchange for making a copy (into your RAM & hard drive) you agree to {not reverse engineer | not benchmark | offer your firstborn}. A customer of a used product won't be breaking a seal-with-fine-print or clicking the 2,000-word click-thru EULA, so the manufacturer cannot claim breach of contract. The manufacturer can only claim inadvertent copyright infringement, because the cutomer of the used product thought he was within his rights to use what he bought (which is ordinarily legal, unlike distributing copyrighted works), whereas in reality (if you accept the validity of EULAs) he had bought an item that was not usable as it appears, but had encumbrances, the rights given up by the EULA by the first customer.
The situation resembles a conflicting claim to title (from back taxes for example) on real estate. Someone buys property and--surprise!--someone else has a claim on what you bought. That makes bankers, who are floating a lot of credit on these deals, nervous. This is why your local county court house has a stack of deed books. Who bought what from whom is spelled out and recorded very carefully, and a paralegal traces the transactions back to...well far enough that you don't have to worry about it...and prepares an abstract of title. That way the guy in the bow-tie writing a check for $150,000 won't be so nervous.
Hence my comment that used electronics will need an abstract of title.
Why not? The purpose of programming is not to prove some
esoteric point about API elegance, but to solve a problem. If a loop that sits there and spins on a bit does the job (whatever its performance
faults, it certainly is portable), then that may be better than
some non-portable API call.
Elsehere in this discussion, others have described near-equivalent ways to implement this functionality
in Posix, to which you have countered that Win32 threading
intgrates process scheduling & I/O in a way that is not easily duplicated in Posix. So far, that integration is the only reason I have seen to put wake-up-on-some-combination in the kernel space.
In the end it boils down to a trade-off in performance/ease-of-programming
(by writing it into the kernel) vs.
portability/security/determinisitc-behavior
(by pushing it out to userland). Win32 favors the former while
Posix favors the latter, at least on this narrow issue. Which way is "better" is something
about which reasonable people can disagree.
...oh, and to give credit where it is due, I think it is fair to say that the guys in California, the Reason Institute, were on the vanguard of exposing the illiberal nature of modern copyright law, probably even moreso than Cato.
Many in the libertarian movement, especially the Randroid faction, being staunch defenders of property rights, got suckered by the "intellectual property" meme when Microsoft conveniently discovered libertarianism during the anti-trust trial days. It seemed to jibe with the Randian cult-of-the-creator and the anti-trust-sux mentality. But, being the logical thinkers that they are, most libertarians fairly quickly corrected and took on a more purely Jeffersonian view, as others here are pointing out.
Yet another reason to be glad Ed Crane left the LP and started Cato. Those guys have done a million times as much to advance freedom as the LP could ever hope for.
This points up that EULAs aren't really compatible with the contract law theory that underpins them. Company A sells product to Customer B, who clicks a EULA and is therefore is encumbered by its terms (if EULAs are considered valid). Customer B sells the used item to party C. Party C, not having agreed to any EULA, reverse engineers the product and publishes the spec.
Company A sues....whom? On what grounds? B never reverse engineered. C never agreed to a EULA or knew of its existence. The only ways out are
a) EULAs are not valid
b) Everyone selling used items containing software is comitting fraud (selling what they don't own).
c) Used computing devices require, like real estate, an abstract of title before being sold.
Conclusions (b) & (c) are insane.
Well, in the case as stated, it violates neither copyright (if it doesn't exist how can it?) nor trademark. But in that universe, the smart shopper will look for an imprint from $REPUTABLE_PUBLISHER, a trademark, to have assurance that the book's contents are not misrepresented.
US folks rarely hear a broad Scottish accent of any kind (no, Mel Gibson in Braveheart doesn't count...
Ever see the movie Chicken Run? Mel Gibson voices the chracter of an American rooster, who cannot believe that the techie-nerdy hen, prattling on about something technical in a Scots brogue, is actually speaking English. I don't know if the joke was a reference to Bravehart, but the scene was quite hilarious.
Outlook can organize contacts by (multiple, if you like) labels, but messages would be news to me. (Palms organize by categories and in some circumstances the sychronization between the two gets botched, arrgh!)
...and in the process, keep a redundant store of your mail on your local machine, thereby gaining resistance to vendor lock-in. They're Not Evil(tm), but you gotta think ahead, folks!
Heh, when they introduced the $40/yr for all those Win/Outlook specific features, they dropped the $10/yr POP service. Outlook calandaring is not much use to an Amiga user, so to me it was just a big price increase. Even when you pay for a service you still can be left high & dry. You have to select a company that seems committed to staying in the business you need from them. Any ex-PeopleLink or Portal System users here? (Two online services that abruptly shut down to go into other businesses.)
I switched to Usermail. Their price has drifted up over the years, from $12 to $20/yr, though in fairness spam-filtering is a bigger job than it used to be and they now have IMAP too.
ATMs of the 80's did use encryption (56-bit DES typically), but they didn't have a complete chain-of-trust system for exchanging and authenticating keys. Early ATMs were always at the bank or other trusted location so it didn't matter until they started cropping up all over the place in the late 80's. By sniffing the communication line (usually a phone line and some sort of modem) long enough, it was theoretically possible to intercept keys and then impersonate, from the ATM's view, the bank. My understanding is that this vulnerability persisted into the early 90's but I am sure it is gone now.
This is often overlooked. The tiny but tenacious Amiga community has been drafting (in the auto racing sense) off the Linux movement for years, porting software, using the same file formats and protcols, etc. For example, an Amiga Jabber client (called Jabberwocky) allows me to use my Amiga to IM with my mother who uses MSN. A Trillian-like client that reverse-engineers the shifting IM protocols would be much harder for such a small group.
I work at a place the has a licensing agreement covering some 45,000 PC's. But it is not a site license in the tradiional sense, where you pay a flat fee and copy as much as you want. In fact, it is a contract with hundreds of pages. I'm not claiming to have a complete understanding of such a behemoth, but the direction I get is that we have license to upgrade any version of Windows, but not license to install on a PC built from parts.
All new machines get re-imaged because that is the most efficient way to put on all the necessary network scripts and site-licensed software like anti-virus, but the OS licensing terms still require the OEM Windows.
The Zeitgiest numbers do seem low to me, too; in every other way Linux seems to be roughly equal to Mac in popularity. My geuss is that the tech-savvy Linux-using set are more efficient in their search habits, and don't have to Google as much to get the same amount of "work" done.
the town where I live in is considered large enough ( 100k+ ) for banks to have permanent establishments, but what about smaller towns?
Can't speak for the low countries, but US small towns have banks, but they are open 10-2 , closed weekends and Wednesdays. Not that it matters much, because all the (non-grocery) stores are open 7-3, and maybe 3 hours on Saturday. Grocers stay open till 10, but they take checks. I never saw a closed grocery store until I came to a live in a small Pennsylvania town.
You just have to keep $300 stashed somewhere in your house for the occasional for late night gas, beer, etc. And that's no big deal either because small American towns have very low rates of property crime. The only place I ever lived where I wouldn't bother locking the front door if I had to walk upstairs to get the key.
Yes, the red slot display was the only option that was legible on a south-facing wall in direct sunlight. As bank buildings are remodeled, they can now accomodate recessed kiosks that provide their own shade, or semi-indoor ones so no one sneaks out of the bushes behind you.
I don't think it is a matter of state law as much as it is the merchant agreement with Visa, et al. If they charge a different price, or have a minimum purchase, Visa can stop processing transactions for them or perhaps hit them with a penalty. It does appear, though, that you can have a sign that says $10 credit card minimum, please.
You are not supposed to read the biography. It is merely there to have a reason to put the celeb's photo on the cover (or full page spread). They have to make it a biography because the usual alternative is an interview and then the celeb starts talking about politics, which is much, much worse.
If general interest magazines were really brazen they would stay on-topic and write an article about how the celeb looks so good in a photograph.
But you don't see any teams going bankrupt do you?
Part of the reason NFL teams don't go bankrupt is because it is so easy for them to get investment capital. The NFL doesn't seem to have progressed as far as baseball, though, where the Seattle Mariners can lose money for 10 years in a row, but the owner turns a big enough profit selling the team to make up for it, and then the team loses money for 10 more years, and then that owner can make up for it by selling the team.
Sports teams aren't really businesses anymore; they are hobbies for zillionaires. Or, for Steinbrenner at least, a way to convert cash into fame.
1) Buy the Yankees
2) Screw with it
3) Read you name in the headlines.
4) Profit? Who cares?
Your arguments (yours and the GP post) can be reconciled. RMS's position on copyright, in fact, is neither capitalist nor anti-capitalist. Capitalism is a sytem consisting of property rights, freedom to arrange terms of a contract, and enforcement of contracts. Copyrights have nothing to do with it. The term intellectual property is a bit of a crutch to help us think about copyrights, etc. in terms we are familliar with, but the analogy is superficial.
The pharoh of Egypt owned the Nile and all the water in it. A rather strong monopoly position in the middle of the desert, that was. The population was allowed to partake only by his graces and the result was autocratic rule. Despite being presented as a property right, that was not capitalism. Those who overthrew pharonic rule were not anti-capitalists (nor pro-capitalists), and neither is RMS.
Whether RMS's position is a good idea or not is another matter, but the issue is entirely orthogonal to capitalism.
The 1940 US Census counted 131 million people. The current figure is something like 290 million, so your figures are off by 1/3rd. The proportion is about the same so it doesn't affect your argument. I agree with your basic thesis that US military spending is small by cold-war standards. As a fraction of GDP is has been declining since WWII, with only a small upward blip near 1970 for Vietnam, and a leveling out in the Reagan 80's, before falling again. It is a hopeful sign for humanity that US military spending can decline so much and still deliver effective security.
But you really should be more careful with your statistics, there.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it really is true. With non-linear PDE's the parallelization falls apart. You say, "ok smarty-pants, when modeling the copressible fluid around a car (ie, the air), how much can the flow around the bumper depend on the flow arond the mirror?" The answer is not much, but when you discretize the problem into a fine mesh, there are a gazillion boundary points between the mirror region and the bumper region, so the communication links between parallel processors bog down. It is faster to solve all the points with the same, really fast, processor.
GPL is different though. GPL grants a license to copy, albeit limited by certain conditions. The customer gains rights without giving anything in return. It only comes into play when someone who does not have copyright starts distributing copies. Without GPL distributing such copies would be illegal anyhow.
EULAS are a trade-this-for-that arrangement: in exchange for making a copy (into your RAM & hard drive) you agree to {not reverse engineer | not benchmark | offer your firstborn}. A customer of a used product won't be breaking a seal-with-fine-print or clicking the 2,000-word click-thru EULA, so the manufacturer cannot claim breach of contract. The manufacturer can only claim inadvertent copyright infringement, because the cutomer of the used product thought he was within his rights to use what he bought (which is ordinarily legal, unlike distributing copyrighted works), whereas in reality (if you accept the validity of EULAs) he had bought an item that was not usable as it appears, but had encumbrances, the rights given up by the EULA by the first customer.
The situation resembles a conflicting claim to title (from back taxes for example) on real estate. Someone buys property and--surprise!--someone else has a claim on what you bought. That makes bankers, who are floating a lot of credit on these deals, nervous. This is why your local county court house has a stack of deed books. Who bought what from whom is spelled out and recorded very carefully, and a paralegal traces the transactions back to...well far enough that you don't have to worry about it...and prepares an abstract of title. That way the guy in the bow-tie writing a check for $150,000 won't be so nervous.
Hence my comment that used electronics will need an abstract of title.
Oh, and don't do something like userland polling.
Why not? The purpose of programming is not to prove some esoteric point about API elegance, but to solve a problem. If a loop that sits there and spins on a bit does the job (whatever its performance faults, it certainly is portable), then that may be better than some non-portable API call.
Elsehere in this discussion, others have described near-equivalent ways to implement this functionality in Posix, to which you have countered that Win32 threading intgrates process scheduling & I/O in a way that is not easily duplicated in Posix. So far, that integration is the only reason I have seen to put wake-up-on-some-combination in the kernel space.
In the end it boils down to a trade-off in performance/ease-of-programming (by writing it into the kernel) vs. portability/security/determinisitc-behavior (by pushing it out to userland). Win32 favors the former while Posix favors the latter, at least on this narrow issue. Which way is "better" is something about which reasonable people can disagree.
...oh, and to give credit where it is due, I think it is fair to say that the guys in California, the Reason Institute, were on the vanguard of exposing the illiberal nature of modern copyright law, probably even moreso than Cato.
Many in the libertarian movement, especially the Randroid faction, being staunch defenders of property rights, got suckered by the "intellectual property" meme when Microsoft conveniently discovered libertarianism during the anti-trust trial days. It seemed to jibe with the Randian cult-of-the-creator and the anti-trust-sux mentality. But, being the logical thinkers that they are, most libertarians fairly quickly corrected and took on a more purely Jeffersonian view, as others here are pointing out.
Yet another reason to be glad Ed Crane left the LP and started Cato. Those guys have done a million times as much to advance freedom as the LP could ever hope for.
This points up that EULAs aren't really compatible with the contract law theory that underpins them. Company A sells product to Customer B, who clicks a EULA and is therefore is encumbered by its terms (if EULAs are considered valid). Customer B sells the used item to party C. Party C, not having agreed to any EULA, reverse engineers the product and publishes the spec.
Company A sues....whom? On what grounds? B never reverse engineered. C never agreed to a EULA or knew of its existence. The only ways out are
a) EULAs are not valid
b) Everyone selling used items containing software is comitting fraud (selling what they don't own).
c) Used computing devices require, like real estate, an abstract of title before being sold.
Conclusions (b) & (c) are insane.
Well, in the case as stated, it violates neither copyright (if it doesn't exist how can it?) nor trademark. But in that universe, the smart shopper will look for an imprint from $REPUTABLE_PUBLISHER, a trademark, to have assurance that the book's contents are not misrepresented.
US folks rarely hear a broad Scottish accent of any kind (no, Mel Gibson in Braveheart doesn't count...
Ever see the movie Chicken Run? Mel Gibson voices the chracter of an American rooster, who cannot believe that the techie-nerdy hen, prattling on about something technical in a Scots brogue, is actually speaking English. I don't know if the joke was a reference to Bravehart, but the scene was quite hilarious.
Google for "Captain Midnight", the guy who hijacked the HBO uplink.
Outlook can organize contacts by (multiple, if you like) labels, but messages would be news to me. (Palms organize by categories and in some circumstances the sychronization between the two gets botched, arrgh!)
...and in the process, keep a redundant store of your mail on your local machine, thereby gaining resistance to vendor lock-in. They're Not Evil(tm), but you gotta think ahead, folks!
Heh, when they introduced the $40/yr for all those Win/Outlook specific features, they dropped the $10/yr POP service. Outlook calandaring is not much use to an Amiga user, so to me it was just a big price increase. Even when you pay for a service you still can be left high & dry. You have to select a company that seems committed to staying in the business you need from them. Any ex-PeopleLink or Portal System users here? (Two online services that abruptly shut down to go into other businesses.)
I switched to Usermail. Their price has drifted up over the years, from $12 to $20/yr, though in fairness spam-filtering is a bigger job than it used to be and they now have IMAP too.
ATMs of the 80's did use encryption (56-bit DES typically), but they didn't have a complete chain-of-trust system for exchanging and authenticating keys. Early ATMs were always at the bank or other trusted location so it didn't matter until they started cropping up all over the place in the late 80's. By sniffing the communication line (usually a phone line and some sort of modem) long enough, it was theoretically possible to intercept keys and then impersonate, from the ATM's view, the bank. My understanding is that this vulnerability persisted into the early 90's but I am sure it is gone now.
This is good for other alternative OSs as well.
This is often overlooked. The tiny but tenacious Amiga community has been drafting (in the auto racing sense) off the Linux movement for years, porting software, using the same file formats and protcols, etc. For example, an Amiga Jabber client (called Jabberwocky) allows me to use my Amiga to IM with my mother who uses MSN. A Trillian-like client that reverse-engineers the shifting IM protocols would be much harder for such a small group.
I work at a place the has a licensing agreement covering some 45,000 PC's. But it is not a site license in the tradiional sense, where you pay a flat fee and copy as much as you want. In fact, it is a contract with hundreds of pages. I'm not claiming to have a complete understanding of such a behemoth, but the direction I get is that we have license to upgrade any version of Windows, but not license to install on a PC built from parts.
All new machines get re-imaged because that is the most efficient way to put on all the necessary network scripts and site-licensed software like anti-virus, but the OS licensing terms still require the OEM Windows.
The Zeitgiest numbers do seem low to me, too; in every other way Linux seems to be roughly equal to Mac in popularity. My geuss is that the tech-savvy Linux-using set are more efficient in their search habits, and don't have to Google as much to get the same amount of "work" done.
Well, you know how hot those processor chips get...
the town where I live in is considered large enough ( 100k+ ) for banks to have permanent establishments, but what about smaller towns?
Can't speak for the low countries, but US small towns have banks, but they are open 10-2 , closed weekends and Wednesdays. Not that it matters much, because all the (non-grocery) stores are open 7-3, and maybe 3 hours on Saturday. Grocers stay open till 10, but they take checks. I never saw a closed grocery store until I came to a live in a small Pennsylvania town.
You just have to keep $300 stashed somewhere in your house for the occasional for late night gas, beer, etc. And that's no big deal either because small American towns have very low rates of property crime. The only place I ever lived where I wouldn't bother locking the front door if I had to walk upstairs to get the key.
Yes, the red slot display was the only option that was legible on a south-facing wall in direct sunlight. As bank buildings are remodeled, they can now accomodate recessed kiosks that provide their own shade, or semi-indoor ones so no one sneaks out of the bushes behind you.
I don't think it is a matter of state law as much as it is the merchant agreement with Visa, et al. If they charge a different price, or have a minimum purchase, Visa can stop processing transactions for them or perhaps hit them with a penalty. It does appear, though, that you can have a sign that says $10 credit card minimum, please.
You are not supposed to read the biography. It is merely there to have a reason to put the celeb's photo on the cover (or full page spread). They have to make it a biography because the usual alternative is an interview and then the celeb starts talking about politics, which is much, much worse.
If general interest magazines were really brazen they would stay on-topic and write an article about how the celeb looks so good in a photograph.
But you don't see any teams going bankrupt do you?
Part of the reason NFL teams don't go bankrupt is because it is so easy for them to get investment capital. The NFL doesn't seem to have progressed as far as baseball, though, where the Seattle Mariners can lose money for 10 years in a row, but the owner turns a big enough profit selling the team to make up for it, and then the team loses money for 10 more years, and then that owner can make up for it by selling the team.
Sports teams aren't really businesses anymore; they are hobbies for zillionaires. Or, for Steinbrenner at least, a way to convert cash into fame.
1) Buy the Yankees
2) Screw with it
3) Read you name in the headlines.
4) Profit? Who cares?
If someone makes a version of Planet of the Apes (2002 version) with the final scene cut out, no one will watch the original anymore!
Your arguments (yours and the GP post) can be reconciled. RMS's position on copyright, in fact, is neither capitalist nor anti-capitalist. Capitalism is a sytem consisting of property rights, freedom to arrange terms of a contract, and enforcement of contracts. Copyrights have nothing to do with it. The term intellectual property is a bit of a crutch to help us think about copyrights, etc. in terms we are familliar with, but the analogy is superficial.
The pharoh of Egypt owned the Nile and all the water in it. A rather strong monopoly position in the middle of the desert, that was. The population was allowed to partake only by his graces and the result was autocratic rule. Despite being presented as a property right, that was not capitalism. Those who overthrew pharonic rule were not anti-capitalists (nor pro-capitalists), and neither is RMS.
Whether RMS's position is a good idea or not is another matter, but the issue is entirely orthogonal to capitalism.
The 1940 US Census counted 131 million people. The current figure is something like 290 million, so your figures are off by 1/3rd. The proportion is about the same so it doesn't affect your argument. I agree with your basic thesis that US military spending is small by cold-war standards. As a fraction of GDP is has been declining since WWII, with only a small upward blip near 1970 for Vietnam, and a leveling out in the Reagan 80's, before falling again. It is a hopeful sign for humanity that US military spending can decline so much and still deliver effective security.
But you really should be more careful with your statistics, there.