"So, will the US government allow this to be examined by someone completely independent who can then vouch that the government is clean ?"
Why would they? Seriously, you're talking about the US. One of the few nations in history that can call a shot that it will invade a sovreign nation and replace its government, follow through on that threat, and face absolutely no opposition, and even come out with exactly the same alliances and trade relationships as before. Certianly no domestic rebellion or resistant military.
And you think that country should, or would, subject itself to any scrutiny from someone outside its government because....?
>I live in South Australia, which has approximately 30% of the world's known uranium, and if we started selling it...
You're going to be pissed when you go look for that Uranium and find it's already been secretly dug up and sold, and you were not compensated:-)
>I read this article as containing spin to make nuclear radiation/contamination sound less dangerous than it really is so >that the public is less wary of adopting nuclear electricity generation, with the associated dumping of radioactive waste.
Not power generation: pre-emptive war. The nations of the world are standing aside and allowing the US to make plans for a pre-emptive nuclear attack. They *should* be breaking any and all alliances, and mustering military forces to defend whoever the US makes a target, but they aren't. At most, there's some diplomatic yammering. But at the end of the day, if the US wants to attack someone, no nation has the guts to do a thing to stop them.
>Real answer: Deploy it once to test. If it works go with it.
Did that with both D-Link and Linksys. Re-ordered the same product by all identifiers available. In both cases, the originals were Prism2/Intersil, and the replacements were Broadcom. So your Real Answer doesn't actually solve the problem, it leads to disaster.
>Other real answer: Buy a premade/tested system.
Who sells a 802.11g PCI card? Even in a premade/tested system? And how do THEY manage to get them from their vendor? That's the very information I need.
>Real real answer: I'm at a loss as to why the compatablilty list is useless to you.
Almost everything on the list is a long discontinued product or else was never available in the US to begin with. Many that are marked as compatable, if you order by the indicated model number, you stand a high chance of getting an incompatible device.
>If you buy the exact same model of card and use the same equipment otherwise as >before, why would you expect any performance difference?
The manufacturers change the low level device without notifying the customers.
Making a purchase order for a desktop deployment which requires PCI 802.11g wireless, what precise wireless card to I put on the order, from what vendor, and with what guarantees that the card specified will have linux drivers, and what guarantees that future orders for the same card will also have linux drivers?
Ask that question and invariably, numerous people will point you to the linux wireless HOWTO and its compatability list. And all you can really deduce from that list is that there is no such thing, even though the list looks like there are some options.
Press the issue, and the buck gets passed to nobody, because nobody can actually fix the problem. And that ends the argument for deploying linux in the situation I described.
Okay, so maybe wireless support is a corner case, but it's a major source of discomfort for me.
>I think CD was like that. Not so sure about DVD though.
DVD, to the consumer, was X+1. Essentially a CD for moving pictures, and was received as "it's about time", not "what an amazing, unexpected development."
Audio cassette tape might have been more important, but it took Ampex so long to make it available for consumers (due to IP constraints!), that it was also received with derision.
"Detecting a synthetic benchmark is just cheating, and they were actually lowering the quality of the output as well. "
The benchmark shares some responsibility for making itself so easy to detect. But Ok. This is supposed to steer people away from both NVidia and ATI cards. Good luck with that;-)
> I'd like to see what kinds of problems are to be solved
No kidding. That's like, the only information that would really be interesting. Sure, it's okay to say who won, or how many teams there were, and that sort of thing. But show us the code, so that we can decide "hey, I could do that", or "hey, these guys are out of my league!"
I'm in a local programming contest on Saturday 4/15. Wish me luck.
>"When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10 >minutes?"
Um, yesterday. I had to write and deploy a JMX MBean for a configuration issue, and yes, the turnaround time from order to deployment was 10-15 minutes. Between the mbean itself, the adapter, and the observer that had to be put into the existing code, there were on the order of a hundred lines plus a unit test that checked that the MBean would set/get each of its params and wouldn't come from the server null.
>like, say, 10,000 colored boxes, or circles... like benchmark programs do) and would >silently decide to perform only a fraction of them to jack the benchmark numbers up
Seems like a reasonable optimization to defer computation of some polygons in a backbuffer. I wouldn't necessarily peg that as "just" jacking up the benchmark numbers. I'd be suspicious of a design that didn't defer some processing, or had some predictive algorithm for controlling the pipeline.
But then, I don't "recall this particular hubbub", so I'm not informed enough to make an opinion. The little I know about graphics processing makes me wonder if the manufacturer should be given the benefit of the doubt though.
"If you want to seriously hurt your bullies or if you think it's okay to torment weaker people, you need to read this."
I've never understood why "bullying" can't simply be handled as assault and battery. If someone on the street did to you what is accepted in schools, you'd have a clear, simple case to have them charged with a felony, put in jail, and given something they will have to explain at every job interview for the rest of their lives. I'm not understanding what makes it different in a school. Assaults should be treated as such, albeit, with the appropriate juvenile prosecution. If a school administrator turns a blind eye, though, HE should be the one who does time for the assault. Hard time. 20 to life for conspiracy to commit assault, death penalty if the assault could reasonably have put the victim in danger of life or limb.
I'm totally serious.
You'll never again see a school principal laugh off a bully situation if he knows that HE can go to the LETHAL INJECTION CHAMBER for failing to correct the matter.
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt. I buy game consoles on an impulse, long after they are old news, when I stumble on one at a cheap price point. That's why I have an X-Box. I didn't care about X-Box until I saw them on sale for less than $100, which was also after my local used bookstore (literally my next-door neighbor:-) had a whole shelf full of titles. A no-brainer. To me, it did not seem like it had been all that long since people (e.g., co-workers) were paying $500 and up.
I grew up on them, and I'm as healthy as a horse, look 20 years younger than I am, and was never once in my life overweight until after the food groups were replaced with the pyramid.
Pulled from *what* shelves? It's April 2006, and while I don't really look for this stuff, it does occur to me that I have never once seen an XBox 360 in stock in any retail store. I haven't been actively looking for one, but I happen to have done a lot of shopping this year, in six different states, and this is the kind of thing I notice. I assume this means they are sold as fast as they come in,
> I can't imagine students paying for the truck rental and materials.
Every college campus I've ever seen was crowded with students who wear designer clothes, drive late model cars, own the houses they live in off-campus, etc.
Not spectacular, but I certainly am glad I chose to keep my -4.25 glasses when everybody else was tripping over each other to get lasik or whatever was the eye surgery du jour.
I'm responding to a joke by an AC, but there's a good point here.
I compose and record music. I struggle with certain kinds of DRM and copy protection, because I would seriously like to be able to put my tools and my work in a time capsule and have it be usable to future generations.
I understand that digital media can be volatile. Plastics evaporate. Magnetic bits realign. Etc. I can handle that, because that makes *me* responsible for the media.
What I *cannot* handle, is any form of crypto that "protects" my work, or "protects" the software needed to reproduce my work. If it's tied to a certain piece of hardware, if it needs to call home, or if it prevents me from making a copy, it is completely unacceptable to me. I take it as far as considering it to be an abridgement of my own rights if the tools and media are not open to me, particularly if they are closed through hard crypto.
I started a Masters Thesis on the work of Bach (I'm a Music Theory major). One thing that fascinated me was the amount of detailed understanding that we can derive from Bach's manuscripts, both the ones he created himself and those that were copywritten. For example we're able to deduce whether Bach had a particular composition complete in his head before he sat down to compose, or whether he sketched out a framework and filled it in over a period of time. We have a pretty good sample, and he had different processes for different kinds of musical ideas. It's even possible to make deductions based on the way he started drawing the staves. Open to debate, to say the least, but regardless of where you stand on the controversy, it is very fascinating to have some visualization into the thought processes of a composer, particularly, Bach.
It's unlikely and ironic that anyone 500 years from now will be able to look with the same level of detail at the writing processes of our contemporaries. It's not even clear that our media will *last* that long, even most contemporary paper and ink self-destructs. When you add DRM to the equation, you introduce yet another risk: That mathematics will not happen to have advanced to a point where current cryptosystems are rendered ineffective. Imagine a future archaeologist needing to break a 1024 bit public key system... I'm not the sort of optimist that believes future generations will know how to do such things in their head by third grade...
It would not have mattered in my shop that JBoss was free. We migrated away from Weblogic *after* paying for it, and *after* having it in production for years.
Despite what BEA's marketing and training droids will tell you, there are many situations where JBoss works better. Much, much better.
I think the space where app servers like this really live, is a pretty small town to begin with. Lots of people in the industry are quite confused by the whole idea of J2EE, see it as a solution looking for a problem, don't really see the point, etc. If you don't know why you need a J2EE app server, you probably don't. If you *do* know, you ought to be able to see past the hype and into the reality.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some situations where BEA Weblogic scales better, in some ways, out of the box. Admins tend to prefer WLS as a blackbox (it requires very little maintenance), whereas developers tend to prefer JBoss as a whitebox.
I have seen situations where a company stuck with BEA because they'd already spent the money on it. I don't actually disagree with that reasoning, but I wonder if they spent that money (LOTS of it) while their own developers were screaming "NO!"
"You sure did. You voted (or failed to vote) for your representatives, and those representatives passed a law not just allowing, but REQUIRING SCMS on all audio devices."
LOL! You're blaming *me*, an activist who campaigned agaisnt the AHRA and the DMCA?
"You implicitly agreed to let Sony do *all* of those things when you started using their hardware and software - those features/limitations are mentioned right in the manual."
It became my problem then... It became Sony's problem when I *stopped*.
I don't approve of the way MD locks me out of my own music. I didn't give Sony the authority to put DRM on stuff I record, but my MD recorder takes this liberty. I don't want to hear about how I can buy a "pro" deck that turns off DRM, and I certainly don't care about "Soundstage" software or whatever the hell they make you use now, where you get three chances to copy your original or some such, and it's *erased* -- I *certainly* didn't give Sony permission to *erase* my masters.
I loved the idea of MD, but I hate, absolutely seethe with hate, to let Sony abridge my copyrights by putting DRM and copy-limitations on my work, just because I chose to use their cheap media. No thanks. CF-recorders may start at the $400 price point, but at least they don't seek to lock me out of my own work.
I really don't care how badly Sony wants to control things. When they try to control *MY* work, I tend to get very, very upset.
Slashdot Mirror
"So, will the US government allow this to be examined by someone completely independent who can then vouch that the government is clean ?"
Why would they? Seriously, you're talking about the US. One of the few nations in history that can call a shot that it will invade a sovreign nation and replace its government, follow through on that threat, and face absolutely no opposition, and even come out with exactly the same alliances and trade relationships as before. Certianly no domestic rebellion or resistant military.
And you think that country should, or would, subject itself to any scrutiny from someone outside its government because....?
>I live in South Australia, which has approximately 30% of the world's known uranium, and if we started selling it...
:-)
You're going to be pissed when you go look for that Uranium and find it's already been secretly dug up and sold, and you were not compensated
>I read this article as containing spin to make nuclear radiation/contamination sound less dangerous than it really is so
>that the public is less wary of adopting nuclear electricity generation, with the associated dumping of radioactive waste.
Not power generation: pre-emptive war. The nations of the world are standing aside and allowing the US to make plans for a pre-emptive nuclear attack. They *should* be breaking any and all alliances, and mustering military forces to defend whoever the US makes a target, but they aren't. At most, there's some diplomatic yammering. But at the end of the day, if the US wants to attack someone, no nation has the guts to do a thing to stop them.
>How bizarre. Why would you bother to lie about something like that?
Which one was lying? The Soviet style bureaucrat writing the denial, or the original journalist, or both?
>Real answer: Deploy it once to test. If it works go with it.
Did that with both D-Link and Linksys. Re-ordered the same product by all identifiers available. In both cases, the originals were Prism2/Intersil, and the replacements were Broadcom. So your Real Answer doesn't actually solve the problem, it leads to disaster.
>Other real answer: Buy a premade/tested system.
Who sells a 802.11g PCI card? Even in a premade/tested system? And how do THEY manage to get them from their vendor? That's the very information I need.
>Real real answer: I'm at a loss as to why the compatablilty list is useless to you.
Almost everything on the list is a long discontinued product or else was never available in the US to begin with. Many that are marked as compatable, if you order by the indicated model number, you stand a high chance of getting an incompatible device.
>If you buy the exact same model of card and use the same equipment otherwise as
>before, why would you expect any performance difference?
The manufacturers change the low level device without notifying the customers.
> How about firing her for abusing her position of public trust?
Persuade Congress to act thusly, and it will be so.
For example:
Making a purchase order for a desktop deployment which requires PCI 802.11g wireless, what precise wireless card to I put on the order, from what vendor, and with what guarantees that the card specified will have linux drivers, and what guarantees that future orders for the same card will also have linux drivers?
Ask that question and invariably, numerous people will point you to the linux wireless HOWTO and its compatability list. And all you can really deduce from that list is that there is no such thing, even though the list looks like there are some options.
Press the issue, and the buck gets passed to nobody, because nobody can actually fix the problem. And that ends the argument for deploying linux in the situation I described.
Okay, so maybe wireless support is a corner case, but it's a major source of discomfort for me.
>I think CD was like that. Not so sure about DVD though.
DVD, to the consumer, was X+1. Essentially a CD for moving pictures, and was received as "it's about time", not "what an amazing, unexpected development."
Audio cassette tape might have been more important, but it took Ampex so long to make it available for consumers (due to IP constraints!), that it was also received with derision.
"Detecting a synthetic benchmark is just cheating, and they were actually lowering the quality of the output as well. "
The benchmark shares some responsibility for making itself so easy to detect. But Ok. This is supposed to steer people away from both NVidia and ATI cards. Good luck with that
> I'd like to see what kinds of problems are to be solved
No kidding. That's like, the only information that would really be interesting.
Sure, it's okay to say who won, or how many teams there were, and that sort of thing.
But show us the code, so that we can decide "hey, I could do that", or "hey, these guys are out of my league!"
I'm in a local programming contest on Saturday 4/15. Wish me luck.
>"When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10
>minutes?"
Um, yesterday. I had to write and deploy a JMX MBean for a configuration issue, and yes, the turnaround time from order to deployment was 10-15 minutes. Between the mbean itself, the adapter, and the observer that had to be put into the existing code, there were on the order of a hundred lines plus a unit test that checked that the MBean would set/get each of its params and wouldn't come from the server null.
>like, say, 10,000 colored boxes, or circles... like benchmark programs do) and would
>silently decide to perform only a fraction of them to jack the benchmark numbers up
Seems like a reasonable optimization to defer computation of some polygons in a backbuffer. I wouldn't necessarily peg that as "just" jacking up the benchmark numbers. I'd be suspicious of a design that didn't defer some processing, or had some predictive algorithm for controlling the pipeline.
But then, I don't "recall this particular hubbub", so I'm not informed enough to make an opinion. The little I know about graphics processing makes me wonder if the manufacturer should be given the benefit of the doubt though.
> Not all bullying is illegal.
Oops. That's going to butt up against the school of thought that anything not expressly forbidden is mandatory.
"If you want to seriously hurt your bullies or if you think it's okay to torment weaker people, you need to read this."
I've never understood why "bullying" can't simply be handled as assault and battery. If someone on the street did to you what is accepted in schools, you'd have a clear, simple case to have them charged with a felony, put in jail, and given something they will have to explain at every job interview for the rest of their lives. I'm not understanding what makes it different in a school. Assaults should be treated as such, albeit, with the appropriate juvenile prosecution. If a school administrator turns a blind eye, though, HE should be the one who does time for the assault. Hard time. 20 to life for conspiracy to commit assault, death penalty if the assault could reasonably have put the victim in danger of life or limb.
I'm totally serious.
You'll never again see a school principal laugh off a bully situation if he knows that HE can go to the LETHAL INJECTION CHAMBER for failing to correct the matter.
> ...or that they just aren't coming in at all.
:-) had a whole shelf full of titles. A no-brainer. To me, it did not seem like it had been all that long since people (e.g., co-workers) were paying $500 and up.
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt. I buy game consoles on an impulse, long after they are old news, when I stumble on one at a cheap price point. That's why I have an X-Box. I didn't care about X-Box until I saw them on sale for less than $100, which was also after my local used bookstore (literally my next-door neighbor
Oh well, xbox360 will be next year I guess.
>sounds like all you're going to be able to study there now is the so-called gospel of Judah....
Understand that the department in the article isn't one where students have to take 3 semesters of calculus and 2 years of physics.
> Anyone remember the four food groups?
I grew up on them, and I'm as healthy as a horse, look 20 years younger than I am, and was never once in my life overweight until after the food groups were replaced with the pyramid.
Pulled from *what* shelves? It's April 2006, and while I don't really look for this stuff, it does occur to me that I have never once seen an XBox 360 in stock in any retail store. I haven't been actively looking for one, but I happen to have done a lot of shopping this year, in six different states, and this is the kind of thing I notice. I assume this means they are sold as fast as they come in,
> I can't imagine students paying for the truck rental and materials.
Every college campus I've ever seen was crowded with students who wear designer clothes, drive late model cars, own the houses they live in off-campus, etc.
Not spectacular, but I certainly am glad I chose to keep my -4.25 glasses when everybody else was tripping over each other to get lasik or whatever was the eye surgery du jour.
I'm responding to a joke by an AC, but there's a good point here.
I compose and record music. I struggle with certain kinds of DRM and copy protection, because I would seriously like to be able to put my tools and my work in a time capsule and have it be usable to future generations.
I understand that digital media can be volatile. Plastics evaporate. Magnetic bits realign. Etc. I can handle that, because that makes *me* responsible for the media.
What I *cannot* handle, is any form of crypto that "protects" my work, or "protects" the software needed to reproduce my work. If it's tied to a certain piece of hardware, if it needs to call home, or if it prevents me from making a copy, it is completely unacceptable to me. I take it as far as considering it to be an abridgement of my own rights if the tools and media are not open to me, particularly if they are closed through hard crypto.
I started a Masters Thesis on the work of Bach (I'm a Music Theory major). One thing that fascinated me was the amount of detailed understanding that we can derive from Bach's manuscripts, both the ones he created himself and those that were copywritten. For example we're able to deduce whether Bach had a particular composition complete in his head before he sat down to compose, or whether he sketched out a framework and filled it in over a period of time. We have a pretty good sample, and he had different processes for different kinds of musical ideas. It's even possible to make deductions based on the way he started drawing the staves. Open to debate, to say the least, but regardless of where you stand on the controversy, it is very fascinating to have some visualization into the thought processes of a composer, particularly, Bach.
It's unlikely and ironic that anyone 500 years from now will be able to look with the same level of detail at the writing processes of our contemporaries. It's not even clear that our media will *last* that long, even most contemporary paper and ink self-destructs. When you add DRM to the equation, you introduce yet another risk: That mathematics will not happen to have advanced to a point where current cryptosystems are rendered ineffective. Imagine a future archaeologist needing to break a 1024 bit public key system... I'm not the sort of optimist that believes future generations will know how to do such things in their head by third grade...
rant off.
It would not have mattered in my shop that JBoss was free. We migrated away from Weblogic *after* paying for it, and *after* having it in production for years.
Despite what BEA's marketing and training droids will tell you, there are many situations where JBoss works better. Much, much better.
I think the space where app servers like this really live, is a pretty small town to begin with. Lots of people in the industry are quite confused by the whole idea of J2EE, see it as a solution looking for a problem, don't really see the point, etc. If you don't know why you need a J2EE app server, you probably don't. If you *do* know, you ought to be able to see past the hype and into the reality.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some situations where BEA Weblogic scales better, in some ways, out of the box. Admins tend to prefer WLS as a blackbox (it requires very little maintenance), whereas developers tend to prefer JBoss as a whitebox.
I have seen situations where a company stuck with BEA because they'd already spent the money on it. I don't actually disagree with that reasoning, but I wonder if they spent that money (LOTS of it) while their own developers were screaming "NO!"
"You sure did. You voted (or failed to vote) for your representatives, and those representatives passed a law not just allowing, but REQUIRING SCMS on all audio devices."
LOL! You're blaming *me*, an activist who campaigned agaisnt the AHRA and the DMCA?
"You implicitly agreed to let Sony do *all* of those things when you started using their hardware and software - those features/limitations are mentioned right in the manual."
It became my problem then... It became Sony's problem when I *stopped*.
I don't approve of the way MD locks me out of my own music. I didn't give Sony the authority to put DRM on stuff I record, but my MD recorder takes this liberty. I don't want to hear about how I can buy a "pro" deck that turns off DRM, and I certainly don't care about "Soundstage" software or whatever the hell they make you use now, where you get three chances to copy your original or some such, and it's *erased* -- I *certainly* didn't give Sony permission to *erase* my masters.
I loved the idea of MD, but I hate, absolutely seethe with hate, to let Sony abridge my copyrights by putting DRM and copy-limitations on my work, just because I chose to use their cheap media. No thanks. CF-recorders may start at the $400 price point, but at least they don't seek to lock me out of my own work.
I really don't care how badly Sony wants to control things. When they try to control *MY* work, I tend to get very, very upset.
>This Execuitve Branch has assumed too much power.
Don't worry. It has not yet occurred to them that they will hand over that power, probably to an extreme opposition party.