"With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results."
And therein lies the rub. While GPU's are getting more and more like general purpose vector floating point units, they remain closed architectures, unlike CPUs. Only those that can get help from ATI (or Nvidia) need apply to this game.
A new Iranian computer game sets players the task of blowing up a U.S. tanker in the Gulf to block the sea route for much of the world's oil supplies, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The game, "Counter Strike", invites players to plant two bombs on the oil tanker to sink it and make the strait of Hormuz impassable, the Jomhouri-ye Eslami daily reported. About two-fifths of globally traded oil passes through the channel.
The game illustrates a warning by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said in June that oil exports in the Gulf region could be seriously endangered if the United States made a wrong move on Iran.
Why is this defined as terrorism? This is self defense by a country that doesn't want to be invaded by the United States. If the United States doesn't bomb Iran, Iran won't be sinking any oil tankers in the strait of Hormuz. Iran does not have the sophisticated air force, communications, and naval capabilities of the United States military. It is only natural that they would defend themselves by the means available to them, including economic warfare against the most indebted country in the world.
In deference to the critical role of distributions, we regard reducing the
Open Source licensing profusion as a primary objective. GPLv2 has played an
important role in moving towards this objective by becoming the dominant
Licence in the space today, making it possible to put together a Linux
Distribution from entirely GPLv2 components and thus simplify the life of a
distributor. Therefore, we believe that any update to GPLv2 must be so
compelling as to cause all projects currently licensed under it to switch as
expediently as possible and thus not fragment the currently unified GPLv2
licensed ecosystem.
This is a moot point. I think it's a given that all FSF copyrighted code
will move to GPL v3 (or LGPL v3). That includes such core components of
Linux distributions as gcc. So the further proliferation of licenses
in Linux distributions is a given, regardless of what the Linux kernel developers do.
While we find the use of DRM by media companies in their attempts to reach
into user owned devices to control content deeply disturbing, our belief in
the essential freedoms of section 3 forbids us from ever accepting any licence
which contains end use restrictions. The existence of DRM abuse is no excuse
for curtailing freedoms.
In other words, if manufacturers start selling PCs with
Linux installed, complete source for their version of Linux, but no ability to actually
modify, compile, and upgrade the kernel due to the hardware enforcing DRM authentication
(and the necessary keys being kept secret), this is fine by the Linux developers.
This leads to precisely the sort of problem that led RMS to create the GPL in the first
place -- he wanted to fix a printer driver but couldn't because the code was proprietary.
Is it any different if the code is available but you can't install your fixes anyway?
The purpose of GPL v3 is to forbid certain egregious end use restrictions.
Finally, we recognise that defining what constitutes DRM abuse is essentially
political in nature and as such, while we may argue forcefully for our
political opinions, we may not suborn or coerce others to go along with them.
An odd statement, given that the GPL is and always has been political in nature.
(I think RMS would agree with that statement.)
People who don't care what happens to the source code, and what restrictions are
placed on the end user, use the BSD license.
As drafted, this currently looks like it would potentially jeopardise the
entire patent portfolio of a company simply by the act of placing a GPLv3
licensed programme on their website. Since the Linux software ecosystem relies
on these type of contributions from companies who have lawyers who will take
the broadest possible interpretation when assessing liability, we find this
clause unacceptable because of the chilling effect it will have on the
necessary corporate input to our innovation stream.
Further, some companies who also act as current distributors of Linux have
significant patent portfolios; thus this clause represents another barrier to
their distributing Linux and as such is unacceptable under section 2 because
of the critical reliance our ecosystem has on these distributions.
The relevant section of GPL v3 says:
You receive the Program with a covenant from each author and conveyor of the
Program, and of any material, conveyed under this License, on which the
Program is based, that the covenanting party will not assert (or cause others
to assert) any of the party's essential patent claims in the material that the
party conveyed, against you, arising from your exercise of rights under this
License. If you convey a covered work, you similarly covenant to all
recipients, including recipients of works based on the covered work, not to
assert any of your essential patent claims in the covered work.
I'm in my late forties. Most of the young whippersnappers in my office have never even
seen a record player outside of movies. So, to listen to those "indie" vinyl records
they're going to have to do some shopping.
First they need a
turn table. But that low, low price does not of course include the required
phono cartridge.
The output of a phono cartridge is measured in micro volts and must be amplified before to "line levels"
before it can be fed into an ordinary preamp. So last the aspiring vinylphile will have to collect that change that fell behind his couch cushions and
get a
phono preamp.
Like any other things there should not be any invasion of privacy unless a criminal act is being committed.
The pro-active net vacuuming approaches that the NSA has been using mean that by definition
there are continual invasions of privacy in the hopes of eventually catching someone in a criminal act.
Our best defense against terrorism would be to end the acts of empire that encourage it, but our
administration will never think of that. Instead they will continue to shred the Constitution.
Here in NYC we have AMD advertisements on taxicabs. I think they're burning enough money on marketing. I'd rather see them spending their money on getting their 45 nm process working and manufacturable, because right now Intel's planning to move to 45 nm about 6 months (2nd Q 2007) after AMD first starts producing 65 nm chips (4th Q 2006).
If you have nothing better to do than make me remember constantly changing passwords (and it's always more than one, everything takes a password these days) then, fine, I don't want to work for you.
There are four times as many of us as there were a century ago. I'm not at all concerned that the human race won't survive the next century. Let's consider the worst case -- massive global warming, depletion of oil leading to the breakdown of modern energy intensive agriculture and thus to widespread starvation, a nuclear war or two, George Bush IV gets elected, someone releases a bioengineered combination of AIDS and the common cold. Even with all this, I doubt very much that we'd lose more than 90% of the human population. That would still leave 650 million people, about as many people as the world had in 1700. Nobody in 1700 thought we were near extinction. In fact 650 million is a very large population for a 50 kg top-of-the-food-chain mammal.
The United States might not survive as an intact country (particularly considering its massive pile-ups of debt). A good many of the five million or so species of non-human life are not likely to make it through the next century. But people will certainly survive.
The policy of forcing people to change their passwords on a regular basis is in direct conflict with requiring the password to be obscure and full of funny characters. If I'm forced to change my password every two months I'll use passwords like "january", "march", "may", etc. If I'm forced to to change my password every two months and have it be obscure, I'll write the damn thing on a post-it note and attach it to the back of my monitor. If you want me to remember an obscure password like Big98Boob$-311 without writing it down I better be able to keep it.
"Didn't IBM and other large players pledge their patent portfolios to FOSS in case of cases like this?"
Having a patent portfolio for defensive purposes is only useful for preventing suits from other
manufacturers who want to produce stuff without infringing on those patents. They will be
happy to swap their patent rights for yours. But a patent troll holds only patents and doesn't make
anything. He gets no benefits from cross licensing. So it doen't matter if IBM has pledged patents
X, Y, and Z to open source. A troll who has a patent on W will still sue.
From reading the posts here it is clear that most people have no idea how serious this is.
RMS has been warning about the dangers of software patents for at least 15 years. He was right
but has always been too readily dismissed as an extremist. It will only take one or two successful
patent infringement lawsuits before the legal sharks smell blood and the feeding frenzy begins.
Don't think you'll be saved because the patents are for "obvious" ideas (which, of course, they are).
Once a patent is granted the legal presumption is that it's valid and it is very, very expensive
to overturn it. And there is a high degree of capriciousness -- if you are right in a patent dispute
there's maybe a 50% chance you'll actually win the suit -- if you don't go bankrupt first. That's why businesses usually just fork over the exortion payments.
Maximum Prophet wrote:
We need to show that we're causing global warming and that it's a bad thing. Last I heard, we were supposed to be heading for an Ice Age, so a little induced warming might not be a bad thing.
Ah, yes, that favorite argument of the global warming deniers.
Yes, if humans never existed the Earth would probably be into the start of another ice age by now.
But the C02 already in the atmosphere by 1970 was more than sufficient to prevent
another return of the ice sheets. We are now far past what is needed to stop an ice age.
I make a distinction between "commie do gooders", the label free market ideologues apply to liberals who believe that government can sometimes do some good, and Communists, the totalitarians who have long proven to be very much against any real rights for the working man. And believe me, people like you were arguing that poor American families would starve if they couldn't send their children out to do factory work, right up to the day the legislation making it illegal was passed.
Sweatshops are GOOD. Of course it doesn't seem that way seen from our first-world perspective, but is better than hunger. It's usually the only way out from extreme poverty. We had an industrial revolution where childen worked in similar circumstances. It's not something to be proud of, the feelings are all against it, but you cannot jump from having nothing to having everyting.
Ah yes, the excuse of greedheads everywhere. Yes, we had factories with child labor.
Do you know why we don't anymore? Was it because of the glories of the free market?
No, it was because legislators, under pressure by those commie do gooders, made it illegal.
So factory owners were forced to hire adults, and because they couldn't get adults at the
same low wages they hired children, they had to raise wages. The result -- the kids could
go to school, and everyone had more to eat.
China has the ultimate labor surplus. So long as workers can't organize (as is usually the
case in Communist countries) and people in industrial countries keep making excuses the life
of the average Chinese factory worker will be hell. And by keeping his wages low, you ensure
even more outsourcing and a continuing transfer of wealth from working people everywhere to
a small global elite.
This drug is used by the military because a major problem they have is keeping soldiers awake and alert when battles go on for days at a time.
I do wonder about its safety though. I find that if I go several days with inadequate sleep I am much more likely to catch a cold. So if I took modafinil I might feel fine after going 48 hours without any sleep but would I still be more likely to get sick? After all, we aren't consciously aware of the state of our immune systems.
The article was slashdotted so I couldn't read it and this post is the usual Slashdot speculation.
The smallest dinosaurs known were about the size of chicken.
So I presume they meant this beast is the smallest known sauropod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropod.
Most sauropods were humungous, so a one ton adult would be very small.
So what happens to all the bits of glass and palladium after it releases its hydrogen load?
I guess ideally, it would get saved somewhere for recycling - but presuming that doesn't happ
en - is it going to be OK to breath microsopic bits of that stuff?
It's pretty clear you will be able to recharge the balls simply by putting them in some
hydrogen under pressure. Also, palladium is an expensive platinum group metal (currently
about $350 an ounce) so there will be every incentive not to lose the stuff.
If this is all above board and legal, there is no reason at all why our fine, upstanding, Constitutional government wouldn't want us to know the particulars about how it's done.
Southern California hospitals are closing because of the huge flood of illegal aliens who use the hospitals for emergency health care (which the hospitals are required to provide)and never pay the bills. Rather than use a one-time windfall of Google stock profits to pay for this, it would make much more sense to have a special tax on the businesses that hire that "cheap" labor.
I'm over 40 so obviously I'm not cool, hip, or fly enough to use a Mac.
Actually, Linux is probably an appropriate choice, as it's a reimplementation of an
operating system developed when I was a kid.
Slashdot Mirror
"With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results."
And therein lies the rub. While GPU's are getting more and more like general purpose vector floating point units, they remain closed architectures, unlike CPUs. Only those that can get help from ATI (or Nvidia) need apply to this game.
Why is this defined as terrorism? This is self defense by a country that doesn't want to be invaded by the United States. If the United States doesn't bomb Iran, Iran won't be sinking any oil tankers in the strait of Hormuz. Iran does not have the sophisticated air force, communications, and naval capabilities of the United States military. It is only natural that they would defend themselves by the means available to them, including economic warfare against the most indebted country in the world.
This is a moot point. I think it's a given that all FSF copyrighted code will move to GPL v3 (or LGPL v3). That includes such core components of Linux distributions as gcc. So the further proliferation of licenses in Linux distributions is a given, regardless of what the Linux kernel developers do.
In other words, if manufacturers start selling PCs with Linux installed, complete source for their version of Linux, but no ability to actually modify, compile, and upgrade the kernel due to the hardware enforcing DRM authentication (and the necessary keys being kept secret), this is fine by the Linux developers. This leads to precisely the sort of problem that led RMS to create the GPL in the first place -- he wanted to fix a printer driver but couldn't because the code was proprietary. Is it any different if the code is available but you can't install your fixes anyway? The purpose of GPL v3 is to forbid certain egregious end use restrictions.
An odd statement, given that the GPL is and always has been political in nature. (I think RMS would agree with that statement.) People who don't care what happens to the source code, and what restrictions are placed on the end user, use the BSD license.
The relevant section of GPL v3 says:
In other words, you can't enfo
I'm in my late forties. Most of the young whippersnappers in my office have never even seen a record player outside of movies. So, to listen to those "indie" vinyl records they're going to have to do some shopping.
First they need a turn table. But that low, low price does not of course include the required phono cartridge. The output of a phono cartridge is measured in micro volts and must be amplified before to "line levels" before it can be fed into an ordinary preamp. So last the aspiring vinylphile will have to collect that change that fell behind his couch cushions and get a phono preamp.
Sure beats overpaying for DRMed music.
I have mod points but I couldn't use them because there was no option for "Groan".
Like any other things there should not be any invasion of privacy unless a criminal act is being committed.
The pro-active net vacuuming approaches that the NSA has been using mean that by definition there are continual invasions of privacy in the hopes of eventually catching someone in a criminal act.
Our best defense against terrorism would be to end the acts of empire that encourage it, but our administration will never think of that. Instead they will continue to shred the Constitution.
I thank the environmentalists for making it impractical for the NSA to violate our fourth amendment rights even more often than they already do.
Here in NYC we have AMD advertisements on taxicabs. I think they're burning enough money on marketing. I'd rather see them spending their money on getting their 45 nm process working and manufacturable, because right now Intel's planning to move to 45 nm about 6 months (2nd Q 2007) after AMD first starts producing 65 nm chips (4th Q 2006).
Actually, I'm too much of a middle aged geek with no life for MySpace.
If you have nothing better to do than make me remember constantly changing passwords (and it's always more than one, everything takes a password these days) then, fine, I don't want to work for you.
There are four times as many of us as there were a century ago. I'm not at all concerned that the human race won't survive the next century. Let's consider the worst case -- massive global warming, depletion of oil leading to the breakdown of modern energy intensive agriculture and thus to widespread starvation, a nuclear war or two, George Bush IV gets elected, someone releases a bioengineered combination of AIDS and the common cold. Even with all this, I doubt very much that we'd lose more than 90% of the human population. That would still leave 650 million people, about as many people as the world had in 1700. Nobody in 1700 thought we were near extinction. In fact 650 million is a very large population for a 50 kg top-of-the-food-chain mammal.
The United States might not survive as an intact country (particularly considering its massive pile-ups of debt). A good many of the five million or so species of non-human life are not likely to make it through the next century. But people will certainly survive.
The best part of the article was the ad at the bottom:
You can get anything on eBay!
The policy of forcing people to change their passwords on a regular basis is in direct conflict with requiring the password to be obscure and full of funny characters. If I'm forced to change my password every two months I'll use passwords like "january", "march", "may", etc. If I'm forced to to change my password every two months and have it be obscure, I'll write the damn thing on a post-it note and attach it to the back of my monitor. If you want me to remember an obscure password like Big98Boob$-311 without writing it down I better be able to keep it.
"Didn't IBM and other large players pledge their patent portfolios to FOSS in case of cases like this?"
Having a patent portfolio for defensive purposes is only useful for preventing suits from other manufacturers who want to produce stuff without infringing on those patents. They will be happy to swap their patent rights for yours. But a patent troll holds only patents and doesn't make anything. He gets no benefits from cross licensing. So it doen't matter if IBM has pledged patents X, Y, and Z to open source. A troll who has a patent on W will still sue.
From reading the posts here it is clear that most people have no idea how serious this is. RMS has been warning about the dangers of software patents for at least 15 years. He was right but has always been too readily dismissed as an extremist. It will only take one or two successful patent infringement lawsuits before the legal sharks smell blood and the feeding frenzy begins. Don't think you'll be saved because the patents are for "obvious" ideas (which, of course, they are). Once a patent is granted the legal presumption is that it's valid and it is very, very expensive to overturn it. And there is a high degree of capriciousness -- if you are right in a patent dispute there's maybe a 50% chance you'll actually win the suit -- if you don't go bankrupt first. That's why businesses usually just fork over the exortion payments.
I have a pile of CDs bought in the 90s and they still play just fine. What have you been doing with yours? Using them to play "fetch" with your dog?
Maximum Prophet wrote: We need to show that we're causing global warming and that it's a bad thing. Last I heard, we were supposed to be heading for an Ice Age, so a little induced warming might not be a bad thing.
Ah, yes, that favorite argument of the global warming deniers. Yes, if humans never existed the Earth would probably be into the start of another ice age by now. But the C02 already in the atmosphere by 1970 was more than sufficient to prevent another return of the ice sheets. We are now far past what is needed to stop an ice age.
I make a distinction between "commie do gooders", the label free market ideologues apply to liberals who believe that government can sometimes do some good, and Communists, the totalitarians who have long proven to be very much against any real rights for the working man. And believe me, people like you were arguing that poor American families would starve if they couldn't send their children out to do factory work, right up to the day the legislation making it illegal was passed.
Ah yes, the excuse of greedheads everywhere. Yes, we had factories with child labor. Do you know why we don't anymore? Was it because of the glories of the free market? No, it was because legislators, under pressure by those commie do gooders, made it illegal. So factory owners were forced to hire adults, and because they couldn't get adults at the same low wages they hired children, they had to raise wages. The result -- the kids could go to school, and everyone had more to eat.
China has the ultimate labor surplus. So long as workers can't organize (as is usually the case in Communist countries) and people in industrial countries keep making excuses the life of the average Chinese factory worker will be hell. And by keeping his wages low, you ensure even more outsourcing and a continuing transfer of wealth from working people everywhere to a small global elite.
This drug is used by the military because a major problem they have is keeping soldiers awake and alert when battles go on for days at a time.
I do wonder about its safety though. I find that if I go several days with inadequate sleep I am much more likely to catch a cold. So if I took modafinil I might feel fine after going 48 hours without any sleep but would I still be more likely to get sick? After all, we aren't consciously aware of the state of our immune systems.
The article was slashdotted so I couldn't read it and this post is the usual Slashdot speculation. The smallest dinosaurs known were about the size of chicken. So I presume they meant this beast is the smallest known sauropod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropod. Most sauropods were humungous, so a one ton adult would be very small.
It's pretty clear you will be able to recharge the balls simply by putting them in some hydrogen under pressure. Also, palladium is an expensive platinum group metal (currently about $350 an ounce) so there will be every incentive not to lose the stuff.
If this is all above board and legal, there is no reason at all why our fine, upstanding, Constitutional government wouldn't want us to know the particulars about how it's done.
Southern California hospitals are closing because of the huge flood of illegal aliens who use the hospitals for emergency health care (which the hospitals are required to provide)and never pay the bills. Rather than use a one-time windfall of Google stock profits to pay for this, it would make much more sense to have a special tax on the businesses that hire that "cheap" labor.
According to their change log (http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/hurd/hurd-l4/ ChangeLog?rev=1.26&view=log) no updates have been made to the L4 microkernel version of Hurd for over a year.
The project is dead.
I'm over 40 so obviously I'm not cool, hip, or fly enough to use a Mac. Actually, Linux is probably an appropriate choice, as it's a reimplementation of an operating system developed when I was a kid.