Don't forget that most of the useful work is done at the bottom, so it's not a bad idea to have some people with experience down there.
Managers just need to run around telling people how wonderful of a job they are doing, and figuring out who really needs a raise, and who won't complain too much if he doesn't get one. ----------
Whatever people do with your code, they can't be depriving anybody of seeing how it works, because they can always get the code from you.
On the other hand, I give my code away for people to learn and use as they please, and only for that reason. I don't want them not to use it because they have to link my code to some non-GPLed code. Let them link with whatever, and license in whatever way, if they used it and learned from it, I've achieved my goal. I don't need to spread my beliefs in the process, as well.
The bottom line is -- it should be about writing code you want other people to use and learn from. It should NOT be about making personal choices for them.
Grow up. Microsoft mentioned GPL in a series of very lame, generic statements. It doesn't sound like somebody who's scared to death, or someone who even cares too much.
If they were, they'd say something meaningful. If that's possible from m$.
Unless you think I'm "forcing" you to GPL your software because you want to use my GPL'd software in yours, in which case you'd be complaining that you can't do something which you couldn't do anyway if my software was closed.
Yeah, and if you released it under BSD license, or simple 'gave it away', I'd really be free to do what I want to do with it, and not forced to use GPL. Is it really freedom when the only way you can contribute to the open source comunity is by subscribing to RMS's definition of what the sotfware world should be like?
Oh, well, we've heard these arguments enough, it just gets me riled up every time somebody start explaining what the "simple deal" is..:(
It doesn't sound perfect.. First, you have to fly around for a few hours, collecting oxygen.. Then, you still have to carry all that collected fuel into orbit. Finally, the complexity of the "breather" will cause a lot of flights to fail in the "flying around" stage, and that's a big no-no for space tourism. Imagine cancelling the flight after you've been circling for 6 hours already?
The ideal "breather" vehicle would be making liquid oxygen in "real time", i.e. as it's flying toward the orbit. That way, it would never have to carry any extra LO around, making things cheap for real.
This is just one step further from examining your family history, or asking you for a medical exam, history..
Insurance is not some kind of a right that we all have to have at an affordable rate. If your genes say that you will probably lose your hair by the time you're 30, it makes sense that you should pay more to insure your hair!
Why is going into your genes any more invasion of privacy than other types of medical examinations? Just because it was impossible/too expensive until now?
The designs are run through simulations, on many different levels, thousands of times before they even get close to a fab. It would be rather inefficient if a chip would have to be created physically after every bug fix:).
The simulation tools are a little on the pricey side. Students can get cheap, but stripped down, tools from FPGA companies, like Altera, though. Enough to play around, implement and simulate simple designs.
Nobody is trying to hide (to a degree) the design of the latest CPUs from less developed, or hostile, countries. Just look up a magazine like IEEE Micro, and you can see a lot of details on how most of the popular CPUs work.
US is trying to keep the manufactured CPUs away, though. Because that's the real difference between a high-tech country, and a low-tech one -- the capability to produce these chips. The bulk of the expense is the manufacturing cost.
Open-source is not going to help a poor country much. They could use it to educated people, maybe, but they still wouldn't be able to produce any designs they come up with.
Using the same logic, cooking is the same as sheep breeding. I mean, anyone can microwave a TV dinner, but to prepare a good meal you need to know your pans, ovens, spices, and meats.
In the same sense, anyone can get lock a couple of sheep in a barn and wait for them to do what the nature intended them to do, but to do it more efficiently you have to pretty up the sheep to make it attractive to the ram.
Wait.. what was my point again?
Oh, yes. I think your point is very moot. You don't need much skill to get simple, yet effective, software to work (VB), while you do need a lot of skill to get a chip to work at all. Even if you get past the HDL writing, the synthesis and physical compiler tools are not nearly as easy to use as VB. There is no "Build" button. It takes skill to produce something that can be sent to the fab.
Now, FPGAs usually come with VC-like IDEs, and it's possible to make very simple designs with only basic HDL/digital logic knowledge. The software equivalent in complexity would be a CGI counter, though. Hardly useful for a future open-source hardware community.
You'd think that they already knew that lowering the clock speed lowers the power consuption. I guess they didn't believe the "science mumbo-jumbo" until they built a chip and tried it out.
"Oh, look, the smaller feature size also made the chip smaller! Damn those mathematicians, they were right again!" ----------
Why should it be surprising? Java has become very popular, and Microsoft doesn't own it, and can't buy it. So, they have to try to kill it by making their own product and integrating it into Windows.
It's not like they haven't done it before. ----------
Looking at the White Paper, executing CGIs locally is just one of the features of Protozilla. A more interesting feature is the "protocol handlers" feature -- you can assign any external program to handle any existing protocols (like finger), or you can define your own protocols and assign program (or URLs!) to handle them!
For those afraid of the security issues associated with running CGI scripts locally -- this is a development tool only. In order for a script kiddie to misuse this, (s)he'll have to send your the CGI script in the mail, and tell you to run it for him:). Unless you're running Outlook, you're ok;).
----------
No matter how lame-ass it is, it is virutal porn. The question is whether it should be legal, or not, in case of virtual child porn.
I feel it's morally wrong, but you'd be hard pressed to find legal justification for banning it, since no children are actually forced to do anything against their will. ----------
You are missing the main point, though. The idea is to discover if there is intelligence out there, we'll work on figuring out what they are saying later. SETI is trying to find ANY signal that looks to be artifically created. I'm sure that if we received Alien HDTV signal or the Galactic Quake login prompt, we'd know that it is a sign of intelligence, even if we didn't know how to decode it.
Integrated chipset is a chipset with at least one peripheral integrated into it. I.e. chipset with built-in 3D graphics, or audio, or a network card, or any combination of these.
The main advantage is the cost -- manufacturing an extra bit of silicon for a network card is practically free, yet it's an important feature in today's PC. It's a big space/energy-saver, as well, which is very important in mobile industry.
Finally, you could even achieve some performance gains, since you're bypassing PCI/AGP busses and talking to integrated components directly. Since PCI/AGP are not much of a bottlneck at the moment, this is not an important point. It could come into play in the future, though.
Disadvantages? Integrated 3D shares the memory bandwidth with the CPU, often making significant performance impact. Audio cards don't have dedicated ram, so integrated audio shouldn't be any worse than a stand-alone card.
Another disadvantage is that you can't pop a piece of silicon out of the chip and plop a new one in, upgrading your integrated 3D:).
The biggest disadvantage to the geek community is that, because the main goal is low cost, the components that get integrated are usually far from top-of-the-line, and we just don't want to use those!:)
The link is not broken or slashdotted, the server just won't serve up the page if the URL is typed in, for some reason. If you go to www.hitachi.com, and click on DVD Cam, it loads fine.
The "big thing" about Napster was that people could share songs (legally or illegally). Now that Napster will provide songs for a fee -- they won't be providing it on my site, or John's site.. The music will be sitting on their servers. That won't be "Napster" any more, but "Amazon.com", except you download what you buy, instead of having it shipped.
Changing Napster into something else preserves the name, but nothing else..:(
IRC is pretty popular, and it doesnt appeal much to the average person.
That's absolutely not true -- the average person is very interested in the idea of chatting on the internet. Before ICQ provided a simpler method to talk to your friends, IRC was very popular among net newbies..
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that most of the useful work is done at the bottom, so it's not a bad idea to have some people with experience down there.
Managers just need to run around telling people how wonderful of a job they are doing, and figuring out who really needs a raise, and who won't complain too much if he doesn't get one.
----------
Here's what *you* missed.
Whatever people do with your code, they can't be depriving anybody of seeing how it works, because they can always get the code from you.
On the other hand, I give my code away for people to learn and use as they please, and only for that reason. I don't want them not to use it because they have to link my code to some non-GPLed code. Let them link with whatever, and license in whatever way, if they used it and learned from it, I've achieved my goal. I don't need to spread my beliefs in the process, as well.
The bottom line is -- it should be about writing code you want other people to use and learn from. It should NOT be about making personal choices for them.
----------
Grow up. Microsoft mentioned GPL in a series of very lame, generic statements. It doesn't sound like somebody who's scared to death, or someone who even cares too much.
If they were, they'd say something meaningful. If that's possible from m$.
----------
Yeah, and if you released it under BSD license, or simple 'gave it away', I'd really be free to do what I want to do with it, and not forced to use GPL. Is it really freedom when the only way you can contribute to the open source comunity is by subscribing to RMS's definition of what the sotfware world should be like?
Oh, well, we've heard these arguments enough, it just gets me riled up every time somebody start explaining what the "simple deal" is.. :(
----------
It doesn't sound perfect.. First, you have to fly around for a few hours, collecting oxygen.. Then, you still have to carry all that collected fuel into orbit. Finally, the complexity of the "breather" will cause a lot of flights to fail in the "flying around" stage, and that's a big no-no for space tourism. Imagine cancelling the flight after you've been circling for 6 hours already?
The ideal "breather" vehicle would be making liquid oxygen in "real time", i.e. as it's flying toward the orbit. That way, it would never have to carry any extra LO around, making things cheap for real.
----------
First bind, then ssh.. what's next -- will somebody find a way to hack Hotmail?!
:)
Oh, wait..
----------
This is just one step further from examining your family history, or asking you for a medical exam, history..
Insurance is not some kind of a right that we all have to have at an affordable rate. If your genes say that you will probably lose your hair by the time you're 30, it makes sense that you should pay more to insure your hair!
Why is going into your genes any more invasion of privacy than other types of medical examinations? Just because it was impossible/too expensive until now?
----------
You can't just "compile" your scematics and test them.
Actually, yes, you can, and that's in fact how it works :). You run a compiler, and then you run a test in a simulator to see if it works.
You have a point regarding the rest, though. The cost of actually producing a chip is prohibitive to enthusiasts.
I imagine very few people on the street could tell you how to create an XOR operation with a simple set of logic gates.
Not to sound nit-picky, but XOR is a simple logic gate :).
----------
The designs are run through simulations, on many different levels, thousands of times before they even get close to a fab. It would be rather inefficient if a chip would have to be created physically after every bug fix :).
The simulation tools are a little on the pricey side. Students can get cheap, but stripped down, tools from FPGA companies, like Altera, though. Enough to play around, implement and simulate simple designs.
----------
Nobody is trying to hide (to a degree) the design of the latest CPUs from less developed, or hostile, countries. Just look up a magazine like IEEE Micro, and you can see a lot of details on how most of the popular CPUs work.
US is trying to keep the manufactured CPUs away, though. Because that's the real difference between a high-tech country, and a low-tech one -- the capability to produce these chips. The bulk of the expense is the manufacturing cost.
Open-source is not going to help a poor country much. They could use it to educated people, maybe, but they still wouldn't be able to produce any designs they come up with.
----------
Using the same logic, cooking is the same as sheep breeding. I mean, anyone can microwave a TV dinner, but to prepare a good meal you need to know your pans, ovens, spices, and meats.
In the same sense, anyone can get lock a couple of sheep in a barn and wait for them to do what the nature intended them to do, but to do it more efficiently you have to pretty up the sheep to make it attractive to the ram.
Wait.. what was my point again?
Oh, yes. I think your point is very moot. You don't need much skill to get simple, yet effective, software to work (VB), while you do need a lot of skill to get a chip to work at all. Even if you get past the HDL writing, the synthesis and physical compiler tools are not nearly as easy to use as VB. There is no "Build" button. It takes skill to produce something that can be sent to the fab.
Now, FPGAs usually come with VC-like IDEs, and it's possible to make very simple designs with only basic HDL/digital logic knowledge. The software equivalent in complexity would be a CGI counter, though. Hardly useful for a future open-source hardware community.
----------
You're not changing the CPU, you're changing the way it responds to instructions. That could almost still be called an OS. It's still software.
Agreed, it would be cool, but it's not open-source hardware.
----------
You'd think that they already knew that lowering the clock speed lowers the power consuption. I guess they didn't believe the "science mumbo-jumbo" until they built a chip and tried it out.
"Oh, look, the smaller feature size also made the chip smaller! Damn those mathematicians, they were right again!"
----------
Why should it be surprising? Java has become very popular, and Microsoft doesn't own it, and can't buy it. So, they have to try to kill it by making their own product and integrating it into Windows.
It's not like they haven't done it before.
----------
For those afraid of the security issues associated with running CGI scripts locally -- this is a development tool only. In order for a script kiddie to misuse this, (s)he'll have to send your the CGI script in the mail, and tell you to run it for him :). Unless you're running Outlook, you're ok ;).
----------
By my morals, of course. I said I believe the act to be morally wrong, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
No one gets to be the moral jugde, but the supreme court judges get to decide what's legal and what's not.
(P.S. Is oral sex really illegal in some US states?! Which ones?!)
----------
I believe it's worse because the drawing depicts an act which is morally wrong, i.e. child porn.
----------
No matter how lame-ass it is, it is virutal porn. The question is whether it should be legal, or not, in case of virtual child porn.
I feel it's morally wrong, but you'd be hard pressed to find legal justification for banning it, since no children are actually forced to do anything against their will.
----------
You are missing the main point, though. The idea is to discover if there is intelligence out there, we'll work on figuring out what they are saying later. SETI is trying to find ANY signal that looks to be artifically created. I'm sure that if we received Alien HDTV signal or the Galactic Quake login prompt, we'd know that it is a sign of intelligence, even if we didn't know how to decode it.
Integrated chipset is a chipset with at least one peripheral integrated into it. I.e. chipset with built-in 3D graphics, or audio, or a network card, or any combination of these.
:).
:)
The main advantage is the cost -- manufacturing an extra bit of silicon for a network card is practically free, yet it's an important feature in today's PC. It's a big space/energy-saver, as well, which is very important in mobile industry.
Finally, you could even achieve some performance gains, since you're bypassing PCI/AGP busses and talking to integrated components directly. Since PCI/AGP are not much of a bottlneck at the moment, this is not an important point. It could come into play in the future, though.
Disadvantages? Integrated 3D shares the memory bandwidth with the CPU, often making significant performance impact. Audio cards don't have dedicated ram, so integrated audio shouldn't be any worse than a stand-alone card.
Another disadvantage is that you can't pop a piece of silicon out of the chip and plop a new one in, upgrading your integrated 3D
The biggest disadvantage to the geek community is that, because the main goal is low cost, the components that get integrated are usually far from top-of-the-line, and we just don't want to use those!
The link is not broken or slashdotted, the server just won't serve up the page if the URL is typed in, for some reason. If you go to www.hitachi.com, and click on DVD Cam, it loads fine.
You point a flashlight at it, thus bombarding it with photons, untill the BSOD goes away!
The "big thing" about Napster was that people could share songs (legally or illegally). Now that Napster will provide songs for a fee -- they won't be providing it on my site, or John's site.. The music will be sitting on their servers. That won't be "Napster" any more, but "Amazon.com", except you download what you buy, instead of having it shipped.
:(
Changing Napster into something else preserves the name, but nothing else..
That's absolutely not true -- the average person is very interested in the idea of chatting on the internet. Before ICQ provided a simpler method to talk to your friends, IRC was very popular among net newbies..
I'm going to patent my method of harvesting resources in C&C...