You can't compare the app store and totalitarianism. Apple sells products and people have a choice whether or not they use them. The store is exclusive and the entry policies are somewhat arbitrary/elitist/wanky, but that is no difference from a fancy nightclub. Legally they have a right to offer the service, and I have the right to ignore it. You can't choose whether you want to live under a communist system or not if you're born in a country that has one.
Also Apple haven't killed millions of innocent people.
Now I know people are going to say something like "but they banned my app from the appstore/won't let me run my OSX torrent on my netbook/kicked me out of the Apple Store for explaining the principles of Free Software! My life is just as hard as someone that got killed in a concentration camp! BAWWW!". And unfortunately there is no response to that.
Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set.
Actually no. Intel sued AMD for patent infringement and the case was settled back in 1995. The end result of that was patent cross licensing but the agreement was asymmetric. AMD have to pay Intel a license fee for all the Intel patents they use but Intel does not have to pay AMD.
Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.
"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.
Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.
Though Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy declined to comment on whether or not Intel is working on a 32/64 bit chip, he concurred with Belgard.
"There are no legal barriers" that would prevent Intel from coming out with a chip that is similar and compatible with Opteron, he said. "There are no pitfalls either way."
An AMD representative stated: "I believe that is the case," but added that it would all depend on the circumstances.
Here's the key point
Under the terms of the settlement, both companies gained free access to each other's patents in a cross-licensing agreement. AMD agreed to pay Intel royalties for making chips based on the x86 architecture, said Mulloy, who worked for AMD when the settlement was drafted. Royalties, he added, only go one way. AMD does get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt.
AMD also agreed not to make any clones of Intel chips, but nothing bars Intel from doing a clone of an AMD chip, Mulloy added.
While the terms may seem one-sided, AMD has benefited from the agreement as well. Without the clean and enforceable right to make x86 chips granted by the agreement, AMD would not have been able to produce the K6, K6 II, K6III, Athlon, Duron, Athlon 64 or Opteron chips without fear of incurring a lawsuit.
So Intel already have a right to use x86-64 license free.
I like the way Opera is doubly secure. Firstly it's a minority platform, secondly Opera are quick at patching vulnerabilities.
Opera kicks the ass of both Firefox and IE in my subjective 'elegance' benchmark too.
The only thing I wish they'd do is to run the Opera process in a low privilege protected mode on Windows like IE7+ uses on Vista and later. That would make it hard for any exploit to get from the browser process into your system.
It's not foolproof of course - see here (this exploit was fixed in Vista SP1)
Well the Germans and Japanese in WWII inadvertently turned the US into a global power. And the Chinese have put billion into T bills to keep the dollar strong and their currency weak to keep America importing. Still if the US inflates its way out of the debt they'll effectively lose that money. Even better the Chinese political system is much more vulnerable to economic pain than the American one. It's quite possible that when the US stops importing the Chinese political system may change rapidly into a more liberal one, much like economic pain forced liberalisation onto the USSR. In fact, you suspect, into one not unlike America, given how fond most rich Chinese people are of the obtaining US residency.
That's the benefit of a well designed political system (compared to the competitors listed at least). People keep trying to attack you because you're a ninja, and you can dodge out of the way and they end up hurting themselves. Because you're a ninja.
What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself.
Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)
Yeah but making a super efficient site in PHP or Perl or whatever the current sweet spot is makes you a good engineer. Making an inefficient site in a fashionable language that only the cool kids really use makes you a poseur.
See that's a perfect summary of why I haven't watched Panorama in ages. It's become more and more like the US style of hypermentary: Tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Tell them they should be afraid / excited / awestruck. Play some bass noise. Talk in a Really. Slow. Earnest. Voice. Tell them what you're telling them. Tell them what you've told them. End forty minutes of drawn out information.
Have you seen Brass Eye? There are lots of jokes about this style of presentation.
Still this particular program is interesting because it shows what MI5 and the NSA are quite capable of. In fact at one point it is clear that they could read "dead letterboxes" - the terrorists wannabes in the this case didn't actually send emails because they knew they could be intercepted. They'd all share one account and put the emails in the draft folder, read them and delete them. Now there are a lot of webmail providers. Either they can spy on all of them or they can can decrypt https and read emails even if they are only stored on the server. Or both.
The other interesting thing is how much surveillance they do on "persons of interest". With these guys they read every email and IM they read and had bugs in place for 90% of the conversations.
For something on the scale of Facebook, 5 GB of wasted overhead for the chat system would not scare me.
It's not about the cost of the memory. Big systens tend to run more slowly because of locality effects. Systems running byte code run more slowly too. I think the Facebook guys have been saved by big ass hardware, not an efficient design.
TAYLOR: They then walked round the corner to Universal Video in Slough. Again, the spooks were on the case.
CLARKE: What they did was look at an email account on which were images of devises, electronic components which formed part of remote detonation.
Heroic British SIS officers, with a little help from the NSA were able to spy on the https connection to the web email service and also bug their car
TAYLOR: Omar's friend then had a touch of the jitters.
KUAJA: Bruv, just one thing, you don't think this place is bugged, do you?
OMAR: Nar, I don't think it's bugged bruv, at all. I don't even think the car's bugged. I was saying to XXX what we talk about sometimes, what we're doing, what I'm doing, yeah, bruv, if they knew about it, they wouldn't wait a day bruv, they wouldn't wait one day to arrest me, yeah, or any of us.
TAYLOR: At night, two days later, police specialists moved in to access to neutralise the threat.
Plus they got tips from helpful members of the public
ACCESS GIRL: [on telephone] Hi, is that the police?
TAYLOR: But the spooks also needed something else, luck.
ACCESS GIRL: We've got a suspicion about one of our customers.
TAYLOR: And there was good reason for the call, and this was it, a huge bag stored in unit 1118. Now the staff at Access had got no idea what was inside, but the warning that said oxidising agent was more than enough to cause them concern. In fact, the bag contained 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. That's around half a ton, and that's more than the IRA used to bomb canary wharf.
Later that night specialists from the anti terrorist branch gained access to unit 1118, the lockup where the bag was stored. They needed to establish that the substance inside the bag was ammonium nitrate ? it was. Alarm bells rang. The spooks had been hearing details of a bomb plot and now they'd found the explosive needed to make it. The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together.
That gives you 5GB of space just for the process structures it you want 5 million of them. A quick Google shows that lots of people have problems with Erlang running out of memory because they've screwed up the GC somehow, so this is definitely a minimum. Once those process start to allocate memory things will get much worse. Even the minimum, 5GB is not really good. What will it do to access locality for example?
Basically saying "lightweight compared to Unix and and Windows" isn't that impressive because both of those OSs are extremely bloated compared by the standards of embedded systems. Java, which Erlang claims to be faster than, is horrible for performance too.
Hokey interpreted languages are no match for native code written by someone who understands how processors execute it if you want lightweight.
Try going there. Seriously the anti porn law is one thing. How people behave in night clubs is quite another. In fact I think Japan is a classic case of a repressive public attitude to sex concealing a very open private one.
There's a deep truth to this - I lived in countries with a very open attitude to sex and a ones which on the surface seem puritanical. I'd bet money that there are more one night stands, affairs and so on in the ones puritanical ones.
What I think is odd is that (as far as I know) neither Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or HDTV have a 3D mode. With a bit of foresight they could have made 3D one of the killer features to get people to buy those.
Disney made Ghosts of the Abyss in 2003, and Blu-Ray wasn't finalized until 2004. At that point there were quite a few 3D films in production and cinemas were being fitted with the gear to show them.
You'd think someone would have put a 3D mode into Blu-Ray. I think it would be possible to get polarization based 3D into high end LCD screens. LCDs are based on polarization after all.
Then pricey home cinema systems would show films in 3D if they were 3D at the cinema. From what I've read take up on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD was a bit disappointing because most people couldn't see the difference between a DVD and the new formats. Adding 3D would might have helped.
That being said, it seems like there is a plan to get 3D into Blu-Ray retroactively.
Nonsense. These Giant Communist Mutant Jellyfish are clearly constructs of Red China. I say we rush a carrier battle group to the area armed with nuclear depth charges. I've seen enough 50's Sci Fi to I know nothing can go possibly wrong when using nuclear weapons on radiation mutated creatures.
You need to be careful about talking about "Asian countries". Asia is a big place. Taiwan, Japan and China are very permissive about sex. Korea is not at all. My impression is that Malaysia is somewhere in between. Of course all the majority Muslim countries are not at all permissive.
The problem is that "Asia" was defined somewhat naively by the Greeks and Romans as "anything East of Turkey". That's a huge chunk of the world, with much more variety in culture than Europe or America. At that point it becomes meaningless to talk about "Asian culture" or, shudder, "Asian values".
MACs encode the brand of wifi card (and usually of your laptop if it came with) so it can be reasonably easy to visually scan the room for the offender if there aren't 9001 MacBook Pros in it.
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You can't compare the app store and totalitarianism. Apple sells products and people have a choice whether or not they use them. The store is exclusive and the entry policies are somewhat arbitrary/elitist/wanky, but that is no difference from a fancy nightclub. Legally they have a right to offer the service, and I have the right to ignore it. You can't choose whether you want to live under a communist system or not if you're born in a country that has one.
Also Apple haven't killed millions of innocent people.
Now I know people are going to say something like "but they banned my app from the appstore/won't let me run my OSX torrent on my netbook/kicked me out of the Apple Store for explaining the principles of Free Software! My life is just as hard as someone that got killed in a concentration camp! BAWWW!". And unfortunately there is no response to that.
It's not about that. It's about FREEDOM OF CODE!
They can take our rights to run unsigned ARM code but they can't take our FREEDOM! RAAAAHH!
I have just spent some time reviewing documents from just before the Wall fell and it was very clearly revealed that letting people have a little bit of freedom was ultimately disastrous.
WTF? Would you prefer the European Communist regimes run people over with tanks instead? You've pretty much Godwined the discussion right there.
This poor man's brain has been ROTTED AWAY by COMMUNISM. He is to be pitied. Now kill him and burn the body.
Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set.
Actually no. Intel sued AMD for patent infringement and the case was settled back in 1995. The end result of that was patent cross licensing but the agreement was asymmetric. AMD have to pay Intel a license fee for all the Intel patents they use but Intel does not have to pay AMD.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39146227,00.htm
Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.
"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.
Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.
Though Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy declined to comment on whether or not Intel is working on a 32/64 bit chip, he concurred with Belgard.
"There are no legal barriers" that would prevent Intel from coming out with a chip that is similar and compatible with Opteron, he said. "There are no pitfalls either way."
An AMD representative stated: "I believe that is the case," but added that it would all depend on the circumstances.
Here's the key point
Under the terms of the settlement, both companies gained free access to each other's patents in a cross-licensing agreement. AMD agreed to pay Intel royalties for making chips based on the x86 architecture, said Mulloy, who worked for AMD when the settlement was drafted. Royalties, he added, only go one way. AMD does get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt.
AMD also agreed not to make any clones of Intel chips, but nothing bars Intel from doing a clone of an AMD chip, Mulloy added.
While the terms may seem one-sided, AMD has benefited from the agreement as well. Without the clean and enforceable right to make x86 chips granted by the agreement, AMD would not have been able to produce the K6, K6 II, K6III, Athlon, Duron, Athlon 64 or Opteron chips without fear of incurring a lawsuit.
So Intel already have a right to use x86-64 license free.
I hope that MBA turns out to be a good investment for you.
I like the way Opera is doubly secure. Firstly it's a minority platform, secondly Opera are quick at patching vulnerabilities.
Opera kicks the ass of both Firefox and IE in my subjective 'elegance' benchmark too.
The only thing I wish they'd do is to run the Opera process in a low privilege protected mode on Windows like IE7+ uses on Vista and later. That would make it hard for any exploit to get from the browser process into your system.
It's not foolproof of course - see here (this exploit was fixed in Vista SP1)
http://www.uninformed.org/?v=8&a=6&t=pdf
Still nothing is foolproof. Defence in depth is still it good principle. Mozilla are considering it in FF too
http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2006/08/labs-ideas-to-investigate-survey-results/
If you watch this video, his behaviour is not so surprising
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEWIw-a0GJw
Well the Germans and Japanese in WWII inadvertently turned the US into a global power. And the Chinese have put billion into T bills to keep the dollar strong and their currency weak to keep America importing. Still if the US inflates its way out of the debt they'll effectively lose that money. Even better the Chinese political system is much more vulnerable to economic pain than the American one. It's quite possible that when the US stops importing the Chinese political system may change rapidly into a more liberal one, much like economic pain forced liberalisation onto the USSR. In fact, you suspect, into one not unlike America, given how fond most rich Chinese people are of the obtaining US residency.
That's the benefit of a well designed political system (compared to the competitors listed at least). People keep trying to attack you because you're a ninja, and you can dodge out of the way and they end up hurting themselves. Because you're a ninja.
The reason US cars don't burn plutonium is the green lobby.
Actually when you read about nuclear propulsion it could have powered some truly awesome things e.g.
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself.
Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)
Yeah but making a super efficient site in PHP or Perl or whatever the current sweet spot is makes you a good engineer. Making an inefficient site in a fashionable language that only the cool kids really use makes you a poseur.
There's a principle at stake.
See that's a perfect summary of why I haven't watched Panorama in ages. It's become more and more like the US style of hypermentary: Tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Tell them they should be afraid / excited / awestruck. Play some bass noise. Talk in a Really. Slow. Earnest. Voice. Tell them what you're telling them. Tell them what you've told them. End forty minutes of drawn out information.
Have you seen Brass Eye? There are lots of jokes about this style of presentation.
Still this particular program is interesting because it shows what MI5 and the NSA are quite capable of. In fact at one point it is clear that they could read "dead letterboxes" - the terrorists wannabes in the this case didn't actually send emails because they knew they could be intercepted. They'd all share one account and put the emails in the draft folder, read them and delete them. Now there are a lot of webmail providers. Either they can spy on all of them or they can can decrypt https and read emails even if they are only stored on the server. Or both.
The other interesting thing is how much surveillance they do on "persons of interest". With these guys they read every email and IM they read and had bugs in place for 90% of the conversations.
For something on the scale of Facebook, 5 GB of wasted overhead for the chat system would not scare me.
It's not about the cost of the memory. Big systens tend to run more slowly because of locality effects. Systems running byte code run more slowly too. I think the Facebook guys have been saved by big ass hardware, not an efficient design.
Actually they have caught people planning to blow up supermarkets who did discuss it over web email
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6692741.stm
TAYLOR: They then walked round the corner to Universal Video in Slough. Again, the spooks were on the case.
CLARKE: What they did was look at an email account on which were images of devises, electronic components which formed part of remote detonation.
Heroic British SIS officers, with a little help from the NSA were able to spy on the https connection to the web email service and also bug their car
TAYLOR: Omar's friend then had a touch of the jitters.
KUAJA: Bruv, just one thing, you don't think this place is bugged, do you?
OMAR: Nar, I don't think it's bugged bruv, at all. I don't even think the car's bugged. I was saying to XXX what we talk about sometimes, what we're doing, what I'm doing, yeah, bruv, if they knew about it, they wouldn't wait a day bruv, they wouldn't wait one day to arrest me, yeah, or any of us.
TAYLOR: At night, two days later, police specialists moved in to access to neutralise the threat.
Plus they got tips from helpful members of the public
ACCESS GIRL: [on telephone] Hi, is that the police?
TAYLOR: But the spooks also needed something else, luck.
ACCESS GIRL: We've got a suspicion about one of our customers.
TAYLOR: And there was good reason for the call, and this was it, a huge bag stored in unit 1118. Now the staff at Access had got no idea what was inside, but the warning that said oxidising agent was more than enough to cause them concern. In fact, the bag contained 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. That's around half a ton, and that's more than the IRA used to bomb canary wharf.
Later that night specialists from the anti terrorist branch gained access to unit 1118, the lockup where the bag was stored. They needed to establish that the substance inside the bag was ammonium nitrate ? it was. Alarm bells rang. The spooks had been hearing details of a bomb plot and now they'd found the explosive needed to make it. The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together.
These new interpreted GCd languages always claim to be ultra lightweight.
In this case an Erlang process needs 1232 bytes (more if you want HiPE and/or SMP support, which you probably do)
http://www3.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/processes.html
That gives you 5GB of space just for the process structures it you want 5 million of them. A quick Google shows that lots of people have problems with Erlang running out of memory because they've screwed up the GC somehow, so this is definitely a minimum. Once those process start to allocate memory things will get much worse. Even the minimum, 5GB is not really good. What will it do to access locality for example?
Basically saying "lightweight compared to Unix and and Windows" isn't that impressive because both of those OSs are extremely bloated compared by the standards of embedded systems. Java, which Erlang claims to be faster than, is horrible for performance too.
Hokey interpreted languages are no match for native code written by someone who understands how processors execute it if you want lightweight.
They're running over five million Erlang processes for their chat system!
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1
If the objective were to maximize the number of Erlang processes, that would be an indeed be an impressive achievement.
Not if you're a cockroach.
Try going there. Seriously the anti porn law is one thing. How people behave in night clubs is quite another. In fact I think Japan is a classic case of a repressive public attitude to sex concealing a very open private one.
Which reminds me of this video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi4CRKxT8yU
There's a deep truth to this - I lived in countries with a very open attitude to sex and a ones which on the surface seem puritanical. I'd bet money that there are more one night stands, affairs and so on in the ones puritanical ones.
Well yeah, there is that too.
What I think is odd is that (as far as I know) neither Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or HDTV have a 3D mode. With a bit of foresight they could have made 3D one of the killer features to get people to buy those.
Disney made Ghosts of the Abyss in 2003, and Blu-Ray wasn't finalized until 2004. At that point there were quite a few 3D films in production and cinemas were being fitted with the gear to show them.
You'd think someone would have put a 3D mode into Blu-Ray. I think it would be possible to get polarization based 3D into high end LCD screens. LCDs are based on polarization after all.
Then pricey home cinema systems would show films in 3D if they were 3D at the cinema. From what I've read take up on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD was a bit disappointing because most people couldn't see the difference between a DVD and the new formats. Adding 3D would might have helped.
That being said, it seems like there is a plan to get 3D into Blu-Ray retroactively.
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=1303
Almost certainly there will be a large number of viewers without the glasses
3D GLASSES NOT AVAILABLE IN ALL AREAS! It's like I can touch you
If it's broadcast TV it can't be based on polarisation, since no one has a TV that can superimpose two images with different polarisations.
TV can use glasses with different colour lenses, i.e. the classic red and blue , or in this case Blue and Amber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_glasses#ColorCode_3-D_.28blue-amber_method.29
There are other options, e.g. the Pulfrich effects.
Nonsense. These Giant Communist Mutant Jellyfish are clearly constructs of Red China. I say we rush a carrier battle group to the area armed with nuclear depth charges. I've seen enough 50's Sci Fi to I know nothing can go possibly wrong when using nuclear weapons on radiation mutated creatures.
If you want to talk more about this, why not take a seat. Over there.
You need to be careful about talking about "Asian countries". Asia is a big place. Taiwan, Japan and China are very permissive about sex. Korea is not at all. My impression is that Malaysia is somewhere in between. Of course all the majority Muslim countries are not at all permissive.
The problem is that "Asia" was defined somewhat naively by the Greeks and Romans as "anything East of Turkey". That's a huge chunk of the world, with much more variety in culture than Europe or America. At that point it becomes meaningless to talk about "Asian culture" or, shudder, "Asian values".
MACs encode the brand of wifi card (and usually of your laptop if it came with) so it can be reasonably easy to visually scan the room for the offender if there aren't 9001 MacBook Pros in it.
Like this? http://www.abluestar.com/utilities/rndimages/img/acer.jpg
Think different!