Depends on your point of view. Most bird habitats are threatened. Humans are overpopulated.
If you're concerned about overpopulation you're free to not have children, or even kill yourself. What you're not free to do is ban DDT and thus indirectly kill millions of people in the third world.
Twenty years is a long time for a creative type to be mostly kicking back and enjoying the good things in life. Rust sets in quickly, dulling the drive that keeps one working nights and weekends and eating bad takeout food while crazy project deadlines loom. I wonder how much Woz has left.
For the company, it might not matter. Hiring Woz helps build the brand - people will now have heard of them and start paying attention to them. Like Transmeta hiring Torvalds.
Sad to say, I think you're right. I bet they had a controller prototyped in FPGAs long before the hired him.
Still, what they're doing is in a way a sort of spiritual successor to the Integrated Woz Machine, i.e. getting more performance out of a storage device by using less hardware in a smarter way. So it's not entirely unjustified.
Not using a SATA interface should yield a good performance advantage.
Rock on, Woz
You could have an option Rom, or you could just emulate AHCI (or even ATA) in hardware up to the point the OS loads a native driver, and switch to native mode after that.
Actually I sort of wonder if you couldn't implement an AHCI contoller which talks to flash directly. The bottleneck in SATA is the drive and the SATA bus, not the PCI Express AHCI controller. PCI-E x16 can manage 4,000 MB/s compared to SATA2's 300 MB/s. SATA2 has plenty of bandwidth for a hard disk, but it looks like it will become a bottleneck with an SSD with lots of flash chips running in parallel. In fact an 2.5 inch Intel extreme SSD manages 250MB/sec now, pretty close to the SATA limit. A PCI Express card covered in NAND flash aimed at enterprise servers could easily be more parallel than this.
AHCI is quite flexible (it has efficient NCQ for example) and is already supported by all current OSs and Bioses. There's no reason why you couldn't design a wide flash array on a PCI express card that looks like a fast drive behind an AHCI controller to software.
The upside to this is that there is no device driver and option Rom to develop/support.
What scares me most is that this style of distribution is something I'd actually fall for. I mean, pop ups and stuff are easy enough to ignore, but what about local flies for bands, business cards, and these tickets? Just goes to show that no matter how much protection you have on the tech side, there's always a social engineering way around it.
You should install the lordpwnalot toolbar, it will protect you from this sort of thing.
A Chinese dissident who was arrested after campaigning for the parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake will stand trial on state secret charges, his wife and lawyer said.
The abrupt announcement that Huang Qi , 45, would be tried came nearly eight months after he was detained as authorities silenced criticism about fragile school buildings that collapsed on children in the May 12 quake.
"This morning I received a phone call from the court... to ask me to tell Huang Qi's lawyers that he will be put on trial on Tuesday [today] for illegal possession of state secrets," Huang's wife Zeng Li told reporters by phone yesterday.
Later, Huang's lawyer Mo Shaoping said that the district court in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, had agreed to push back the trial date after attorneys protested they had not been given enough time to prepare.
"The court must warn the defense side three days before," he said, adding that he did not know when the trial would begin.
Huang was detained in Chengdu on June 10 â" about a month after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead or missing.
Huang, a long-time rights activist who used the Internet to publicize his causes, had started to campaign for parents whose children were killed when their schools collapsed in the quake.
About 7,000 schools were destroyed, often as nearby buildings stood firm, and relatives of the dead children initially spoke out loudly against the graft they believed led to shoddy construction.
"Up to now, we still have not been able to see the [specific] charges" against Huang, Mo said.
Zeng said Huang's arrest was a result of his work in the earthquake zone.
"This is because he went to the disaster area a couple of times. He reported on the shoddy schools and reported about the appeals of the parents of the students. So he was arrested and charged with possessing state secrets," she said.
The ill-defined charge is often used to clamp down on dissent and send activists to prison.
The founding principles of the NHS called for its funding out of general taxation and not through national insurance.
Services would henceforth be provided by the same doctors and the same hospitals, but: services were provided free at the point of use; services were financed from central taxation; everyone was eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).
All very laudable really, but it has a fatal flaw that dentists don't actually have any financial incentive to treat people, hence the British Teeth syndrome.
Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't pay the dentists by treatment rather than just for being there. To some extent the government has moved over to this model, the problem being that the NHS pays too little to motivate them. They're actually better off selling their services on the open market to private patients and not accepting NHS patients ones post reform. So now if you're relatively well off you can get good treatment and that treatment is actively marketed, but it will cost you.
Actually back in the old NHS days you could get good treatment too, if you were lucky enough to be in the catchment area of a hardworking dentist. The system didn't incentivise this though.
Skunk included a short comic exploring the result of getting a catgirl in your bed. It wasn't pretty!
This is as my Master told it to me and now I tell it thee.
There are a billion names of furfaggotry! A billion kinds of furries that slither and slime and defile the land and sea and wind. Each furry is a kind of sin spawned by the internet's evil. And that internets is very sinful there are many of these damned furfags and their power is great.
As the purpose of all things in nature is to increase so it is with the furry. They would we joined them and so they seek to overcome us. In alien forms they assault us. In sleep they come to spread doubt and fear among us. They would corrupt our hearts and see us yiff too. Trust them not nor suffer them to live.
For each furfag destroyed is a soul freed from eternal bondage. Each mortal furry life extinguished is an/i/nsurgent soul raised to glory. Thus our eternal destiny is written in the blood of the furfag.
With box and tampon destroy the furfag. With pizza and koran smash the furfag. With credit card hacks and searing mormons scatter the furfag to the stars. With gore and dataforce and bandwidth raep, with hax and AIDS and jehovas, with yellow vans and steroids!
Kill them! Kill them! Kill them all!
As my Master told it me I now tell it thee that thou shalt tell others in thy turn.
In an internet of a million sites, what is the death of one site in the cause of purity? Some may question your right to destroy ten billion furfags. Those who understand realize that you have no right to let them live.
That meant the chapter where you had to use your grav gun to get objects to stand on top of the sand was a real pain, cause you couldn't see any boxes that were more than 15 feet away unless you zoomed in,
BAM! Antlioned.
and you couldn't use the grav gun while zoomed. Zoom in, find an object, zoom out, pull it, zoom back in to see if you lost it, repeat.
Did you know that Stallman sounds like the Swedish Stålman, literally man of steel (or figuratively Superman). The nomme de guerre Stalin means (more or less) man of steel in Russian.
Clearly Stallman has the right name and the requisite facial hair and he can write GPL4,5 and 6 to enforce collectivisation of Stallix and the crushing of Kulaks like Torvalds.
Actually the UK is an excellent example. Post 1945 the Labour Party tried to build a Keynesian/socialist economy and the Tories largely left it intact when they were in power. Essentially Keynesianism became a consensus which both parties respected. That continued up until 1979, by which point inflation and unemployment were both high, something which Keynesian theory did not predict.
At that point Thatcher won an election and on the advice of the monetarists started to dismantle the system. To some extent the Labour Party respected the new post Keynesian consensus, e.g. by continuing the free marketification of the NHS, passing control of interest rates to an independent Monetary Policy Committee with distinctly monetarist goals.
India is another good example because post independence the Congress Party were keen on the same sorts of ideas as the Labour Party, perhaps worse ones including protectionism. India developed fairly slowly right up until they opened up their economy, at which point they started to take your jobs.
All that said, I think a certain amount of Keynesianism or something like it is inevitable to get us out of the shit economically. What I don't agree with is that we let the pendulum swing back so that it becomes the consensus, as it did in the UK between 1945 and 1979.
I'm not sure what you mean about "telling you on page 1 they are prejudiced". Still, maybe I don't have the secret decoder ring you Marxist types have for spotting conspiracies.
You still haven't addressed what they actually said, which is that German subsidies for solar power have pushed up prices, not pushed them down and that the government has actually subsidised the wrong renewable. In fact you seem to thing that rattling off ad hominems about the magazine somehow negates everything they said.
I'm not sure what you're referring to by "Nobel prize winning economists demonstrated the flaw in the free market concept - the accumulation of secret asymmetric information - and were promptly proved right in the early 21st Century". My point is that government planners don't know enough about the future to plan for it effectively. Now in a free market system that doesn't matter. If I have access to secret information I can start a business based on it. IP laws will even let me publish that information without putting it in the public domain and license it to investors. So if there was an 'accumulation of secret asymmetric information', the best way to deal with it is via free markets and IP law.
A group of computer scientists build the world's most powerful computer. Let us call it "HyperThought." HyperThought is massively parallel, it contains neural networks, it has teraflop speed., etc. The computer scientists give HyperThought a shakedown run. It easily computes Pi to 10000 places, and factors a 100 digit number. The scientists try find a difficult question that may stump it. Finally, one scientist exclaims: "I know!" "HyperThought," she asks "is there a God?" "There is now," replies the computer.
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Thank you.
John F. Kennedy - September 12, 1962
Yeah and JFK kept denying the holocaust too. Oh, wait he didn't because he wasn't a crazy antisemitic nutjob. Unlike Ahmacrazyguy.
You've already given away your political leaning by copy and paste from the Economist - which by the way was one of the cheerleaders that led to the present financial crisis - but it's fair to mention one other thing. Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US. The US was never bombed, and Pearl Harbor did less damage to the US than a single air raid of London. As a result, Britain emerged almost bankrupt with much of its productive capacity destroyed, and only rescued itself by having a strongly dirigiste economy focussed on exports, while people at home went cold and hungry. During the late 40s and early 50s, we got shot of the Empire (to our financial benefit). During the Thatcherite "reforms", the UK slipped back economically relative to its European neighbours.
Yours, and the Economist's view of history is dangerously simplistic. Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy. But I don't expect to learn that from a comic that sells mainly to non-tax paying expats and their accountants.
Wah! The Economist mentions facts that don't fit my world view! Must attack its credibility!
I think in a well managed company Clearcase is brilliant. You can have people working all around the world, dropping code onto branches to be merged later. Unfortunately very few companies are well managed like this. Maybe you can get people at one site working in a structured way, but you most likely can't get two sites to do it without the whole thing turning into chaos and blamemongering.
In a very real sense Clearcase is more scalable than most management techniques. I like the merge tool though, it beats the pants off things like cvs. And config specs, automerges the like allow for all sorts of complicated multi level branching strategies.
Well, you have to consider the long term goals of this. The main problem is that there is a chicken-egg problem with solar energy: with high panel prices is there is no demand and without demand the prices will remain high in the long term.
They want to break this cycle by creating artifical demand. While the prices go up in the short term, the increased production capacity and investments into new technologies will drive them down in the long term.
The point of the article I quoted was that it hasn't worked like that. And logically, you wouldn't expect it to. If you create artificial demand, you'd expect prices to go up. If you stop creating prices will go down. In fact the German government is tailing off support for exactly that reason, because the price of solar panels has gone up too much.
And yet everyone who lives there has adequate healthcare and the same standard of living without massive national debt.
The US has a high debt at the moment it's true. I think it's partly due to Bush's spendthrift policies and partly a structural thing. Most US Federal Debt is owned domestically which makes it seem less threatening, almost like a voluntary tax system. There is a long term risk of Federal debts spiralling out of control admittedly, but that risk is exacerbated by increased government spending. If you want low debts, free market policies are the way to go.
In fact in the UK social security would have bankrupted the government in the long run if entitlements had not been cut.
The US, despite the rhetoric faces the same problem
And unlike the UK, they haven't cut entitlements to make sure the system balances.
In terms of health care, haven't you heard the expression "British Teeth"? I'm English and I grew up in the UK and travelled extensively and I have to say that British teeth from the NHS era are a on average lot worse than the teeth of Americans from the private healthcare era. In fact middle class English people over about 40 have worse teeth than ghetto/trailer park Americans. That's not unexpected either, the point of the NHS was that dentists got paid a (high) salary for taking part, not for actually treating anyone. It wasn't in their interests to "sell" treatment since they didn't charge for it. By contrast in the US dentists could market shiny straight teeth to people, or rather get them to buy them for their kids.
Actually since Thatcher successive UK governments have largely dismantled the NHS. Most dental treatment in the UK is now private for example. Young English people have teeth like Americans.
Most of Germany's electricity comes from coal-fired and nuclear plants. But the former are unpopular because of their relatively high greenhouse-gas emissions, and the latter because of the fear of a catastrophic accident. So in 1991 Germany adopted a renewable-energy law, now known as the EEG, which encourages investment by cross-subsidising renewable electricity fed into the grid. The law is popular with those who support the rapid introduction of new clean technology. Stefan Schurig of the World Future Council, a green think-tank in Hamburg, calls it "the best law of its kind worldwide".
The law says electricity produced from renewable sources must be purchased by utilities according to a generous "feed-in tariff" that sets higher-than-market rates and fixes them for 20 years. Roof-mounted photovoltaic systems installed in 2007, for example, can sell power at €0.49 per kilowatt-hour, or about seven times today's wholesale price, until 2027. The fixed rate allows investors to calculate returns and removes uncertainty over financing.
The utilities that buy power at these higher rates pass the extra costs back to their customers in the form of higher electricity bills. This added an average of 1 euro cent per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity last year, increasing the typical household electricity bill by 5%, or €3 a month. For the country as a whole, the cost was €7.7 billion in 2007, up 38% on the year before. Enthusiasts consider that a small price to jump-start a new industry and start decarbonising the power supply.
Clouds on the horizon
But the government is not so sure. It has proposed a revision to the EEG, which calls for a shift away from solar and towards other forms of renewable energy, and offshore wind in particular. As things stand, the feed-in tariff for solar goes down by 5% every year. But new proposals call for a cut of 9.2% next year, and 7-8% thereafter.
The problem is not just the expense of the existing law. Cheerleaders for solar had hoped that the increased demand for panels would help manufacturers reduce unit costs, and thus make solar more competitive in the long run. Instead, the rush into solar has led to a shortage of the high-grade silicon used to make the cells, which has soared in price from $25 per kilogram in 2003 to around $400 today.
Indeed, such is the demand for solar panels in Germany that it has kept prices high globally. This is wonderful for manufacturers, but makes it more expensive to install solar capacity in sunnier parts of the world, where it would generate more electricity. The EEG's generous rates for solar amounted to "picking winners on a grand scale", says Dieter Helm, an expert on energy policy at the University of Oxford. A euro in cross-subsidies spent on wind power, rather than solar, produces more generating capacity and a larger reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically if you subsidise the wrong thing, you can potentially hurt more than you help. Picking the right things to subsidise is non trivial.
Hell if planned economies worked, India and the UK would have grown faster than free market places like the US in the 50's and 60's. Actually, despite being poorer, they grew more slowly until they implemented free market reforms.
Now traditionally greens seem to see economic growth as some kind of problem because it usually leads to more pollution, but in the case of the renewable energy industry, more growth actually means less pollution.
And actually the EEG is a fairly lightweight piece of government intervention, adding only 5% to bills.
To misquote Socrates "True knowledge exists in knowing that the Government knows nothing."
I once worked with an Indian consultancy company. They were working on software for a mobile phone and were using ClearCase. Now ClearCase is expensive, but it does the job. A colleague and I were writing code to test the peripherals on the baseband chips. Now one of the Indian managers said that the project was stalled because the I2S controller didn't support some mode.
Since we had code that tested the I2S controller, we were drafted in to help them. We asked for a config spec. It looked like this
foo.c@\main\1212 bar.c@\main\1254
and so on, for thousands of files. Even worse if you emailed a few different people, you'd get slightly different config specs, but always of this form
Now normally in Clearcase you develop on a branch and then merge to a release branch. So the development config spec will be something like this
element * CHECKEDOUT element *.../developers_branch/LATEST element -file * RELEASE_LABEL_1 -mkbranch developers_branch
What this means is take the checked out file if if exists, otherwise look for the one on my branch, otherwise look for the released version
and a release one will be like this. Once you're done developing you merge your branch back and label the result with a new release label. Then the config spec looks like this.
element -file * RELEASED_LABEL_2 -nocheckout
Of course for this to happen you need to have a management structure that makes sure people get things right before they merge them back, and if two teams of people are fighting that things get resolved. Otherwise you end up with a minority report situation where different bits of the team end up working on different baselines.
The worst case of this would be where everyone picked a set of last known good versions that were different. Which is exactly the situation these guys were in.
Now you can see that the spec they sent us showed that something was very wrong.
We managed to get it to build but some things didn't work, actually the things we wanted to check. So we asked them and they said something like "ask Raj, he's go a fix for that". The fix was one file, which he emailed you. You checked the file out and overwrote it with the one in the email.
At this point, it was clear that the I2S settings were totally wrong. We fixed those and managed to punt the whole thing back. Given the chaos the project was in, I didn't really expect it to ever work properly.
It was the most amazing misuse of a version control system I have ever seen. What was odd about it was the individual developers seemed to me to be ok, the problem was the shitty consultancy company was loading them down with work without setting up things like version control properly. Actually I always suspected that the project we saw had been put together in a few hours by some very smart people, who had then billed my client for a shitload of hours which hadn't been worked. Then after that they handed over the whole mess to some much less experienced developers who were basically too timid to realise that they needed to do a drastic set of module tests, merges, system tests, bug fixes and so on until they had a stable baseline to work from, because the alternative would be that the project would crash and burn.
Still I'd never trust one of those big Indian outsourcing companies to do software after that. And as I said, it's a problem of the company, not the developers. With one decent manager, the project I saw would probably have not got to this dire state. Actually with one decent manager they could probably have pulled themselves back from the brink given a month or so.
Amid threats of a lawsuit from Adobe, Microsoft acknowledged Friday that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista.
The changes follow a breakdown of talks between the two technology giants after Microsoft announced last year it would include native PDF publishing with the release of Office 2007. The feature has long been a top request from customers, the company said at the time, and other office suites have the capability.
But Adobe was unhappy with the move and a dispute has been brewing for four months, Microsoft's lead counsel Brad Smith said Friday. Although PDF claims to be an open format and is integrated into OpenOffice and Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Adobe apparently sees Office 2007 as a real threat to its business.
Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the feature, which the Redmond company has refused to do. Smith said Adobe threatened to file an antitrust suit in Europe, and his company was preparing for that eventuality. Now, however, Microsoft says it will make the feature available through a downloadable add-on.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your point of view. Most bird habitats are threatened. Humans are overpopulated.
If you're concerned about overpopulation you're free to not have children, or even kill yourself. What you're not free to do is ban DDT and thus indirectly kill millions of people in the third world.
And that's not just rhetoric
http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.htm
Tens of millions of excess malaria deaths have occured since DDT was banned in the developed world.
Want another penny? Here you go:
A cloud-distributed filesystem using each processor's bottom 2 or 3 general-purpose registers as a block for said filesystem,
Wow, that's like 24 bytes of storage per core. How will anyone ever fill it up?
Twenty years is a long time for a creative type to be mostly kicking back and enjoying the good things in life. Rust sets in quickly, dulling the drive that keeps one working nights and weekends and eating bad takeout food while crazy project deadlines loom. I wonder how much Woz has left.
For the company, it might not matter. Hiring Woz helps build the brand - people will now have heard of them and start paying attention to them. Like Transmeta hiring Torvalds.
Sad to say, I think you're right. I bet they had a controller prototyped in FPGAs long before the hired him.
Still, what they're doing is in a way a sort of spiritual successor to the Integrated Woz Machine, i.e. getting more performance out of a storage device by using less hardware in a smarter way. So it's not entirely unjustified.
It would have an Option ROM, like RAID cards and every other bootable controller does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM
Not using a SATA interface should yield a good performance advantage.
Rock on, Woz
You could have an option Rom, or you could just emulate AHCI (or even ATA) in hardware up to the point the OS loads a native driver, and switch to native mode after that.
Actually I sort of wonder if you couldn't implement an AHCI contoller which talks to flash directly. The bottleneck in SATA is the drive and the SATA bus, not the PCI Express AHCI controller. PCI-E x16 can manage 4,000 MB/s compared to SATA2's 300 MB/s. SATA2 has plenty of bandwidth for a hard disk, but it looks like it will become a bottleneck with an SSD with lots of flash chips running in parallel. In fact an 2.5 inch Intel extreme SSD manages 250MB/sec now, pretty close to the SATA limit. A PCI Express card covered in NAND flash aimed at enterprise servers could easily be more parallel than this.
AHCI is quite flexible (it has efficient NCQ for example) and is already supported by all current OSs and Bioses. There's no reason why you couldn't design a wide flash array on a PCI express card that looks like a fast drive behind an AHCI controller to software.
The upside to this is that there is no device driver and option Rom to develop/support.
What scares me most is that this style of distribution is something I'd actually fall for. I mean, pop ups and stuff are easy enough to ignore, but what about local flies for bands, business cards, and these tickets? Just goes to show that no matter how much protection you have on the tech side, there's always a social engineering way around it.
You should install the lordpwnalot toolbar, it will protect you from this sort of thing.
Actually they have a much more elegant way of resolving things like this
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2009/02/03/2003435140
A Chinese dissident who was arrested after campaigning for the parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake will stand trial on state secret charges, his wife and lawyer said.
The abrupt announcement that Huang Qi , 45, would be tried came nearly eight months after he was detained as authorities silenced criticism about fragile school buildings that collapsed on children in the May 12 quake.
"This morning I received a phone call from the court ... to ask me to tell Huang Qi's lawyers that he will be put on trial on Tuesday [today] for illegal possession of state secrets," Huang's wife Zeng Li told reporters by phone yesterday.
Later, Huang's lawyer Mo Shaoping said that the district court in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, had agreed to push back the trial date after attorneys protested they had not been given enough time to prepare.
"The court must warn the defense side three days before," he said, adding that he did not know when the trial would begin.
Huang was detained in Chengdu on June 10 â" about a month after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead or missing.
Huang, a long-time rights activist who used the Internet to publicize his causes, had started to campaign for parents whose children were killed when their schools collapsed in the quake.
About 7,000 schools were destroyed, often as nearby buildings stood firm, and relatives of the dead children initially spoke out loudly against the graft they believed led to shoddy construction.
"Up to now, we still have not been able to see the [specific] charges" against Huang, Mo said.
Zeng said Huang's arrest was a result of his work in the earthquake zone.
"This is because he went to the disaster area a couple of times. He reported on the shoddy schools and reported about the appeals of the parents of the students. So he was arrested and charged with possessing state secrets," she said.
The ill-defined charge is often used to clamp down on dissent and send activists to prison.
Slashdot: some may call it pedantry, we call it rigour.
Because the original design principle of the NHS was "free at the point of use and funded solely through general taxation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Health_Service
The founding principles of the NHS called for its funding out of general taxation and not through national insurance.
Services would henceforth be provided by the same doctors and the same hospitals, but:
services were provided free at the point of use;
services were financed from central taxation;
everyone was eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).
All very laudable really, but it has a fatal flaw that dentists don't actually have any financial incentive to treat people, hence the British Teeth syndrome.
Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't pay the dentists by treatment rather than just for being there. To some extent the government has moved over to this model, the problem being that the NHS pays too little to motivate them. They're actually better off selling their services on the open market to private patients and not accepting NHS patients ones post reform. So now if you're relatively well off you can get good treatment and that treatment is actively marketed, but it will cost you.
Actually back in the old NHS days you could get good treatment too, if you were lucky enough to be in the catchment area of a hardworking dentist. The system didn't incentivise this though.
Lol wut?
If it's an open standard anyone should be allowed to implement it.
Skunk included a short comic exploring the result of getting a catgirl in your bed. It wasn't pretty!
This is as my Master told it to me and now I tell it thee.
There are a billion names of furfaggotry! A billion kinds of furries that slither and slime and defile the land and sea and wind. Each furry is a kind of sin spawned by the internet's evil. And that internets is very sinful there are many of these damned furfags and their power is great.
As the purpose of all things in nature is to increase so it is with the furry. They would we joined them and so they seek to overcome us. In alien forms they assault us. In sleep they come to spread doubt and fear among us. They would corrupt our hearts and see us yiff too. Trust them not nor suffer them to live.
For each furfag destroyed is a soul freed from eternal bondage. Each mortal furry life extinguished is an /i/nsurgent soul raised to glory. Thus our eternal destiny is written in the blood of the furfag.
With box and tampon destroy the furfag. With pizza and koran smash the furfag. With credit card hacks and searing mormons scatter the furfag to the stars. With gore and dataforce and bandwidth raep, with hax and AIDS and jehovas, with yellow vans and steroids!
Kill them! Kill them! Kill them all!
As my Master told it me I now tell it thee that thou shalt tell others in thy turn.
In an internet of a million sites, what is the death of one site in the cause of purity? Some may question your right to destroy ten billion furfags. Those who understand realize that you have no right to let them live.
That meant the chapter where you had to use your grav gun to get objects to stand on top of the sand was a real pain, cause you couldn't see any boxes that were more than 15 feet away unless you zoomed in,
BAM! Antlioned.
and you couldn't use the grav gun while zoomed. Zoom in, find an object, zoom out, pull it, zoom back in to see if you lost it, repeat.
Sorry, did I interrupt your train of thought?
Did you know that Stallman sounds like the Swedish Stålman, literally man of steel (or figuratively Superman). The nomme de guerre Stalin means (more or less) man of steel in Russian.
Clearly Stallman has the right name and the requisite facial hair and he can write GPL4,5 and 6 to enforce collectivisation of Stallix and the crushing of Kulaks like Torvalds.
Actually the UK is an excellent example. Post 1945 the Labour Party tried to build a Keynesian/socialist economy and the Tories largely left it intact when they were in power. Essentially Keynesianism became a consensus which both parties respected. That continued up until 1979, by which point inflation and unemployment were both high, something which Keynesian theory did not predict.
At that point Thatcher won an election and on the advice of the monetarists started to dismantle the system. To some extent the Labour Party respected the new post Keynesian consensus, e.g. by continuing the free marketification of the NHS, passing control of interest rates to an independent Monetary Policy Committee with distinctly monetarist goals.
India is another good example because post independence the Congress Party were keen on the same sorts of ideas as the Labour Party, perhaps worse ones including protectionism. India developed fairly slowly right up until they opened up their economy, at which point they started to take your jobs.
PBS has a good documentary on it
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/story/index.html
All that said, I think a certain amount of Keynesianism or something like it is inevitable to get us out of the shit economically. What I don't agree with is that we let the pendulum swing back so that it becomes the consensus, as it did in the UK between 1945 and 1979.
I'm not sure what you mean about "telling you on page 1 they are prejudiced". Still, maybe I don't have the secret decoder ring you Marxist types have for spotting conspiracies.
You still haven't addressed what they actually said, which is that German subsidies for solar power have pushed up prices, not pushed them down and that the government has actually subsidised the wrong renewable. In fact you seem to thing that rattling off ad hominems about the magazine somehow negates everything they said.
I'm not sure what you're referring to by "Nobel prize winning economists demonstrated the flaw in the free market concept - the accumulation of secret asymmetric information - and were promptly proved right in the early 21st Century". My point is that government planners don't know enough about the future to plan for it effectively. Now in a free market system that doesn't matter. If I have access to secret information I can start a business based on it. IP laws will even let me publish that information without putting it in the public domain and license it to investors. So if there was an 'accumulation of secret asymmetric information', the best way to deal with it is via free markets and IP law.
A group of computer scientists build the world's most powerful computer. Let us call it "HyperThought." HyperThought is massively parallel, it contains neural networks, it has teraflop speed., etc. The computer scientists give HyperThought a shakedown run. It easily computes Pi to 10000 places, and factors a 100 digit number. The scientists try find a difficult question that may stump it. Finally, one scientist exclaims: "I know!" "HyperThought," she asks "is there a God?" "There is now," replies the computer.
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Thank you.
John F. Kennedy - September 12, 1962
Yeah and JFK kept denying the holocaust too. Oh, wait he didn't because he wasn't a crazy antisemitic nutjob. Unlike Ahmacrazyguy.
You've already given away your political leaning by copy and paste from the Economist - which by the way was one of the cheerleaders that led to the present financial crisis - but it's fair to mention one other thing. Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US. The US was never bombed, and Pearl Harbor did less damage to the US than a single air raid of London. As a result, Britain emerged almost bankrupt with much of its productive capacity destroyed, and only rescued itself by having a strongly dirigiste economy focussed on exports, while people at home went cold and hungry. During the late 40s and early 50s, we got shot of the Empire (to our financial benefit). During the Thatcherite "reforms", the UK slipped back economically relative to its European neighbours.
Yours, and the Economist's view of history is dangerously simplistic. Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy. But I don't expect to learn that from a comic that sells mainly to non-tax paying expats and their accountants.
Wah! The Economist mentions facts that don't fit my world view! Must attack its credibility!
I think in a well managed company Clearcase is brilliant. You can have people working all around the world, dropping code onto branches to be merged later. Unfortunately very few companies are well managed like this. Maybe you can get people at one site working in a structured way, but you most likely can't get two sites to do it without the whole thing turning into chaos and blamemongering.
In a very real sense Clearcase is more scalable than most management techniques. I like the merge tool though, it beats the pants off things like cvs. And config specs, automerges the like allow for all sorts of complicated multi level branching strategies.
Well, you have to consider the long term goals of this.
The main problem is that there is a chicken-egg problem with solar energy: with high panel prices is there is no demand and without demand the prices will remain high in the long term.
They want to break this cycle by creating artifical demand. While the prices go up in the short term, the increased production capacity and investments into new technologies will drive them down in the long term.
The point of the article I quoted was that it hasn't worked like that. And logically, you wouldn't expect it to. If you create artificial demand, you'd expect prices to go up. If you stop creating prices will go down. In fact the German government is tailing off support for exactly that reason, because the price of solar panels has gone up too much.
And yet everyone who lives there has adequate healthcare and the same standard of living without massive national debt.
The US has a high debt at the moment it's true. I think it's partly due to Bush's spendthrift policies and partly a structural thing. Most US Federal Debt is owned domestically which makes it seem less threatening, almost like a voluntary tax system. There is a long term risk of Federal debts spiralling out of control admittedly, but that risk is exacerbated by increased government spending. If you want low debts, free market policies are the way to go.
In fact in the UK social security would have bankrupted the government in the long run if entitlements had not been cut.
The US, despite the rhetoric faces the same problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GAO_Slide.png
And unlike the UK, they haven't cut entitlements to make sure the system balances.
In terms of health care, haven't you heard the expression "British Teeth"? I'm English and I grew up in the UK and travelled extensively and I have to say that British teeth from the NHS era are a on average lot worse than the teeth of Americans from the private healthcare era. In fact middle class English people over about 40 have worse teeth than ghetto/trailer park Americans. That's not unexpected either, the point of the NHS was that dentists got paid a (high) salary for taking part, not for actually treating anyone. It wasn't in their interests to "sell" treatment since they didn't charge for it. By contrast in the US dentists could market shiny straight teeth to people, or rather get them to buy them for their kids.
Actually since Thatcher successive UK governments have largely dismantled the NHS. Most dental treatment in the UK is now private for example. Young English people have teeth like Americans.
The German model of subsidising renewables is not without its problems
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10961890
Most of Germany's electricity comes from coal-fired and nuclear plants. But the former are unpopular because of their relatively high greenhouse-gas emissions, and the latter because of the fear of a catastrophic accident. So in 1991 Germany adopted a renewable-energy law, now known as the EEG, which encourages investment by cross-subsidising renewable electricity fed into the grid. The law is popular with those who support the rapid introduction of new clean technology. Stefan Schurig of the World Future Council, a green think-tank in Hamburg, calls it "the best law of its kind worldwide".
The law says electricity produced from renewable sources must be purchased by utilities according to a generous "feed-in tariff" that sets higher-than-market rates and fixes them for 20 years. Roof-mounted photovoltaic systems installed in 2007, for example, can sell power at €0.49 per kilowatt-hour, or about seven times today's wholesale price, until 2027. The fixed rate allows investors to calculate returns and removes uncertainty over financing.
The utilities that buy power at these higher rates pass the extra costs back to their customers in the form of higher electricity bills. This added an average of 1 euro cent per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity last year, increasing the typical household electricity bill by 5%, or €3 a month. For the country as a whole, the cost was €7.7 billion in 2007, up 38% on the year before. Enthusiasts consider that a small price to jump-start a new industry and start decarbonising the power supply.
Clouds on the horizon
But the government is not so sure. It has proposed a revision to the EEG, which calls for a shift away from solar and towards other forms of renewable energy, and offshore wind in particular. As things stand, the feed-in tariff for solar goes down by 5% every year. But new proposals call for a cut of 9.2% next year, and 7-8% thereafter.
The problem is not just the expense of the existing law. Cheerleaders for solar had hoped that the increased demand for panels would help manufacturers reduce unit costs, and thus make solar more competitive in the long run. Instead, the rush into solar has led to a shortage of the high-grade silicon used to make the cells, which has soared in price from $25 per kilogram in 2003 to around $400 today.
Indeed, such is the demand for solar panels in Germany that it has kept prices high globally. This is wonderful for manufacturers, but makes it more expensive to install solar capacity in sunnier parts of the world, where it would generate more electricity. The EEG's generous rates for solar amounted to "picking winners on a grand scale", says Dieter Helm, an expert on energy policy at the University of Oxford. A euro in cross-subsidies spent on wind power, rather than solar, produces more generating capacity and a larger reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically if you subsidise the wrong thing, you can potentially hurt more than you help. Picking the right things to subsidise is non trivial.
Hell if planned economies worked, India and the UK would have grown faster than free market places like the US in the 50's and 60's. Actually, despite being poorer, they grew more slowly until they implemented free market reforms.
Now traditionally greens seem to see economic growth as some kind of problem because it usually leads to more pollution, but in the case of the renewable energy industry, more growth actually means less pollution.
And actually the EEG is a fairly lightweight piece of government intervention, adding only 5% to bills.
To misquote Socrates "True knowledge exists in knowing that the Government knows nothing."
I once worked with an Indian consultancy company. They were working on software for a mobile phone and were using ClearCase. Now ClearCase is expensive, but it does the job. A colleague and I were writing code to test the peripherals on the baseband chips. Now one of the Indian managers said that the project was stalled because the I2S controller didn't support some mode.
Since we had code that tested the I2S controller, we were drafted in to help them. We asked for a config spec. It looked like this
foo.c@\main\1212
bar.c@\main\1254
and so on, for thousands of files. Even worse if you emailed a few different people, you'd get slightly different config specs, but always of this form
Now normally in Clearcase you develop on a branch and then merge to a release branch. So the development config spec will be something like this
element * CHECKEDOUT .../developers_branch/LATEST
element *
element -file * RELEASE_LABEL_1 -mkbranch developers_branch
What this means is take the checked out file if if exists, otherwise look for the one on my branch, otherwise look for the released version
and a release one will be like this. Once you're done developing you merge your branch back and label the result with a new release label. Then the config spec looks like this.
element -file * RELEASED_LABEL_2 -nocheckout
Of course for this to happen you need to have a management structure that makes sure people get things right before they merge them back, and if two teams of people are fighting that things get resolved. Otherwise you end up with a minority report situation where different bits of the team end up working on different baselines.
The worst case of this would be where everyone picked a set of last known good versions that were different. Which is exactly the situation these guys were in.
Now you can see that the spec they sent us showed that something was very wrong.
We managed to get it to build but some things didn't work, actually the things we wanted to check. So we asked them and they said something like "ask Raj, he's go a fix for that". The fix was one file, which he emailed you. You checked the file out and overwrote it with the one in the email.
At this point, it was clear that the I2S settings were totally wrong. We fixed those and managed to punt the whole thing back. Given the chaos the project was in, I didn't really expect it to ever work properly.
It was the most amazing misuse of a version control system I have ever seen. What was odd about it was the individual developers seemed to me to be ok, the problem was the shitty consultancy company was loading them down with work without setting up things like version control properly. Actually I always suspected that the project we saw had been put together in a few hours by some very smart people, who had then billed my client for a shitload of hours which hadn't been worked. Then after that they handed over the whole mess to some much less experienced developers who were basically too timid to realise that they needed to do a drastic set of module tests, merges, system tests, bug fixes and so on until they had a stable baseline to work from, because the alternative would be that the project would crash and burn.
Still I'd never trust one of those big Indian outsourcing companies to do software after that. And as I said, it's a problem of the company, not the developers. With one decent manager, the project I saw would probably have not got to this dire state. Actually with one decent manager they could probably have pulled themselves back from the brink given a month or so.
Its like for version control they use perforce, while MSFT fans are stuck using visual source safe.
Outside of one tiny (and fucked) company I had the misfortune of working at, I've never seen anyone use Visual SourceSafe.
MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.
Oh my God, is that an ASCII RickRoll?
Funnily enough Microsoft planned to implement PDF support in Office. Unfortunately Adobe threatened a lawsuit until they agreed to drop the feature -
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_to_Drop_PDF_Support_in_Office/1149284222
Amid threats of a lawsuit from Adobe, Microsoft acknowledged Friday that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista.
The changes follow a breakdown of talks between the two technology giants after Microsoft announced last year it would include native PDF publishing with the release of Office 2007. The feature has long been a top request from customers, the company said at the time, and other office suites have the capability.
But Adobe was unhappy with the move and a dispute has been brewing for four months, Microsoft's lead counsel Brad Smith said Friday. Although PDF claims to be an open format and is integrated into OpenOffice and Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Adobe apparently sees Office 2007 as a real threat to its business.
Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the feature, which the Redmond company has refused to do. Smith said Adobe threatened to file an antitrust suit in Europe, and his company was preparing for that eventuality. Now, however, Microsoft says it will make the feature available through a downloadable add-on.
So much for open standards I guess.