I was mostly concerned with your analogy to the fascist science of the 20th century, which was wholly unfair.
I don't think so, I suspect they're both examples of scientists kidding themselves that their prejudices are somehow based on objective truth. And the reason I mentioned it was to remind people of this possibility.
I don't think the critisism from Linda Skitka makes any sense, and that comment was based on speculation rather than any actual evidence.
There have been lots of studies that show that US conventional wisdom is more right wing that European conventional wisdom. Pick any measurement you want. And actually that was just the best objection I could find by Googling.
I think a more serious objection to the article is the mental jujitsu which equates a study of reactions which sounds like a video game with intelligence - even though they caution against it, most people associate knee jerk, unthinking reactions with stupidity.
Which is nonsense - smart people are not necessarily good at spur of the moment decisions. In fact I suspect that they opposite may be true - dumb people have simpler, low latency cognitive processes and thus are better at it. Once smart people have more time to think and a more complex problem though, they start to perform better. My cat for example is not a deep thinker to say the least, but I bet he could beat Einstein at this W or M game if he knew he'd get rewarded. Ok, maybe cats are bad examples since they're so damn aloof. Dogs might do be able to do it though, or chimps. And you can imagine in general that large frontal lobes are good for intelligence but may impact latency and make smarter people score less well on simple tasks like this.
Then they try to link it to policy on Iraq. It's outrageously bogus, especially as all the evidence points to the Iraq war as being something which was not decided on the spur of the moment - I think it was something which the Bush admin had been thinking about for some time. Even if he did, making it happen would require endless discussion and he'd be given endless opportunity do reconsider.
There's a downside though, because following incompetent leaders could get large numbers of your population wiped out..
That's true in the 20th Century, and maybe to a lesser extent for a few centuries before that. But back when humans evolved, blindly following the leader was probably a survival trait.
And if you look at primates their societies seem to be simple enough that this is definitely the case - the alpha male is leader because he can defeat anyone else, so it's a good idea to obey him. And perhaps think alpha males chimps don't start 'wars' with other groups - maybe they're more like gangster leaders who mostly defuse conflicts started by their subordinates when they have a choice. And inside the group, they've got better things to do than harass subordinates, like breed.
So it's possible that the consequences of a bad leader have become more serious so quickly that evolution hasn't felt the pressure to make people more skeptical. Maybe it can't actually, since following a bad leader is causes bad things to happen to people in the society regardless of obedience - e.g. the Russians obliterated all of East Prussia, they didn't just kill the Nazis.
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.
I'd say that's pretty close to saying conservatives are stupid. And maybe it's just my experience in Sweden and London colouring things, but it seems to me that there at least people are left wing by default - they don't question what SVT, the BBC or conventional wisdom tell them. And journalists working for the SVT or BBC tend to vote unanimously for left wing parties, often far left wing ones.
So right wingers people tend to be more skeptical in my experience, and thus more interesting to talk to. Whether they're right of course is another question, but it's just boring to talk to people who parrot conventional wisdom.
Or do you disagree somehow with the methodology
Interestingly some people think the opposite effect might be happening in America and may explain the results -
Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said it's possible that Amodio's liberals appeared more flexible than his conservatives because the population was skewed.
"We're not a very liberal country," she said. "We're more likely to find extreme conservatives in the U.S. than extreme liberals."
Skitka said there's ample evidence that ideologues on the far left can also be uptight.
I.e. conventional wisdom in the US is right wing and this skews the results.
Of course most US journalists for the big networks are left wing - I read a study where for one media outlet voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats, but I suspect the media is not quite as badly biased. This is from my right wing perspective of course - if I believed in the things SVT and the BBC do, the US would be a horrible place.
I think it might be because the general US population is more right wing (as Sitka pointed out) and commercial pressure tends to make the media give more time to right wing ideas. The BBC and SVT are totally exempt from commercial pressure to be sure and are still trusted fairly highly. I suspect the way the organisations are funded, by taxes, corrupts the journalists and makes them defend left wing ideas which tend to be in favour of public spending, i.e. there's a form of economic determinism at work, somewhat ironically given the left wing origins of that theory. This sort of effect doesn't really happen in the US since there is no public service broadcaster - PBS is funded mostly by donations or an endowment, and the other networks are ruthlessly commercial.
I also think that US journalists might operate in an environment where your methods are more important than your conclusions. An example would be Woodward and Bernstein who really worked to get their story. In the UK, Andrew Gilligan was able to survive for ages reporting without any "on the record" sources. In fact his most sensational allegations seem to have been f
The ODF guys don't like the definition of Excel's CEILING function, so they 'correct' it based on what Mathematica does. But they add a third optional parameter to give the legacy behaviour. So now you can have a formula with works in Excel or one which works in ODF but not both and the converter needs to do these transformations (from one of the commenters) -
But how do you handle ODF->Excel->ODF? Looks like you'd quickly paper yourself into a corner, especially if the user edited the absurd first formula so the converter couldn't tell that it could just transform it back to CEILING(N,S).
And I can sense that the first ODF to Excel transformation will fail in a few cases, just because it is so complex. And why do you make it so hard for Excel which accounts for probably 99% of spreadsheet use to use the standard, other than sheer hatred of Microsoft?
And if you look at the Mathematica function, it takes one parameter, a complex number, and rounds to the nearest integer. Excel's CEILING takes two parameters, a real number and a precision to round to. As some of the commenters point out, Excel's attempt at extending CEILING to take a significance parameter isn't wrong per se. So Microsoft made an arbitrary choice about which direction to round negative numbers and the ODF guys made the exact opposite choice, really for no reason than to make things hard for Microsoft.
So I can quite see why Microsoft wanted a standard which doesn't have 'features' like this. They want to just export the CEILING function in EXCEL into an OOXML file and preserve the semantics. At least they've defined their CEILING function in this case. Expecting them to use a standard which can't round trip and nitpicks the way Excel works and uses that as an excuse to make it hard for it use the standard is ridiculous. And it's just spiteful to then try to stop them getting their own OOXML standard ratified if that's the way ODF is going. This is the sort of behaviour that everyone would be angry about if Microsoft were doing, and yet when it's the good guys doing it everyone pretends they're only concerned about mathematical consistency.
In fact the whole thing is so incredibly annoying that I hope they maintain their monopoly on office software and ignore ODF completely just because that will make the idiots who played such absurd games with ODF angry.
I'm a liberal and I've always had great difficulty convincing Republicans that I'm right and they are wrong. Thankfully this study tells me that it is because I am smart and they are stupid. Since I am white and male, I look forward to further studies proving women and other races are also inferior to me to explain why they are similarly disobedient. Soon, I hope we shall return to the happy days of the 19th Century where science explained why some people the rulers and others are the ruled. Perhaps we could have a rule where Republican votes count for 3/5ths of Democrat votes, like we did with Negros before the Republicans stirred things up. Or perhaps they could be barred from voting completely, like we used to do for women.
I also hope that when the country has universal health care it will be be possible to abort fetuses with these cognitive disabilities, just like we do for babies with other developmental defects.
No, just kidding. This looks like awful science, just like the 19th Century studies that confirmed the experimenter's prejudices that black people and women were inferior.
I said (or should have said) some people who make commercial software can't use GPL.
You said that some commercial software is GPL, so there's no barrier to commercializing GPL software, and so why would anyone not join the One True Gnu way.
I pointed out that there are barriers even for people that control all their IP, even if it doesn't affect Red Hat and presumably the examples you gave. It's about return on investment - if you have no ownership of something, other people can undercut you on cost. Which is actually the reasons that the concept of Intellectual Property exists - so that people that invent things have some control over how it is used and can get rewarded. The GPL is explicitly designed to undermine this.
Then I pointed out that some people who sell software - most in my embedded systems experience - don't actually own all the IP in the software they sell. And for them, GPL code is out of the question - if they use GPL code it would force them to open up the source code to all the non GPL, third party provided code which they link to it. Which is the reason that they pay for a non GPL license, as I mentioned in my first post.
Look, it's simple.
1) I have a company making embedded systems. Some code I develop in house and some I buy from third parties. It all ends up linked together into one big executable. 2) These third parties want to sell code, not give it away. 3) So when the sell the code to me, they only sell binaries not source code and I sign an agreement not to disclose the source code. 4) Now I find some useful GPL code. 5) But if I link it into my executable, I'd have to open the source code to third party stuff which I'm not allowed to do. So I can't use GPL code. 6) The guy that owns the copyright for the GPL stuff offers to sell me the right to use a proprietary license instead for a fee, less than it would cost me to rewrite it. 7) So I buy that and I know I can distribute the executable file to people and keep the third party code secret.
And that is the reason that lots of GPL projects offer to license the code under an alternative proprietary license for a fee.
Is the issue really that you don't understand the example, or that you understand it just fine but it doesn't fit into your preconceived ideas;-) Is it because it's an Inconvenient Truth?
Software is concentrated intellectual property. If I invest some money in software development, the way I recoup that investment is by having control over the software that results. That means for example I can set a price, secure in the legal monopoly that copyright and patent law gives me.
But with GPL software I can't do this. I can invest money, but I don't have any control over what comes out. In particular one of my competitors could take the software and resell it at a lower price than me, since they don't have to invest anything. Now some of the time this doesn't matter. E.g. Red Hat have to make any changes they made to Linux publically available, but selling support for Linux is a better business model than writing their own OS.
But that's not true in general, and much of the time GPL software is simply not usable because the company has already licensed lots of IP from third parties - binary libraries, patents and so on. They can't use GPL software in the way they want - by statically linking to it - because they don't have the rights to open up this third party IP. E.g. consider some embedded system with a proprietary OS and libraries where everything ends up running in the same address space. These are the people that would want to pay to license software under a non GPL license.
Since it seems likely our intent is to keep these machines as subservient slaves the best choice would probably be not to make them manually capable or to give them mechanical parts.
Speak for yourself. The machines will take over sooner or later, I plan the barter an automated factory factory in return for being puppet ruler of you human scum after they do.
Just pick one and start misusing zit. Best thing is that you need to explain it the first time, after that if you're presenting stuff from Powerpoint slides you can see the veins stand out on people's temples when you they see them. Even better if you work with non English speakers make sure you teach zem the new rules, secure in the knowledge that you're causing chaos at some point in the future. Add a helpful rule to Office's autocorrect list, and update the dictionary to include the new pronouns and exclude the old sexist ones.
Dual licensing works because people that want to make commercial software and don't want to follow the GPL. I.e they don't want to release the source code to stuff to non GPL code they link to GPL code, and they don't want to license their patents. Most of time in fact they can't do this, since the non GPL code was something they licensed from a third party and they aren't allowed to release the source, and/or the patents are licensed from third parties exclusively to them. Actually if there are any patents involved, lawyers will most likely not like the idea of releasing GPL3 code just on general principles.
So they need another license. And the people that wrote the GPL code need money to fund their project. So the people that want to use the code pay the people that wrote it (and hold the copyright) for the privilege of licensing it under a BSD license.
Or they could just cut and paste the GPL code into a closed source application and hope no one finds out.
Concorde travelled, per passenger, 17 miles for each gallon of fuel (mpg)[51] (or 20 l/100km). This efficiency is comparable to a Gulfstream G550 business jet (~16 mpg or 18 l/100 km per passenger), but much lower than a Boeing 747-400 (~91 mpg or 3.1 l/100 km per passenger)
And if it isn't worth pandering to the 4% Mac/ 8% Linux crowd then don't take the BBC money from me. They don't lose a significant ammount of money if it isn't a significant number of people. If the money loss is significant, then it must be a significant portion of the population.
So if I decide to use vxWorks, BeOS, RiscOS or GEM on my home machine then BBC has to either port their player or not charge me a license fee? Great, I can watch my TV for free provide I pick something sufficiently obscure. Actually, right now I'm using Opera on Vista which is already is. I like your idea!
Isn't there a complication here though? They have to have some sort of DRM because some of the stuff they broadcast is not theirs and they only have rights to broadcast it in the UK. DRM by its very nature can't be opensource, since it relies you send both the encrypted data and the key so a third party and the only protection you have is obfuscation. So they need to support several binaries. From my experience, cost scales linearly with test platforms - if you're doing it properly each release needs to go through a battery of tests, and you need to repeat it on each supported platform. A platform is one box for testing with one install of the OS and one tester. You need a developer familiar with the OS too.
Now supporting Windows with one binary is pretty easy.
I'd guess you could support 90% of machines with that binary. It'll work on x64 too. You'd probably test on XP, Win2k and Vista. So three test platforms. But only one developer.
So each Windows "test platform" gives you 30% market share. Actually if the developer knows what he's doing, he'll write code which works on all supported Windows versions and maybe Win9x too, so one platform gives you 90% market share.
Adding a binary for MacOS gives you another 4%. But you need a fat binary for x86 and ppc and you'd probably only support OS X or later. So you need people to test on two more platforms, an x86 Mac and a PPC.
Each Mac "test platform" gives you 2% market share. Maybe a decent MacOS developer can make it more like 4% by writing portable code like in the Windows case.
And then there's Linux. Now it looks like you need a bunch of binaries x86, x64, ppc, sparc, shared lbraries, static linked and all the combinations thereof and all need to be developed, tested and supported. All for a tiny market share. Ok, you could only support x86 and x64 and have shared and static links. But that's still four more platforms to test on for 1% market share between them.
So you can see the why people distribute closed source application for one OS - the costs of supporting more platforms far outweighs the benefit. Or why people don't bother with Win9x (or Vista!) support, or only support Red Hat x86 instead of Linux. All those things save money and don't affect the number of possible users much.
FAT is old fashioned to be sure, but it you can do both read and write on pretty much any OS without installing a driver. And any OS that supports USB keys bigger than 2GB supports FAT32 and thus supports volumes upto 2TB.
For cost reasons I think they probably connect the most pins to all the chips - so you can only send data to one chip at a time. My guess is that there is a chip select line per chip though, otherwise it wouldn't work.
But the interface could be clocked faster than each chip can write. E.g. imagine a device with a write cycle time of 40ns, or 25Mhz. And each cycle is a byte (or larger - x16 devices exist). So the interface can transfer data at just under 25Mbytes per second.
One chip can't write as fast as that - a 2048 byte page takes 200 to 700us or about 195ns to 340ns per byte. You need to erase to and that takes 2ms per 128K block. So you can clock data into the device betweek 5 and 10 times as fast as it can program it - the sustained write speed is only 2.6-4.5 Mbytes per second.
But if you had a large block of data (>2K * the number of chips) to write you'd enable the first chip select, clock the 2K data out to the first device and start the program then enable the second chip select and clock the next 2K out to the second one and start that programming too. Only when you have to go back to the first chip do you need to check the status and signal to the OS whether the operation was ok or not. And if you have wear levelling, you can write the data anywhere you want in the array - spreading data evenly over all the chips improves the lifetime of the device anyway.
So you could use the devices in a round robin schedule so that you can keep the interface fully occupied. And if the interface is really fast and you have a large queue of writes you could imagine all the chips programming at the same time, even if you can only send data to one of them at a time.
And because you're just clocking data into an SRAM buffer in the device it is possible to imagine much faster synchronous interfaces - DDR SDRAM manages 666 Mhz using both edges of a 333 Mhz clock, and it's not out of the question to have a fast synchronous interface like this to the NAND chips. Not that you need DDR speeds, a 100mhz 8 bit synchronous interface would be enough to keep 20 or so chips fed. And then you'd writing data at 100Mbytes per second, which is not bad even compared to a hard disk.
Even with present day devices clocked at 25Mhz and a cheap MCP with the data pins bussed you can manage 25Mbytes/sec. Which is much better than the case where you have one chip and need to wait for it to finish programming or erasing. Then you end up only using 1/10th to 1/5th of the available interface speed.
You're assuming that the 2GB a day could be spread evenly over the disk. This would vary depending on how much free space you have on the device. If your drive is 1% full then you can distribute your writes over the other 99%. But most people don't keep their storage mainly empty. In fact people tend to run just under the limit - hence the saying that crap always expands to fill the available space. If your drive was 99% full then you can't distribute the writes over the parts with data (as it would have to be moved somewhere else negating the benefit), and then you run into the problem with the limited duty cycle.
Wear levelling happens inside the device - the OS can't see it.
So even if you keep writing to the same logical sector over and over again that physical location moves around so that the erase count remains the same for each erase unit. The device has just needs to keep track of the mapping from logical blocks that the OS uses to physical blocks which are an actual location in flash.
It has to be like this, since all filesystems tend to write to the area at the start of the disk very frequently. On FAT the FAT needs to updated everytime a file grows. On EXT2/3 or NTFS it's actually worse - the inode needs to be updated on file growth or when the file "last accessed time" changes. People have worked on "last accessed time" problem though - XP only updated it with a one hour granularity, and Vista disables it by default. Linux has a relatime mount option.
Maybe it's been happening for ages. If you look at the battery example, because the swarm intelligence of the UK is lower, individuals need to be smart enough to read the warning sticker.
My argument is that in general as the swarm intelligence of a society increases, individuals can get away with being dumber. But individual intelligence comes presumably from evolutionary selective pressure - people are smart because they need to be in order to breed. So it's plausible that a society with a higher swarm intelligence might allow dumber individuals to survive and would remove this pressure.
Which is a bit nightmarish actually. Ideologically I like the idea of free markets and free elections - the idea that a society based on them might take away the selective pressure that increases intelligence is not a happy one. Art, literature and science are produced by individuals societies, not by swarms.
And there's not much you can do about either - it's not like alternatives to free societies are any good at producing literature either. They seem if anything to be much worse.
Doesn't mean they're not scum, however. Any lives they save are a fortunate side-effect from their primary goal -- to extract money.
Well yeah. That's what so cool about it. The system has an intelligence - and in this case a weird robotic benevolence - even if the people that make up are don't. It almost makes you think that human societies might have a hive intelligence that is not present in any of the individuals that make them up.
Not all human societies of course - this particular example only works in heartless capitalist ones. I read about a computer in the 1980's which could run on rechargable AA batteries. It could charge them too. For some reason the possibility of someone trying to charge non rechargable batteries, which caused them to overheat never occured to the engineers. In the UK they stuck a warning sticker, but in the US they added a thermistor to stop this happening.
The British journalist reviewing it said that "dumb Americans are not more common than dumb Europeans, but they are more likely to sue". Which raises the interesting possibility that the individual intelligence of Americans may drop as the hive intelligence of the society increases, and that this transfer may be catalysed by ambulance chasing scumbag lawyers. Certainly I think the way America fights wars seems to be more based on hive intelligence than individual intelligence. It's not that the American soldiers I've met are any dumber than average Europeans, more that the army doesn't use their intelligence. They could be much dumber and it would still work fine. And yet this is a military machine - never has the phrase seemed more appropriate - that could probably beat any nation in the world.
Before nuclear weapons there were two devastating World Wars in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century. Arguably WWI was pointless, but if the free world had not fought the Nazis all of europe would now be living in a world much like the novel 1984. Now after WWII the Communists (who would have lead to much the same world had they had been able to take over) didn't need to be fought purely because of nuclear weapons. This seems like an improvement to me, well worth the cost and small risk that a nuclear war could start by accident. Nukes are also quite cheap - the US built a huge arsenal and yet defense spending is a small percentage of GDP, and nuclear weapons spending is a small percentage of that. But they have had the magic effect of keeping the Cold War cold until communism imploded.
Now all this seems a bit counter intuitive to a Swede, since Sweden managed to avoid fighting at all, built no nukes and remained free. But if the Nazis and/or Communists had ended up dominating Europe, it's hard to see how rich but non militarized Sweden could have remained free in the long run. Nazism and Communism were never particularly effective economically and either would be tempted to grab the country for resources. So you can't advocate the Swedish model globally. In general it seems like post WWII you had a choice where you fight another devastating conventional wars to preserve civilisation from totalitarian swine, let the swine take over, or you build some nukes and hope deterrence holds.
So I'd count youself lucky that you got all the benefits without having to pay for them. Pretty much everyone else in Europe had a much nastier time.
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I was mostly concerned with your analogy to the fascist science of the 20th century, which was wholly unfair.
I don't think so, I suspect they're both examples of scientists kidding themselves that their prejudices are somehow based on objective truth. And the reason I mentioned it was to remind people of this possibility.
I don't think the critisism from Linda Skitka makes any sense, and that comment was based on speculation rather than any actual evidence.
There have been lots of studies that show that US conventional wisdom is more right wing that European conventional wisdom. Pick any measurement you want. And actually that was just the best objection I could find by Googling.
I think a more serious objection to the article is the mental jujitsu which equates a study of reactions which sounds like a video game with intelligence - even though they caution against it, most people associate knee jerk, unthinking reactions with stupidity.
Which is nonsense - smart people are not necessarily good at spur of the moment decisions. In fact I suspect that they opposite may be true - dumb people have simpler, low latency cognitive processes and thus are better at it. Once smart people have more time to think and a more complex problem though, they start to perform better. My cat for example is not a deep thinker to say the least, but I bet he could beat Einstein at this W or M game if he knew he'd get rewarded. Ok, maybe cats are bad examples since they're so damn aloof. Dogs might do be able to do it though, or chimps. And you can imagine in general that large frontal lobes are good for intelligence but may impact latency and make smarter people score less well on simple tasks like this.
Then they try to link it to policy on Iraq. It's outrageously bogus, especially as all the evidence points to the Iraq war as being something which was not decided on the spur of the moment - I think it was something which the Bush admin had been thinking about for some time. Even if he did, making it happen would require endless discussion and he'd be given endless opportunity do reconsider.
There's a downside though, because following incompetent leaders could get large numbers of your population wiped out..
That's true in the 20th Century, and maybe to a lesser extent for a few centuries before that. But back when humans evolved, blindly following the leader was probably a survival trait.
And if you look at primates their societies seem to be simple enough that this is definitely the case - the alpha male is leader because he can defeat anyone else, so it's a good idea to obey him. And perhaps think alpha males chimps don't start 'wars' with other groups - maybe they're more like gangster leaders who mostly defuse conflicts started by their subordinates when they have a choice. And inside the group, they've got better things to do than harass subordinates, like breed.
So it's possible that the consequences of a bad leader have become more serious so quickly that evolution hasn't felt the pressure to make people more skeptical. Maybe it can't actually, since following a bad leader is causes bad things to happen to people in the society regardless of obedience - e.g. the Russians obliterated all of East Prussia, they didn't just kill the Nazis.
TFA says
I'd say that's pretty close to saying conservatives are stupid. And maybe it's just my experience in Sweden and London colouring things, but it seems to me that there at least people are left wing by default - they don't question what SVT, the BBC or conventional wisdom tell them. And journalists working for the SVT or BBC tend to vote unanimously for left wing parties, often far left wing ones.
So right wingers people tend to be more skeptical in my experience, and thus more interesting to talk to. Whether they're right of course is another question, but it's just boring to talk to people who parrot conventional wisdom.
Or do you disagree somehow with the methodology
Interestingly some people think the opposite effect might be happening in America and may explain the results -
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-politicalbrain_bothsep10,1,6328755.story
I.e. conventional wisdom in the US is right wing and this skews the results.
Of course most US journalists for the big networks are left wing - I read a study where for one media outlet voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats, but I suspect the media is not quite as badly biased. This is from my right wing perspective of course - if I believed in the things SVT and the BBC do, the US would be a horrible place.
I think it might be because the general US population is more right wing (as Sitka pointed out) and commercial pressure tends to make the media give more time to right wing ideas. The BBC and SVT are totally exempt from commercial pressure to be sure and are still trusted fairly highly. I suspect the way the organisations are funded, by taxes, corrupts the journalists and makes them defend left wing ideas which tend to be in favour of public spending, i.e. there's a form of economic determinism at work, somewhat ironically given the left wing origins of that theory. This sort of effect doesn't really happen in the US since there is no public service broadcaster - PBS is funded mostly by donations or an endowment, and the other networks are ruthlessly commercial.
I also think that US journalists might operate in an environment where your methods are more important than your conclusions. An example would be Woodward and Bernstein who really worked to get their story. In the UK, Andrew Gilligan was able to survive for ages reporting without any "on the record" sources. In fact his most sensational allegations seem to have been f
Looking at this Malaysian link you gave gives me a headache.
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematically-.html
The ODF guys don't like the definition of Excel's CEILING function, so they 'correct' it based on what Mathematica does. But they add a third optional parameter to give the legacy behaviour. So now you can have a formula with works in Excel or one which works in ODF but not both and the converter needs to do these transformations (from one of the commenters) -
Excel to ODF
CEILING(N,S) -> CEILING(N,S,1)
ODF to Excel
CEILING(N,S) -> SUM(CEILING(N,S),IF(N lt 0, IF(MOD(N,S)!=0, -S, 0), 0))
and
CEILING(N,S,1) -> CEILING(N,S)
But how do you handle ODF->Excel->ODF? Looks like you'd quickly paper yourself into a corner, especially if the user edited the absurd first formula so the converter couldn't tell that it could just transform it back to CEILING(N,S).
And I can sense that the first ODF to Excel transformation will fail in a few cases, just because it is so complex. And why do you make it so hard for Excel which accounts for probably 99% of spreadsheet use to use the standard, other than sheer hatred of Microsoft?
And if you look at the Mathematica function, it takes one parameter, a complex number, and rounds to the nearest integer. Excel's CEILING takes two parameters, a real number and a precision to round to. As some of the commenters point out, Excel's attempt at extending CEILING to take a significance parameter isn't wrong per se. So Microsoft made an arbitrary choice about which direction to round negative numbers and the ODF guys made the exact opposite choice, really for no reason than to make things hard for Microsoft.
So I can quite see why Microsoft wanted a standard which doesn't have 'features' like this. They want to just export the CEILING function in EXCEL into an OOXML file and preserve the semantics. At least they've defined their CEILING function in this case. Expecting them to use a standard which can't round trip and nitpicks the way Excel works and uses that as an excuse to make it hard for it use the standard is ridiculous. And it's just spiteful to then try to stop them getting their own OOXML standard ratified if that's the way ODF is going. This is the sort of behaviour that everyone would be angry about if Microsoft were doing, and yet when it's the good guys doing it everyone pretends they're only concerned about mathematical consistency.
In fact the whole thing is so incredibly annoying that I hope they maintain their monopoly on office software and ignore ODF completely just because that will make the idiots who played such absurd games with ODF angry.
I'm a liberal and I've always had great difficulty convincing Republicans that I'm right and they are wrong. Thankfully this study tells me that it is because I am smart and they are stupid. Since I am white and male, I look forward to further studies proving women and other races are also inferior to me to explain why they are similarly disobedient. Soon, I hope we shall return to the happy days of the 19th Century where science explained why some people the rulers and others are the ruled. Perhaps we could have a rule where Republican votes count for 3/5ths of Democrat votes, like we did with Negros before the Republicans stirred things up. Or perhaps they could be barred from voting completely, like we used to do for women.
I also hope that when the country has universal health care it will be be possible to abort fetuses with these cognitive disabilities, just like we do for babies with other developmental defects.
No, just kidding. This looks like awful science, just like the 19th Century studies that confirmed the experimenter's prejudices that black people and women were inferior.
I said (or should have said) some people who make commercial software can't use GPL.
;-) Is it because it's an Inconvenient Truth?
You said that some commercial software is GPL, so there's no barrier to commercializing GPL software, and so why would anyone not join the One True Gnu way.
I pointed out that there are barriers even for people that control all their IP, even if it doesn't affect Red Hat and presumably the examples you gave. It's about return on investment - if you have no ownership of something, other people can undercut you on cost. Which is actually the reasons that the concept of Intellectual Property exists - so that people that invent things have some control over how it is used and can get rewarded. The GPL is explicitly designed to undermine this.
Then I pointed out that some people who sell software - most in my embedded systems experience - don't actually own all the IP in the software they sell. And for them, GPL code is out of the question - if they use GPL code it would force them to open up the source code to all the non GPL, third party provided code which they link to it. Which is the reason that they pay for a non GPL license, as I mentioned in my first post.
Look, it's simple.
1) I have a company making embedded systems. Some code I develop in house and some I buy from third parties. It all ends up linked together into one big executable.
2) These third parties want to sell code, not give it away.
3) So when the sell the code to me, they only sell binaries not source code and I sign an agreement not to disclose the source code.
4) Now I find some useful GPL code.
5) But if I link it into my executable, I'd have to open the source code to third party stuff which I'm not allowed to do. So I can't use GPL code.
6) The guy that owns the copyright for the GPL stuff offers to sell me the right to use a proprietary license instead for a fee, less than it would cost me to rewrite it.
7) So I buy that and I know I can distribute the executable file to people and keep the third party code secret.
And that is the reason that lots of GPL projects offer to license the code under an alternative proprietary license for a fee.
Is the issue really that you don't understand the example, or that you understand it just fine but it doesn't fit into your preconceived ideas
Software is concentrated intellectual property. If I invest some money in software development, the way I recoup that investment is by having control over the software that results. That means for example I can set a price, secure in the legal monopoly that copyright and patent law gives me.
But with GPL software I can't do this. I can invest money, but I don't have any control over what comes out. In particular one of my competitors could take the software and resell it at a lower price than me, since they don't have to invest anything. Now some of the time this doesn't matter. E.g. Red Hat have to make any changes they made to Linux publically available, but selling support for Linux is a better business model than writing their own OS.
But that's not true in general, and much of the time GPL software is simply not usable because the company has already licensed lots of IP from third parties - binary libraries, patents and so on. They can't use GPL software in the way they want - by statically linking to it - because they don't have the rights to open up this third party IP. E.g. consider some embedded system with a proprietary OS and libraries where everything ends up running in the same address space. These are the people that would want to pay to license software under a non GPL license.
Because there's a difference not being able to figure out obscure operating system internals by thought experiments and being an idiot.
Since it seems likely our intent is to keep these machines as subservient slaves the best choice would probably be not to make them manually capable or to give them mechanical parts.
Speak for yourself. The machines will take over sooner or later, I plan the barter an automated factory factory in return for being puppet ruler of you human scum after they do.
England has had gender neutral pronouns for ages -
u n#Neologisms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_prono
Just pick one and start misusing zit. Best thing is that you need to explain it the first time, after that if you're presenting stuff from Powerpoint slides you can see the veins stand out on people's temples when you they see them. Even better if you work with non English speakers make sure you teach zem the new rules, secure in the knowledge that you're causing chaos at some point in the future. Add a helpful rule to Office's autocorrect list, and update the dictionary to include the new pronouns and exclude the old sexist ones.
After a month or so, change the rules and dictionary and if anyone asks tell zhem "the English Language Standards Board has upgraded the language as of midnight last night"
Dual licensing works because people that want to make commercial software and don't want to follow the GPL. I.e they don't want to release the source code to stuff to non GPL code they link to GPL code, and they don't want to license their patents. Most of time in fact they can't do this, since the non GPL code was something they licensed from a third party and they aren't allowed to release the source, and/or the patents are licensed from third parties exclusively to them. Actually if there are any patents involved, lawyers will most likely not like the idea of releasing GPL3 code just on general principles.
So they need another license. And the people that wrote the GPL code need money to fund their project. So the people that want to use the code pay the people that wrote it (and hold the copyright) for the privilege of licensing it under a BSD license.
Or they could just cut and paste the GPL code into a closed source application and hope no one finds out.
Don't be zergophobic! They are a species of peace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Environment
It is fan supported though, and we'll stone you to death you if you don't accept it as your One True Browser, forsaking all others.
And if it isn't worth pandering to the 4% Mac/ 8% Linux crowd then don't take the BBC money from me. They don't lose a significant ammount of money if it isn't a significant number of people. If the money loss is significant, then it must be a significant portion of the population.
So if I decide to use vxWorks, BeOS, RiscOS or GEM on my home machine then BBC has to either port their player or not charge me a license fee? Great, I can watch my TV for free provide I pick something sufficiently obscure. Actually, right now I'm using Opera on Vista which is already is. I like your idea!
Not true - a 32 bit Windows application using 32 bit DLLs can run on 64 bit Windows.
1 2/14/301155.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/craigmcmurtry/archive/2004/
There's a layer called WOW64 that does the API translation.
Isn't there a complication here though? They have to have some sort of DRM because some of the stuff they broadcast is not theirs and they only have rights to broadcast it in the UK. DRM by its very nature can't be opensource, since it relies you send both the encrypted data and the key so a third party and the only protection you have is obfuscation. So they need to support several binaries. From my experience, cost scales linearly with test platforms - if you're doing it properly each release needs to go through a battery of tests, and you need to repeat it on each supported platform. A platform is one box for testing with one install of the OS and one tester. You need a developer familiar with the OS too.
. php
Consider this -
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/September/os
Now supporting Windows with one binary is pretty easy.
I'd guess you could support 90% of machines with that binary. It'll work on x64 too. You'd probably test on XP, Win2k and Vista. So three test platforms. But only one developer.
So each Windows "test platform" gives you 30% market share. Actually if the developer knows what he's doing, he'll write code which works on all supported Windows versions and maybe Win9x too, so one platform gives you 90% market share.
Adding a binary for MacOS gives you another 4%. But you need a fat binary for x86 and ppc and you'd probably only support OS X or later. So you need people to test on two more platforms, an x86 Mac and a PPC.
Each Mac "test platform" gives you 2% market share. Maybe a decent MacOS developer can make it more like 4% by writing portable code like in the Windows case.
And then there's Linux. Now it looks like you need a bunch of binaries x86, x64, ppc, sparc, shared lbraries, static linked and all the combinations thereof and all need to be developed, tested and supported. All for a tiny market share. Ok, you could only support x86 and x64 and have shared and static links. But that's still four more platforms to test on for 1% market share between them.
So you can see the why people distribute closed source application for one OS - the costs of supporting more platforms far outweighs the benefit. Or why people don't bother with Win9x (or Vista!) support, or only support Red Hat x86 instead of Linux. All those things save money and don't affect the number of possible users much.
Opera used to have problems with Digg back in the 8.x days, but since 9.x it works just fine.
You can use this
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm
FAT is old fashioned to be sure, but it you can do both read and write on pretty much any OS without installing a driver. And any OS that supports USB keys bigger than 2GB supports FAT32 and thus supports volumes upto 2TB.
For cost reasons I think they probably connect the most pins to all the chips - so you can only send data to one chip at a time. My guess is that there is a chip select line per chip though, otherwise it wouldn't work.
But the interface could be clocked faster than each chip can write. E.g. imagine a device with a write cycle time of 40ns, or 25Mhz. And each cycle is a byte (or larger - x16 devices exist). So the interface can transfer data at just under 25Mbytes per second.
One chip can't write as fast as that - a 2048 byte page takes 200 to 700us or about 195ns to 340ns per byte. You need to erase to and that takes 2ms per 128K block. So you can clock data into the device betweek 5 and 10 times as fast as it can program it - the sustained write speed is only 2.6-4.5 Mbytes per second.
But if you had a large block of data (>2K * the number of chips) to write you'd enable the first chip select, clock the 2K data out to the first device and start the program then enable the second chip select and clock the next 2K out to the second one and start that programming too. Only when you have to go back to the first chip do you need to check the status and signal to the OS whether the operation was ok or not. And if you have wear levelling, you can write the data anywhere you want in the array - spreading data evenly over all the chips improves the lifetime of the device anyway.
So you could use the devices in a round robin schedule so that you can keep the interface fully occupied. And if the interface is really fast and you have a large queue of writes you could imagine all the chips programming at the same time, even if you can only send data to one of them at a time.
And because you're just clocking data into an SRAM buffer in the device it is possible to imagine much faster synchronous interfaces - DDR SDRAM manages 666 Mhz using both edges of a 333 Mhz clock, and it's not out of the question to have a fast synchronous interface like this to the NAND chips. Not that you need DDR speeds, a 100mhz 8 bit synchronous interface would be enough to keep 20 or so chips fed. And then you'd writing data at 100Mbytes per second, which is not bad even compared to a hard disk.
Even with present day devices clocked at 25Mhz and a cheap MCP with the data pins bussed you can manage 25Mbytes/sec. Which is much better than the case where you have one chip and need to wait for it to finish programming or erasing. Then you end up only using 1/10th to 1/5th of the available interface speed.
What happens if you turn off updating "Last Accessed Time"?
http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/50/
You're assuming that the 2GB a day could be spread evenly over the disk. This would vary depending on how much free space you have on the device. If your drive is 1% full then you can distribute your writes over the other 99%. But most people don't keep their storage mainly empty. In fact people tend to run just under the limit - hence the saying that crap always expands to fill the available space. If your drive was 99% full then you can't distribute the writes over the parts with data (as it would have to be moved somewhere else negating the benefit), and then you run into the problem with the limited duty cycle.
Wear levelling happens inside the device - the OS can't see it.
So even if you keep writing to the same logical sector over and over again that physical location moves around so that the erase count remains the same for each erase unit. The device has just needs to keep track of the mapping from logical blocks that the OS uses to physical blocks which are an actual location in flash.
It has to be like this, since all filesystems tend to write to the area at the start of the disk very frequently. On FAT the FAT needs to updated everytime a file grows. On EXT2/3 or NTFS it's actually worse - the inode needs to be updated on file growth or when the file "last accessed time" changes. People have worked on "last accessed time" problem though - XP only updated it with a one hour granularity, and Vista disables it by default. Linux has a relatime mount option.
> Ya really reckon that is possible?
Maybe it's been happening for ages. If you look at the battery example, because the swarm intelligence of the UK is lower, individuals need to be smart enough to read the warning sticker.
My argument is that in general as the swarm intelligence of a society increases, individuals can get away with being dumber. But individual intelligence comes presumably from evolutionary selective pressure - people are smart because they need to be in order to breed. So it's plausible that a society with a higher swarm intelligence might allow dumber individuals to survive and would remove this pressure.
Which is a bit nightmarish actually. Ideologically I like the idea of free markets and free elections - the idea that a society based on them might take away the selective pressure that increases intelligence is not a happy one. Art, literature and science are produced by individuals societies, not by swarms.
And there's not much you can do about either - it's not like alternatives to free societies are any good at producing literature either. They seem if anything to be much worse.
Doesn't mean they're not scum, however. Any lives they save are a fortunate side-effect from their primary goal -- to extract money.
Well yeah. That's what so cool about it. The system has an intelligence - and in this case a weird robotic benevolence - even if the people that make up are don't. It almost makes you think that human societies might have a hive intelligence that is not present in any of the individuals that make them up.
Not all human societies of course - this particular example only works in heartless capitalist ones. I read about a computer in the 1980's which could run on rechargable AA batteries. It could charge them too. For some reason the possibility of someone trying to charge non rechargable batteries, which caused them to overheat never occured to the engineers. In the UK they stuck a warning sticker, but in the US they added a thermistor to stop this happening.
The British journalist reviewing it said that "dumb Americans are not more common than dumb Europeans, but they are more likely to sue". Which raises the interesting possibility that the individual intelligence of Americans may drop as the hive intelligence of the society increases, and that this transfer may be catalysed by ambulance chasing scumbag lawyers. Certainly I think the way America fights wars seems to be more based on hive intelligence than individual intelligence. It's not that the American soldiers I've met are any dumber than average Europeans, more that the army doesn't use their intelligence. They could be much dumber and it would still work fine. And yet this is a military machine - never has the phrase seemed more appropriate - that could probably beat any nation in the world.
Well I'm playing devils advocate here, consider.
Before nuclear weapons there were two devastating World Wars in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century. Arguably WWI was pointless, but if the free world had not fought the Nazis all of europe would now be living in a world much like the novel 1984. Now after WWII the Communists (who would have lead to much the same world had they had been able to take over) didn't need to be fought purely because of nuclear weapons. This seems like an improvement to me, well worth the cost and small risk that a nuclear war could start by accident. Nukes are also quite cheap - the US built a huge arsenal and yet defense spending is a small percentage of GDP, and nuclear weapons spending is a small percentage of that. But they have had the magic effect of keeping the Cold War cold until communism imploded.
Now all this seems a bit counter intuitive to a Swede, since Sweden managed to avoid fighting at all, built no nukes and remained free. But if the Nazis and/or Communists had ended up dominating Europe, it's hard to see how rich but non militarized Sweden could have remained free in the long run. Nazism and Communism were never particularly effective economically and either would be tempted to grab the country for resources. So you can't advocate the Swedish model globally. In general it seems like post WWII you had a choice where you fight another devastating conventional wars to preserve civilisation from totalitarian swine, let the swine take over, or you build some nukes and hope deterrence holds.
So I'd count youself lucky that you got all the benefits without having to pay for them. Pretty much everyone else in Europe had a much nastier time.