What happened in 1989 at Tiananmen Square will always be part of our historical record, but the effect fades over time. Telling people that "almost 20 years ago, your government did something terrible" doesn't have nearly enough impact on people. Perhaps if there was a new massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the news could spread like wildfire through China over the Internet it could bring about change, as in this is happening NOW and we have to stop it. What happened, happened but as much as I hate to admit it, they got away wtih it.
It's too early to tell. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia there were failed attempts at democratic revolution in 1956 and 1968. It took until 1989 for the system to fall, which was 33 or 21 years later. If China takes as long as Hungary, it will be 2022 when the CCP is forced to change.
And I had friends in Hungary who said that pretty much everyone knew what the government did in 1956 was wrong, even if it was a bad idea to discuss it. Someone actually told me that around 1989, the history teacher actually cancelled the class after telling them that the lesson plan he was about to teach was all lies, and there was no point teaching history until they had new books and a new curriculum.
Now China is a admittedly a different case since the CCP is homegrown tyranny whereas Hungarians and Czechs were only communist because of Russian occupation and the system only fell because the USSR imploded, but it shows that people have very long memories about things like this. Hell in Asia, people are still arguing over things that happened hundreds of years ago. And the fact that the government needs to censor so much shows that people haven't forgotten.
I just think it's ironic. I don't much like people like him in the West because they seem shallow, self obsessed and self important. But I really hate the Chinese Communist Party and it seems that people like him will eventually grind it down, even though the CCP seems hell bent on producing lots of them for economic reasons.
Mind you, my favourite post 1949 Chinese politician, Zhao Ziyang was criticised for being a yuppie too. It's almost as if the CCP was right to fear "peaceful evolution" and "bourgeous democracy". But the weird thing is that the consensus is that prosperity has made the CCP more secure in the short term, so I guess they're in some kind of trap where either path leads to doom.
I used to think that would happen when Hong Kong went back actually - that if they allowed it to stay relatively free the freedom would spread and destroy them, but if they clamped down the money would leave and then they would be ruined by popular discontent. But HK is a special case like the treaty ports in imperial times. The Emperors managed to keep foreign influences confined to them before and the CCP could do the same. But they can't do that inside China as this story seems to tell you.
Actually, come to think of it the Chinese Emperors didn't quite manage to keep foreign influences confined, since the Empire eventual fell. Unfortunately the evil CCP and KMT ended up replacing it, but with a bit of luck the CCP will be replaced by something more liberal when it goes. I suppose that practically that's up to the Chinese anyway, the best the West could do is to provide resources to nascent political parties that seem to be committed to democracy like it did at the end of the cold war. Anything more direct is likely to lead to WWIII.
But the idea that you can achieve this sort of change by giving Hong Kong and Macau back has a certain twisted appeal to it, given that the CCP was obessed with regaining territory lost to unequal treaties. It would mean that it was good for China to be reunified as they thought, just not necessarily for them personally.
It would be nice if that were automatically true. But historically there have been lots of examples of societies that have made no progress toward democracy for thousands of years including China pre revolution. But unlike the Middle East, there's lots of evidence that Chinese people in the 21st century are ready for democracy. E.g. look at Taiwan. Even Singapore seems to me to be likely to turn into a real democracy given time and a lack of strong leaders. Same with Hong Kong.
And in Gorbachev's memoirs he quoted Zhao Ziyang as saying that there should be free elections for the head of the Chinese Communist Party in the short term, and a multiparty system in the long term. Given that he was General Secretary at the time, that's breathtaking. But if you look at Chinese history, lots of people have tried to introduce democracy and most of them ended up either imprisoned, or under house arrest or executed. Incidentally most reactionary movements in China have been strongly nationalist too and it is possible that they will lash out at America, Japan or Taiwan to distract the Chinese people's attention away from their loss of freedom.
So I'd say that it is likely that China will democratise, and there are certainly signs that it is happening. But it's also likely that reactionary politicians will attempt to roll back the process and it's in everyone's interests that the US tries to stop them.
Free societies shouldn't fall for the telelogical fallacy that history has a direction, or be so arrogant as to assume that all societies will end up being like them automagically. Lots of non free societies would still exist if they had been able to isolate themselves from the outside world and achieve a measure of self sufficiency, and China is big enough to do just that.
I don't know. Lots of people have pointed out that the cost of fab plants has been increasing exponentially. Now for Intel that's not good, but since it has most the CPU market, and historically all of the high end CPU market where the margins are it's not too bad. Whereas AMD has tended to do quite well at the low end where the margins aren't. I realise that during P4 vs Athlon AMD manages to improve a bit, but that was only for a short time. And it only happened because Intel got everything about Netburst wrong and AMD got everything about Athlon and Hammer right. That just about let them compensate their fab plant disadvantage. All the evidence is that this scared the hell out of Intel and they switched responsibility for high end chip design to the Israeli team that developed Core. But AMD can't rely on that happening all the time.
So on average Intel has a greater percentage of the cash and can plow it back into fabs to produce high end chips and sell them at an outrageous markup. AMD is reduced to making entry level stuff on its outdated fabs, and Intel can dump products in that market, subsidized by its high end business to keep AMD profits low. E.g. there have been numerous times where the Celeron version of a new Intel chip is actually identical to the Pentium version, just sold at a much lower price.
Now if going fabless lets AMD buy time at the high end fabs it could work. But as far as I can tell most fabs that fabless companies use are actually a couple of generations behind Intel so it will make things worse. Mind you the AMD/ATI merger makes me think that maybe AMD are not interested in the high end market.
It seems like a CPU/GPU hybrid is much more suited to an ultra cheap laptop for example, than a kick ass gaming rig. And you could probably make such a beast even on an old fab plant, since the performance of a chip would likely be rather low. I imagine it as being a bit like the CPU in the OLPC actually, but souped up a bit so it can run Vista Aero. But it would suck for games and CPU intensive stuff. Probably most of the people in the world that want a laptop would be happy with it performance wise though, and it might be able to beat Intel mobile chipsets on cost and power.
Actually if you look at Via systems on a chip, you get the idea. It's essentially a system on a chip with a slightly out of date CPU core + graphics fabbed at TSMC.
If that's what they're trying to do cutting costs by going fabless makes sense. But if they want to keep competing with Core 2 Quad and the like, it doesn't. But then again, I don't see how they can keep doing that given the economics.
I hope I'm wrong by the way. But unfortunately I don't think I am.
Allowing all contributors to keep their copyrights creates exponential complexity.
Yeah, I guess it's like the Soviet Union in the 1930's. Keeping private ownership caused problems under the NEP (GPLV2) , so the Party collectivised everything under the Five Year Plan (GPLV3-5). This was because Kulaks (the Soviet version of Tivo Inc) were hoarding rather than sharing. Clearly the Kulaks could not be trusted, all resources had to be owned by the Party under the infallible Comrade Stalin (Richard Stallman).
Once the policy of collectivisation had been completed it had a dramatic effect on agriculture in places like the Ukraine, that much is clear. But in the long run collective ownership proved to be a disappointment economically.
If everyone on/. started calling the RIAA a Terrorist Organization whenever the RIAA was brought up in their presence, even THAT would probably push it into mainstream parlance eventually.
Bwahaha. So by sitting around making absurdly hyperbolic comparisons on slashdot ("The RIAA have censored downloads from TorrentSpy? Well you know someone else who believed in censorship? Hitler!") and getting modded "+5 Sophie Scholl" by people that agree with you, you're somehow reclaiming the English language from The Man? Damn, and I thought I was wasting my time here.
I believe Edward's health care plan calls for mandatory insurance, admittedly after a load of other changes. One of them is to increase productivity by barratry. In stage 1 teams of highly skilled lawyers will chase after ambulances and sue the crew in the ones they catch for negligence, since they were clearly endangering their patients lives by driving too slowly. The ambulance crews will thus drive faster to avoid crippling damages and be more productive. In stage 2, lawyers will chase the more highly paid doctors around hospitals to prevent them from slacking and in the hope that they see them make a mistake.
I am trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a fucking thing (that's what IBM is, a thing) suffering by any definition of the word which is comparable. This is just sad on so many levels.
IBM is just a name for a bunch of shareholders pooling their resources, e.g. investment from pension plans and the like. Since they've effectively lost millions of dollars, you can bet they suffered. And legally, IBM is a person.
In fact discrimination against Corporate Americans like IBM, Microsoft and Starbucks now reminds me of discrimination against African Americans pre civil rights. The rhetoric is remarkably similar. I'm sure I could find quotes from the KKK and various Southern bigots calling African Americans 'fucking things' too. And just like African Americans they are denied the right to vote or hold public office but are still forced to pay taxes. They are even frequently attacked by anti globalisation organisations when they campaign for their civil rights, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the KKK's vicious war against voter registration.
If you assign your copyright to them, are they under some Power of Attorney like duty to act in your best interests? If you want to switch to a BSD license, are they allowed to say no?
Your bringing up the irrelevant topic of racist oppression seems spurious.
Lighten up Francis. This is Slashdot, not the Oxford Union Debating Society. The difference is like that between kicking a rabid squirrel to death in back alley after a miserable, inebriated night and a Queensbury rules boxing match.
As for the GPLV3? tough - suck it up. GPL by its nature was never intended to be worked around or filled with loopholes. The spirit of it is clear - no profit, no stealing, no typical corporate BS with the code.
Since when do legal documents have a 'spirit'? People agree to them because they don't have any clauses which are unacceptable. You can't just release a new version and allow the users to choose it regardless of the opinions of the people that wrote the code. Or vice versa actually. There are two parties here, and contracts are about binding agreements between them, not some arrogant third party imposing restrictions on one side.
Or consider this analogy. US Constitiution Version 2 is announced, and it offers the police more rights over how they treat terror suspects. Constitution Version 1 has a seldom noticed clause about how the police can accept that version or a later one at their discretion. People start to complain but the politicians that released it point out that terrorism 'goes against the spirit of Consitution version 1, V2 is just plugging a few loopholes'.
The case I worry about is where I contribute code to a GPL2 or later project. Then later on some users opts to license it under GPL3 or GPL4. This gives him extra rights, for example to patent licenses and so on. But the patents he gets a right to license are ones my company has an exclusive license to following some patent lawsuit. I.e. we won't get sued for infringing them, but we can't license them to third parties.
Or where I own a company that bases a project on non GPL code. Some developer comes along and cut'n'pastes GPL code into it, enough to be non fair use. Under the GPL I'm supposed to release the source code to the whole lot, but I don't have access to the non GPL code. But I never wanted the GPL code in the first place - I just employed some idle zealot who plagiarised it rather than writing it himself.
In general there are two parts of the GPL that I think I are poisonous to businesses and designed to be so. The first is the idea that if you use GPL code in a project, all the non GPL code statically linked to it becomes GPLd. The second is that future versions of the GPL may attempt to transfer rights from the copyright owner to users of the software which the copyright owner doesn't own.
I actually think if Stallman had actually worked in a real job rather than staying in pseudo academia for his whole life he'd understand this stuff a bit better. As it is he's basically the world's oldest student still hectoring people about things that he's managed to remain totally ignorant of. It's sad really.
Fanboy seems to be the calling card of someone with passion behind a product or company. Take away the tech and IT and gizmos and they're just fans. As in sports fans.
Hardcore fans have their team. THEIR team. Armchair coaching while watching the game, collecting memorabilia, indoctorinating others with how awesome his team is and, if they're doing less than awesome, it's because of external influences and not lack of awesomeness.
Well yeah, but aren't these sorts of people idiots? I remember reading Byte magazine and liking the interplay of the industry - seeing how one side could invent something revolutionary, and the other side could respond to it by tweaking what they had because they couldn't afford a revolutionary change. Or how Intel and Amd would both arrive with the best processor they could do each generation but inevitably one would win. And the problem with fanboys is that they fixate on one side and buy their products even when they are temporarily bad. But that actually messes up the process - if you care about technology you should buy the best performing alternative in each generation because losing money is is a powerful incentive to improve.
You bring up a good point with case of the "inverse fanboy" who feverishly, persistently, and often irrationally criticizes or insults a particular company or product.
Or country;-) The word is bigot. We don't need any neologism for it.
It's funny that the author clearly has no idea on Apple at all. In fact the Apple audience are known to be excessively vicious to the Apple company, suing it for the slightest of issues. E.g. Right now apple is getting sued because some users believe the pixels on their displays "sparkle" a little bit.
Farm animals tend to bleat a bit when the farmer gives them less food or increases the slaughter rate. But it's still easier to be a farmer than hunt in the wild.
Now, here's a thought. I realize you have to stop typing for a second to think it, but could it be, maybe, that Moore's problem is with the healthcare of the 9/11 first responders? You know, what he could be complaining about isn't that healthcare given to suspected terrorists is too much, it might be that the healthcare given to genuine heroes is too little?
Actually, I don't really like the way the US healthcare system works anymore than he does. The link I posted earlier shows that the US spends a fortune per capita and yet there are loads of examples of people that get terrible coverage. But you can't use the 'Gitmo healthcare model' to solve it, and the comparison shows he's more interested in being a smartarse than discussing how to fix it.
It's also highly disingenous to blame market forces for the failure of the US system, given that the UK one is almost as bad and is entirely devoid of market forces.
Way to miss the point. And make generalizations to back up your claims while providing no proof. You partly hinge your argument on the cost being negligible.
I actually base it on the fact that providing health care to detainees seems like the right thing to do. Given that the sort of people who like Michael Moore films would (like me) be angry if the US didn't provide healthcare it is hypocrtical to complain when it does. Cost is a secondary issue.
Care to show where you found the financial data for Gitmo?
In terms of cost, look at it this way. The base needs to provide health care to the US personnel. There's a marginal cost to providing care to the detainees too, but since they are kept in very controlled conditions this is probably not high per capita compared to the US personnel. It's not like they can injure themselves or get medical problems from a bad diet, because the military control everything they do. There are also a rather small number of detainees (200-500 compared to 9500 US personnel). And foreign military bases are expensive in general and Gitmo is probably more expensive than average since the Cuban government won't cooperate.
Even if it's not negligable, the DOD can just request more money to cover it. DOD resources are practically unlimited anyway.
And the cost of providing healthcare to American citizens is probably negligible anyway if you look at it as a percentage of the vast cost of running a nation.
The costs of providing health care to Americans is nowhere near negligable. In fact the US spends more on health care per capita than anywhere else
There are also 300 million Americans compared to 200-500 gitmo detainees. So the comparison between the cost of providing healthcare to Americans vs Gitmo detainees is absurd. And I'm sure Michael Moore knows this, even if his idiot fans can't accept that he's pulled some slight of hand to make the two situations seem remotely comparable.
Yes, there would be complaints about a lack of healthcare for detainees. That strawman doesn't change the fact that prisoners of war, citizens of foreign nations, have access to better healthcare than citizens of the U.S. who work everyday and struggle to stay alive.
I don't think you know what a strawman is. Please look it up on wikipedia. I'm sure that rights for gitmo detainees are determined at least partly with what the US can get away with politically. And one of the downsides about freedom is that the government is no longer obligated to give you free healthcare, at least in the US model. If you really prefer gitmo to "working every day and struggling to stay alive" then resign your citizenship (if you are American, otherwise skip this step), head to Iraq and join the people Moore called freedom fighters. Get captured by US forces and I'm sure you can sample the delights of free healthcare at Gitmo.
Maybe God is a very powerful but non enlightened entity? I never get the assumption that very powerful entities are necessarily good. For example, God could be so powerful that he's as unconcerned about our wellbeing as we are of the wellbeing of bacteria.
Firstly, that would be more plausible if Castro had attempted to establish a free society but hardened it only after the US had backed a violent counter revolution. E.g. you could make an argument for this in Nicaragua. But in Cuba, Castro started to behave like a dictator as soon as he took over - if you read the Wiki link I posted the regime had become Stalinist in months or even weeks after the revolution. The Bay of Pigs was a response to this, not its cause.
Secondly, how would you feel about Bush using the excuse of violent terrorism to ban the Democratic party and murder its leaders and opposition journalists and then rig the electoral system so he could stay in power for the next 47 years until ill health forced him to hand over to his brother? If it happened, how would you react to this post just as he was doing so -
Gee, could Bush have been forced to clamp down on the American political, financial, and other domestic structures due to the constant attempts to subvert pro-Christian interests and install pro-Terrorist leaders and media to help the Arabs establish a defacto Islamic empire? Just like Bush learned from previous meddlings/overthrows of leaders in other countries in the West.
Nah, it was just because he was a bad man who turned into a fascist. Bad fascist, bad!
Do you see how stupid your post is now? Setting up a dictatorship is evil. Other county's foreign policy is no excuse for the suffering you inflict on your own people.
There was an revolution which removed the old dictator and looked like it would turn Cuba into a free country - orginally Castro promised free elections. But it turned into a communist one once they started summary executions of opposition leaders, censorship of the press, and installing Fidel as a new dictator. Incidentally, the people who disagreed with this ended up being the Cuban exile community which campaigns to keep the embargo in place until the regime goes.
Actually if you watched the movie, no wait if you even watched the promo's you would know he didn't go to Cuba to show how great Castro medical centers were. He went there as he heard that suspected terrorists got free and better health care then most Americans and tried to get to Gitmo to get health care
What does that mean though? If the US government didn't give free and good healthcare to people detained indefinitely at gitmo, the public would complain. Quite rightly in my opinion. Part of the vast death rate of Russian soldiers captured by the Germans (and vice versa) in WWII was caused by denying them healthcare. And the cost of providing healthcare to detainees is probably negligable anyway if you look at it as a percentage of the vast cost of keeping gitmo open.
Like everything else he does it's stunt designed to show the irony of the situation. But it only does that until you start to think about what would happen if things were the reverse of what they are. And then it doesn't seem so ironic anymore.
There should be some sort of ultra long term intellectual property device that allows for the innovation to pay for the research. E.g. imagine if Intel and co ended up licensing the patents or whatever which the universities or governments got on the original research that made micro chips possible. The problem is that there's an extremely long time between the science (Quantum mechanics at the turn of the century) and the engineering (transistors in the 1950's and microchips in the 1960s and 1970's)
Ok, it can't be retroactive but I can imagine that if you had something like this it would pull private money in to fund accelerators, researchers and so on.
I used to regularly use winamp to play music. The problem is that once you start dealing with a 40+gig repository it quickly becomes obvious that winamp is completely incapable of coping.
make a batch file with dir *.mp3/s/b > playlist.m3u
Add playlist.m3u to your Winamp bookmark list. Select "Read Titles on Play" in Options->Preferences->Options. Ghetto, but it works fine for ~60GBs of MP3s. Plus if you copy more mp3s into the collection you can just rerun the batch file and they appear in Winamp. Works for UNC paths (\\Server\share\path\file.mp3) too. You can use Jtitle to jump to title.
The problem with iTunes and the like is that the people who own the music don't want the software to let you import gigabytes of music into your collection as easily as this, and they have a lot more say in how the software works than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened in 1989 at Tiananmen Square will always be part of our historical record, but the effect fades over time. Telling people that "almost 20 years ago, your government did something terrible" doesn't have nearly enough impact on people. Perhaps if there was a new massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the news could spread like wildfire through China over the Internet it could bring about change, as in this is happening NOW and we have to stop it. What happened, happened but as much as I hate to admit it, they got away wtih it.
It's too early to tell. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia there were failed attempts at democratic revolution in 1956 and 1968. It took until 1989 for the system to fall, which was 33 or 21 years later. If China takes as long as Hungary, it will be 2022 when the CCP is forced to change.
And I had friends in Hungary who said that pretty much everyone knew what the government did in 1956 was wrong, even if it was a bad idea to discuss it. Someone actually told me that around 1989, the history teacher actually cancelled the class after telling them that the lesson plan he was about to teach was all lies, and there was no point teaching history until they had new books and a new curriculum.
Now China is a admittedly a different case since the CCP is homegrown tyranny whereas Hungarians and Czechs were only communist because of Russian occupation and the system only fell because the USSR imploded, but it shows that people have very long memories about things like this. Hell in Asia, people are still arguing over things that happened hundreds of years ago. And the fact that the government needs to censor so much shows that people haven't forgotten.
I just think it's ironic. I don't much like people like him in the West because they seem shallow, self obsessed and self important. But I really hate the Chinese Communist Party and it seems that people like him will eventually grind it down, even though the CCP seems hell bent on producing lots of them for economic reasons.
Mind you, my favourite post 1949 Chinese politician, Zhao Ziyang was criticised for being a yuppie too. It's almost as if the CCP was right to fear "peaceful evolution" and "bourgeous democracy". But the weird thing is that the consensus is that prosperity has made the CCP more secure in the short term, so I guess they're in some kind of trap where either path leads to doom.
I used to think that would happen when Hong Kong went back actually - that if they allowed it to stay relatively free the freedom would spread and destroy them, but if they clamped down the money would leave and then they would be ruined by popular discontent. But HK is a special case like the treaty ports in imperial times. The Emperors managed to keep foreign influences confined to them before and the CCP could do the same. But they can't do that inside China as this story seems to tell you.
Actually, come to think of it the Chinese Emperors didn't quite manage to keep foreign influences confined, since the Empire eventual fell. Unfortunately the evil CCP and KMT ended up replacing it, but with a bit of luck the CCP will be replaced by something more liberal when it goes. I suppose that practically that's up to the Chinese anyway, the best the West could do is to provide resources to nascent political parties that seem to be committed to democracy like it did at the end of the cold war. Anything more direct is likely to lead to WWIII.
But the idea that you can achieve this sort of change by giving Hong Kong and Macau back has a certain twisted appeal to it, given that the CCP was obessed with regaining territory lost to unequal treaties. It would mean that it was good for China to be reunified as they thought, just not necessarily for them personally.
It would be nice if that were automatically true. But historically there have been lots of examples of societies that have made no progress toward democracy for thousands of years including China pre revolution. But unlike the Middle East, there's lots of evidence that Chinese people in the 21st century are ready for democracy. E.g. look at Taiwan. Even Singapore seems to me to be likely to turn into a real democracy given time and a lack of strong leaders. Same with Hong Kong.
And in Gorbachev's memoirs he quoted Zhao Ziyang as saying that there should be free elections for the head of the Chinese Communist Party in the short term, and a multiparty system in the long term. Given that he was General Secretary at the time, that's breathtaking. But if you look at Chinese history, lots of people have tried to introduce democracy and most of them ended up either imprisoned, or under house arrest or executed. Incidentally most reactionary movements in China have been strongly nationalist too and it is possible that they will lash out at America, Japan or Taiwan to distract the Chinese people's attention away from their loss of freedom.
So I'd say that it is likely that China will democratise, and there are certainly signs that it is happening. But it's also likely that reactionary politicians will attempt to roll back the process and it's in everyone's interests that the US tries to stop them.
Free societies shouldn't fall for the telelogical fallacy that history has a direction, or be so arrogant as to assume that all societies will end up being like them automagically. Lots of non free societies would still exist if they had been able to isolate themselves from the outside world and achieve a measure of self sufficiency, and China is big enough to do just that.
To the sound of thunderous whining from a bunch of Youtube/Flickr/blogosphere addicted yuppies.
Off to Digg articles about Zhao Ziyang.
I don't know. Lots of people have pointed out that the cost of fab plants has been increasing exponentially. Now for Intel that's not good, but since it has most the CPU market, and historically all of the high end CPU market where the margins are it's not too bad. Whereas AMD has tended to do quite well at the low end where the margins aren't. I realise that during P4 vs Athlon AMD manages to improve a bit, but that was only for a short time. And it only happened because Intel got everything about Netburst wrong and AMD got everything about Athlon and Hammer right. That just about let them compensate their fab plant disadvantage. All the evidence is that this scared the hell out of Intel and they switched responsibility for high end chip design to the Israeli team that developed Core. But AMD can't rely on that happening all the time.
So on average Intel has a greater percentage of the cash and can plow it back into fabs to produce high end chips and sell them at an outrageous markup. AMD is reduced to making entry level stuff on its outdated fabs, and Intel can dump products in that market, subsidized by its high end business to keep AMD profits low. E.g. there have been numerous times where the Celeron version of a new Intel chip is actually identical to the Pentium version, just sold at a much lower price.
Now if going fabless lets AMD buy time at the high end fabs it could work. But as far as I can tell most fabs that fabless companies use are actually a couple of generations behind Intel so it will make things worse. Mind you the AMD/ATI merger makes me think that maybe AMD are not interested in the high end market.
It seems like a CPU/GPU hybrid is much more suited to an ultra cheap laptop for example, than a kick ass gaming rig. And you could probably make such a beast even on an old fab plant, since the performance of a chip would likely be rather low. I imagine it as being a bit like the CPU in the OLPC actually, but souped up a bit so it can run Vista Aero. But it would suck for games and CPU intensive stuff. Probably most of the people in the world that want a laptop would be happy with it performance wise though, and it might be able to beat Intel mobile chipsets on cost and power.
Actually if you look at Via systems on a chip, you get the idea. It's essentially a system on a chip with a slightly out of date CPU core + graphics fabbed at TSMC.
If that's what they're trying to do cutting costs by going fabless makes sense. But if they want to keep competing with Core 2 Quad and the like, it doesn't. But then again, I don't see how they can keep doing that given the economics.
I hope I'm wrong by the way. But unfortunately I don't think I am.
Allowing all contributors to keep their copyrights creates exponential complexity.
r .all/pub_detail.asp
Yeah, I guess it's like the Soviet Union in the 1930's. Keeping private ownership caused problems under the NEP (GPLV2) , so the Party collectivised everything under the Five Year Plan (GPLV3-5). This was because Kulaks (the Soviet version of Tivo Inc) were hoarding rather than sharing. Clearly the Kulaks could not be trusted, all resources had to be owned by the Party under the infallible Comrade Stalin (Richard Stallman).
Once the policy of collectivisation had been completed it had a dramatic effect on agriculture in places like the Ukraine, that much is clear. But in the long run collective ownership proved to be a disappointment economically.
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filte
If everyone on /. started calling the RIAA a Terrorist Organization whenever the RIAA was brought up in their presence, even THAT would probably push it into mainstream parlance eventually.
Bwahaha. So by sitting around making absurdly hyperbolic comparisons on slashdot ("The RIAA have censored downloads from TorrentSpy? Well you know someone else who believed in censorship? Hitler!") and getting modded "+5 Sophie Scholl" by people that agree with you, you're somehow reclaiming the English language from The Man? Damn, and I thought I was wasting my time here.
I believe Edward's health care plan calls for mandatory insurance, admittedly after a load of other changes. One of them is to increase productivity by barratry. In stage 1 teams of highly skilled lawyers will chase after ambulances and sue the crew in the ones they catch for negligence, since they were clearly endangering their patients lives by driving too slowly. The ambulance crews will thus drive faster to avoid crippling damages and be more productive. In stage 2, lawyers will chase the more highly paid doctors around hospitals to prevent them from slacking and in the hope that they see them make a mistake.
I am trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a fucking thing (that's what IBM is, a thing) suffering by any definition of the word which is comparable. This is just sad on so many levels.
IBM is just a name for a bunch of shareholders pooling their resources, e.g. investment from pension plans and the like. Since they've effectively lost millions of dollars, you can bet they suffered. And legally, IBM is a person.
In fact discrimination against Corporate Americans like IBM, Microsoft and Starbucks now reminds me of discrimination against African Americans pre civil rights. The rhetoric is remarkably similar. I'm sure I could find quotes from the KKK and various Southern bigots calling African Americans 'fucking things' too. And just like African Americans they are denied the right to vote or hold public office but are still forced to pay taxes. They are even frequently attacked by anti globalisation organisations when they campaign for their civil rights, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the KKK's vicious war against voter registration.
If you assign your copyright to them, are they under some Power of Attorney like duty to act in your best interests? If you want to switch to a BSD license, are they allowed to say no?
Your bringing up the irrelevant topic of racist oppression seems spurious.
Lighten up Francis. This is Slashdot, not the Oxford Union Debating Society. The difference is like that between kicking a rabid squirrel to death in back alley after a miserable, inebriated night and a Queensbury rules boxing match.
As for the GPLV3? tough - suck it up. GPL by its nature was never intended to be worked around or filled with loopholes. The spirit of it is clear - no profit, no stealing, no typical corporate BS with the code.
;-)
Since when do legal documents have a 'spirit'? People agree to them because they don't have any clauses which are unacceptable. You can't just release a new version and allow the users to choose it regardless of the opinions of the people that wrote the code. Or vice versa actually. There are two parties here, and contracts are about binding agreements between them, not some arrogant third party imposing restrictions on one side.
Or consider this analogy. US Constitiution Version 2 is announced, and it offers the police more rights over how they treat terror suspects. Constitution Version 1 has a seldom noticed clause about how the police can accept that version or a later one at their discretion. People start to complain but the politicians that released it point out that terrorism 'goes against the spirit of Consitution version 1, V2 is just plugging a few loopholes'.
Suck it up, right
The case I worry about is where I contribute code to a GPL2 or later project. Then later on some users opts to license it under GPL3 or GPL4. This gives him extra rights, for example to patent licenses and so on. But the patents he gets a right to license are ones my company has an exclusive license to following some patent lawsuit. I.e. we won't get sued for infringing them, but we can't license them to third parties.
Or where I own a company that bases a project on non GPL code. Some developer comes along and cut'n'pastes GPL code into it, enough to be non fair use. Under the GPL I'm supposed to release the source code to the whole lot, but I don't have access to the non GPL code. But I never wanted the GPL code in the first place - I just employed some idle zealot who plagiarised it rather than writing it himself.
In general there are two parts of the GPL that I think I are poisonous to businesses and designed to be so. The first is the idea that if you use GPL code in a project, all the non GPL code statically linked to it becomes GPLd. The second is that future versions of the GPL may attempt to transfer rights from the copyright owner to users of the software which the copyright owner doesn't own.
I actually think if Stallman had actually worked in a real job rather than staying in pseudo academia for his whole life he'd understand this stuff a bit better. As it is he's basically the world's oldest student still hectoring people about things that he's managed to remain totally ignorant of. It's sad really.
Fanboy seems to be the calling card of someone with passion behind a product or company. Take away the tech and IT and gizmos and they're just fans. As in sports fans.
Hardcore fans have their team. THEIR team. Armchair coaching while watching the game, collecting memorabilia, indoctorinating others with how awesome his team is and, if they're doing less than awesome, it's because of external influences and not lack of awesomeness.
Well yeah, but aren't these sorts of people idiots? I remember reading Byte magazine and liking the interplay of the industry - seeing how one side could invent something revolutionary, and the other side could respond to it by tweaking what they had because they couldn't afford a revolutionary change. Or how Intel and Amd would both arrive with the best processor they could do each generation but inevitably one would win. And the problem with fanboys is that they fixate on one side and buy their products even when they are temporarily bad. But that actually messes up the process - if you care about technology you should buy the best performing alternative in each generation because losing money is is a powerful incentive to improve.
You bring up a good point with case of the "inverse fanboy" who feverishly, persistently, and often irrationally criticizes or insults a particular company or product.
;-) The word is bigot. We don't need any neologism for it.
Or country
It's funny that the author clearly has no idea on Apple at all. In fact the Apple audience are known to be excessively vicious to the Apple company, suing it for the slightest of issues. E.g. Right now apple is getting sued because some users believe the pixels on their displays "sparkle" a little bit.
Farm animals tend to bleat a bit when the farmer gives them less food or increases the slaughter rate. But it's still easier to be a farmer than hunt in the wild.
Now, here's a thought. I realize you have to stop typing for a second to think it, but could it be, maybe, that Moore's problem is with the healthcare of the 9/11 first responders? You know, what he could be complaining about isn't that healthcare given to suspected terrorists is too much, it might be that the healthcare given to genuine heroes is too little?
Actually, I don't really like the way the US healthcare system works anymore than he does. The link I posted earlier shows that the US spends a fortune per capita and yet there are loads of examples of people that get terrible coverage. But you can't use the 'Gitmo healthcare model' to solve it, and the comparison shows he's more interested in being a smartarse than discussing how to fix it.
It's also highly disingenous to blame market forces for the failure of the US system, given that the UK one is almost as bad and is entirely devoid of market forces.
Way to miss the point. And make generalizations to back up your claims while providing no proof. You partly hinge your argument on the cost being negligible.
I actually base it on the fact that providing health care to detainees seems like the right thing to do. Given that the sort of people who like Michael Moore films would (like me) be angry if the US didn't provide healthcare it is hypocrtical to complain when it does. Cost is a secondary issue.
Care to show where you found the financial data for Gitmo?
In terms of cost, look at it this way. The base needs to provide health care to the US personnel. There's a marginal cost to providing care to the detainees too, but since they are kept in very controlled conditions this is probably not high per capita compared to the US personnel. It's not like they can injure themselves or get medical problems from a bad diet, because the military control everything they do. There are also a rather small number of detainees (200-500 compared to 9500 US personnel). And foreign military bases are expensive in general and Gitmo is probably more expensive than average since the Cuban government won't cooperate.
Even if it's not negligable, the DOD can just request more money to cover it. DOD resources are practically unlimited anyway.
And the cost of providing healthcare to American citizens is probably negligible anyway if you look at it as a percentage of the vast cost of running a nation.
The costs of providing health care to Americans is nowhere near negligable. In fact the US spends more on health care per capita than anywhere else
http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf
There are also 300 million Americans compared to 200-500 gitmo detainees. So the comparison between the cost of providing healthcare to Americans vs Gitmo detainees is absurd. And I'm sure Michael Moore knows this, even if his idiot fans can't accept that he's pulled some slight of hand to make the two situations seem remotely comparable.
Yes, there would be complaints about a lack of healthcare for detainees. That strawman doesn't change the fact that prisoners of war, citizens of foreign nations, have access to better healthcare than citizens of the U.S. who work everyday and struggle to stay alive.
I don't think you know what a strawman is. Please look it up on wikipedia. I'm sure that rights for gitmo detainees are determined at least partly with what the US can get away with politically. And one of the downsides about freedom is that the government is no longer obligated to give you free healthcare, at least in the US model. If you really prefer gitmo to "working every day and struggling to stay alive" then resign your citizenship (if you are American, otherwise skip this step), head to Iraq and join the people Moore called freedom fighters. Get captured by US forces and I'm sure you can sample the delights of free healthcare at Gitmo.
What if they retaliate by calling you a NAZI?
Maybe God is a very powerful but non enlightened entity? I never get the assumption that very powerful entities are necessarily good. For example, God could be so powerful that he's as unconcerned about our wellbeing as we are of the wellbeing of bacteria.
Secondly, how would you feel about Bush using the excuse of violent terrorism to ban the Democratic party and murder its leaders and opposition journalists and then rig the electoral system so he could stay in power for the next 47 years until ill health forced him to hand over to his brother? If it happened, how would you react to this post just as he was doing so -
Do you see how stupid your post is now? Setting up a dictatorship is evil. Other county's foreign policy is no excuse for the suffering you inflict on your own people.
They had an, at most, Socialist revolution
r evolution
There was an revolution which removed the old dictator and looked like it would turn Cuba into a free country - orginally Castro promised free elections. But it turned into a communist one once they started summary executions of opposition leaders, censorship of the press, and installing Fidel as a new dictator. Incidentally, the people who disagreed with this ended up being the Cuban exile community which campaigns to keep the embargo in place until the regime goes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#Cuba_following_
I've heard people argue convincingly that Cuba was free from the fall of Batista to the point where Castro managed to grab power permanently.
Actually if you watched the movie, no wait if you even watched the promo's you would know he didn't go to Cuba to show how great Castro medical centers were. He went there as he heard that suspected terrorists got free and better health care then most Americans and tried to get to Gitmo to get health care
What does that mean though? If the US government didn't give free and good healthcare to people detained indefinitely at gitmo, the public would complain. Quite rightly in my opinion. Part of the vast death rate of Russian soldiers captured by the Germans (and vice versa) in WWII was caused by denying them healthcare. And the cost of providing healthcare to detainees is probably negligable anyway if you look at it as a percentage of the vast cost of keeping gitmo open.
Like everything else he does it's stunt designed to show the irony of the situation. But it only does that until you start to think about what would happen if things were the reverse of what they are. And then it doesn't seem so ironic anymore.
There should be some sort of ultra long term intellectual property device that allows for the innovation to pay for the research. E.g. imagine if Intel and co ended up licensing the patents or whatever which the universities or governments got on the original research that made micro chips possible. The problem is that there's an extremely long time between the science (Quantum mechanics at the turn of the century) and the engineering (transistors in the 1950's and microchips in the 1960s and 1970's)
Ok, it can't be retroactive but I can imagine that if you had something like this it would pull private money in to fund accelerators, researchers and so on.
I used to regularly use winamp to play music. The problem is that once you start dealing with a 40+gig repository it quickly becomes obvious that winamp is completely incapable of coping.
/s /b > playlist.m3u
make a batch file with
dir *.mp3
Add playlist.m3u to your Winamp bookmark list. Select "Read Titles on Play" in Options->Preferences->Options. Ghetto, but it works fine for ~60GBs of MP3s. Plus if you copy more mp3s into the collection you can just rerun the batch file and they appear in Winamp. Works for UNC paths (\\Server\share\path\file.mp3) too. You can use Jtitle to jump to title.
The problem with iTunes and the like is that the people who own the music don't want the software to let you import gigabytes of music into your collection as easily as this, and they have a lot more say in how the software works than you do.